Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Game Discussion => Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) => Topic started by: Rdood on January 03, 2013, 11:19:30 AM
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Hey, I would like to mention "Tomenet" a multiplayer online rogue-like. For some reason the number of people online at any one time is never great yet the game is pretty good. It might be too hard for most people used to mmorpgs so they leave when they die because they arent used to it. Anyway if youre looking for multiplayer roguelike maybe check it out at www.tomenet.net
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Just to clear up some things about tomenet:
The reason few people play tomenet is that it just isn't a good game. There are a lot of reasons for that, but they basically fall under two categories: Gameplay and developer culture.
The gameplay issues mostly stem from the fact that it's a real time angband variant (think ToME/zangband circa 2002 or so) in which not nearly enough effort has been addressed to the problem of making what is designed to be a turn-based game reasonable for real time play across an internet connection. In angband, almost all actions have instantaneous effects. Crucially, if you read a teleport scroll you are somewhere else the next turn and a monster summons you are surrounded by monsters on the the next turn. This is fine in angband because if you need to, you can really sit and think through your options, which usually include teleporting. In angband, it's maybe not the best game mechanic ever conceived -- a summon can easily put you in a position where you can't survive the next round of combat -- but it's not ridiculous. In tomenet, the next round of combat comes and is over in a fraction of a second. This means your level 48 shaman with greater titan form and over 1500 hp (a character it would take probably 40 hours for a competent player to build) will die essentially instantly in what are in fact fairly common circumstances. If you are summoned on at high levels in an even slightly open area (e.g. in a natural hallway), usually, you MUST teleport within about a quarter of a second or you will die. If you don't live in Paris, adjust that figure for ping.
It takes a lot of unreasonable character deaths for an average player to get that one of the main things (if not the main thing) in tomenet is to avoid getting summoned on. This means not playing open levels, digging or walking through walls whenever possible, and generally playing a very, very tight game where you are never exposed a summoner with more than a couple of open spaces for him to summon on. In general, if you know what you're doing, your higher level characters will only die in two situations: a large, unexpected summon or being breathed on by a pack of high level hounds after coming up or down stairs. (There are some other things that happen, for example you find out you missed a resistance after regearing and get hit for 1500 breath damage or something -- mostly user error type stuff.)
The problem is, this doesn't make for very compelling gameplay. You usually don't even move when you fight at high levels. You just spam spell and potion macros. You take some time to set up, dig tunnels and so forth to avoid summoning, you attack, if things go wrong you teleport. The going wrong part transpires within the space of a second so it's not like there's a lot of complex decision making: Are there suddenly a bunch of Us, Ds, As, Ws, uniques, or flashing Zs? Then teleport immediately. No? Okay, maybe stay a second and reevaluate. If you had to teleport, get off level quickly. When you die, it's often difficult to escape the feeling that you were cheated. There was lag, it happened too fast in comparison to the 40 hours you put into building the character (again, this would happen within a fraction of a second or it wouldn't happen at all), whatever.
At low levels, which are all a typical player ever sees, the issues aren't as obvious. This is where the misconception that the game is good comes from. When you don't know what you're doing, the game looks good. It has what looks like a fairly complex and interesting skill system that would be fun to experiment with. In fact, though, after something like 10 to 15 years of play from people who know everything about the game, there are surprisingly few endgame viable builds and a new player never guesses what they are ("axes or swords? why not both!?" or "ranger seems good. this tox spell really kills orcs!"). So most characters have little chance of surviving past level 35 simply by virtue of poor allocation of skill points. The older players will always object that this isn't true, even though they all play the same kinds of mages, mimics, and shamans. It's true these guys can king anything, but this has a lot more to do with their unlimited access to endgame loot in party houses that have been in operation since the Bush administration and their decades of experience than the remarkable balance of the game. You really need to have a willingness to learn from other players to be successful. The reality is, though, that most players do not have that and prefer to "experiment" -- over 90% of these people are gone in a month.
You could say the skill system issue exists with lots of other roguelikes and it's probably true. But you can really see the issue vividly by watching tomenet players come and go, building terrible characters for a couple weeks and dying consistently around levels 25-35. Cutting down on useless skills (e.g. swimming, the nature school, etc.) would be a start.
There are many other ways in which the apparent features of tomenet fail to deliver a deep gameplay experience. For example, a lot of newer players are impressed with the size of the world and feel it would be interesting to explore it fully. This would be true if you were playing zangband, which sometimes does generate interesting wilderness. In tomenet, the world is large and empty. There's a handful of towns with dungeons and these with a couple of exceptions are the only dungeons you want to go to. There are others scattered through the wilderness, but most of them have goofy rules, like no word of recall, only down staircases, etc. These predictably get very little play (except the ironman dungeons immediately outside the first town). The rest is mostly featureless. Not a lot of monsters, not a lot of interesting terrain. Travel is slow and uneventful (unless you have a high level character, then it's only uneventful).
