Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Announcements => Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) => Topic started by: guest509 on December 13, 2011, 02:23:29 AM
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The voting has started over at Doull's site, Ascii Dreams.
http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com/2011/12/request-for-votes-ascii-dreams.html
Man this is exciting. How will JADE do? Still too new? What about Brogue? Good showing last year and some great updates this year. Freaking puzzles? Nice.
What about the money RL's? Cardinal, 100 Rogues, Dreadmor, Binding of Isaac (if you don't think it counts don't vote for it). All of these are solid as a rock.
The classics are still going strong as well. Crawl, TOME, etc...so many good ones this year it's hard to choose.
EDIT: Hey Getter if Doull decides to put up his own announcement here go ahead and delete mine or merge the threads or whatever. No worries.
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Don't forget you can vote for multiple titles at once - it's not all about the ToME4s and the Crawls, all the minor devs deserve a little praise too. There have been a staggering number of releases this year.
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I even see my silly card game on there. Please don't vote for it. It may be a clone of Rogue in card game form but it hardly qualifies as a roguelike.
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No telling who'll win this year, though I'd roughly suppose the Top 10 is likely to see some degree of shuffling at the very least.
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Always a fun poll. Too bad I did not do a proper release this year :(
Go IA FTW, DF sucks, peace :P
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With the diversity and sheer number of entrances I believe a category system of titles may be appropriate. I'll post when the raw data is available, unless Mr. Doull wants to run with it. I'll post the top 5 in each of these categories.
Best Single Developer
Best Multi Developer
Best Primarily Portable (though this can be a tough call on Powder)
Best New Game
Best Overall
Note I chose these categories as they are easy to differentiate whether or not a roguelike belongs to a category or not. Top Roguelike-like or top graphical roguelike would be too open to argument. And I ain't about to engage in that noise.
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I completely agree with you. 185 completely different games, which should not and can not be compared with each other.
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I completely agree with you. 185 completely different games, which should not and can not be compared with each other.
In theory I'd agree, too. However, that nice little poll is a very good measurement regarding awareness of roguelikes in general -- what are the games people know about and play and consider worth to voting.
That's the reason why some people don't want to have Dredmor on this list -- because its commercial and has, via Steam, a much greater impact on roguelike market. My hypothesis is that many of the people who voted for Dredmor haven't heard of other roguelikes at all, or never really got into the more traditional ones.
This observation and hypothesis is neither good nor bad -- it's just interesting.
I mean, even Dungeon Crawl and Dwarf Fortress have a hard fight against Dredmor.
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I completely agree with you. 185 completely different games, which should not and can not be compared with each other.
In theory I'd agree, too. However, that nice little poll is a very good measurement regarding awareness of roguelikes in general -- what are the games people know about and play and consider worth to voting.
That's the reason why some people don't want to have Dredmor on this list -- because its commercial and has, via Steam, a much greater impact on roguelike market. My hypothesis is that many of the people who voted for Dredmor haven't heard of other roguelikes at all, or never really got into the more traditional ones.
This observation and hypothesis is neither good nor bad -- it's just interesting.
I mean, even Dungeon Crawl and Dwarf Fortress have a hard fight against Dredmor.
But think of the marvelous upside to it: I'd strongly wager many of those voting for Dredmor exclusively now have this as their very first visit to the ASCII Dreams site, to say nothing of being confronted with such a massive list of likely unknown to them games alongside it. As they revisit the site to see if Dredmor is winning or has won, they'll likely take note of the strongest competition---then perhaps they start checking these sites out, then said games out when they discover them to likely be free, then things snowball nicely down mountain with Dredmor having served as that which got the ball rolling as far as turning them onto Roguelikes period and Doull's Big List having given them some leads to follow on vaguely democratic acclaim.
8)
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Very nice point, getter.
Jo, if you're doing categories then 7DRLs should be a heading to itself.
