Roguelikes and Roguelike-likes

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Delicateflower_sl

shitlord
558
0
Ive been blowing money on steam games alot to pass the time until starbound is released, and i stumbled upon the game dungeons of dredmor here on the forums and decided to try it.
Had quite a bit of fun, and one thing led to the next, i bought sword of the stars: The pit and stumbled on my favorite of em all, which is FREE:http://te4.org/Tales of Maj"eyal. First game ever of this genre for me was faster than light, which people say is not really a roguelike, i cant say im really new to the genre.

Are there other gems like TOME around? I heard dwarf fortress is good, its on my to-check list

Havent had this much fun with games for a long time, doesnt feel like work, like linear'ing it up trying to finish mass effect for 15mins before closing the game down.
 
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Goldenmean_sl

shitlord
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Knytestorme_sl said:
I only just saw this one today, haven't got it yet but looks like it could be interesting fun

http://www.roguelegacy.com/
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Grabbed it on Steam today and have been playing quite a bit. I'll second Derpa's recommendation

It's a metroidvania perspective roguelike with more progression than your average roguelike. Every death you start a new character as a descendant of your previous character, can spend any money you earned on expanding your manor, which works like an account wide talent tree, where you can unlock new classes, boost stats, etc and then run off back into the dungeon.

Because of the manor system, unlike many roguelikes, you're not constantly starting from scratch when you die, so early on you're pretty much just trying to survive until you get enough money to upgrade some part of your manor. I'm not certain how long it is, and the downside to progression is that you'll eventually trivialize areas, but I'd say you'll definitely get your 15$ worth out of it. I haven't even unlocked all of the manor yet, and some of the repeatable upgrades go up to level 75, with the prices for everything steadily increasing.
 
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Goldenmean_sl

shitlord
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And while we're talking about roguelikes, there was a kickstarter for one that seems to have some potential that recently (just barely) met its funding goal.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...rker-purpose-0

It's most similar to Binding of Isaac, so it's a zelda style roguelike. It mostly differs by leaning more on the RPG style progression system. Your character advances in levels, and every level you get the choice of two randomized level up boosts, which come with a range of stats. There's also some account wide progression. Every level you play you get course credits, the harder the level, the more credits you get. Those stick permanently, even after you die, and you'll unlock more choices of things to spend credits on as you play.

Like I said, the kickstarter just finished, so this probably won't be out for a while (they say expected delivery Mar 2014 on the kickstarter). I think it's worth following though.

There's a pre-alpha available athttp://ourdarkerpurpose.com/pre-alpha/odp.zip
 
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Cerzi

Golden Knight of the Realm
109
10
Rogue Legacy is pretty neat but it's definitely not a roguelike or even a roguelikelike in any form. You never die and have to start over - any upgrades or items you've purchased you'll have access to with your new character (which is essentially an extra life with a twist), so the game is just about venturing out as far as you can into the dungeon and inevitably dying, and using the gold to upgrade and enable your subsequent go to have a better chance of making it much further, repeat. It's a lot of fun and very challenging but it's no permadeath.

ToMe4 is definitely the best gateway roguelike. It has a solid amount of depth and the way it's laid out will be pretty familiar to anyone who's played any RPG. But if you really get into ToMe and roguelike's you'll want to scratch the itch properly with a full-fledged hardcore roguelike, and DCSS (Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup) is the answer for that. Like Dwarf Fortress it has tilesets so you aren't forced to get used to the ASCII. It's ridiculously deep, with a full set of dieties to worship that are fundamental to getting through the game, a fuckton of different races (some with wildly different gameplay) and a really nice skill system that lets you build a class really flexibly based on what you encounter. Starting classes are just that; they set your initial items and skills, but through the game you can train skills in whatever fashion you wish.

Yeah, I enjoyed ToMe 4 for a bit, it has a storyline and lots of different active abilities to play with. But I've spent 100x more hours playing DCSS, it's just such a better game if you can get into it.

http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/


Oh there's also a shit hot DayZ-like roguelike which is unbelievably well made but I don't think it has a tileset yet, so might not be the best one to start with. CataclysmDDAhttp://en.cataclysmdda.com/
 
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Goldenmean_sl

shitlord
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Enh. Roguelikelike is a notoriously poorly defined term, especially with all of the modern interpretations and the pseudogenre becoming more and more prevalent in the indie developer space.

Rogue Legacy definitely falls a bit further afield than many of them, and you're right, if you're using permadeath as one of the must-haves for a game to qualify as a roguelike, it isn't, but it does have some of the other common features (randomized dungeons, character death and 'starting over' being a fact of the game, even if you do keep character progression, etc.) Personally, I consider anything randomized and highly lethal with much of the game state resetting every death enough for me to consider something a roguelikelike, mostly for want of a better term, but like I said, it's poorly defined. If I called it a roguelikelikelike, would you buy that?