Not that you'd want travel to be eventful. It used to be you had to walk about 20 map sectors to get from the first town to the second town with your crappy level 25 character with no speed bonuses and probably not much ability to survive a fight with anything much stronger than a pack of orcs. This mind-numbing journey would take about 15 to 20 minutes. It had to be repeated for every single character you made (unless you die before level 25, of course). It was a blessing that the only thing you ran into were trees that made it so you couldn't just shift-move (run) from Bree to Gondolin, but had to babysit your character, maneuvering around each thing you hit into and hitting shift-move again. If you actually met anything interesting on the way, you'd probably be bored for 10 minutes then die suddenly to a mature dragon.
Note: you don't have to do anything special to get to Gondolin. There's no quest or item needed and there's no way to get there other than walking. All you need -- and it IS required -- is the willingness to waste 15 minutes staring at a field of dots and pound signs going by.
This brings me to the second basic issue: developer culture. These guys just aren't good game designers. The game is full of tedium. You start with the angband variant's ten kinds of fire and associated resistances (fire, chaos, nexus, nether, shards, etc.) and the great fun of sifting through thousands of pieces of equipment to get the combination you need to resist all of them (remember, you're really playing with fire, so to speak, if you don't have all the resistances at once, because even if the thing you're fighting now doesn't breathe shards, there's no guarantee the thing it summons won't -- and you can be sure you won't have time to adjust your equipment). Fine, that's not really their fault, although they would never consider changing it. Over time, as players get a feel for the game and figure out nice tricks to level, etc. marginally quicker and safer, the developers close those. So you like to farm unmakers? Pretty dangerous, but used to be good xp. Not anymore. Zero xp. You like to farm unique escorts and use a staff of *destruction* to avoid killing the unique? Now the *des* staff knocks you out when you use it -- certain death if anything goes even slightly wrong. Drop rates seem to get worse over time. There's rarely an exciting change. The changes usually make the game worse or make no difference. E.g. new classes that are strictly worse than the current viable options -- who cares? You're just creating new ways for inexperienced players to never figure out the game.
The central mechanic of high level play is scumming. You scum levels, you scum shops, you farm monsters. If you know what you're doing, you don't even want to explore anything. You just want to kill packs of Us. You spend hours and hours scumming black markets, dungeon shops, and the lamp shop for gear. It's addictive in its way, but it's not the kind of thing you want to be addicted to.
You really need to have a love for loot to play this game and a high tolerance for disappointment. Most things that look good (level 49 randart or whatever) turn out to be useless. They aggravate monsters, have an antimagic shield, prevent teleportation, etc. Things all but the second are unusable to all viable characters. The antimagic shield would be acceptable to certain kinds of warriors. Who designs this kind of crap? Just don't generate the item. The joke gets old after the 200th useless randart boot with +10 speed.
The player is needled constantly by the designer in a thousand different ways. The developers are generally unreceptive to suggestions regarding balance and mechanics. They view fairly ordinary behavior in multiplayer games as "cheezing." Many exchanges of items are viewed with suspicion, although in fact there's little enforcement. The developers seem to get all their input from a small group of high level players most of whose characters rely heavily on loot obtained from party houses (e.g. you can check one of their youtube channels to see how each of their characters have a full compliment of extremely rare items, including, hilariously, ethereal or death dragon scale mail -- when all your characters can run through walls because of items your friends picked up five years ago, it's really hard to see why anyone thinks the ranger skill tree could profit from some revisions). The hypocrisy of it is a bit galling. But again, this is probably true of a lot of small scale multiplayer games developed by some guy and a couple of his friends. It is an impediment to improvement though.
Well anyway, this has turned into a somewhat less focused rant than I had intended it to be. There's a lot more to be said against tomenet and it could be put more convincingly. The game just basically fails along a number of dimensions to be a compelling multiplayer online game. (I haven't even gotten into the crappy spell system that barely even pretends to address the multiplayer aspect of the game.) A lot could be done to improve the situation -- making most things that are currently instantaneous not instantaneous would be a good start. But that'll never happen. It's a shame because I think a lot of people are interested in the online multiplayer roguelike concept -- it's been in the nethack FAQ since the early 90s -- but they play games like tomenet and conclude that what's out there sucks and what sucks about it cannot be overcome by a roguelike.
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@mp, I've never played tomenet, but a weird thing just happened; I was away from my computer and thought, "this game I'm working on might be better as a multiplayer RL'. Then I opened up Roguetemple and read your excellent post/rant.
So my question is, what else would make a good multiplayer RL?
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@mp, I've never played tomenet, but a weird thing just happened; I was away from my computer and thought, "this game I'm working on might be better as a multiplayer RL'. Then I opened up Roguetemple and read your excellent post/rant.
So my question is, what else would make a good multiplayer RL?
This topic has been discussed at some length. Here for example: http://forums.roguetemple.com/index.php?topic=2561.0 (http://forums.roguetemple.com/index.php?topic=2561.0)
The answer of course is nothing.
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To do a multiplayer game, you have to embrace real time mechanics. In reality, most modern roguelikes have already abandoned true turn-based combat, even the angband line. It's no longer you get a turn then the monster gets a turn (or you get a turn and the monster gets two if it's faster than you). It's more like for every eight of your turns the monster gets 5 spaced in a certain way among your 8. This is not turn based in any reasonable sense.
