Tulpa… you’re sounding like a jerk. None of that applies exclusively to roguelikes. Replaying a game you enjoyed is no worse than rereading a book you like or kissing someone you’ve already kissed.
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minotaur berserker, which is the exact opposite of ‘expert audience’ playstyle.
I think there may be some erasure of engaged amateurs in your analysis
I would categorize myself as formerly an ‘engaged amateur’ of roguelikes but now I just see them as a pathological anti-design with occasional exceptions.
having deep thoughts about the fact that there was a “Pandemonium!” port for n-gage
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the guy who made ringo ishikawa has early development vids of it up on his youtube clarifying the connection my brain made
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Whenever I find myself excoriating an entire genre of anything, I find that, perhaps, I am experiencing some kind of internal bias.
Or, to be less passive aggressive, statements like these make it hard to actually take your argument seriously because they are so dismissive.
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Also the implication is that the only people who play the majority of roguelikes are addicts and fools, which is rude as heck!!
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As an addict and fool I have never found roguelikes compelling
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Brogue and Shiren are good games
I don’t think people who play roguelikes are fools, I do think that playing a roguelike is on the same level as the way I compulsively play picross. They’re compulsion games and the way the design trends of roguelikes have been reified in modern games has been an overwhelming net negative.
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I’ll agree here. The things that modern games learned from roguelikes are “random good” and “stupid hard good” without any of the good bits.
Actually I view roguelikes in sort of the same light you view Sekiro: the goal is to get good enough that the mooks on the first 5 floors pose no threat and can be steamrolled. It’s satisfying getting very good at the first bits because it narrows the game down to a series of interesting decisions (and luck) that could have a major impact later.
Anyway I’m not a roguelike expert but I bristle at these sweeping statements. I understand your position a bit better now
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As a dilletante of many genres I find roguelikes have the healthiest output of learning for the first few dozen hours out of any of them. And that is to say, I think they have some of the healthiest return on play out of any genre for a standard player experience (a straight clear).
If we’re talking about the edge of roguelikes played to mastery – played for months and dozens to hundreds of hours – I think they flirt with but don’t fall into what I’d consider grindy patterns. Instead, I think they’re comparable to multiplayer and competitive aesthetics.
Players repeat similar actions, in similar contexts, dozens of times, hoping for a combination of luck and incremental advances in their skill to reach new plateaus of ability.
As this is not a direct time->progress output, I don’t think it qualifies as a bare progression loop, nor do I think it’s a good fit under our softer definition of ‘grindy’ (I’ve been defining it as: game systems gating content behind repetitive play with a low skill component).
Now, like with multiplayer games, players can easily be hooked on a roguelike long past the point of enjoyment. I think this is a bigger discussion about what we normally consider healthier game components (skill and execution) turning unhealthy at high contexts. And we need to be careful to separate it from the healthy competitive side that many people enjoy, in becoming true subject matter experts, in organized competition, and the like.
(to the RTS point: I don’t think this is grindy, and they didn’t use progression loops, but they were intensely compelling in the way many multiplayer games are)
The other assertion is that pre-PSX RPGs cannot be called grindy. Well, they definitely defined progression loops. Did they misuse them? I think a case can be made that the better examples didn’t; that the slow pace is more a result of a slow content pacing and repetitive, simplistic battle systems are a side effect. But the 8-bit JRPGs are usually egregious in this; lacking strong tactical choices in battle, and a good clip of narrative, the vast majority of them consist of dozens of hours of samey battles with the promise of slightly different tilesets. Grind was significantly lower in the 16-bit and early 3d eras as the production values of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy shaped the genre.
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My favorite other than Shiren is probably Powder, not for its complexity but for its ability to be played with a dpad and 6 buttons, i.e. on a GBA. Very traditional roguelike otherwise
can you be specific here? Can you clarify why leveling up and collecting loot is bad-wrong in a jrpg but good in a roguelike?
I actually consider this far worse than JRPG-ish time → progress because this is literally relying on gambling mechanics to exploit player’s time. It’s Skinnerian ‘semi-random rewards for consistent inputs’ design. One of the most insidious compulsion loops in games.
I don’t think the random reward schedule of loot is all that important to a run’s success up to a certain high skill goal. The more important consequence of randomized player inventory is forcing the player to consider their loadout in new and different contexts; to unpack assumptions from other games and try sub-optimal possibilities.
It’s great! I naturally love working under pressure so this is just about my favorite thing.
Now, it’s hardly fair to build your critique of random reward schedules and hold up Dragon Quest, the mainstream game with such a deep and true love of gambling.
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I love working under pressure too, but I can think of two roguelikes (which I named) where I have ever been required to work under sub-optimal conditions to try to succeed. Most of the genre is trapped in this awful awful place of one-true-strategy-ism and wiki-scumming. That is to say, they are pseudo random in a way that they’re either trivial to solve or require an exacting script to follow. Both of those options preclude interesting sub-optimal decisions. When skillful play is isomorphic with scripted play, how can it be interesting?
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This is good context; I deliberately avoid wiki play or reading strategies from people less cool than SB. I want to figure it out myself, that’s the entire reason I play.
If a game boils down to this at any but the highest levels of play, the game has a real problem. At advanced skill, it’s extremely difficult for any game to avoid compressing down; usually the designers don’t even play it at that level! In this regard I forgive most games the way I can find most games extremely compelling without standing up to a lifetime of study.
Interesting to think about the strategy trading as part of the cultural environment these games foster; it’s really great in a friends context, a playground context, and to some extent the streamer context (I think the longterm Spelunky and Binding of Isaac streamers would say it’s more interesting than playing multiplayer games over a long time). From a Word-of-God context it’s as poisonous as any other.
related: I refuse to read about Magic: The Gathering meta before it’s two years out of date
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when I have 20 options and 19 of them are traps that only idiots would choose, I consider it to be bad design. This was infamously the case with character building in 3rd edition D&D. Insofar as system mastery comes from trial and error figuring out which choices are universally bad until you are left with the one good choice, I am not interested. What I want from certain games (let’s call them dynamic puzzlebox games): every strategy is viable if you can figure out how to apply it, there’s no optimal solution and there are no ‘traps’ to make you feel stupid and people who have ‘mastered’ the systems feel smart. What I get in most roguelikes, randomly generated king’s quest puzzles as game design.
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Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think we’ve got different context and I haven’t played a broad enough swathe of roguelikes at a high enough skill level to feel like that’s a genre trait. And indeed, most of my thinking about the Form of roguelike is drawn from Shiren, Brogue, and Spelunky, colored by the mutations of the modern action interpretations and their various successes and failures.