Roguelike of the Year!

[getter77]

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.

[ido]

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).

[Krice]

Is ToME 4 actually good now? I tried it back a while, didn't like.

[Darren Grey]

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.

[Z]

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.

[guest509]

   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.

[Darren Grey]

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.

[guest509]

  IF the 7DRL competition were in Nov I think this might change. Se la vi.

[mariodonick]

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.

[ido]

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).

[ido]

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.

[ido]

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.

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.

[guest509]

  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.