Once you believe that roguelikes do not actually have to be turn based and in current practice many aren't, the situation becomes clearer. What you're doing is making a roguelike with a modern time system, nonblocking i/o, and a turn timer. Outside of combat, the difference between real time and turn based play is mostly inconsequential (except if scumming shops is a huge part of your game). If there's nothing trying to kill you, you can still sit around all day thinking of how to use your slime mold in combination with your lantern and trident and keying in complicated command sequences to make your vision a reality. So it's really a question of how to do real time combat in a discrete gridded map in a visually intelligible and keyboard controllable way. There's a lot of possibility here, but unfortunately, people see it done badly and decide to throw up their hands and forget about it.
The root cause of problems in tomenet, in my opinion, is instant teleportation. This is way too powerful. It means that if monsters can't kill you instantly, they can't kill you at all. Either remove long distance teleportation or put a delay on it and you have something to work with. From there, start dialing back monsters' burst damage and summoning (e.g. make them take some time to materialize, give players good counters to summoning, impose sensible limits on the types and numbers of monsters summoned etc.). I agree it's a hard problem and trying to do it working from an angband variant may not be realistic. But there's no reason to think it can't be done.
People here talk about "the definition of roguelike" that includes things like turn based gameplay and permadeath that are really peripheral to what rogue actually was: a terminal-based graphical Dungeons and Dragons (or similar RPG system) simulator. Content generated by random numbers is right there in the D&D manual, rogue just automated it and took it further. Turn-based play is just one interpretation of the D&D system that breaks down even in real pencil and paper play when characters are not in close proximity. And as I say above, the turn-based concept has evolved quite a bit in the last thirty years. Even the single player aspect is more a byproduct of the technology available in the late 70s than anything else.
People should be more willing to get creative about new mechanics and real time is a good one that could work.
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There was a 7DRL this year called MmoRL that promised multiplayer mechanics. Unfortunately it was pretty buggy. When it works though it is like this:
1. A real time overworld where you can chat and converse. Call this the OVERWORLD. It could be a town, looks like a forest in MmoRL. Movement is discrete on the grid, but you can jam away on your arrows and move as fast as you desire irrespective of how fast someone else in town is jamming away.
2. Town level has several dungeon entrances. Go down into one solo and explore it, or team up. If you team up the dungeon instance that you are diving into is the same one as the leader of the team. You have to all be on the dungeon entrance at the same time to enter it as a team.
3. When in a team in a dungeon things become turn based. You have to wait for everyone to go before you can go again. This didn't work properly in MmoRL if I remember right. But that's how it was supposed to work.
Also it looks like the primary advancement mechanic had to do with finding materials with which to build better gear. Maybe that can solve the gear ninja issue, or the grinding issue, as every dive can yield valuable materials.
I was momentarily very excited for this game, but it just didn't seem to work right.
http://7drl.org/tag/mmorl/
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Just to clear up some things about tomenet:
[snip]
These are the main reasons why I never played MAngband or TomeNet. Playing a *band in a non-grindy way requires thinking time, and in real-time there's none.
One worth mentioning is Friends of Yendor (http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Friends_of_Yendor). The site seems to be defunct, but the article explains it well enough. Movement and player interaction are realtime, and monsters attack only in retaliation.
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People here talk about "the definition of roguelike" that includes things like turn based gameplay and permadeath that are really peripheral to what rogue actually was: a terminal-based graphical Dungeons and Dragons (or similar RPG system) simulator. Content generated by random numbers is right there in the D&D manual, rogue just automated it and took it further. Turn-based play is just one interpretation of the D&D system that breaks down even in real pencil and paper play when characters are not in close proximity. And as I say above, the turn-based concept has evolved quite a bit in the last thirty years. Even the single player aspect is more a byproduct of the technology available in the late 70s than anything else.
People should be more willing to get creative about new mechanics and real time is a good one that could work.
Is this a troll post? Turn-based and permadeath are not peripheral to rogue, they are practically essential. There is a reason that we have roguelikes and rpgs and the two are distinct. When you take a roguelike and make it "real time" you aren't getting creative, you're just making an action rpg/platformer/etc instead of a roguelike...
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But is it a roguelike? ;)
We have a bad habit of letting all discussion fall into this question.
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But is it a roguelike? ;)
We have a bad habit of letting all discussion fall into this question.
I think we need a custom emote for that :P
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It sounds like your theory is that the angband variant tomenet is not a roguelike. A game whose roguelike pedigree goes back to the early eighties is not a roguelike? Seriously? Who's trolling now?
It's an absurd suggestion. This is no different than saying a game is not roguelike because it doesn't have fruit as items or because it allows you to open doors by moving into them instead of requiring players to hit the 'o' button, then the direction of the door. It's dangerous to let discussion slide so constantly in this direction. Imagine a forum on mystery novels in which there was constant handwringing about whether this or that is really the particular kind of genre fiction under discussion. "Harry Potter? Well, I don't know, the series certainly has mystery-like elements, but are they really 'according to Hoyle' mystery novels?" This is silliness.
The essential elements of roguelikes are terminal based play, fantasy role playing, and randomized, algorithmically generated maps, items, monster behavior, etc.