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Regarding Dredmor: I don't understand why some people are against including it, you may like it or not, but it is a notable roguelike. It is a fault of the Actively Developing List maintainer that it was not included there, and this fault was fixed by adding an exception to the rules. Somebody add it to RogueBasin please, so that its enemies can rate it "@" on IRLDb.
Regarding categories: I think it's a nice idea. But probably we will know which categories make sense after the voting is finished. For example, an ASCII only category makes sense if the top three entries have graphical modes, single dev category makes sense only if the top three entries have multiple devs, and so on. Also unclear categories like "roguelike-like" might still have a clear winner.
New game category... I wonder what people mean when voting for an old game (e.g. DoomRL or DCSS). I think it means "the 2011 update is great", not "the game is great". One bad thing about the new game category is that it seems to discourage from the "releasy early" method (JADE could win if TB released it in, say, 2016, but since he released an early version this year, he cannot).
7DRL category... that's a very good category, but there is one potential problem (I don't know any example this year, but last year, Hydra Slayer was started as a 2DRL and then greatly extended, would it count as a 7DRL or not?) A bit similar for "portable games" (Hydra Slayer aims to be a good Android roguelike, but how do you tell whether people who vote for it agree with this or just like the desktop version?)
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But think of the marvelous upside to it
Why "but"? I am totally FOR including DoD in the poll, because of the reasons you mention, and simply because it's a roguelike.
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But think of the marvelous upside to it
Why "but"? I am totally FOR including DoD in the poll, because of the reasons you mention, and simply because it's a roguelike.
Oops, I meant the notion of people getting wary of a commercial entrant drawing a large crowd to potentially upset the apple cart of a poll that has generally been dominated by non-commercial projects.
I probably should have went with "Also" instead of "but" given we're on the same page, I'd just woken up! :P
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Some roguelike developers take donations. It's commercial so let's burn them!
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I don't think including commercial games like Dredmor, Isaac, or Cardinal Quest would really upset the balance of the votes too much since, the whole thing will still be primarily voted on by the die-hard roguelike fans. Anyone who just happened to come across Dredmor and had not played roguelikes before or has no interest in them will not likely even bother to vote.
I don't see any reason why the commercial games should not be included. Although I suppose I would prefer focus on the non-comercial games for some reason I honestly can't quite put my finger on. It just "feels right" to put more attention on games like Infra Arcana, Crawl, TSLM, Hydra Slayer, or any of the other non-commercial efforts. Some like Binding of Isaac and Desktop Dungeons, just don't really seem much like roguelikes as opposed to different games with some roguelike elements.
Although, I don't really see why some games that have already been around for quite some time are there like Crawl and DoomRL. I suppose DoomRL keeps changing so much it's a defferent game than when it started.
Wouldn't it make sens that if there are going to be separate categories that there should be separate voting for those categories?
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Wouldn't it make sens that if there are going to be separate categories that there should be separate voting for those categories?
Its about time that the Temple had its own roguelike polls at the end of the year! Someone do that. Now.
Plus it would liven the place up a bit around the end of the year, get some new publicity and get developers excited to release something so they have a chance of winning something. I can not compete against DF and DoD.
Best 7drl.
Best new RL.
Best RL.
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Some roguelike developers take donations. It's commercial so let's burn them!
With fire! :P
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I do believe that the issue with Dredmor is varied. First people do not want their old school hobby projects compared to a project with a budget and a team. Also the old 'I hate grafix' and the insularity of a fringe hobby group wary of outsiders is adding fuel to the fire.
But no worries. When the data is tabulated I'll do a nice best of in the various categories and everyone will be happy...in my dreams.
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Just a quick rundown, I'll do a bigger + better one later.
Were the poll to end right now the winners would be -
Best Single Developer
- TOME (that's a single guy, right?)
Best Multi Developer
- Dredmor
Best Portable
- 100 Rogues
Best New Game
- Dredmor
Best Overall
- Dredmor - TOME (nearly tied), followed by Crawl, DF, Binding, Brogue, Jade, Cataclysm, Doom, Desktop Dungeons.
