Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Game Discussion => Classic Roguelikes => Topic started by: guest509 on October 06, 2011, 11:21:05 AM
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I see Crawl, Nethack, Adom and Angband are all classic and complex games. Seems like we throw ToME in there as well. Also the progenitors are often discussed here (Rogue, Moria, etc...).
So how does one add a game to the list of Majors? Games like DoomRL are certainly popular enough. Dungeons of Dreadmore, Cardinal Quest, Desktop Dungeons, Spelunky and Legends of Yore seem to be coming along as well.
So how do we add a new major? Or are they pretty set? And since Angband and Nethack are no longer actively developed, do we include all *bands and Slash'Em here? We certainly include DCSS.
Just wondering...
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I suppose it's a rather outdated term. It used to be fairly clear that only a few roguelikes were big, back when only a few could justify having their own newsgroup. Now it's quite a different matter, with newer games like Dredmor having more players than some classics like ADOM and Nethack. Of course it's hard to tell how lasting that will be. Still, I'd personally suggest we abandon the idea of major roguelikes - there are RLs of many flavours and many degrees of popularity, and trying to identify an elite tier does a great injustice to the variety of the genre.
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Far better to me would be to recognize the ones that are especially industrious and ambitious in terms of what they are aiming to do stylistically and perhaps in absolute terms--rough examples would be MageGuild being pretty much the king of Puzzle Roguelikes alongside Desktop Dungeons, Sprawling World/Quest doings like ADOM, JADE, Legend of Siegfried, Rayel....
Though, I should say that Angband is still developing along nicely and the next version should be a sizable leap forward thanks in no small part to Shockbolt's wonderful tileset amidst other core improvements. Some of the variants are trucking along rather nicely as well with big changes, like the very recent FayAngband.
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Maybe this would break the tradition, but I think this term should not be dependent on the player count, but on the size and type of the game, something like an opposite of coffebreak roguelike. ADOM, Angband, NetHack, Crawl all have several hundreds of items, monsters, lots of races and classes to choose from, several days are usually required to win the game, and in general, lots of options and huge complexity. Some roguelike developers set goals like "I want to create the new ADOM/NetHack/Crawl/etc, but even more complex", and these roguelikes become major roguelikes if given enough time, and some focus on a simple goal. I think Spelunky, DoomRL and probably all 7DRLs fall into the second category, and I would not qualify them as major roguelikes, no matter how many players play them. Both major and coffebreak roguelikes can be good or bad games, and have lots or few players.
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I think that ignores games in the middle like DoomRL (which is no longer a coffeebreak) and Dungeons of Dredmor (which has significant complexity, but not on the same scale of Nethack). There is no black and white comparison. Also what about old RLs like Moria, Omega and ToME2? These are large, complex games. Are they still major even though rarely played?
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I dunno if they are majors, but they are the classic precurser games so they are discussed on this section of the forum.
The effective difference I see here is one of longevity. If you are a newer game you get placed in the Not Majors, if you are old and are/were played quite a bit then you are a major.
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I think Spelunky, DoomRL and probably all 7DRLs fall into the second category, and I would not qualify them as major roguelikes
They can't be major roguelikes, because they are not roguelikes at all.
JADE is going to be the next one I guess. It looks like TB is getting more involved and getting results fast. He's such a rascal.
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They can't be major roguelikes, because they are not roguelikes at all.
Maybe Spelunky only has some roguelike elements, but why won't you qualify DoomRL as a roguelike?
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They can't be major roguelikes, because they are not roguelikes at all.
Maybe Spelunky only has some roguelike elements, but why won't you qualify DoomRL as a roguelike?
I'd like to know this as well. Not saying I disagree, just curious.
Let's see what high value factors of the Berlin interpretation says-
Random environment generation - Very primitive, but yes.
Permadeath - Yes.
Turn-based - Yes.
Grid-based - Yes.
Non-modal - Mostly yes.
Complexity - Not sure...
Resource management - Yes.
Hack'n'slash - Yes.
Exploration and discovery - Almost none as far as I remember (aside from exploring the levels).
So it may be missing two critical components, depending how you look at it. And of course you don't have to agree with this definition of a RL either.
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Spelunky is tun based?
Also, while the levels are tiles based the character seem to be able to move continually (i.e. a char can be 0.7 on one tile and 0.3 on another) .
