What are the biggest possible turn-off in a roguelike?

[ido]

Clear simple ascii makes new players happier.

New players who are veteran players of other roguelikes.

People who are not familiar with roguelikes do not find plain ascii simpler to understand, not does it make them happier.

Personally with the added color and glitz I find games like teemu or many libtcod games (e.g. Vicious Orcs) quite a bit more digestible than curses-based games.

In fact I think Vicious Orcs is pretty close to as good as it gets with somewhat-traditional ascii display and somewhat-traditional keyboard controls.

[Darren Grey]

But Vicious Orcs does use clear, simple ASCII.  It's one of the examples of libtcod's palette used responsibly.  It doesn't use any unnecessary colours or symbols and makes good choices for every application of symbols and colours.  It has the sort of simple and pure aesthetic that I look out for in ASCII roguelikes.

[XLambda]

I should add that I often hesitate to play a game because it is tiles-only, or mouse-only (it's often both). Playing with the keyboard instead of the mouse just feels right. It takes maybe half an hour to get into the most important keys, and it goes downhill from there. Tiles can look good, but most of the time fail in conveying the overview and information of pure ASCII.

I think this is to a very large extent because you are already used to playing like that from playing roguelikes beforehand and I think it is very much not the case for most people (including myself).

Also, half an hour is a long time - I have a few hours per week dedicated to playing games and a whole steam library full of barely-/un-played games as well as a ton of free games on my to-play list- including brogue and the new version of crawl, which I haven't played since 0.5.

If your game has a half an hour learning curve for the basic controls I will most likely either quit after 5 minutes or (more likely) not start playing to begin with.

Only reason crawl gets a free pass is that I already know how to play it, and the reason brogue gets it is that I am a fairly experienced player of roguelikes and it controls similar enough to other games I've played before to not be too much of a hassle.

But you generally cannot expect players to already be grizzled veteran roguelike players, nor do I think it's good for the future to simply rely on the "old ways" instead of coming up with better solutions.

Of course, you're right. And I agree.
What I wanted to say was that most seasoned RL gamers do prefer ASCII and key-based control over tiles and mouse-based (IMO). And most non-commercial RL devs probably want to make a game they would like to play, so they will prefer to make a RL with classic controls.

Also,  those 30mins are a fair bit exaggerated. 

[Z]

http://koti.mbnet.fi/paulkp/teemu/island.jpg

Word. Pseudo-ASCII can be awesome, if done right. 

True, it is possible to do pseudo-ASII alright. And Teemu looks alright from the screenshot. But I have seen several pseudo-ASCII roguelikes where this was a big turn-off. For a non-rogueliker any kind of ASCII would be a big turn-off, I think it is similar.

[jocke the beast]

- Non-permanent dungeon levels....that's the worst thing in my opinion.

[Chex Warrior]

1) A strong storyline, not a huge turn off but I enjoy imagining my own like in Dungeon Crawl.

2) Mouse heavy interface, I am far far to used to the keyboard now.

[Darren Grey]

No RogueBasin article is a pet peeve of mine.  It's a nice place to get some basic info on a game, and through the IRLDB one can leave ratings and reviews.

[XLambda]

No RogueBasin article is a pet peeve of mine.  It's a nice place to get some basic info on a game, and through the IRLDB one can leave ratings and reviews.

I do have to agree - before I decide to dl a game, I check RogueBasin if there's an article.

[Bear]

2 - pseudo-ASCII, as others have noted.  It can be done reasonably well, but simple things that ought to work on ASCII (like copy-and-paste into plain text files) never seem to work.  It makes taking notes or talking about the game in text forums into a pain.  Also, pseudo-ASCII passes up a lot of "freebies" that you get with a term window, like automatic text resizing or font picking.

2 - Tiles-only.  Lots of people prefer tiles, but two things that virtually all tilesets have in common are that many monsters look a lot like other monsters with a minor addition or palette swap, and you can't see very much dungeon around yourself because they're bigger than ascii letters.  I really don't care whether a goblin is wearing a blue cloak or not, and ASCII doesn't bother to show me; it just displays 'g' for goblin.  If I see a tile, I still don't care about the cloak, but it turns out the blue-cloak-wearing variety of goblin is actually something else entirely and I was WRONG when I glanced at it and classified it as some kind of goblin.  Also, the short visible distances to the edge of the screen make much of the map invisible.  And the simple things that ought to work on ASCII (see above) still don't work.