OTHER CATEGORIES REQUESTED
Best 7DRL
-Broken Bottle (unless Rogue Survivor was a 7DRL, not sure)
Best Roguelike-like
-Binding of Isaac
Best Graphical
- Dredmor
Make sure you vote!!!
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ToME 4 is sort of a general one guy thing in that DarkGod is pretty well king of the project and does the stuff, though he has grown a cadre of various helpers/contributors submitting patches, sounds, graphics, class breakdowns, specific vault designs, etc. Though, I'd say the sheer volume and variety of things he continues to hash out pretty much puts it squarely on him deservedly...as otherwise the breakdown would get kind of sticky with closed source Roguelikes with no modding focus and no collaboration at all being the purist one-man-band.
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I think Dredmor was the only roguelike made this year. So it's the winner also.
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Woohoo, my roguelike is on the list :D
BTW Into the Dungeon was also made this year, although it is not finished yet. Expect an update over the holydays!
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Some roguelike developers take donations. It's commercial so let's burn them!
*gives krice a pile of wood and a lighter and smiles broadly*
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Some roguelike developers take donations. It's commercial so let's burn them!
*gives krice a pile of wood and a lighter and smiles broadly*
Is that really that bad?! I was thinking about puttin' a paypal donation link on my site for ITD++ ...
P.S. If the above was sarcasm... well it is hard to detect it on internet.
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I don't know if Krice was serious here, but I could imagine. But I could also imagine he was just a little bit provocing. Or trolling. He's a half-troll.
I think donation requests are okay if you have put money into a game which is otherwise free, for example for paying artists: You paid them on your own, but if anybody is willing to support you with that, 'cause it's expensive, donations are welcome. Or you have a really good concept which convices people to support you for realising it. Or they just want to thank you.
Apparently, if the fan base is large enough, this can give the developer 1 or 2 months off their regular jobs, to work on the game (see the amount which was donated for ToME 4 -- over 3.000 EUR).
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I think Dredmor was the only roguelike made this year. So it's the winner also.
I'm surprised to hear this from you. Does it really meet your stringent requirements? You can kick items in it, I suppose...
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I think Dredmor was the only roguelike made this year. So it's the winner also.
(http://hh.bjern.com/rand/HahaOhWowHaddock.jpg)
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I think Dredmor was the only roguelike made this year. So it's the winner also.
I'm surprised to hear this from you. Does it really meet your stringent requirements? You can kick items in it, I suppose...
Darren I do believe he was joking.
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Some roguelike developers take donations. It's commercial so let's burn them!
(http://thewisecracker.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Witch-Monty-Python-Holy-Grail.jpg)
There are ways of telling if they are commercial.
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Is it a forum about roguelike games or an imageboard? at least we need posters done in ASCII style :D
ps: Dredmor and Isaac in this year list and Diablo 3 next year ? :D
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I think donation requests are okay if you have put money into a game which is otherwise free
I would set up a donation button for Kaduria if I knew how! I'm too dumb to understand Paypal.
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It's very easy. If you have a PayPal account, you simply log in, go to the business section and somewhere there is the link. Then there's a small form where you fill in your options (i.e. fixed donation rate, or users may decide freely), and some things regarding the look of the button. In the end you get some HTML code you insert into your website.
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Is it a forum about roguelike games or an imageboard? at least we need posters done in ASCII style :D
ps: Dredmor and Isaac in this year list and Diablo 3 next year ? :D
I imagine the Diablo 3 debate to rage hot and unresolved throughout 2012.
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If you have a PayPal account
Don't have it.
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Will Diablo 3 have any roguelike features?
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Comparing Dredmor to Diablo, I think the two are very similar, but Dredmor is turn based and shallower.
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I've said it once and I'll always maintain it: Din's Curse (Demon War) bears much more attention warranted than most anything kicking about this slice of the"ARPG" space. Older-school Roguelkes could stand to jot some notes down in terms of living world/NPC interactions that'd likely flow a bit better in a turn-based apparatus.