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The essential elements of roguelikes are terminal based play, fantasy role playing, and randomized, algorithmically generated maps, items, monster behavior, etc.
Looks like it's all settled then, what a relief. ;)
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Cheeky winks aside, it's good to have clarity. Otherwise, you're reduced to a discussion of how far you can deviate from the idioms of a game implemented in the late 70s by a couple of graduate students in their spare time and still have a product of such moral purity as to be obviously superior to the mass market drivel peddled by Blizzard and the so-called indie sellouts trying to hock their wares on Steam.
How do you know you're more hardcore than people who play games with graphics, particularly if you like to use tiles with your "roguelikes"? You need permadeath and rigid turn-based play, at least. You may have been the only kid on the block who thought the problem with Megaman was that you got more than one life, but at least now with the ascii version available, you have the benefit of knowing in retrospect that you were right.
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Well if you derive ego from that sort of thing, I guess. I play a ton of different games, but find Roguelikes are fun to design and build for amateurs. So I hang out on this forum.
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Cheeky winks aside, it's good to have clarity. Otherwise, you're reduced to a discussion of how far you can deviate from the idioms of a game implemented in the late 70s by a couple of graduate students in their spare time and still have a product of such moral purity as to be obviously superior to the mass market drivel peddled by Blizzard and the so-called indie sellouts trying to hock their wares on Steam.
How do you know you're more hardcore than people who play games with graphics, particularly if you like to use tiles with your "roguelikes"? You need permadeath and rigid turn-based play, at least. You may have been the only kid on the block who thought the problem with Megaman was that you got more than one life, but at least now with the ascii version available, you have the benefit of knowing in retrospect that you were right.
That's just not it at all. You completely miss the point. The game is either a roguelike or not, it's not a question of how hardcore it is. You can't call farmville a roguelike just because you want to. It's a question of reality. And rogue is not at all the measure of roguelikeness (it's a misnomer!), so you should actually learn what this genre is i think :P
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Of course it's a question of whether it's hardcore. How else do you account for the tone of people saying this or that is roguelike for this or that reason? The implication is that something like "permadeath" is a matter of integrity rather than simple convention -- which would be subject to interpretation or renegotiation.
The issue, it seems to me, is that you have a group of people who've set themselves up as the arbiters of what's roguelike and created a standard beyond simple affinity to rogue, larn, moria, hack, etc. That people would confidently assert that a game identical in all respects to nethack, a classical roguelike of undisputed pedigree, except for the existence of an obscure resurrection trick is debatable as a roguelike points up the extreme dogmatism of the supposed definition. That's in line with your appeals to "reality," as you call it.
At the same time, this so-called definition pretends that in spite of rogue, larn, moria, hack, nethack, etc. all being fantasy roleplaying themed, fantasy roleplaying is not, in fact, integral to the genre and is simply incidental to the well known examples. What are the counterexamples that justify this? TrademarkInfringementRL?
What you should be saying is that a roguelike that does not have straightforward permanent death but offers ways around it is nontraditional in that respect. Instead, you assert straight out that it isn't roguelike. It's an absurd notion. It's nothing but chest beating about how hardcore the games you like are. Permanent death is not what distinguished the classic roguelikes from games that came before or after them. It is incidental, a matter of convention, that makes sense in the context of a single character fantasy roleplaying game. Nothing more.
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You're making a lot of strange assumptions here. I love all genres of games pretty much (maybe not social games :P), so to say that I choose the definition of roguelike based on my personal tastes for how hardcore something is is absurd. I love turn-based rpgs as well as roguelikes. I'm guessing most people on here do as well, or at least enjoy some other genres. It seems to me that you don't really understand what permadeath means to a game if you can think it is in any way cursory or a matter of convention. Item identification is a convention. Classes are conventions. Hit points, magic, equipment are conventions. All these things are swapped in and out depending on the developer but there is a reason permadeath, by contrast, is so vital to the experience.
I also think most people would say that a game that has a way around permadeath is still a roguelike, so you're again off-base with that. I.E. in my roguelike there are ways to get extra lives, and in tome4 you can donate to remove permadeath and no one is going to tell you either game isn't a roguelike (except maybe krice ;)). Jo has made a good point here and there about it being the meta-experience of learning from death that makes a roguelike, not permadeath. But it turns out I've only seen this done as well with permadeath itself.
I'm just not sure how this classification can cause any harm to you. I mean what do you care if the fruit you have is an orange or an apple. It is what it is and it tastes just the same. But at the same time you shouldn't sell apples at an orange stand, or at least you should make note that you are selling some "orange-like" products.
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But at the same time you shouldn't sell apples at an orange stand, or at least you should make note that you are selling some "orange-like" products.
This is the way we should be looking at the term "roguelike". Not as some holy ark that includes some things and excludes others, but as more of a "hey, you liked Rogue? Then you'll like these games too!"
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interhack http://sourceforge.net/projects/interhack/
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The issue, it seems to me, is that you have a group of people who've set themselves up as the arbiters of what's roguelike and created a standard beyond simple affinity to rogue, larn, moria, hack, etc.
There are as many definitions as there are roguelike players. Possibly more, in fact, as our own personal definitions change over time.