Out of curiousity, for you to consider something a roguelike, does all progression have to wipe? Because there are definitely several games that do fit the roguelike definition much more strongly that still have progression systems of a sort in the form of unlocking new classes at least.

Oh, while I'm thinking about it, another roguelike(add however many likes you want) that I've really been enjoying for some time ishttp://www.desktopdungeons.net. It's been in beta approximately forever, but you can play the most recent build if you pre-order. It's a casual roguelike that almost resembles a puzzle game in some ways. Games are very short (pretty much just one dungeon level for the most part), and it's mostly about best utilizing the resources you have at your disposal to level up enough to kill the boss. It does have some sort of gamewide progression (you steadily unlock more classes/races and can keep gold from game to game which allows you to start new games with items already in your inventory), but the challenges also scale up steadily.
 
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velk

Trakanon Raider
2,546
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Cerzi_sl said:
ToMe4 is definitely the best gateway roguelike. It has a solid amount of depth and the way it's laid out will be pretty familiar to anyone who's played any RPG. But if you really get into ToMe and roguelike's you'll want to scratch the itch properly with a full-fledged hardcore roguelike, and DCSS (Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup) is the answer for that. Like Dwarf Fortress it has tilesets so you aren't forced to get used to the ASCII. It's ridiculously deep
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Personal opinions and whatnot aside, that claim struck me as a little outrageous. Crawl skills are stuff like fighting, swords, shields, dodge etc, which give passive multipliers and are the same across every 'class'. ToME has more interesting skills in any one quest unlockable skill tree than crawl does in the entire game. And every class has multiple unique/shared and unlockable trees. These are not '+1 with swords' type rubbish either - skills are multilevel with increasing active and passive effects that interact with other skills.

Crawl has 'ridiculous depth' in the same way that chess does.
 
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Cerzi

Golden Knight of the Realm
109
10
velk_sl said:
Personal opinions and whatnot aside, that claim struck me as a little outrageous. Crawl skills are stuff like fighting, swords, shields, dodge etc, which give passive multipliers and are the same across every 'class'. ToME has more interesting skills in any one quest unlockable skill tree than crawl does in the entire game. And every class has multiple unique/shared and unlockable trees. These are not '+1 with swords' type rubbish either - skills are multilevel with increasing active and passive effects that interact with other skills.

Crawl has 'ridiculous depth' in the same way that chess does.
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Maybe, although you're forgetting the huge array of spells available in Crawl. I don't know - I played the hell out of ToMe for a couple of weeks but after that it felt bland, despite all the interesting classes and skills/generics. I think maybe for me the emphasis on story and open-world detracts from the raw roguelike experience (the same problem I had with eg WoW's storytime instances vs EQ dungeon camping), and the lack of a hunger clock or a choice of deities takes away a lot of the atmosphere of a good roguelike (imo). There actually feels like more variety in DCSS just because of the way the dungeon and branches are generated, whereas in ToMe you go through the standard order of zones and see the same plot mechanisms repeat themselves. All that stuff just becomes ultra dry if you're forced to repeat it over and over (see diablo 3 over-bearing storyline vs diablo 2's non-instrusive one, and which game was less tiresome to run through multiple times).

Yeah, to me ToMe is to Crawl as WoW was to EQ, or UT was to Q3. It sacrifices raw gameplay goodness in favour of fluff, bells and whistles. Maybe I'm just opening up a whole can of worms here.
 
Caliane

Caliane

Avatar of War Slayer
14,586
10,078
Goldenmean_sl said:
Enh. Roguelikelike is a notoriously poorly defined term, especially with all of the modern interpretations and the pseudogenre becoming more and more prevalent in the indie developer space.

Rogue Legacy definitely falls a bit further afield than many of them, and you're right, if you're using permadeath as one of the must-haves for a game to qualify as a roguelike, it isn't, but it does have some of the other common features (randomized dungeons, character death and 'starting over' being a fact of the game, even if you do keep character progression, etc.) Personally, I consider anything randomized and highly lethal with much of the game state resetting every death enough for me to consider something a roguelikelike, mostly for want of a better term, but like I said, it's poorly defined. If I called it a roguelikelikelike, would you buy that?

Out of curiousity, for you to consider something a roguelike, does all progression have to wipe? Because there are definitely several games that do fit the roguelike definition much more strongly that still have progression systems of a sort in the form of unlocking new classes at least.

