What “Roguelike” Meant
zenorogue.medium.com
zenorogue.medium.com
Roguelike is a self-descriptive classifier -- something like Rogue. The defining characteristic of roguelikes is exploring game mechanics amidst permadeath. Starting over is fun, and different every time. These are the important traits. BoI, FTL, Spelunky et al are most definitely Roguelikes in that runs don't influence future runs, the world is randomly generated and doesn't persist, and things can take wild turns and every run ends drastically differently.
I'm not sure what the author is going for, beyond pedantry for the sake of being pedantic. I don't know any Roguelikes developers (Angband, Caves of Qud, etc.) that feel strongly about use of the term. Enjoy it! Play good games!
That is more or less a rogue-lite in my opinion. Games like The Binding of Isaac, FTL, Rogue Legacy, Crypt of the NecroDancer etc. It's a fuzzy definition, though.
I assume that what's being talked about in DCSS and Hades is a stronger effect, though?
Very much so. In some games, past runs only unlock additional content (more possible items, monsters, etc.). In Hades, for example, you actually get stronger with each run.
In The Binding of Isaac, each run starts the same. The difference is playthroughs allow new items to be found, but the main character is not enhanced. FTL unlocks different starting ships, but there are no "upgrades" as far as I'm aware, just different ships with pros and cons.
In Rogue Legacy and Crypt of the NecroDancer, successful playthroughs enhance aspects of the main character. This to me is a hallmark of roguelites. The Binding of Isaac technically has iterations but since only the random item pool is modified, I would keep it in the roguelike camp.
They affect one another, but there's no meta-resource and meta-progression as in an Enter the Gungeon, Hades or Dead Cells.
This is no surprise. David Ploog and his sister Johanna helped write the Berlin Interpretation. David served as de facto PMs of crawl for years.
In the same sense that some strongly distinguish "FOSS" from software which is just "open source" or just "free as in beer", I think Roguelikes to many people indicates not only the "style" of the game but both the development style and shared history of the game.
The "lowest common denominator" roguelikes like Angband, ToME, Nethack etc. are pretty dissimilar games, apart from some shared procedural generation and dungeon crawling aspects, but they all share either a literal or spiritual lineage to the original Rogue game, itself written as a kind of demo for the curses library in BSD UNIX.
Hack began life as a Rogue-clone written by a highschooler on the school's PDP-11, was rewritten a few times, eventually ended up becoming a collaborative effort on the "net". Angband is based on the gameplay of UMoria, a rewrite of Moria in C for Unix, itself originally a rogue clone for the VAX written in BASIC/Pascal/assembler because UNIX didn't exist for the VAX then and the developer missed playing Rogue from the PDP-11.
To some Roguelikes aren't just a "style of game" but a community that encompasses both playing, developing, distributing, and modifying the games. Many people have learned coding from making small modifications to Roguelikes , which are in turn modified by others, similar to game mods today.
Unlike most game mods, however, because of the open-source nature of "traditional" Roguelikes, they tend to be "forked" and released under new names as large monoliths, which can themselves be forked. Instead of the modern phenomena of installing 100+ mods to your favorite RPG, a developer would throw 100+ patches into Angband and call it YAngband, and then some other person would throw another 100+ patches and call it NeoYAngband.
I agree that at the end of the day being pedantic is pretty silly and people shouldn't lose sleep over something as silly as this, but I also think it'd be sad to forget about the community of "original" roguelikes and abandon the practice of kids picking up the last generation's game and forking it.
Thing is, that hasn't happened -- it's just that "games that mechanically resemble roguelikes" have become sort of mainstream, and the group of people who just want to play games and be done with it has grown much faster than the sort interested in the old way.
a. While this is common in roguelikes I'd never pick it out of a list of defining traits of a roguelike. It's like defining first person shooters by whether they have keys that open doors. Sure it's common but I'm not playing Doom to find red keycards, I'm playing to shoot things. The keys just help direct the experience and there are plenty of mechanics that could fill that same gap.