And there can be no arbiters. A word can only bear the meaning it's used for. I cannot claim "decimate" means to kill every tenth person in a group just because of an old definition - it only means what people understand it to mean.
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I can't believe no one has mentioned Mangband, which is probably the first true multiplayer roguelike. And it's a pretty good game too, if you can get past the user interface. Correction, someone did mention Mangband. I need better reading skills.
Anyway, what is and isn't a roguelike has been debated for a long time, and different people come down on different sides of the debate. Back when most roguelikes were traditional roguelikes, I was on the more experimental and lenient side. I used to believe that if it had random levels, it was probably a roguelike. But then roguelikes got huge mainstream attention, and everyone wanted to call everything a roguelike. These days I believe in a strict definition of roguelikes. I feel like so many games that aren't roguelikes at all try to call themselves roguelikes just to cash in on the name, and that defeats the whole purpose of the genre.
I wanted to support the development of more experimental roguelikes during a time when there weren't that many. Now, it's just the opposite situation. Experimental games inaccurately calling themselves "roguelikes" outnumber traditional real roguelikes by at least a 10 to 1 ratio. If you ask me, in this time of a flood of games calling themselves "roguelikes" that have very little to do with the genre, we need to get back to the original core of the genre. We need more traditional, real roguelikes.
Having said that, everyone is free to have their own opinion about it. This is just how I personally feel right now. Also, I'm still opposed to permadeath, but that's the only traditional feature I oppose.
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The essential elements of roguelikes are terminal based play, fantasy role playing, and randomized, algorithmically generated maps, items, monster behavior, etc.
My favorite of the things you listed is the etc.. I agree that etc. is an essential element of the roguelike genre and without it we would be sorely lost.
Terrible witticism aside, if you replace the "etc." with "single-modal combat system" (ie. the game does not do a Pokémon/FinalFantasy/DragonQuest and just DOODELYDOO you into a seperate screen for combat) and replace "fantasy role playing" with "permadeath" I'd be able to agree with your little list of essentials.
The fantasy setting is one of the most used, but that's because it is easy to use (since almost everyone is familiar with it up to a certain point, especially so the target audience) but that doesn't make it essential for the roguelike genre.
Cheeky winks aside, it's good to have clarity. Otherwise, you're reduced to a discussion of how far you can deviate from the idioms of a game implemented in the late 70s by a couple of graduate students in their spare time and still have a product of such moral purity as to be obviously superior to the mass market drivel peddled by Blizzard and the so-called indie sellouts trying to hock their wares on Steam.
How do you know you're more hardcore than people who play games with graphics, particularly if you like to use tiles with your "roguelikes"? You need permadeath and rigid turn-based play, at least. You may have been the only kid on the block who thought the problem with Megaman was that you got more than one life, but at least now with the ascii version available, you have the benefit of knowing in retrospect that you were right.
Between your acerbic words and the thick layer of sarcasm I'm having more than a fair share of trouble finding out what you're trying to say. My favorite part here is the tacit implication that we're not allowed to discriminate BECAUSE the original was made "in the 70s", " by a couple of graduate students" and/or "in their spare time". Cool.
At the same time, this so-called definition pretends that in spite of rogue, larn, moria, hack, nethack, etc. all being fantasy roleplaying themed, fantasy roleplaying is not, in fact, integral to the genre and is simply incidental to the well known examples. What are the counterexamples that justify this? TrademarkInfringementRL?
What you should be saying is that a roguelike that does not have straightforward permanent death but offers ways around it is nontraditional in that respect. Instead, you assert straight out that it isn't roguelike. It's an absurd notion. It's nothing but chest beating about how hardcore the games you like are. Permanent death is not what distinguished the classic roguelikes from games that came before or after them. It is incidental, a matter of convention, that makes sense in the context of a single character fantasy roleplaying game. Nothing more.
Man I can't even TELL if you're trolling anymore.
The Slimy Lichmummy is post-apocalyptic as is Alphaman. ZAPM is camp sci-fi.
"But ZAPM is identical to Nethack in every way other than calling things by sci-fi names other than by fantasy names!" Well I guess that means that the setting (fantasy/sci-fi/post-apoc/sports) is nothing more than flavor and context and thus completely irrelevant as to what does or does not constitute a roguelike! If you try to argue that ZAPM isn't a roguelike because it's not fantasy flavored I don't think I'll be able to take you seriously ever again.
As for permadeath, NOBODY suggests that a game with "ways around" permadeath is not a roguelike. Nethack had an amulet of life-saving or whatever, so you could argue that "option to bypass death" has been proven by legacy to be part of the genre. However a user option, before starting the game, to turn off permadeath?
It's called Wizard mode. If it's clearly marked as a cheat/explore option that allows players to leisurely explore the game I'd say its fine, since Rogue/Nethack/Angband had it. But if it's a CORE aspect of the game, that is to say, your character never permanently dies, then the game is simply not a roguelike. It's that simple. Permadeath is part of the genre, having an option to turn it off or an ingame method to avoid it once or twice is fine, but if it's permanently off you're playing a different kind of game.
You can call it dogmatism if you want and that's fine. Nothing wrong with having a solid dogma.
