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Comment by Hammershaft | Hacker News Reader

I was pretty disappointment by Noita

I had been looking forward to this game for years before it was released, but it ended up being quite a different game then I had intuited from the trailers. I expected an environmental sandbox where you would have to combine quick thinking with the manipulation of interacting environmental elements (water + electricity, or fire + coal) to survive, similar to my favorite roguelike Brogue. When the game came out, I realized it was designed more in the style of Binding of Isaac or Risk of Rain, emphasizing combining slotmachine-esque random weapon modifiers into hideously overpowered weapons that for the most part did not meaningfully interact with the environmental simulation in a meaningful way.

It is still an interesting experience, the weapon combination system is a strong source of emergent play, but that emergent weapon design does not meaningfully influence the player's strategy in how he/she approaches the game across runs.

I think there is a better game trapped inside of the pixel simulation of Noita, waiting to be unearthed.

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I half agree on this. I agree the environmental manipulation and tactical side of the game is underdeveloped. I think a lot of that is similar monster designs. Despite a huge bestiary of cool monsters, when it comes to how you deal with those monsters it just boils down to flying/hopping, ranged/melee, and does it bleed something nasty. Not all of those 8 combinations need substantively different approaches, either.

While you absolutely can just slot machine until you get a rigged build (which seems to be a requirement for a mass appeal roguelite), it's possible to win more consistently with other play styles. Wand editing adds a lot more actual decision making compared to BoI or RoR, so you have to actually think about building a game-winning kit of items. The focus on building a kit from random components reminds me more of Shiren The Wanderer, Brogue, FTL, or my own roguelike Hero Trap. The game ends up being about how many different ways you know to build a broken wand, which is something I can respect.

The biggest problem with Noita to me is its emphasis on resource extraction. Good play involves grinding for 600+ gold in the game's first area, when a casual search for the bottom will get you under a hundred. Couple that with monsters that can usually be slowly killed without taking damage, but will deal large amounts of damage if your attention lapses, and you get a game where optimal play involves an awkward mix of long periods of focus with low interest.

Totally agree, optimal play is often just slow deliberate chip damage and tedious scouring for resources. It's a pretty common problem across roguelikes.

Yeah. Some games fix it by having small enough dungeons that scouring them all isn't such a big deal (Brogue comes to mind). Others use a hunger clock (I think Spelunky's ghost is actually the best hunger clock I've seen).

I think Noita would benefit from harder monsters, with much higher gold drops (or cheaper shops), and a tight hunger clock. Though that's somewhat at odds with the cool side dungeons (which are already at odds with the rest of the game).

agree with need for more variation on combat mechanics but i absolutely hope the don’t add anything to rush me through this magical game.

I think something to rush the player is necessary for it to work well as a roguelite.

But I also think Noita has enough cool exploratory stuff in it doesn't necessarily have to be a roguelite. It'd also be a good game with some fast travel options and a system of respawn points.

It's incredibly hard to design a game around an emergent physical system where that system not only allows the gameplay to remain fun, but actually contributes to the fun in a meaningful way. The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild did an astoundingly good job of this, but it's one of the only examples I can think of where it really worked at all. Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts is the other, though most people probably haven't heard of that one.

> It's incredibly hard to design a game around an emergent physical system where that system not only allows the gameplay to remain fun, but but actually contributes to the fun in a meaningful way

Starsiege: Tribes

This comment probably is referring to Tribes’ hill skiing “feature” that became a core gameplay mechanic in Tribe’s 2 - though I guess it’s fair to say this wasn’t originally by design, but a nice accident.

You mean like some kind of emergent physical system? ;)

For context: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zIAWzG-wOKY&t=4m11s (~1999, probably)

That one mechanic emerged and became popular is not the same as a game whose core conceit depends on emergence occurring within each game.

I would argue they're extremely similar across successful emergent games.

The core feature of a playable, entertaining emergent game is a set of flexible gameplay rules, able to bend and tolerate the unexpected without breaking.

In the case of Tribes, there weren't any gameplay rules predicated on movement speed or height. Consequently, skiing only enriched gameplay. I would argue that EVE Online features the same style of emergent-tolerant rules.

In contrast would be something like Braid, where the available actions and rules, while seeming free, are in fact extremely rigid and intolerant of the unexpected.

Failed emergent games typically fail by innovating in their gameplay, but attempting to apply inflexible or overly-specific rules on top of that.