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DoomRL is action shooter, it's just turn-based. Roguelikes should be role-playing games in the way they are usually. Otherwise you could call a turn based Tetris with ascii graphics a roguelike. That doesn't sound right.
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Roguelikes should be role-playing games in the way they are usually. Otherwise you could call a turn based Tetris with ascii graphics a roguelike. That doesn't sound right.
It sounds to me like you are talking about adom-likes rather than roguelikes.
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In case you are new to this site, Krice has a very strict and traditional view of what a Rogue-Like is. It is more akin to what some of us would call Rogue-Clone. DoomRL is definitely like rogue in many ways, so can aptly be called a Roguelike.
This whole RPG thing is silly anyway because DoomRL has plenty of stats and character class mechanics that place it firmly in the RPG camp. Though SciFi can be a bit nontraditional to roleplay.
Try not to get too mixed up with the definitions. I'm sure there are people that say Roguelikes are not RPG's because there is very little actual roleplay.
Creativity always pushes the bounds of easy definition.
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I dunno. I've always seen the "kill things and take their stuff" mechanic as being more central to roguelike games than the "roleplaying" mechanic. Not that roguelikes are devoid of roleplaying, and roleplaying can make the game more fun if the players do it.
But roleplaying is a funny thing. It's the players that do it, not the game. I've seen a kid playing asteroids and having a wonderful time yelling orders at his imaginary gunnery officer and his imaginary navigation officer, who were named Plantaganett and Mojçek respectively. So does that make asteroids a roleplaying game? Not really, although it was for this kid. And I've seen people show up at D&D games and annoy the hell out of everyone by minmaxing every decision and absolutely refusing to roleplay at all. So even though D&D is a roleplaying game, it turns out that people can still engage in it while refusing to roleplay.
And roguelikes are somewhere in the middle. They're not social games like D&D where you have other players who are there to roleplay and want you to do so as well, but they're also not so purely tactical/strategic that roleplaying is merely a weakness to be avoided, or purely irrelevant, like Chess or Go.
Kill Things and Take Their Stuff is absolutely central to roguelike gameplay. I think roleplaying should add enjoyment to the game, and provide ways to choose between valid tactical options, but it's not as central as Kill Things and Take Their Stuff.
But nobody has really said what they think is missing from a game that makes it "not a roleplaying game." At a guess, I'm supposing that the Power Curve is important to a lot of roleplayers; the advance in equipment or intrinsic power through the game is considered very important in a lot of traditional roleplaying games. And on that point DoomRL doesn't deliver as much as "traditional" roguelike games.
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On How to be a Major Roguelike.
I think that having a large player base that continues to find the game fun over a long long period of time qualifies something as a "major" roguelike.
No matter what else it has, if people can play it through a few times and then get bored with it, it isn't a major roguelike. Even if a million people play Dungeons of Dredmor or Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon, if those million mostly get to the point where the game's not fun anymore, within a few weeks or months, then in my mind it fails to qualify as a "Major" roguelike game.
So, to my mind, if you want to make a "major" game make a game that continues to present interesting tactically-different challenges, in a lot of different ways. Give the character lots of different ways to interact with his environment and equipment. Give him interesting challenges with several different solutions. Give him opportunities to roleplay and opportunities to minmax. Engage his mind by limiting what he can do mindlessly - keep things interesting enough that 'spoilers' can't reliably tell him how to win. And time will tell how well you've succeeded. If you wind up with a whole lot of fanatics who've been playing for ten years and still think it's fun, then you've managed to make a major roguelike game.
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Far better to me would be to recognize the ones that are especially industrious and ambitious in terms of what they are aiming to do stylistically and perhaps in absolute terms--rough examples would be MageGuild being pretty much the king of Puzzle Roguelikes alongside Desktop Dungeons, Sprawling World/Quest doings like ADOM, JADE, Legend of Siegfried, Rayel....
Though, I should say that Angband is still developing along nicely and the next version should be a sizable leap forward thanks in no small part to Shockbolt's wonderful tileset amidst other core improvements. Some of the variants are trucking along rather nicely as well with big changes, like the very recent FayAngband.
Kudos to you for *mentioning* Mage Guild, that incredibly awesome game that's also incredibly underadvertised and underfollowed.