> (b) you're forced to progress to the next level on a timer
b. There is a timer that prevents you from leaving before it's up (engine charging), and there is escalation of force the longer you stay in a sector (rebel controlled beacons) but neither of those design decisions strike me as incompatible with the roguelike formula.
The problem is no one agrees on what those defining characteristics are. You've given your opinion, but it's just an opinion. It's highly subjective. I hear people all the time say the same thing "it's self evident!" and then go on to list "turn based/grid based" as the self evident requirements.
The author and I disagree on this topic (I wrote the linked article "The Roguelike War Is Over"), but.... I do feel for fans of traditional roguelikes. They had a well understood genre of game for about 30 years that meant specific things: turn based, grid based combat with random levels and real permadeath. Many of these fans just can't get into action games and they have a hard time finding what they're looking for these days.
I think this is just like music genres - nobody owns a genre and games will come out that do different things with that genre... the market is open and new games just add to the collection of choice - it might be that rogue-lites end up stealing some community support and income from more classic rogue-likes but nothing has destroyed Rogue or any of the other games people have fallen in love with along the way.
I have my own classifications for what roguelike would be and Diablo (even in permadeath mode) wouldn't fit into it - it's far too fixed and predictable of a game and quite easy to initially get into - I'd consider a lack of accessibility to basically be a rogue-like requirement.
I just have to say that's a strange take. Lots of newer traditional RLs are quite accessible and accessibility was a big goal for my game. There's no real reason to have a game use 95 separate key commands. Then again this classification is no less arbitrary than the low value factor "ASCII display" in the Berlin Interpretation.
Everyone who has ever played a dwarf fortress game for longer than four seasons will tell you "Oh yea - I realized you're going to need plump helmet" - compare that to starcraft where often times players will realize they'll eventually need a military of some form in their first game.
Being brutal is just an outgrowth of those basic mechanics. Meaningful risks require meaningful costs. Using an unidentified scroll consumes the scroll. Fighting monsters consumes an unknown amount of resources to receive some benefit. But, if you tone the game down to near safety then without twitch based tests it’s just wandering around freely.
Similarly, if you can memorize the layout or the meaning of a scroll for the next life, then that’s not a risk you’re taking.
When you move that scout you don't know if you're going to encounter a barbarian or a tribal village - do you hold off on building a warrior to escort your settler hoping that you can settle without it being captured?
I have a clear picture in my mind of what roguelike is, and that picture is nethack because someone introduced me to nethack and said "This is a roguelike" and I still basically believe them - trying to abstract the specific mechanics that make something a roguelike is hard... Here are some questions:
Do you have to just be one person - can a roguelike be a party of adventurers?
Does a roguelike need to have an rpg-style leveling system - can strength be gained by item acquisition alone? Does a leveling system make it not a roguelike?
Do you need to use pixel graphics for display?
Does the PC need to be precisely on coordinate pixel big?
Dwarf fortress, for instance, is turn based but the only real difference between turn based and real time is that twitch factor - if you made a version of starcraft where the game paused every five seconds to let you revise as many orders as you wished would that suddenly be really close to a roguelike?
My core thing here is that rogue was a collection of game mechanics, and games can be judged to be similar to that in an entirely subjective manner - you can objectively call out different features that differ or are the same, but those features only really matter if the person you're talking about strongly believed (subjectively) that that feature was "core" to the gameplay. A young kid playing rogue today is probably just going to walk away saying that rogue-likes use ascii art and I don't think it's wrong to accept that definition - for that kid.
As to being twitch or not, again that’s from a gameplay standpoint. Slow down Starcraft dramatically and it’s still real-time, but eventuality APM stops being a meaningful factor.