Oh, while I'm thinking about it, another roguelike(add however many likes you want) that I've really been enjoying for some time ishttp://www.desktopdungeons.net. It's been in beta approximately forever, but you can play the most recent build if you pre-order. It's a casual roguelike that almost resembles a puzzle game in some ways. Games are very short (pretty much just one dungeon level for the most part), and it's mostly about best utilizing the resources you have at your disposal to level up enough to kill the boss. It does have some sort of gamewide progression (you steadily unlock more classes/races and can keep gold from game to game which allows you to start new games with items already in your inventory), but the challenges also scale up steadily.
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yeah, I kindof roll my eyes at Rogue legacy being called a roguelike. I feel its like calling borderlands an rpg because of levels, gear and skill tree. It does look fun, but Im pretty sure I would just call it a platformer.




http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...rker-purpose-0
^that looks really interesting. Someone let me know what thats out.
 
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Delicateflower_sl

shitlord
558
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Caliane_sl said:
yeah, I kindof roll my eyes at Rogue legacy being called a roguelike. I feel its like calling borderlands an rpg because of levels, gear and skill tree. It does look fun, but Im pretty sure I would just call it a platformer.
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Bought rogue legacy cuz im really itching for something new to play. I didnt play it for hours like i did dungeons of dred, TOME or The pit so guess thats not a good sign (to my taste anyway)

Gonna try stone soup since you guys say its better than TOME and i played tome alot (although i only started playing 2 days ago)

Edit: played half an hour, looks interesting but interface is god awful, not sure if i feel that retro
 
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Goldenmean_sl

shitlord
138
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Caliane_sl said:
yeah, I kindof roll my eyes at Rogue legacy being called a roguelike. I feel its like calling borderlands an rpg because of levels, gear and skill tree. It does look fun, but Im pretty sure I would just call it a platformer.

^that looks really interesting. Someone let me know what thats out.
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I wouldn't call Borderlands an RPG, but it's definitely an FPS with strong RPG elements. That's an important distinction for me, because I like Borderlands 1/2, but really have no interest in most FPSes. The RPG elements make the game for me.

Genre lines are blurring more and more as time goes on and games get increasingly hybridized. It's been a while since we had a genuinely new genre (I'm tempted to say the last one was rhythm games, but I'm probably forgetting something). Everything else is just a mashup of two or three different genres, and nowhere is that more the case than RPGs. Practically everything these days has some sort of RPG DNA spliced in, which is ironic, because "pure" RPGs feel like they're in a steady decline.

In the same way that I'd call Borderlands an FPS with strong RPG elements, Rogue Legacy is probably best described as a Metroidvania with roguelike elements (though it has less item/ability based progression than your typical metroidvania, so maybe "platformer with roguelike elements" is better). Roguelike-like seems to be the shorthand for "with roguelike elements", but it's such a clunky name, and as times go on, they're resembling their grandparent game(s) less and less.

Anyway, I'm veering off into semantics again. In regards to Our Darker Purpose, I'll definitely mention it when it comes out or hits public beta or the like. Did you try the pre-alpha? It's just one level and a teaser of a future boss, but it gives a pretty good impression of what the game is going to be like (A Binding of Isaac-ish Zelda style roguelike-like)
 
Caliane

Caliane

Avatar of War Slayer
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yeah, a key aspect of a metroidvania is an intelligently created map. Exploring, and backtracking for hidden paths, and newly unlocked areas, etc.
A metroidvania pretty much CAN'T be a roguelike.

This is the first time I heard of our darker purpose. sounds neat.
 
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Goldenmean_sl

shitlord
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Caliane_sl said:
yeah, a key aspect of a metroidvania is an intelligently created map. Exploring, and backtracking for hidden paths, and newly unlocked areas, etc.
A metroidvania pretty much CAN'T be a roguelike.
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Yeah, you're right. Maybe I need a new term. Whenever I say platformer, my brain immediately goes more to the mario brothers space, and that doesn't seem quite right either.
 
Gask

Gask

Bronze Baron of the Realm
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Knytestorme_sl said:
I only just saw this one today, haven't got it yet but looks like it could be interesting fun

http://www.roguelegacy.com/
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Got it today and played for a couple hours... if you wanted a roguelike then look elsewhere. This is a platformer where progression is only possible through repeated deaths and gold farming. You really have to get a hang of the controls and figure out the enemies/traps before you can get anywhere at all and that takes a lot of dying as there is no reliable way to heal.

I find it a bit tedious but I suppose it can be fun once you figure it out and get the muscle memory down (if you are using a keyboard).
 
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Goldenmean_sl

shitlord
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Gask_sl said:
I find it a bit tedious but I suppose it can be fun once you figure it out and get the muscle memory down (if you are using a keyboard).
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Yeah, I can't even imagine playing this with keyboard. Lots of fun with a controller though.

And later on you can unlock blood equipment which has a lifedrain effect on it, and the lich class which raises max hp on kills, so there is some semi-reliable healing once you get going a bit.
 
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