Did I say I've started a new tileset for Mage Guild? No, I think I didn't. I've started a new tileset for Mage Guild.
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You mentioned it on the Mage Guild forum ;)
That game's very worthy of mention, and doesn't seem to get the hype it deserves.
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You mentioned it on the Mage Guild forum ;)
That game's very worthy of mention, and doesn't seem to get the hype it deserves.
Yeah. The poor game forum that only you, me, the Dev and another fella visit.
GO AND VISIT http://www.lukossoftware.com/ (http://www.lukossoftware.com/) RITE NAO FOR THE SAKE OF LITTLE KITTENS
(This thread has now been hijacked by the misguided MGSAA*)
*Mage Guild Support and Appreciation Army
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Best wishes on a new Mage Guild tileset Psiweapon, as that is a kind of thing that may very well draw enough renewed glances to ensnare the player base.
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Darren, yes, DoomRL is a game in the middle, I think there is nothing wrong in that.
Krice, I think Spelunky is not a roguelike, just an action roguelike, roguelikelike, semi-roguelike or whatever, but that just helps the point that it is not a major roguelike. :)
There are lots of good ideas about MageGuild, but when I played it, it also had some factors which turned me off, unfortunately. Ugly "graphical ASCII" instead of a real console that I would be able to customize to my tastes (hopefully Psiweapon's new tileset can help here), and C# nature. When I tried it, reaching deep levels felt like a waste of time, since the deeper levels were very large, the game was running slowly, and it was too boring to get down there to get killed by something without a good reason (maybe the game was not balanced, maybe it required more practice), but these experiences are quite old, maybe it became better since then.
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On "Major Roguelikes":
I believe some of the criterias that are needed inorder to be a major RL is:
-Popularity
-Complexity
-As few controversial features as possible (It must stay true to the 'roots' - fantasy, rpg etc.)
But more importantly I think this is a fact: since RL-development seems to be really active lately, makes it problematic to admit new "Major RLs". Inorder for something to be MAJOR, it must be a minority - a minority that is 'ranked' above "everything else".
I rather think the world is crying out for a new term. Something inbetween "Major RLs" and "Not yet Major RLs.." Something like: "Respected RLs" or just "Popular RLs".
Don't you all agree? :-)
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Coffeebreak / Medium / Major ? Overall I don't see the need for these labels at all.
I don't agree a major has to be non-controversial. Cataclysm could be come a major for instance. And ToME4 is pretty non-controverisal in many of its mechanics and interface features.
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Darren, yes, DoomRL is a game in the middle, I think there is nothing wrong in that.
Krice, I think Spelunky is not a roguelike, just an action roguelike, roguelikelike, semi-roguelike or whatever, but that just helps the point that it is not a major roguelike. :)
There are lots of good ideas about MageGuild, but when I played it, it also had some factors which turned me off, unfortunately. Ugly "graphical ASCII" instead of a real console that I would be able to customize to my tastes (hopefully Psiweapon's new tileset can help here), and C# nature. When I tried it, reaching deep levels felt like a waste of time, since the deeper levels were very large, the game was running slowly, and it was too boring to get down there to get killed by something without a good reason (maybe the game was not balanced, maybe it required more practice), but these experiences are quite old, maybe it became better since then.
I must admit that I haven't ever played Mage Guild in text mode. I haven't ever finished it, either, and yes, the deep-ish levels (been only down to 8 myself) are REALLY big, and an instakill nasty might be lurking in the second room you explore. Or two of them.
I'm making two variants of the tileset, one with female PC tiles and another one with a male PC.
So far I've made nine monsters, the five scrolls, three PC ranks, six scenery tiles and I'm starting with the targeting circle. The scenery tiles "repeats" should be grayed out.
You can check an early WIP here:http://lukos.x10hosting.com/sites/default/files/MG_psi_female_tiles_1.png (http://lukos.x10hosting.com/sites/default/files/MG_psi_female_tiles_1.png)
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If you can't kick in the game it's not a roguelike. Kicking stuff is an essential feature every roguelike has to have. In other words you need a lot of features and different ways to interact in the game, so you can use more than one tactical solution to a problem.
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And thus Rogue is not a roguelike... Well done on another feat of logic, Krice :)
Also I'd say complexity does not need to come in the form of item interactions. It's one way the major classics have depth, but there are other approaches.