FWIW, this isn't actually true; you just need to manually apply the gameplay changes that a difficulty setting would normally affect. The two main one's I'd recommend are increasing the number of embark points (in init/world_gen.txt#EMBARK_POINTS) so you can buy more starting resources, and increasing dwarves' speed (in raw/objects/creature_standard.txt#CREATURE:DWARF#APPLY_CREATURE_VARIATION:STANDARD_<x>_GAITS), which just generally makes everything much easier, including increasing your fort's economic productivity to give you better ability to absorb any disaster that do happen.
Your overall point stands though; we proudly call it a learning curve^Wcliff^Woverhang for good reason.
Welcome to the "RPG" club. This is just the nature of games. No genre can remain pure, at least not once it becomes popular. Nor should they.
That's why we have additional classifiers. Diablo is an A(ction)RPG, Baldurs gate is tagged as D&D and Classic on Steam, and TF2 is a multiplayer FPS (without the RPG tag because most people are not pedantic af).
As far as Roguelikes go, I subscribe to the belief that they pretty much have to be permadeath, tile based, procedural generation for levels and items. Most games don't fit the bill, but so what, it's good enough as a general guideline. Recently we also got the "Roguelite" term to describe Roguelikes that are not very Roguelike-y :)
Bottom line, why are people so up in arms about a tag that doesn't even mean that much?
Energy limits how much you can play the game in a particular day.
XP Bonuses ensure that there’s a greater-than-normal (probably dull) grind to progress through the game.
Cosmetics mean that there will be few, if any, cosmetic rewards for playing the game. (An aside: yes, this matters. If cosmetics weren’t an important part of a game, why would they sell them?)
Lootboxes (gacha, etc) mean that the ability to make substantial progress through the game will rely on luck (and grinds to get the chance to test that luck).
And, something new coming to roguelikes/lites, “Undo” consumables mean that you’ll be starting over more than you’d expect to.
Otherwise, I agree with your overall definition of Roguelikes.
Roguelike, as much as the term refers to a game style rather than a development process/community thing, describes a game that is turn based and tile based. I find the turn-based nature of roguelikes core to the genre, because they define so much about how you interact with the game. "Real" or "traditional" roguelikes allow you as much time as you need to decide your next move.
What this means is the genre is completely removed from any sort of mechanical or reflex skill. If reaction times are at all involved, to me, it's not a roguelike. Under this rubric I find FTL is mostly a roguelike due to its pausability, whereas Spelunky is definitely not, given the required mechanical skill.
(I may even consider being turn-based to be more core to the genre than having strictly no between-run progress; FTL gates off some ships behind multiple runs but this barely registers for me. Some people take this 'requirement' a little too strictly for my tastes.)
Why this matters, beyond pedantry, is that blurring the genre lines has made searching for new games in the genre almost impossible. Some great roguelikes have found their way to Steam (Caves of Qud, for example), but finding them amongst the 100s of games that get the "roguelike" tag is difficult. Not a huge issue, of course, but it's why it matters to me.
Beyond that, the term "roguelike" is really not very descriptive unless you're already part of the RL community and are up on how the community defines the genre, so I'm just clueless as to why it has become such a marketing buzzword. "Run based game" has only one extra syllable and provides such a cleaner description of what the game is actually like. And can we really say that a game like Slay the Spire (a game I love) is anything at all like Rogue?
Try the "traditional roguelike" tag, it's exactly what it's there for and carries the meaning well. The author of the article argues against its usage but uses it himself many times throughout.
If someone liked Nethack, I would happily recommend any game from the first list. If someone liked Ziggurat, I wouldn't recommend any of the games from the second list because they're so different. Anyone doing the experiment in my first paragraph would clearly come to the same conclusion.
I think the second group of games is great. And so do a lot of people judging by their popularity. However, I prefer the first set but now searching for games like the first set is much harder. You can't just search for the term that was always used to describe the set. And I've already seen people describe Spelunky as a "classic" or "traditional" roguelike because it's 12 years old now.