Yep. I’m in your side. My comment was mostly to add context because it looked like folks were downvoting you because googling makes people mad.

Or because the comment was low effort.

I make low effort comments all the time (and I’m trying to improve). We need to work together. Ultimately I think we are all on the same side. An encouraging comment can help a low efforter see the light.

Pedantic nitpicking is a greater threat to HN than low effort comments.

Talking at, and not with each other is worse than both :)

My experience has been there's a small Venn sliver of people who are both diligent enough to continue an extended thread and sociopathic(?) enough to completely ignore what the other person is saying.

That said, HN probably beats the average on finding those folks too. ;)

Tbh, I expect most of the downvotes are from people who weren't gaming in the late 90s.

I think a huge element of it is that comment boards like this are hugely impersonal compared to forums back in the day. There's very little room for socialization, so we don't socialize on these platforms, we proselytize, and sometimes it looks like socializing :)

Nuts and Bolts is a tragically underrated game.

The physics simulation is on just the right side of fun/realism, insane contraptions work but the system is flexible enough that players jury rigged turrets.

Lots of games in a similar vein have followed, but I haven't found any to be as easy to play and as fun.

It still blows my mind the kinds of things I was able to make, and the kind of ingenuity that was sometimes (successfully!) required of me to solve the problems presented.

My favorite creation was the "wall-driving car". You could just make a car, and put a propeller on top pointed upward, and it would press you against whatever surface you were on so you could drive on walls or even the ceiling. That worked. And I'm almost certain the devs never imagined it.

I also made a working pod-racer by putting tiny propellers underneath a pair of jet engines (and under the seat), and connecting them to the seat using those flexible coupling-beams. And it drove like a pod-racer. It looked exactly like something out of the film, the way it moved. It was amazing.

Maybe I need to boot that game back up :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brabham_BT46#Brabham_BT46B_%...

the 2J did it first...

I'm really hopping that I get to play this game one day, but it's a shame it was on the X-Box :( it's probably the only exclusive that was attractive on this platform.

Xbox 360 actually

I still remember when Red Faction: Guerilla was hyped up as an amazing feat because it had destructible environment and they promised you could use physics and destruction to pass missions in unusual ways. Sadly, it turned out to be, as it usually is, severely limited by the technical side of things.

I would count Worms in that category. Endless fun in the 90's destroying the level and the other guys!

My biggest gripe is that the randomness of the weapons you find plays way too big of a role in your success. Instead of different weapons requiring different gameplay skills, you either get crazy good stuff (combo'd with perks that have synergies) and effortlessly destroy anything in your path, or end up so weak that even simple mobs give you trouble.

I think some of this could be solved, or at least mitigated, if there was "meta" progression, like in Dead Cells. That way, even bad runs could result in something worthwhile, rather than a total waste of time.

I think the randomness leading to overpowered rounds and weak rounds is sort of true for every rogue lite I've played.

I've played through a half dozen roguelikes to completion of the final (final) boss of whatever it offers. Off the top of my head, Dungeon Crawl, 20XX, Enter the Gungeon, Binding of Isaac, Risk of Rain 1/2, Signal Decay, Dead Cells. It's an indie friendly genre in that it enables lots of gameplay with limited content. But the design trope you've mentioned is waning on me. Most of these games have compounding benefits of good play early in the game to game state near the end, an hour later. Most of these games are easy to play for the first 80% and then quite challenging for the last 20% (BUT, it's still easy to mess up and so early penalties feel really bad). And so it's really frustrating playing them if the first half of your run just feels ok because you're inclined to think it's better to just restart.

Enter the Gungeon was the absolute worst offender. Rare health restores at every level meaning you need to play well even on easy early levels. Hugely important max hp boosts granted only for flawlessly completing each level boss. Items have no indicator for how useful they are unless you get a feel for them or look them up, then have a bunch of hidden synergies which are also unexplained; and even then you have no agency in getting other items to make your crappy loot more viable than permanent garbage. And lastly, a single rare item which doubles the length of a run but vastly increases your chances of long term success.

People love rare OP combos but they kind of suck.

I'd rate Risk of Rain 2, Dead Cells, and Dungeon crawl having the best implementations of this.

Dead Cells is my favorite game of all time. I've been playing it pretty much every week since it launched. Of the games you've played, could you recommend any in particular that might be similar?