But nobody's chestbeating about how hardcore we are for liking roguelikes. This forum isn't that big, these people aren't shitty like that, and this isn't 4chan, reddit or hipstercentral so please don't sling those 3edgy5me accusations around, thank you.
I'm seeing that you love to pack your arguments with heated half-truths, which could fool people into thinking you're right at first glance. Again I can't make up my mind whether to call you a great troll or a misguided fool
Experimental games inaccurately calling themselves "roguelikes" outnumber traditional real roguelikes by at least a 10 to 1 ratio. If you ask me, in this time of a flood of games calling themselves "roguelikes" that have very little to do with the genre, we need to get back to the original core of the genre. We need more traditional, real roguelikes.
This is a very nice piece of post. It's not so much that "we" want to exclude games from our super secret roguelike club because they're not hardcore enough. Or that our raging e-penis will shrivel up if someone on this planet HAS FUN playing something that's not a roguelike and then falsely proceeds to claim he beat a roguelike. We're not saddled down with that kind of inferiority complex (At least I hope most of us aren't? ;)).
It's really about drawing a fucking line. I typed out an entire paragraph filled with some shitty analogy about how I'd be very angry if someone gave me a roguelike that didn't have permadeath or turn-basedness because he'd have given me NOT A ROGUELIKE. And then I wouldn't have the option to complain because games like Borderlands and Diablo would have been commonly accepted as roguelikes. Instead have this, much more succint and excellent explanation:
But at the same time you shouldn't sell apples at an orange stand, or at least you should make note that you are selling some "orange-like" products.
Now to finish by adressing the drivel I read that prompted me to write this abomination:
In reality, most modern roguelikes have already abandoned true turn-based combat, even the angband line.
No, they really haven't. At all.
It's no longer you get a turn then the monster gets a turn (or you get a turn and the monster gets two if it's faster than you). It's more like for every eight of your turns the monster gets 5 spaced in a certain way among your 8. This is not turn based in any reasonable sense.
Would I be breaking any rules if I flat out told him to eat shit?
That is still turn-based. Do you operate a different definition of turn-based from the rest of the world?
If you're going to try and be cheeky by claiming that turn-based is defined by the player and the opponent taking actions in sequence, please don't. Or do and admit you're a troll while you're at it.
Turn-based quite simply means that the entirety of the gameworld is arrested untill the person whose turn it is has input his action. I, for one, don't give a FUCK whether that entity gets to take 128 turns back-to-back, it's still turn-based as long as all other possible actions are PAUSED untill that entity inputs and executes its chosen action. THAT is what turn-based is about.
Even the single player aspect is more a byproduct of the technology available in the late 70s than anything else.
You just pointlessly and casually insulted singleplayer gaming for no discernable reason with an argument too ridiculous to merit an actual rebuttal.
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"Man I can't even TELL if you're trolling anymore."
+1.
I like a good discussion but wall of text plus all vitriol is such a chore.
@Darren - Dude I have a very good definition of what Roguelike is. I've played so many for so long I officially declare myself the oracle of 'but is it a roguelike.' No need to know what that definition is, one need only come to me with alms and ask for my wisdom. I'll give you an thumbs up or thumbs down. There may be no rhyme or reason to my answer, but that's just how it goes with oracles. :P
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So... I started reading this thread with the expectation of following an interesting discussion on what everyone thought about a multiplayer online roguelike, absolutely loved the TomeNet rant, then it all pretty much went awry from there and OMGWTF are you kidding me you guys are arguing about what a roguelike is again?!
It's on blogs, it's on PA, it's in every other freaking post on Reddit, and it's consumed more than half of this tangentially related thread. Damn ;)
Is there any other genre out there that's quite this undefinable? ::continues to completely derail thread::
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My personal feelings about the issue aside, the biggest cause of the discussion itself is probably the player base. Roguelikes attract controlling, meticulous personalities. You might as well ask a room full of advanced OCD folks to jointly determine the optimum pepperoni layout on a pizza.
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I don't think roguelikes and multiplayer go together very well anyway. There are too many mechanics that only make sense in a single player context. Some interesting multiplayer games could be made by picking and choosing a few roguelike aspects a la Spelunky, but then people would argue on the internet about whether they're real roguelikes so it might not be worth it.
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My personal feelings about the issue aside, the biggest cause of the discussion itself is probably the player base. Roguelikes attract controlling, meticulous personalities. You might as well ask a room full of advanced OCD folks to jointly determine the optimum pepperoni layout on a pizza.
I like this explanation--makes a lot of sense. For the most part it's members of the core player base doing the arguing anyway. The general gaming public is like "dude, what's a roguelike?" (And that triggers the arguments ;) j/k, seems that most are started by describing some game as a roguelike.)
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My personal feelings about the issue aside, the biggest cause of the discussion itself is probably the player base. Roguelikes attract controlling, meticulous personalities. You might as well ask a room full of advanced OCD folks to jointly determine the optimum pepperoni layout on a pizza.
