Messages

76

Design / Re: Permanent consequences for failure that aren't death

« on: April 19, 2014, 05:47:54 PM »

Roguelikes aren't defined by graphics. Procedural generation isn't level design, it's a process. Permadeath isn't just a difficulty level, it's a mechanic that puts procedural generation to use. No other genre does that, even though you can play any game with permadeath.

Call it what you want, the fact stays those are general properties any game can have and many games do have. Vague or general classification is not classification at all, it's a semantic nonsense, hence all the stupid arguments about true roguelikes and false roguelike-likes. It's retarded.
 

....roguelikes the way they are meant to be played.

Meant to be played... says who? Who meant it, who invented that commandment and in what Bible it is written?

It's not, unless you're a greedy developer. Compare Dwarf Fortress and the newest Call of Duty: according to you, CoD is more successful because a lot of people play it. I say that DF is a whole lot more successful, because it gathered a relatively small group of devoted fans (just like roguelikes) while Call of Duty players don't feel attached to the game. It's also more successful because of what it accomplishes in terms of gameplay, which has a lot more depth than Call of Duty.

That's incorrect usage of the word "successful". Unless you think like majority yours is only a subjective personal opinion. Majority defines what is and what is not successful, particularly in the case of books, music, movies and games where success and popularity have the same meaning.

77

Design / Re: Permanent consequences for failure that aren't death

« on: April 19, 2014, 12:11:39 PM »

Roguelikes are similar to Rogue in the same way as FPS games are similar to Doom or RTS games are similar to Dune II. They just evolved less due to not being a mainstream genre. The name 'roguelike' is just a convenient shortcut, because nobody would stand calling roguelikes 'turn based dungeon crawlers with procedural generation and permadeath' every time they mention them.

No other genre is defined by the type of graphics, type of level design, difficulty or number of lives. It's fascinating you don't realize how ridiculous that is. Those are very general and arbitrary properties of any game. Permadeath is just a difficulty setting. Roguelikes difficulty does not concern you any more than difficulty of any other game in whatever genre. Offering different difficulty options for different people can only help your game become more popular, whatever type of game it is. And for games, popularity is the only measure of success. Is it not?

78

Design / Re: Permanent consequences for failure that aren't death

« on: April 19, 2014, 07:40:19 AM »

I guess some people don't like permadeath. But.. it's an essential feature of a game type called roguelike.

Why is it important for a game to be like Rogue?

Imagine people instead invented "pacmanlike" genre, and decided, for some strange reason, that success of any pacmanlike game will not be measured by popularity, but likeliness to the original Pac-Man. People would then argue how any good pacmalike must have three lives and four ghosts, because those are the essential features of a game type called pacmanlike.

Think about it, it's insane. Roguelike is not a genre, it's a semantic blunder, ambiguous, meaningless and non-existing word. It's a bunch of arbitrary restrictions, a measure not of any quality, but just plain similarity. And do we really need any more Rogue clones, really?


But if you already must to be remaking one and the same game for 30 years, then at least pick up a better version to imitate than ugly PC one. Macintosh and Atari ST versions from 1985 have graphic tiles, mouse support and even few sounds, they are still more advanced than most roguelikes of today, it's embarrassing.

79

Design / Re: Permanent consequences for failure that aren't death

« on: April 17, 2014, 03:34:21 PM »

Top notch hypocrisy.

I accept your wickedness and unnatural desire to torture yourself with tedious repetition, I do not mind permadeath at all.

80

Design / Re: Permanent consequences for failure that aren't death

« on: April 17, 2014, 03:24:34 PM »

wtf? Eat a donut and take it down a notch, human!

What is your objection about?

81

Classic Roguelikes / Re: Crawl tourney

« on: April 17, 2014, 02:29:51 PM »

I have to say, I find this thread a little sobering. Here's a bunch of self-professed roguelike fans/developers saying they don't have the patience for one of the standard bearers of the genre.

Told ya.

82

Design / Re: Permanent consequences for failure that aren't death

« on: April 17, 2014, 02:27:06 PM »

People like that can do what they want but their opinions are dumb and bad.  Some things really are better than others.

Expressing intolerantly narrow-minded ignorance is not convincing argument. Talking with you about permadeath is like talking to Hitler about genocide, or talking to Krice about women, the extent of your confusion is not even funny. It's just a bloody difficulty setting, why are you getting emotional?

83

Design / Re: Permanent consequences for failure that aren't death

« on: April 17, 2014, 04:51:07 AM »

The devil is in the details, of course, and I'd be very interested to see a game that's explicitly designed to be "RL without permadeath".

Whether you want to challenge yourself by completing any given game with only one life is not a matter of genre but personal preference. Number of lives is external difficulty, it's different and independent of game's internal difficulty. It's only imposed  difficulty modifier where different settings appeal to different people. You don't design a game around it, it works equally for any game, it's just a difficulty setting.