For DIII, IIRC, it is set to have less elements than Diablo II---sliding further from the original. On the flip side, well, I expect to see another good release for DiabloRL somewhere in 2012! :D
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I've said it once and I'll always maintain it: Din's Curse (Demon War) bears much more attention warranted than most anything kicking about this slice of the"ARPG" space. Older-school Roguelkes could stand to jot some notes down in terms of living world/NPC interactions that'd likely flow a bit better in a turn-based apparatus.
For DIII, IIRC, it is set to have less elements than Diablo II---sliding further from the original. On the flip side, well, I expect to see another good release for DiabloRL somewhere in 2012! :D
Glad you mentioned it. It looks like a really cool game.
I honestly can't really see why Dredmor is so far ahead in the running.
When I first saw the trailer for Dredmor, I was blown away. It looked absolutely awesome. Then when it finally came out and I got it, It was awesome. For a few hours.
It's charms soon faded as it just seemed too slow, had too much junk, I rarely found useful weapons/armor and rarely managed to get enough zorkmids to buy some. Even with the new "no time for grind" setting, it still seems drawn out too much. I still think it's a good game and I like the leveling sytem. It's just not nearly as good as most the other roguelikes that have come out this year or the classics like crawl.
I think the main reason for it's high rank is partly the glamour of it being the most roguelike of all the other commercial roguelikes out. Although, I have to say I'm finding myself enjoying Cardinal Quest and Binding of Isaac more then Dredmor.
I would love to see some of the other newer ones get a bit more praise like Hydra Slayer for being pretty innovative and Infra Arcana for it's atmosphere and interesting ideas. I find myself enjoying dying far more in those games within minutes to an hour than the several hours it usually takes to explore two levels and die in Dredmor.
Just my opinion.
It would be nice if the voting page had links to each game. There are quite a few on there that I didn't know about and have missed and haven't tried yet.
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For many people, Dredmor is their gateway into the world of Roguelikes same as Isaac---without a doubt. Also, the Desura crowd is beget from the IndieDB and ModDB sites---they tend to be vocal voters after all these years. If the trail of history had went horribly, horribly astray and only now was Shiren the Wanderer first popping up on PC in a modern form it is likely the same sort of result would've come to pass.
Some of the newcomers will branch out into other Roguelikes, either from the poll, the Gaslamp Games forum, or just as sort of a natural conclusion having had a taste---others may be content with all the massive amount of stuff the Expansion added on top of the latest patch and just hang in there as mods, patches, and all else roll onward----perhaps hoping for an eventual sequel one day.
I've got high hopes for Hack, Slash, Loot for early next year alongside Cardinal Quest 2 as there is room for a vast sea of different Roguelike styles and whatnot. Some folk are apparently hand-wringing over HSL not being a "proper" RL, but this damned overtaxonomy fixation still seems to be a thing.
Agreed that the title for each entry being a hyperlink to the game's homepage would be an improvement for next year----when possible that is. Sadly, the Dungeonmans website is now not even a spammed corpse with all the old info still there buried under it----now just a blanks site with "lol dungeonmans lol" written on it. :'(
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I know I went to the Dungeonman's site about a week ago looking for the game and the site is totally gone. Sad.
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Well the poll is pretty much over, 1 day left. But I won't have time later so I'll do this now. Here is the top 20.
1. ToME 4 666 (23%)
2. Dungeons of Dredmor 584 (20%)
3. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 463 (16%)
4. JADE 413 (14%)
5. Desktop Dungeons 368 (13%)
6. Dwarf Fortress 351 (12%)
7. Brogue 234 (8%)
8. The Binding of Isaac 186 (6%)
9. DoomRL: Doom, the Roguelike 168 (6%)
10. Cataclysm 164 (5%)
11. Legends of Yore 92 (3%)
12. Caves of Qud 83 (2%)
13. UnReal World 77 (2%)
14. X@COM 74 (2%)
15. Angband 66 (2%)
16. Infra Arcana 62 (2%)
17. POWDER 61 (2%)
18. Cardinal Quest 60 (2%)
19. Prospector RL 48 (1%)
20. Rogue Survivor 47 (1%)
Other categories other than a top 20 end up being a bit uninteresting. All the good ones are on this list.