Nuclear Throne is by and far my favorite of the genre having played most of the ones listed above.

Hmm, well Dead Cells is a roguelike castlevania and fairly unique in that regard. Rogue Legacy 1 and 2 are probably a good match.

I'd put Risk of Rain down as the one of the best generic rogue action games to recommend. The first one is a 2D shooter. The second one is a 3D shooter and is especially good for online co-op. I would recommend starting with the second one.

I'm around 200hrs in.

I concur with pretty much everything you've said, however I wanted to add 2 things.

My mental model for playing has settled on "paying" for gold/wands with HP. As you progress though a level you will inevitably get hit by monsters and evironmental effects and there has never been a game as stingy as this one for letting you replace lost health.

The "hideously overpowered weapons" you mentioned are the best part of the game. Finding spell components and building a crazy wand give this this game a fantastic (and fantastical) power curve :)

Is there any progression in between rounds?

The enemies get harder the further down you go but there is no progression between runs, as a roguelike.

I can't wait for the computer generated content trend to end. I understand why it's attractive to indies, because they can focus on the engine - and a game emerges from the effort on its own. But hand generated content is always superior. Turns out Shakespeare writes better stories than even a million monkeys.

There was an era of gaming where it was reasonable to think your game could become a hobby for tens of thousands of players, with all the requisite fame that comes from creating it. Spelunky opened the door here, and a lot of high profile indies like Vlambeer and Spryfox led the surge.

What I think actually happened is that so many games started coming out, that there's more content than any one player can consume. The hand generated stuff floats to the top and a new class of indies now sits the throne. Anyone distracted by procedural gen lost their spot.

For another parallel where players choose hand generated content over procedural, look to the prevalence of multiplayer where humans generate challenge for each other on the fly - versus AI baddies that can be cheesed by easily shared internet guides.

I wait for this trend to grow further. Procedural generation offers higher replayability, requires players to adapt their strategy every time, and shifts the focus from map design to core gameplay, which distinguishes games from books.

Procedural generation has nothing to do with multiplayer. There are games that have competitive multiplayer and procedural generation, e.g., Heroes of Might and Magic III: Horn of the Abyss. Interestingly, this game offers both human-created and procedurally-generated maps, but players compete nearly exclusively on procedurally-generated maps.

> But hand generated content is always superior

It's very much not a binary choice between procedural vs handcrafted. Procedural content creation is truly great at some stuff, while the same is true for handcrafted creations. The real trick is to blend handcrafted and procedurally generated in such a way that both tools get maximal utilization in the domain they excel in.

I fundamentally disagree - games are simulations, and games that limit the simulation in favor of a planned “story” lose a lot of interesting nature of games, especially as they try to get closer to the hardcoded mediums - film, lit, etc. Procedural generation naturally ties into that simulation — though a lot of procgen games misunderstand its purpose, using procgen to “make the game for them”, rather than to produce various environments to interact with the simulation (they end up focusing on the procgen rules as an end to itself, rather than the simulation rules which is actually of interest). Borderlands is probably the most obvious failure in this — they entirely misunderstood the appeal of procgen/sim reducing it almost entirely to loot-gambling for % modifiers, with little to no real impact on the gameplay itself, except by accident (eg the difference between 1-shot and 2-shotting enemies). No man’s sky is another recent game in the same boat — they essentially had no rules to the simulation, and bet almost entirely on sufficient amount of “content” to be generated in an almost purely aesthetic fashion. Spore was also a failure in many, many ways, but the lack of real “rules” to its systems is one of them. It is the simulation rules that one wants to explore, not the visual rendering of it.

That is, Dwarf Fortress is the one true video game.

Multiplayer games on the other hand are like a game dev cheat code — you really don’t need to do much at all to produce a “fun” multiplayer game, because the player-interaction will bring all of the complexity and emergence facilities you need. All you need for multiplayer to work really is to not stop players from doing interesting things with the system, apparently a herculean difficulty for most companies.

I'm hard on story-driven games as well, I don't think games are very good at telling narratives because the narrator's desire to control what happens next is at odds with the player's freedom to choose what happens next.

The ideal game is somewhere in the middle where the designer focuses on mechanics which combine to produce more than their sum, and then anchor it in handcrafted content meant to show the best angle of the mechanical emergence.

