Roguelike games are one of those major events that happened that I completely missed. It's hugely popular and I still don't know what a roguelike game is. lol
Originally rogue likes were that, but specifically in the gameplay genre of turn-based dungeon crawling RPG's. These days they can be in other genres: twin stick shooters, card games, action platformers, etc.
While runs are typically short, it is not always the case. What makes permadeath more acceptable is that thanks to procedural generation, your next run will be different from your last one, avoiding the repetition that can make starting over such a bad experience.
It is such a great combo that permadeath and procedural generation are most often seen together, the roguelike/roguelite formula.
Permadeath is very engaging, try playing a game in "hardcore" mode if it is available and you will see what I mean, it plays with your emotions like nothing else. Problem is, once you are dead, starting over is a tedious experience, same levels, same story, no more surprises, etc... That's where procedural generation comes in, giving you new levels and maintaining the level of excitement on every run. The sense of progression comes from going further and further as you get better.
In the same way, procedural generation is great but for a single run, it will never be as good as a handcrafted environment, it really shines when you do multiple runs, and a great way of making people do multiple runs is, you guessed it, permadeath.
Contra for the NES would be an excellent example of this. The whole game lasts less than an hour for even a moderately-paced run, but it's quite difficult if you're not used to that specific type of game, so in practice it'll take much longer than that for most people to beat it, as they have to restart multiple times. Same deal for Super Mario Bros 1.
Roguelikes are the same kind of loop, but with the improvement that the levels are somewhat different each time. They're still usually similar enough in style/theme/enemies that skills carry over from run to run, but you at least can't just brute force memorize everything. You have to Git Gud or you'll be stuck forever.
"Roguelike" is one of those irritating, smugly obscure terms that keep surfacing in HN post titles. What doesn't help is the failure to capitalize "Rogue," which would at least provide a clue that this is a reference to a particular work.
What has become really popular and was introduced by roguelikes is using procedural generation in games. When it’s done well it does wonder for replayability.
Nah come on. They are incredibly popular since the indie revival age (~2005). Arguably one of the most popular indie genre. Spelunky, FTL, The Binding of Isaac, Rogue Legacy, Slay the Spire, Darkest Dungeon just to name a few. Hades, which is pretty much an AA rougelike.
Recently the biggest hit is Vampire Survivors [0]. Top 50 game on Steam with 20-35k players.
0, https://store.steampowered.com/app/1794680/Vampire_Survivors...
If you excuse the lack of procedural generation, it is not much different than other modern roguelike games like Hades or FTL.
Depends on where you draw the lines I suppose.
That's every shmup!
Also it’s just addictive, punches way above its weight.
I do so wish we had landed on a different genre name for games that share these meta characteristics.
Language evolves, and often the root etymology of a word becomes not quite accurate. One can stand on the shore and tell the tide it is wrong for coming in, but that's not going to stop it. You can tell people to not evolve their language, but it'll still evolve.
Even then, most video-game genres are even LESS descriptive than "Roguelike". If a game is a "shooter", "simulation", "action", or "roleplaying" game, it's quite hard to tell what those things really mean. It turns out that "Roguelike" has actually become one of the most descriptive terms when it comes to game mechanics in recent years.
"Goal/win condition" describes what GAMES are. Games have win conditions. That is what makes them games.
Darkest Dungeon is tagged on Steam as a "roguelike" (and generally discussed as such from what I have seen). It doesn't feature permadeath. Your entire party can wipe in a dungeon and you go back to town.
There is no win condition in Tetris, and arguably there's little to no input into Progress Quest.
> There is no win condition in Tetris
Uh... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_O3Oaz2bos. Also, I am not sure how you would have a tournament for a game with no win condition.
> arguably there's little to no input into Progress Quest.
I don't think most people would categorize Progress Quest as a game.
But there are whole genres of games that you can't win. Minecraft creative mode, the Sims, most MMOs, Cities Skylines, etc etc etc.
And Wikipedia considers progress quest a game, I consider it a game, and the author considers it a game. It might be fairly called a zero player game, but I think it's reasonable to apply the label game.
These are all games that you set your own goals and achieve them. When the player runs out of goals for themselves, they stop playing. Sounds like a win condition to me. Just set by a different person.
> And Wikipedia considers progress quest a game, I consider it a game, and the author considers it a game. It might be fairly called a zero player game, but I think it's reasonable to apply the label game.
I could find a whole bunch of people to say the earth is flat. So what?
I don't consider it a game. What makes the author any more right about that than me?
It's a bit like "story" or "song" or "movie" - there's a lot of stuff that could accept those labels, and some of it is going to be real avant garde.
It's fine for you to hold your opinion, it's just that the rest of us are going to move on with our lives.
They are all games with procedural generation or elements of randomness which have absolutely nothing to do with the gameplay loop of Rogue.
At some point people called them roguelites but I don’t think it makes much sense.
That said, elements of the game(s) are now found in a ton of popular games; a big one nowadays is Hades, which is a roguelite in that the levels are only semi-random, but it has a high replayability value, even when you make it to 'the end'.
There's other games out there that just use procedural / semi-random generation; Diablo and Diablo 2 were big 20 years ago, Bloodborne was big 5ish years ago and they're still making discoveries in the randomized dungeons (with some number manipulation though, has to be said), etc.