Features you love and features you hate to have in Roguelike games.

[Endorya]

Features I love in Roguelikes:

- Exploration
- Survival
- Large world map
- Total Freedom (be good or evil)
- Character development
- Experience meter
- Deadly combat
- Realistic damage system (body parts controlling functionality)
- Interactivity with objects
- detailed physics (corpse decomposition, chars reacting to environment, items rusting or breaking etc...
- Providing more than just combat, with crafting and professions.

Features that usually keep me away from some roguelikes.
(usually, it takes more than one of the following features to keep me away from roguelikes, depending on the number of features that I love that the game nay have included).

- Permadeath (for it begs for repetitiveness if not properly balanced).
- Lack of information about pretty much everything (consulting the manual over and over is not comfortable, specially when using the keyboard).
- Keyboard input only (I just think that being in 2013 there should be also mouse control).
- Having the player's success based on luck and level generation weighting more than 10%.
- Being hack & slash.
- Needing to die over and over and then some, just to get better at it (usually bound to permadeath).
- Repetitive level design and missing a world map, as in Crawl and Brogue (though I find Brogue enjoyable although repetitive).
- Bad ASCII implementation. Some ASCII implementations feel really good while others really confusing.
- Cartoonish graphics (Zelda style).

Tell me about yours

Please, I would like to keep this thread about feature numerating and not discussion other persons' personal preferences.

[NON]

Features I love in Roguelikes:
* High difficulty - winning the game should be a lifetime event
* Procedural map/content generation
* Turn based gameplay - player reaction time should be totally irrelevant.
* Many possible ways to handle bad situations or be generally inventive while playing
* Permadeath
* Needing to die, learn a lesson, try again and do better
* Interesting monster behavior that makes them feel alive (you get the sense that they are struggling to make the correct decisions just as you are)
* Consistent atmospheric setting. I also like an "archetypal" setting: Tolkien, sci-fi, norse, post-apocalyptic, wild west, Lovecraftian horror (*cough*), etc are all fine.

Features that will keep me away from some roguelikes:
* Wacky/artistic setting like playing a naked crying child in the basement (The Binding of Isaac)
* Cute graphics
* Too simple

[Endorya]

* Wacky/artistic setting like playing a naked crying child in the basement (The Binding of Isaac)

LMAO! I just saw the images of it.

[Zireael]

Features I love in Roguelikes:
* Consistent setting
* Moderate difficulty (not IVAN-end of scale and not kiddies' game end either)
* Survival
* Crafting
* Permadeath
* Interface improvements (character saving/quickstart, tooltips)

Features I hate
* Lack of information
* Cute graphics
* Hard-to-dismiss popups (hello, Incursion's "you are empty-handed" message)

[yoshisman8]

Features i love:

• The permadeath (as long as its fair of course)
• interesting monsters
• RACES, SPECIALLY LIZARDMEN (did i emphasized it enough? XD)
• Many possible ways to handle bad situations or be generally inventive while playing
• Turn based gameplay - player reaction time should be totally irrelevant.

Features i hate:

• only humans as a playable race. (or at least when there are other sentient species seen as enemies
• the lack of mouse interaction
• that some RL are far to simple and smilar

[rust]

Features I love in roguelikes:
* being roguelikes

Features I hate in "roguelikes":
* not being roguelikes

[Paul Jeffries]

Love:
- Permadeath + Proc Gen combo
- The ability to experiment with different strategies and play-styles
- Every turn having important consequences
- Complex environmental interactions
- Interesting or novel takes on the basic formula

Hate:
- The same old Tolkien-inspired Elves-Dwarves-Orcs fantasy setting for the bazillionth time
- When randomness vastly outweighs player decisions in determining success
- Zero-effort ASCII graphics (I don't mind ASCII when it's had some thought and effort put into it, but I think often its just used out of laziness)
- Difficulty curve feedback loops

[guest509]

Love:
-ASCII
-Permadeath
-Procedural Generation
-Difficulty

Dislike:
-Interfaces that create needless learning curves.
-'Is it a roguelike' discussions. It's a set of design principals and a genre, figure it out people! :-)
-Unfair deaths, this is rare in a well designed game though

[Avagart]

Love:
- ASCII graphic
- world map
- sandbox (UnReal World, C:DDA), a quantity of (ADoM)
- interaction with objects/environment
- procedural generation
- permadeath
- difficulty (if not unfair or if game is not balanced)
- a lot of classes/races
- keyboard input

Dislike:
- too large (not-single-screen-sized) dungeons, especially if game have not autoexplore
- too sweet/cute graphics
- only tiles graphics (except UnReal World)
- too complicated interface (like magic in ToME 2.3.5)
- weird setting (Binding of Isaac, maybe Elona+)
- little dislike: lack of world map/wilderness

edit:

HATE:
- no diagonal movement

[AgingMinotaur]

Love: Every playthrough feels different: Exploration, surprise, procedural content – with permadeath
Hate: Bland/repetitive early game – with permadeath

Love: Difficulty, skill is required to win – with permadeath
Hate: Getting screwed by the rng – with permadeath

Love: Complex interactions with objects and environments
Hate: Three pages worth of keyboard shortcuts

Love: Character development, going from wimp to badass
Hate: Grinding for xp and loot, rather than getting to the next interesting challenge

Love: Finding better items that impact strategic and tactical options
Hate: Carrying a ton of trash to ID, sort through and sell at convenience

Love: Atmospheric (ideally original) setting, preferably an overworld
Hate: Too linear progression, no possibility to sidetrack, skip quests etc.

Love: Varied and interesting monsters and map features
Hate: Ogres-as-goblins-with-doubled-hp

Love: Turn based, tactically interesting combat
Hate: Too much formulaic tactics, like pillar-dancing and hack'n'back

Love: Easy to pick up controls, the convenience of modern UI design
Hate: Poorly done "modern" UI: tacky graphics with no ascii, not being able to play with a keyboard.

As always,
Minotauros

[vultures]

What everyone enjoys on their coffebreak:
..and then I spilled his gut, another orc shouted but I managed to escape. I've hidden at the end of the next corridor, flanked the whole group and went behind the back of this mean little shaman and slit his throat!
..oh, the next big town's great. I sold ALL the things I didn't need, spent my XP and gold on training AND there was some left for those materials I haven't been able to find back in the dungeons.

What's everyone's dislike in RLs:
..maaan, it's dull now! I'm a 22nd level druid, and there is no hint whatsoever where I should find the only quest item I'm lacking.
..it keeps killing me when I try toreach the 10th rune in this dungeon, and they won't let me into this town to ask for advice because they simply don't like my character's race/class!

[jedjad]

inverted difficulty

-starts out being hardest at the start

[Krenium]

Hate:

• inventory management
• consumables