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All the good ones are on this list.
Legerdemain?
Edit: I must say that I really feel bad about the sound of this. It's like "everything that is not known enough for getting many votes is not worth playing or looking at". :/
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I think he meant in terms of deeper category fodder as was eluded to further back in the thread moreso than absolute game quality. Legerdemain comes back to my ranting in the ASCII Dreams poll thread under the name Brian. :-\
With a few exceptions, the top 20 seem to be largely defined by frequency of updates, outright newcomer shine, and a generally expressive existence.
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I don't think Legerdemain is a good game, but I agree with mariodonick's second sentence. Also I think you should not post the results before the poll officially ends.
Why are people voting for JADE? It has received lots of votes, but IMHO there are lots of other games which are more playable and more promising. Do they think it is actually a good game already, or they think that releasing it was an important event of this year? Or is it because of the huge ADOM fanbase who are voting for it without knowing many other roguelikes?
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I don't think Legerdemain is a good game
May I ask why? (Really, I want to know.)
I think "Roguelike of the year" is simply a bit too blurry -- anyone can vote for anything. But the categories issue has been discussed already a lot. *g*
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Why are people voting for JADE? It has received lots of votes, but IMHO there are lots of other games which are more playable and more promising. Do they think it is actually a good game already, or they think that releasing it was an important event of this year? Or is it because of the huge ADOM fanbase who are voting for it without knowing many other roguelikes?
Hype/exciting moment in Roguelike history in general that would only be rivaled in notoriety by a new ADoM release or one from The Dev Team for Nethack after all these years, solidarity support for the very notion of it(spur Biskup onward)---especially if there's been a surge in the last day or so as he's began to outline his plans for the commercial The Ultimate Edition that'll be showing up in Jan with the next release.
Probably some that just stuck to their respective camps to take the poll to the logical extreme versus voting for many Roguelikes as others did.
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I don't think Legerdemain is a good game
May I ask why? (Really, I want to know.)
It's not a bad game, but it triggered my TL;DR filter pretty quickly - IMO roguelikes are about game mechanics and not about story, and I don't find the two mix too well (I think few games beside RPGs and point&click adventure games really benefit much from a prominent story).
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Is ToME 4 actually good now? I tried it back a while, didn't like.
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When did you try and what didn't you like? There have been many changes, but I wouldn't say the base gameplay has become significantly different.
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May I ask why? (Really, I want to know.)
It has been discussed in this thread: http://roguetemple.com/forums/index.php?topic=1403.0
My post is a year old and I know Legerdemain has changed since then, but it would require rather fundamental changes to change my opinion... BTW I read that it has a graphical tileset, but surprisingly there are no screenshots on Legerdemain site.
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All the good ones are on this list.
Sorry I didn't state myself correctly here Mario. I was going on and on earlier about pointing out the winners in each category. Like best new game, best single developer, best 7DRL, best portable etc...but the way it ends up with a poll like this the top game in each category ends up being plenty recognized by a simple top 20 list. Even top portable game, which was (I think), Legends of Yore.
Surely there are plenty of games that are not listed but people love them. AliensRL for example is definitely in my top 5. I think it's the strong theme. Legerdemain has a strong following it seems but it did not show up on the top 20. It lacks broad appeal for some reason. Or at least broad appeal among those that vote in Roguelike polls.
I have to say I'm big into mechanics of roguelikes. And cannot fathom why anyone could find RPG plots interesting. Different stokes.