One way to split the hair would be to say the mechanics are procedural (I would rather reach for the programming metaphor of composition, however) while the environments are hand crafted.

Nintendo is the king of this, but I also mentioned multiplayer games because they intentionally focus the designer on the mechanics and the levels while leaving the challenge generation to the players (and a whole conversation about how best to matchmake them.)

The key point I had meant to make is that procgen allows wide exploration of the simulation space -- which ofc is only interesting if the simulation is itself interesting. There's nothing wrong with that, but it only works with a sufficiently enabled sim -- Dwarf Fortress is the target here.

In a more shallow simulation, procgen falls on its face, and mostly wastes time as it fails to note any interesting aspects of the sim (or repeats itself, or only points it out once every so often). Hardcoded levels wins out here: its more concise.

That is, as simulation complexity increases, the amount of procgen can be increased. The scaling between megaman (weak sim, all hardcoded) to roguelikes (decent sim, mixture of hardcoded/procgen) to DF (sim porn, procgen porn).

Of course, you can also have a complex sim with hardcoded levels, but this is unsatisfying as it leaves a lot on the table -- you don't play a grand strategy for the campaign mode.

Nintendo games are intentionally fairly weak sims (few general behaviors, usually explored throughout the full game), and thus hardcoded levels works well -- there's little of the simspace remaining to explore when you finish a title -- so procgen would just be a noisy, verbose explanation by comparison

Same disappointment here. I've had some fun experiences - shooting out the side of a water tank to put out a fire below - but they are sadly few and far between.

Oh no :( still haven’t played it but I had a lot of hopes since it seems like it was inspired by liero

I'm disappointed that game called "roguelike" is absolutely nothing like "rogue"

Might as well say "Schindler's List" is an "Indylike" or a donut is a "Pizzalike"

Just to point out: it's called "roguelite", not "roguelike", which tries to be true to the fact that it's not actually "like" Rogue.

Roguelite and roguelikes have one major difference though, roguelites have some sort of progression like items or experience levels that cumulate on your several playthroughs giving you new features.

Good examples of Roguelites would be Wizards of Legend, Flinthook or Moonlighter. To my understand (having not played), Noita would fall under a roguelike as the game resets after your death and you don't carry anything over to the next playthrough except for your newly accumulated wisdom of how you died and how to avoid that :)

I think that's a reasonable distinction between the genres but the boundary can get a bit gray. Two examples:

Bones levels have been a staple of Roguelikes since Nethack, where you can find the area that one of your previous characters died. Usually this means a huge power boost if you can deal with the threat of your ghost and/or whatever killed you.

Angband is an ancient and classic Roguelike but it has a "monster memory" that accumulates the knowledge of the enemies you have fought, both in your current playthrough and all previous playthroughs. This represents a significant assistance as you progress through the game, both because the knowledge that "this beast has killed your ancestor" is a big caution sign, and also that you eventually "know" the stats of all the monsters.

It feels to me like 'roguelike' has recently come to mean something totally different than in used to. It used to be games like Nethack, Moria, Angband, and later AdoM, where you're an @ walking between walls of # fighting d and o. Now it seems they can be any game that involves dungeons and fighting.

You do carry over some things. As far as I know the orbs unlock spells you can't find in the wild before then. It's relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, admittedly.

it's not remotely rogue "lite" either. In the context of all other "lite" things a rogue"lite" would be a rougelike with less features, not a some completely unrelated game genre.

The "lite" is in terms of punishment. Death in a roguelike is usually "game over, better luck next time". Death in a roguelite still generally resets you to the beginning of the game, but there is a metagame progression between runs that means you aren't starting over from scratch.

What does it have to do with rogue though? Nethack is a roguelike. But also somehow is FTL which is a multi character top down space adventure.

I recently played a pretty decent game that was a card game in its essence. They called that one a roguelite due to essentially its bones files. But it’s a card game, not really an RPG even. Rogue is a very specific style of RPG. So what’s the definition of roguelike and roguelite?

The metagameplay -- rogue reset you, permanently, when you died. Similarly when you die in FTL you have to start all over.

It's both an incorrect term (because, as you mentioned, the overlap with rogue is limited) and absolutely the correct term (because people generally understand what it means, even if they've never heard of rogue).

I think it's important to remember that language evolves, it's more important to be understood than to be correct. Shouting into a hurricane isn't going to stop the storm, no matter how right you are.

