Biomes vs levels

Linearity I would imagine. I think it's mainly used in roguelikes and open world games; themed areas

I still prefer the word stage.

Back in my day, we call biomes "stages." And we bad a finite amount of lives. If we fucked it and died we had to try again from the very beginning!

Wasn't this a discussion on the giant bomb podcast?

Basically the word biome gets misused everywhere.

Zones?

I just keep thinking of that legendary film starring Pauly Shore.

"BIO-DOME"

Iron man, Iron man, does whatever an iron can!

I've never heard it applied to games other than Minecraft, and it's correctly applied to Minecraft because, as BillbutnotBen says, the procedural generation in Minecraft divides the continuous world into zones with varying weather, flora, fauna, etc. It only makes sense to refer to 'stages' or 'levels' if the world is discrete, i.e. is not an open world but divided into separate areas with clear level transitions. Super Mario Odyssey has huge levels with clear transitions, but Dark Souls has a continuous world where, even though each area is named, you can't really speak of them as levels or stages.

Calling Dark Souls different areas biomes would be both wrong and stupid, though. The reason why people keep incorrectly applying such words, is because they are dumb and think using sciency words makes them sound smart.

Strictly speaking, it is a game where you can move continuously through the world with few hard level transitions: only Anor Londo and Oolacile cannot be walked to. It doesn't fit the mold that open world games have now thoroughly worn out, but the promise of "you can go anywhere you want from the get-go" holds true for Dark Souls as much as it does for other open worlds.

I was writing for BBC Bitesize last year and I had to do an entire episode about biomes. Not in videogames, but in real life. It was quite weird as - whilst I'm sure I'd heard the word before because I knew roughly what it meant - it seems like I'd only heard it conversationally when applied to Minecraft in the last couple of years.

But now kids are being taught about it at school. Hopefully this will mean people will stop misusing it when referring to areas within a game...

"Biome" makes perfect sense in Returnal as each level is environmentally very different ie jungle, desert, etc., but I still use "levels" for most games or "areas" if I'm talking about something like Dark Souls.

I still have a fondness for the wonderfully old-school term "screens". Not a particularly useful metric for progression these days though!

‘Stages’! Almost sounds retro now! 

And we walked to and from school up a hill in the snow!

You don't hear people talking about how Scrap Brain Zone is basically Sonic Blade Runner