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And thus Rogue is not a roguelike... Well done on another feat of logic, Krice :)
I think we all know that when we talk about roguelikes we actually refer to Nethack as the standard roguelike. Besides Rogue can't be a roguelike, because it IS Rogue. It's not "like". Nethack had influence from Rogue, but it become more complex, so called roguelike.
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I consider Nethack an example, not the definition. Many games are much closer to Rogue and lacking the complexity of Nethack. Rogue itself shows that in the genre you don't have to be complex.
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Krice's definition is similar to what I understood as a roguelike several years ago (http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php/Roguelike_Alphabet): a set of features which appear in NetHack, ADOM, Angband variants, Crawl, Ragnarok, but are less popular in non-roguelike games. This includes not only the big things mentioned by the Berlin Interpretation, but also things like bone files (NetHack, Crawl, Ragnarok, some Angband variants), hallucination (NetHack, Rogue, Ragnarok, some Angband variants), fortune cookies or a similar system (NetHack, ADOM, Angband variants, Ragnarok), identification (every one), blessed/cursed items, and so on. Yes, roguelikeness of Rogue is smaller than of NetHack or ADOM, according to this. But that's not a problem, the genre has evolved since Rogue. It would be possible to imagine a single "ideal roguelike", which would not be Rogue or any of the games mentioned above, but something in between. Roguelikeness would be measured by distance from this ideal roguelike.
But during these several years, the genre has evolved more. 7DRL challenges have shown that you can create a good roguelike without identification or fortune cookies.
I still think that having fortune cookies (or some variant adapted to the specific theme) makes a game more roguelike, even though Rogue ltself and most roguelikes appearing now do not have them. A simple identification minigame might not add much to the tactics, but it adds to roguelikeness. The exact feature set of the ideal roguelike is subjective, but IMO it would still contain fortune cookies, identification, bones, and all other similar side features.
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I think certain things should be considered Nethackisms rather than Rogueisms. For me procedural content + turn-based + single-hero control + permadeath = everything you need. Everything else is flavour.
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Coffeebreak / Medium / Major ? Overall I don't see the need for these labels at all.
I don't agree a major has to be non-controversial. Cataclysm could be come a major for instance. And ToME4 is pretty non-controverisal in many of its mechanics and interface features.
Erm, you are talking about "How to -theoretically- be(come) a Major Roguelike".
I am saying, what is ACTUALLY required to be a "Major Roguelike". And I still think the key factor is "lack of controversy"+Quality+Complexity, in that order. All of the Major Roguelikes is games that, when someone calls it a Major RL - whether you love that RL or not - you will nod to yourself, and say: "Yeah..that IS a good roguelike.."
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All of the Major Roguelikes is games that, when someone calls it a Major RL
Exactly. The players will decide. Not some funny rules or interpretations that were decided by some developers.
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I suppose part of the problem is the forums here, which have separate threads for "Major Roguelikes" and "Not Yet Major Roguelikes". Why is there not just one "Roguelikes" discussion? The "Not Yet" is especially silly, since games like Powder, Brogue, etc are clearly never aiming to be like Crawl or Nethack. Coffeebreaks and 7DRLs are similar. Why are we forced to think about the genre in these irrelevant terms?
If anything the only distinction should be between core roguelikes and roguelike-likes (or games with some roguelike features). And even that distinction just leads to silly debates.
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Another option is WIP/Active ones versus Settled or inherently static like the various handheld and console fare. This way all the taxonomical nomencalture is swept aside, as I've generally ranted it should be most of the time, and it comes down Liveliness and Milestones/Plateauing off.
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I'm sure, if I wanted to, I could come up with a heap of stringent criteria to decide what is and what isn't a major roguelike, but in my opinion there's not much of a point. The players should decide.
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I propose we adopt a dog-Latin taxonomy to assure that all Roguelikes—or, rather, all members of the family Roguelia—are given their due recognition. Doom RL would be Roguelia Scifius Shootemupium, Nethack would be Roguelia Fantasium Kickin'downadoorious, and so on.
I nominate myself for the committee devoted to its implementation.
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Nomination seconded...shall we vote?
Aye!
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So if one were to make an attempt to create a major roguelike? I think the focus should be on tons of content, interactivity and longevity/fun.
Good luck focusing on that last one.