3 - game requires me to switch interface modes, ever.  A game should require the keyboard, or a game should require the mouse.  If the game requires both, then I am likely to not play that game.  The moment when I have to transition from keyboard to mouse, or mouse to keyboard, interrupts my flow state and forces me to think about the interface.  After learning it, I want to never think about the interface.  Personally, I strongly prefer keyboard-only interface.  Mouse-only interfaces are just barely tolerable.  But mouse-only functions with no keyboard equivalent, and keyboard-only functions with no mouse-equivalent, in the same game, is a problem worse than a mouse-only interface in my opinion.

1 - Game requires me to touch the mouse, ever.  I strongly prefer keyboard interfaces over mouse interfaces.  "Point at" is a simpler idea, and tends to result in simplified games.  I don't want the game simplified.

2 - Documentation (especially in-game help) missing or out of sync with interface.  If the help describes the key bindings from last version, or the explanation of some feature hasn't been true since a bug fix 2 versions ago, or etc, that's worse than not having that documentation at all. 

Bear

[Krice]

"Point at" is a simpler idea, and tends to result in simplified games.  I don't want the game simplified.

Mouse is just an input device like keyboard.  It has nothing to do with how complex the game is. Mouse is faster and easier to use in some operations, like the usual mouse look and go to location. Still I agree that everything (in turn-based roguelike) should be possible to control with keyboard only.

[flend]

Following on from the kind of ideas Ido mentioned - about us being old and grey and no longer having >20 hrs a week to play games - I seriously dislike having to make extensive choices before I start the game.

If there's 100+ combinations of races and classes, how do I know my random selection hasn't just screwed me over from the beginning and therefore will waste my precious 2 hrs of gaming playing the game in what amounts to an extra hard difficulty level? No commercial game requires a manual and, following from that, at the very least tell me what options to pick for my first game. POWDER's approach (not letting you pick a god for your first few playthroughs) achieves this well.

[Incidentally, someone mentioned PrincessRL earlier. It does have a fullscreen mode (press capital F) but I did notice this wasn't in the in-game help!]

-flend

[Ancient]

Clear simple ascii makes new players happier.

New players who are veteran players of other roguelikes.

People who are not familiar with roguelikes do not find plain ascii simpler to understand, not does it make them happier.

I wholeheartedly disagree. My first roguelike was ADOM and I sunk in without any problems. It was not ASCII that bothered me. The defining requirement I think is strong preference for books over movies and even books over comic books. Bookworms easily get through text-only interface.

Now, for the gripes.

(1) High system requirements.
May sound silly but this is a warning more work went into funky engine thing and left not so much for content.

(2) Platform specific.
Not so bad if I can run it with Wine or equivalent but expect me to ignore those unportable games that do not have anything extraordinary to offer.

(3) Strongly tied to specific platform.
This is instant death. For example .NET dependencies. Without Windows I cannot do anything to run such a game.

(2) No ASCII mode.
Games with tiles rarely achieve recognizability close to that of plain ASCII display. To picture an orc you do not need an image of orc. This will be a complicated picture easily confusable with other grungy humanoids. Instead use a symbol that could be well associated with orcishness. Then a variation of this for different orcs.

(1) Theme mix-and-match.
Gumband has Cyberdemons, Beholders, Sauron, Cerberus, Archangels, Nibelungs, Ornithopters, Martians and Yog-Sothoth. Plus some obscure music band on top of all that. Such incoherent monster repertoire comes out as just bland.

[mike3]

But you generally cannot expect players to already be grizzled veteran roguelike players, nor do I think it's good for the future to simply rely on the "old ways" instead of coming up with better solutions.

Does this "coming up with better solutions" equal the need to do the additional work to make good tile graphics or something like that?

[Darren Grey]

I think ASCII would be more acceptable if it didn't usually come burdened with an insane keyboard interface.  The many obscure (and inconsistent) keymappings of roguelikes are more off-putting to new players than the funky display.

[guest509]

  It should be noted that the things many people call annoying (mouse, graphics) are exactly the opposite of what the general game player calls annoying (no mouse, no graphics).

   I am a roguelike player but I have to admit my most played games are DCSS with mouse and graphic tiles and Powder with mouse + graphics.