Except its not understood whatsoever. When I read roguelike or roguelite I understand that it should be something similar to "rogue". Since I'm not actually a fan of rogue I will therefore look no further at the game since it was clearly labeled as being similar to "rogue"

What other "~lite" or "~like" in the entire language as a similar property of being nothing like the "~" part?

You might not understand it, but the term is well understood in the gaming community. Just like Metroidvania, the genre description has evolved from previous games.

Another common genre is Souls-like, stemming from the mechanics of Dark Souls. It's a term for a game that has bonfire like mechanics, high difficulty, punishments on death, etc. There are many games that are souls likes that share none of the visual themes or moment to moment combat mechanics of Dark Souls.

And as several other people have commented, the games are similar to rogue, just at a higher level of abstraction than you are looking at them.

MetroidVanias though actually make sense. The game play is similar to Metroid or Castlevania. So taking that same direction a roguelike should be similar to rogue. I've seen zero MetroidVanias where the similarities to Metroid and Castlevania aren't 100% clear.

I think the following characteristics define "roguelike" games:

* Permadeath / "ironman mode", generally enforced by the game

* Procedural generation of game levels/encounters

* "Progression" elements, where the encounters get more difficult but the player is gaining resources to allow them to overcome those challenges (as opposed to simply gaining mechanical skill at the game)

These three elements combine to make a game where you lose early and often, but starting over gives you the opportunity to experience the game differently, due to the procedural nature as well as because you have the opportunity to invest your resources differently, hopefully making better decisions.

I don't think they need to be strictly RPGs, but the progression elements are key. Those elements are present in FTL, for example, if you consider that the ship itself is the main character.

I would use that definition for "roguelite", precisely because because they are not top-down RPG.

The distinction I make is that roguelites are designed around metagame progression rather than / in addition to the in-game progression used by roguelikes.

For example, Rogue Legacy is almost entirely focused on metagame progression between runs, whereas your character barely develops at all mid-run. Classic rogue-lite.

The problem is that roguelike is a very old and established genre, and it is topdown RPG with permadeath. I don't see why meta progression is a feature worth of its own genre - you could easily add it to a roguelike like nethack without any change of genre.

There's the so-called Berlin Interpretation[0] which attempts to codify exactly what a roguelike is, basically, according to that definition, if it isn't a turn based gridlike hack and slash in randomly generated dungeons with permadeath, it isn't a roguelike. Of course, /r/roguelikedev will point out that the most popular roguelikes all deviate from that in one way or another, and people do seem to disagree[1] with the definition.

I personally don't think the distinction matters that much, except to pedants and purists.

[0]http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Berlin_Interpretat...

[1]http://www.gamesofgrey.com/blog/?p=403

Careful calling it an RPG, because to fans of actual RPGs, roguelikes don't involve any actual roleplaying. It's just the hack & slash and level progression elements.

Just like there are people who care about the definition of 'roguelike', there are people who care about the definition of 'rpg'.

Rogue as a gametype is defined by having a randomized world with complexe rules, which will disappear after each gaming-session. Lite and like then say whether there is progress saved between the sessions, influencing way you tackle and maybe randomize the next session, or whether every run is as fresh and original as the run before and the only progress is in the player himself.

Whether the genre is RPG, action or economical simulation doesn't matter nowadays. The only relevance is whether there is a complex gameworld, to tell apart from the simple randomized game-boards which solitair or bejewled offer.

Ignore the haters. I loved this game. Yes, it is very difficult, but every play is totally different, and the environmental effects are truly things you have to think through before just blasting through.

The game may be difficult, and in fact, too difficult, but I still enjoyed it. Finishing it seemed unimportant, as just making progress feels like an incredible accomplishment.

You could have simply given your opinion, but leading off with a dismissive "ignore the haters" (where haters are apparently people who didn't enjoy it) made your comment carry zero weight.

Well, didn’t you do the same thing with your last statement?

“Ignore the haters” to me isn’t dismissive as much as a way of conveying that something is rather polarizing so the reader should check it out themselves before forming an opinion. I do concede that others may have a different interpretation, though.

Their criticism wasn’t that it was difficult, but rather that the weapons don’t contribute much to the environmental simulation. I was also disappointed by how the game didn’t utilize its simulation very well.

If you’re going to reply to someone’s comment, at least reply to what they said.

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