It almost seems like the author is begging for refutation, but I'll bite: I have multiple allrune victories in DCSS (and have also contributed code to the game) and have been around roguelike communities since the mid-2000s (so before Spelunky, FTL, etc), and I have no issue with the modern use of the word "roguelike". In fact, I'm delighted! I think the "run-based" machinery that can be traced back to Rogue (with all the trappings that tends to imply: tangible loss upon death, random layouts, etc.) have been one of the best trends in gaming of the past decade.
It's similar to what happened to RPGs. Remember what "RPG" used to mean in the 90s? Then remember when games starting incorporating "RPG elements" (e.g. character progression through leveling and experience points) into other genres? Turns out there were some widely-applicable, generally good ideas that had mostly only surfaced themselves in classic RPGs that took years to gradually diffuse into the medium at large. So goes the roguelike.
It meant the same as now. We do have sub genres like "Action RPG" or "with RPG elements", we don't call any game with RPG elements RPG's.
So instead of calling any game with permadeath "roguelike" why not just say it has permadeath? Would cause less confusion.
Call them tags and the generality of the tag becomes irrelevant. If enough people like some combination or derivation of rogue elements then roguelike is good enough.
The issue with non specific tags (roguelike vs permadeath) is that the membership defines it, leading to either infinite dilution or periodic membership - think the evolution of political parties.
[1]: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page
I'm all in on this definition.
And you could switch bodies with any monster (best of all Draugr, who moved 4 times faster than everyone and had insane health and other stats!).
And if you morphed into a giant, while wearing rings, they would cut your fingers off. Isn't it nice?
But, best of all, you could meet ghosts of your previous lives, sometimes with gear!
ADOM is much more polished, of course, but lacks this inspired touch.
> It seems that most roguelike fans accept using “roguelike“ as an adjective, for example “roguelike platformer” or “roguelike first-person shooter”. While slightly confusing, this makes sense: a game is a combination of two genres, it has all the properties of the genre appearing as a noun, and the compatible properties of the genre appearing as an adjective. We can also have “first-person shooter roguelike” (DRL) or “platformer roguelike” (a grid-based turn-based game where the structure of the level is similar to that of a platformer, e.g. Fuel or Bump). Although some people do this incorrectly (e.g. “deckbuilding roguelike” is wrong, “roguelike deckbuilder” is better).
Games like DC:SS have more depth and choices, but are also harder to just pick up and play. I played crawl at a fairly high level (took 3rd in a tournament and had an 8 or 9 streak) but games like Shiren are more ‘fun’ to me now.
ADOM was a game I grew up playing with my best friend. There were so many mysteries that we were trying to solve playing game after game. (That mystery kind of evaporated after we found out wiki pages on the Internet)
IVAN and ToME were interesting at the time but didn't play them that much, maybe few dozen games each. IVAN with it's all graphics felt really bloody and brutal. I'm kind of bummed about how ToME was changed during the years, while I do understand the reasons. It's kind of foolish to build/sell game on IP you don't own.
I found Caves of Qud looking and feeling like roguelike I used to like, but I guess I've changed.
One "roguelike" I found very interesting during past years is "Invisible, Inc.". It has that buildup of excitement and surprise I had with older roguelikes, mixed up with some XCOM like action. Surely it's not free and as many others it also has this meta progression.
It was obviously inspired by Angband and Moria, both of which were built on the same "IP."
1. https://www.goldenkronehotel.com/wp/2020/01/15/the-roguelike...
2. https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LarsDoucet/20131203/206159/O...
Rogue has imparted[1] a number of interesting features that add strength to a variety of games - rogue-ish attributes are reflected in these games and that's about the total meaning of what roguelike actually means.
1. Assuming you don't attribute these to earlier games
It is frustrating because it seems such a simple problem to solve, just use "procedural-levels"/"start-from-scratch"/"turn-based" tags or whatever terms the community can come up with, rather than stamping the attractive-but-now-meaningless "rogue" name on everything.
Not always. Genres and categories are useful to describe what it is like without sharing precise knowledge (i.e. finding an example that the person you talk with also knows).