Plebeian fool. You dare waste our time with such trivial problems? Clearly the optimal pepperoni layout can be achieved thusly:
-grind the pepperoni into a fine paste
-smear the paste evenly over the surface of your pizza pie
I don't think roguelikes and multiplayer go together very well anyway. There are too many mechanics that only make sense in a single player context. Some interesting multiplayer games could be made by picking and choosing a few roguelike aspects a la Spelunky, but then people would argue on the internet about whether they're real roguelikes so it might not be worth it.
Making a game is always worth it, unless your exact purpose is to have it be a roguelike. But I doubt you'd only be "picking and choosing a few roguelike aspects" if that was the case.
Fwiw (and I'm not going to drone on about WHAT IS ROGUELIKE, since even I like to be on-topic at times), I think the main reason REAL roguelikes and multiplayer don't mesh is that you can't feasibly have a turn-based game be massively multiplayer. That would require you to either;
-pause the game for everyone except the active player, and then cycle active players. Game speed; zetta slow.
-pause the game untill everyone has input his turn, then resolve all simultaneously. Game speed; zetta slow.
PWMangband, Tomenet etc. BASICALLY follow latter, but they auto-resolve every X seconds. And since that would require players to slap their direction key into the enemy every X seconds lest they do NOTHING it was decided to have melee be an automatic affair. Of course the problem with this was that the player feels as if he has no control over what the fuck is going on, and deaths come across as incredible unfair. The result of combat is, after all, completely out of your hands.
There might be merit in picking and choosing aspects. Best would be if people gave up on demanding their game be called a roguelike and just took the most fun/useful aspects and made a game that WORKS instead of something that shoots itself in the foot just because it wants to be a roguelike. (Like PWMangband and all the current MMORLs)
Features that are appropriate for taking:
-procedural generation for dungeons and monster spawns
-permadeath
-focus on intelligent gameplay, resource management and/or metaknowledge aiding survival
Features best left by the wayside:
-turn based & tile based (since these two are joined at the hip. I can't think of a way to seperate them, anyway.)
Whether it's Ascii or not, the theme, the inspiration for the races/classes and so on are really up to the designer and not integral to being a roguelike-inspired MMO. Would I like a realtime, actionbased, (massively) multiplayer version of Dungeon Crawl/Brogue/Nethack/IVAN? Hell yes! Once you let go of the notion that you need to shoehorn the turn-based aspect into the game you can do whatever you want.
Intelligent gameplay will be what sets the game apart from garbage like Realm of the Mad God though. If there's no higher decision making involved than "run and shoot/whack" VS "run harder" all you really have is a shitty multiplayer action rpg.
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An MMO roguelike wouldn't be a good idea under any circumstances. MMOs are terrible. Even the game concepts that do work as MMOs usually work way better with smaller, semi-fixed player counts. Maybe you could make existing MMOs better by including a few roguelike elements? But all that means is you've produced more palatable trash than your peers.
Multiplayer pseudoroguelike action games have a lot of potential though. I'd like to see more people go for that instead of making Angband into an MMO with no thought given to how that could actually work.
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I guess the result from this thread is that Realm of the Mad God is the epitome of Multiplayer roguelikes?
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What about multiplayer Spelunky?
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I guess the result from this thread is that Realm of the Mad God is the epitome of Multiplayer roguelikes?
RotMG lacks intelligent gameplay. There's no higher decision making beyond "farm fame and potions, kill the same two bosses over and over". No real resource management involved either. So imo it falls short quite a bit.
What about multiplayer Spelunky?
Xbox only, right? And I thought it only had arena-based deathmatch multiplayer, not actually going through the floors with several people.
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Spelunky does have a versus mode, but you can also play in co-op as well.
I haven't played it myself, but there's basically no way it isn't better than RotMG.
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I agree that a MMO roguelike probably is a bad idea.
But what about a co-op roguelike? ...Like for 2-4 players, has that been done yet?
It would probably require some kind of action-point system and perhaps a time limit, in order to get some kind of fluent gameplay. The players plans a few steps ahead, the actions are resolved, then the monsters move etc.
The game could still be permadeath: players could share health (or xp?) so co-operation would be essential.
Just an idea.
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A co-op roguelike? Great idea! :D
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A coop roguelike is already in the works. It's called Legend of Dungeon. It's a 1-4 player side scrolling 3d/2d beat'em up rpg with some permadeath added in there for fun. You can pick it up and start getting the alpha builds for 10 bucks, or get it with the soundtrack for $15. It's coming out for PC, Mac, Linux, Android, IOS, and Ouya. Congrats!
Oh, and here's a link.
http://robotloveskitty.com/LoD/
~Jernah Nerson
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Does Interhack work?
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A coop roguelike is already in the works. It's called Legend of Dungeon. It's a 1-4 player side scrolling 3d/2d beat'em up rpg with some permadeath added in there for fun. You can pick it up and start getting the alpha builds for 10 bucks, or get it with the soundtrack for $15. It's coming out for PC, Mac, Linux, Android, IOS, and Ouya. Congrats!
Oh, and here's a link.
http://robotloveskitty.com/LoD/
~Jernah Nerson
That looks amazing. I just bought the alpha!
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Does Interhack work?
As in can you play it multiplayer? Yes, sure.
I tried it, compiled and hooked up two instances I fired up on one system.
That's kind of a long time ago, but: yup.