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No 7drls made the top 20. Still, I agree that the top 20 is a good guide for the current top of the genre, especially amongst those recently updated (Legerdemain has been stale for a good while now). I said on the podcast that previously we've highlighted the top 10, but this year it really needs stretching to the top 20 to truly represent the genre.
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IF the 7DRL competition were in Nov I think this might change. Se la vi.
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I don't think Legerdemain is a good game
May I ask why? (Really, I want to know.)
It's not a bad game, but it triggered my TL;DR filter pretty quickly - IMO roguelikes are about game mechanics and not about story, and I don't find the two mix too well (I think few games beside RPGs and point&click adventure games really benefit much from a prominent story).
I don't know what you mean by the "TL;DR" abbreviation, but I think I understand your post anyway. I think I had a completely different first contact with roguelikes.
It was Nethack: Many many years ago I had just installed my first Linux and was searching through the games section of the package manager. I was searching for RPG, and Nethack was the first result. With a RPG definition which was based on stats, but not on story, I could agree that Nethack surely was a RPG. That it was a roguelike ... this I discovered years later.
However, while playing Nethack I soon recognized that it was a really BAD RPG, because it had no story, and the whole theme was completely inconsistent. It did not show me a detailed world. This was the moment I switched to Angband (and later Moria).
Angband and Moria were better, because these had a consistent theme, and that this was Tolkien-based added a lot for me.
But it still had too less story in it. And then I decided to start with LambdaRogue, which was in 2006.
So, all in all, the whole roguelike definition thing and roguelike preferences may strongly depend on your experiences with the genre and why you started to play roguelikes at all. :)
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I was searching for RPG, and Nethack was the first result. With a RPG definition which was based on stats, but not on story, I could agree that Nethack surely was a RPG. That it was a roguelike ... this I discovered years later.
It think this is the crux of the issues - roguelikes are not RPGs, and for me they are almost the opposite of RPGs (as in - what I like about RPGs I consider mostly irrelevant to roguelikes and what I like about roguelikes I consider mostly irrelevant to RPGs).
This is part of the reason I see Desktop Dungeons as a refinement of the roguelike formula to it's logical extreme while ADOM, Legerdemain & LambdaRogue are RPG/Roguelike hybrids that don't really appeal to me personally, because my criteria for what makes me enjoy an RPG and what makes me enjoy a roguelike are diametrically opposed.
For me games that exemplify what the genre is about are:
- rogue
- crawl
- brogue
- desktop dungeons (not quite a RL but I enjoy it for the same reason i enjoy RLs)
The games that exemplify RPGs for me are:
- fallout RPGs (not tactics or brotherhood of steel)
- baldur's gate
- planescape torment
- arcanum
And games that are a bit of both are for me neither here nor there, and today I rather play a "true" RPG or a "true" roguelike instead of angband (which is btw not *that* RPG-ish, a better example would be ToME2).
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However, while playing Nethack I soon recognized that it was a really BAD RPG, because it had no story, and the whole theme was completely inconsistent. It did not show me a detailed world.
I agree with that, nethack is a terrible RPG, just like most good roguelikes :)
I also consider tetris, pacman & Microsoft Word to be atrocious RPGs.
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After some more thought, I think the real problem is that there really isn't a good way of explaining what roguelikes are in one sentence, and any sufficient explanation will not be much more concise than the Berlin Interpretation (http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php/Berlin_Interpretation).
The only items on that list I really don't care much about are "ASCII display",
"Dungeons" and "Numbers" which I think are implementation details of many traditional roguelikes and don't really have much to do with what makes these games tick.
If I had to identify it with a less obscure genre I would say roguelikes are tactics-games rather than RPGs.
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I recently explained to a friend that a roguelike is an "auto dungeon master."
But that sort of implies that Roguelikes are RPG's. Which they are if you consider an RPG to be identifying with your character through stat building and progression. But they aren't if you are into identifying with your character through a story.
Plus with permadeth in most (all?) of the top Roguelikes I do not think character immersion is that strong. And this seems to be the hallmark of the RPG genre.