I don't know what the sub-categorization argument is, but I kind of understand that people want to be a bit more precise. For instance, in the "object-oriented" category it is useful to distinguish "class-based" from "prototype-based".
To me, the lack of a commonly accepted definition of "roguelike" is a bit annoying because the definition of the term tends to become more and more fuzzy over time, to the point that the term will eventually become useless as a communication medium. So in my opinion, a little bit of gatekeeping is good.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...
The jokes on this one write themselves.
So - well, for roguelike I prefer to refer to tile-based (and ideally ASCII-visualized) games.
NetHack, mentioned in this section, is actually the rebrand of plain ol' Hack, which I first encountered via a shareware catalogue around 1986. Completely engrossing, and very effective at teaching VI keys well before I knew that was what I was learning.
34 years later NetHack is still coming out with new releases and is great fun to play.
My friend’s floppy disk of hack got corrupt so whenever he read a scroll of identify the game would crash. So he ended up finishing the game without ever reading a scroll of identify, which I admit is quite impressive.
I just played a game of nethack tonight after my family went to sleep!
What I don't understand is what's wrong with just tossing in a new term, instead of latching on and diluting an existing fairly well-defined term.
It's quite clear on the surface, and deeper into it, that they're not the same style of game (from emotional impact, to design structure/goals, to lineage, to graphical design), and often don't even appeal to the same communities
MUDs vary widely, but typically operate by discretizing things into "rooms", often with description in writing rather than as a map layout; the various "rooms" form a graph. If you've played Colossal Cave Adventure, like that (but with fewer puzzles and more combat). Also, time moves forward at the server's preferred pace.
[0] I was killed by a mummy. And in my next run found my now mummified former self and the mummy. After a few runs that level was full of mummies. Needless to say, it did not go well for me.
I do agree that random maps are sort of a hallmark of classic roguelikes to me, but roguelike is such a slippery thing to define.
If you have a (roughly) fixed map where the PC-level appropriate mobs spawn randomly, so you always know the path to victory (or paths) but the challenge is subtly altered by these random encounters, I think you have a JRPG.
If you have a roughly fixed map, random mobs, but which path to take gets randomized (left leads to the boss in one run, right in another run) you're pressing into roguelike territory. But you could also call it Hunt the Wumpus: The RPG.
Roguelikes, again this is opinion, significantly randomize the map as well as having random encounters. I think it changes the way the game is played and explored and why it's replayed.
In the first, you replay the game because you want to try focusing on different stats or classes, an optimal build, the story was fun, etc.
In the second, you replay it because of the general challenge, maybe a bit about optimal builds and such, but also (to whatever extent there is) the puzzling nature of it. I hear a wind in this room, so that means the pit is in one of those two. Better be careful.
In the third, you replay it for all of those reasons and because you genuinely don't know what's coming next. You can have a game where there are a series of holes in the ground and your 2nd level character is suddenly 20 dungeon levels down. Well shit, can my tourist actually survive this?
And these are only three discrete points along a wide spectrum of randomness and its utilization in a game. I think roguelikes tend to be more roguelike when the randomness is somewhere above the second example, up to the extreme of the third. But you could also find other elements of the game to randomize that give you non-physical spaces to explore in a similar manner.
Again, randomness isn't sufficient, but it is necessary. And the degree of randomness or its utilization can be reduced if you keep other "roguelike" qualities present in the game.
DawrfFortress really does a great job of defining losing [FUN]. Nethack captures movement and packages the inevitable illusion of choice perfectly. It's funny how this entire list I've played relentlessly for years daily, and how paradoxical it is by design that hardcore roguelikes are the only times I feel alive and well.
https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/
If you enjoy learning from books, I've written an introductory book about developing roguelikes with JS and Phaser:
This is totally different than the understanding among the traditional roguelike community (and the author) in which a roguelite is not a turn/grid based game, but a roguelike is. Unfortunately, these words are now rather meaningless unless you know who you're speaking to.
I like starve.io for instance. I'm also open to non-browser platforms.
Has everybody predicted this?