84

Design / Re: Permanent consequences for failure that aren't death

« on: April 17, 2014, 03:54:10 AM »

What exactly does (or not) feel healthy to me?

He is obviously very unaware his definition of "replaying events" is vague and inconsistent. I suppose that time he was referring to reloading a game even if you don't die, but rather in an attempt to play a "perfect game".

Somehow he doesn't realise that permadeath is exactly like what he is complaining about, only even worse.

85

Other Announcements / Re: A new roguelike - The Ground Gives Way

« on: April 17, 2014, 03:38:30 AM »

Just upload it for testing and then you can talk about actual specifics. Rather than based on imagination feedback based on play-testing and bug reports can only save you time.

86

Design / Re: Permanent consequences for failure that aren't death

« on: April 16, 2014, 05:29:08 PM »

Resident Evil-style limited saves encourage self-torture (to me), replaying segments until you get the run through a section and then saving.

If limited saves encourage self-torture, then permadeath and no saving at all is the ultimate torture. Correct? So what alternative are you suggesting?

87

Design / Re: My two cents about Permadeath

« on: April 13, 2014, 03:54:22 PM »

I'm not playing the same seed over and over. No one does that, and it has nothing to do with save-scumming. How did you even come up with that... are you having a stroke?

88

Design / Re: Permanent consequences for failure that aren't death

« on: April 13, 2014, 03:38:20 PM »

Ah yes, your savescum training regimen is what made you the great player you are.  Except you're terrible.  You struggled for days to win in Brogue even after stacking the odds massively in your own favor.  I am a much better roguelike player than you are, so obviously you are wrong.

:roll eyes: I bet you are save scumming just like everyone else.

It's cool how you even after your claims are shown to be inarguably false, you still don't reconsider any of your beliefs.  You aren't interested in evidence.  You can't grasp concepts so simple that they border on tautological.  You don't put effort into understanding foreign ideas.  You don't care that you're talking to people far more experienced and knowledgeable than yourself.  You must not even like roguelikes since you go out of your way to circumvent their central features, so I don't know why you post here.

You are talking about me, for some reason.

You don't care that you're talking to people far more experienced and knowledgeable than yourself.

More likely I was making games before you were even born.

If you were the slightest bit interested in learning the truth you'd have taken my suggestion and played Battletoads on an emulator with and then without save states.  That's all you'd have to do and then there'd never be any doubt about whether saving affects difficulty.  But instead of taking an hour to see how blatantly wrong you are, you chose to spend several days bending the words "skill" and "difficulty" beyond all recognition.  Why are you even here?  What made you think that the roguelike forums was a good place to complain about how bad permadeath games are?

A difficulty that challenges patience has its own name, it's called tedium.

89

Design / Re: My two cents about Permadeath

« on: April 13, 2014, 11:36:03 AM »

Decided to check out another long thread. Again another flame war.

Permadeath is important in certain game designs. Strategy, Arcade, Roguelike and Boardgames are permadeath genres. It works with those designs for various reasons. RPG, FPS, Adventure and other types of games generally are not good with permadeath, because seriously who wants to dive the Temple over and over (FF).

What is the difference? Wherever I look I see it works the same for any game. For example you have Jagged Alliance normal and iron-man mode, some people save scum, some people don't save at all, and no one is complaining. Metal Gear games have their easy and extreme mode, and no one is complaining. For any game there are some freaks who play it with only one life or make speed runs without saving at all. It's not a matter of genre, but personal taste.

90

Design / Re: Permanent consequences for failure that aren't death

« on: April 13, 2014, 11:03:42 AM »

It's only a test of your patience if you play like a moron and do the same thing over and over until the RNG finally works in your favor.

If a game requires skill, luck will not get you far. The joy of save scumming is exactly the opposite of what you are suggesting, it gives you a chance to play the same situation differently. A chance to experiment, to just play with it and have fun trying out different possibilities. It's a game, let yourself enjoy it.

I'm not interested to test my real life skills because I already know that I'm amazing, so when playing roguelikes I'm interested to test the skills of my game character, test certain character build and see how far it can go. I don't want to be punished in my real life for what happens on my computer screen, it's a role playing game, not torturing simulator.

If you pay attention and learn from your mistakes you can start winning consistently.  Some Crawl players have been known to win multiple consecutive games.

You will learn from your mistakes much faster if you let yourself replay and analyse the actual situation that killed you, analyse it straight away, instead of playing for another 27 hours until you get into only similar situation hoping to learn something from it that time around.

You see, thanks to save scumming I know things you don't, things you can't afford to experiment with, and if we were competing, I would have most certainly won.