Mechanic here is way better than tomenet's realtime arcadey faring IMHO.
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My roguelike (Infinite Cave Adventure, http://dungeon.name (http://dungeon.name)) is somewhat multi-player and online.
It's not realtime, the core gameplay mechanic is still turn-based dungeon crawling, but the dungeon is modifiable and is shared among all players. A compromise of sorts.
Also all online Nethack servers are multiplayer, at least for the reason that they have shared highscore tables.
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I had forgotten about all this forum business, but I happened upon it again in the course of unrelated searches, so I thought I might respond to this rather angry outburst:
Now to finish by adressing the drivel I read that prompted me to write this abomination:
In reality, most modern roguelikes have already abandoned true turn-based combat, even the angband line.
No, they really haven't. At all.
It's no longer you get a turn then the monster gets a turn (or you get a turn and the monster gets two if it's faster than you). It's more like for every eight of your turns the monster gets 5 spaced in a certain way among your 8. This is not turn based in any reasonable sense.
Would I be breaking any rules if I flat out told him to eat shit?
That is still turn-based. Do you operate a different definition of turn-based from the rest of the world?
If you're going to try and be cheeky by claiming that turn-based is defined by the player and the opponent taking actions in sequence, please don't. Or do and admit you're a troll while you're at it.
Turn-based quite simply means that the entirety of the gameworld is arrested untill the person whose turn it is has input his action. I, for one, don't give a FUCK whether that entity gets to take 128 turns back-to-back, it's still turn-based as long as all other possible actions are PAUSED untill that entity inputs and executes its chosen action. THAT is what turn-based is about.
I think this poster has misunderstood the point I was making. My claim is the kind of mechanics in which actions taken by the player and by monsters have a certain amount of cooldown time after execution which is pegged to a relatively fast moving (as compared to, say, the cooldown for a newly created character -- often something like 10 or even 100 ticks) game clock are not truly turn based. The poster above finds this outrageous because, indeed, single player roguelikes do block on player input -- in other words, they wait for the player to do something, when the opportunity exists, before letting anything else happen.
Elsewhere in the original post, I mention this issue of blocking vs. nonblocking input and game timers. Let me clarify: What I, and I think many other people would call "turn-based play" is the following: All actors (including game controlled ones, e.g. monsters) are given the opportunity consider their moves and make them according to a well-defined and transparent system whereby, except perhaps for information privileged to particular actors (e.g. what cards they're holding) or randomized information (e.g. dice rolls), all actors have full information about what other actors can do between the time they take one turn and the next. In particular, if you cannot reliably determine how many times a monster can move between your move and your next, this is a sign of non-turn based mechanics. This is the situation I claim exists in many prominent modern roguelikes, e.g. angband and crawl. This was not how it worked in older roguelikes, e.g. moria. The point is, if turn order involves rules significantly more complicated than "for each of my moves, you get this many moves," (for example, if movement is based on a hidden clock and it's not possible to determine at what point in its turn cycle a given monster is in when you are asked to move) it's not really turn based in the sense of, for example, board games, card games, or, I would say, computer games.
I'm not saying these somewhat mysterious movement/action mechanics are bad. They allow for more flexible speed mechanics, etc. What I'm saying is there is a reasonable definition of turn based mechanics that is typical of games of all kinds and that many indisputable roguelikes do not have them. What single player roguelikes really have is an input model in which the system waits for user input before proceeding when the player has the opportunity to act. Other games with considerable affinity to roguelikes, e.g. dwarf fortress offer the same kind of mechanics, but don't require them -- the player has the option to let the game proceed from tick to tick according to a possibly adjustable timer. Multiplayer online roguelikes (at least ones with sensible mechanics, e.g. mangband and tomenet -- which suck for other reasons) simply require the game to proceed from tick to tick via a set timer. There's a spectrum of possible input mechanics.
If you want to hang your hat on blocking input mechanics as a key feature of roguelikes, it's problematic, especially if you're talking about a definition broader than affinity to classic examples. Mangband and tomenet have rock solid roguelike pedigree and the right kinds of mechanics all the way down the line with that exception.
On the matter of permadeath -- I think the right way to think about this is not whether you can resurrect your character or revert to a save. The real point is that when your character dies (without items that prevent death, which is obviously not what the discussion is about, btw) it's the end of the world in the sense that the gameworld as it exists in that instance of the game is forever gone and future characters cannot revisit it. (In some cases, e.g. player ghosts/bones files in crawl, some piece of the world persists for random inclusion into future games, but the bulk of the gameworld is still gone.) It's not so much that the character cannot be revived as that there is no one there to revive him. This kind of solipsism makes no sense in a multiplayer setting. The focus on the death of the character makes sense psychologically, but the real point is that the world is regenerated for future characters. It's the circle of life. My point in saying this is that insisting on "permadeath" (the game has to try to delete the save data!) fails to consider alternate interpretations of what happens when a roguelike character dies and is a poor argument in the context of multiplayer games.
Another, perhaps more straightforward argument, is that in fact there is permadeath in mangband and tomenet, there are just items that can be used by other characters to avert permadeath after character death in particular instances. If they aren't used within a span of time governed by complicated rules, the death is permanent.