Wednesday, July 18, 2012

What roguelikes are to me.

As you can tell by the name of this blog, I like roguelikes. I might even love roguelikes. I like and play most types of games, but roguelikes have always had a sort of magic to them that just makes them my special favorite. Something about the roguelike recipe makes it an exquisite experience to a gamer like me.

So this leads me to my topic. What exactly does a roguelike mean to me? What are the elements of a roguelike that make it a special experience?

In my opinion there are four different traits that make a roguelike special. These traits are permanent death, turn based gameplay, procedurally generated content, and a high level of difficulty.  These four things  are rarely found together outside of the genre, and are one of the main reasons a roguelike virgin should take the plunge.

By themselves, each of these elements are not necessarily good game design, in fact adding most of these alone to the common game would usually be a bad decision. However each trait plays well off of the others, and using all four of these together can give the fun distinctive roguelike feel to a game.

High Level of Difficulty
Roguelikes are well known to be have an unforgiving level of difficulty. Hard difficulty is not exactly an uncommon feature in games, but it is one of the guiding principles of roguelike design. Not listing difficulty would result in a skewed view of these other features. A high level of difficulty means that choices should actually give concrete meaningful feedback, with a threat of harsh consequences for bad decisions. Victory should almost never be a foregone conclusion.

With the idea of difficulty comes the aspect of an end win condition. Roguelikes should be goal oriented, with the end goal being very difficult to achieve. Without a well defined end goal the difficulty becomes more of a burden than it should be. When you finally succeed in beating the game for the first time, a huge amount of satisfaction should be gained from doing what you once thought was the impossible.

Permanent Death
Permanent death is perhaps one of the most infamous traits of the roguelike. It almost seems like a modern game designer would recoil in horror at the mere mention of permanent death. Indeed, a game needs
be completely designed around the idea of permanent death for it to not ruin the game. It is no coincidence that all three of these other elements are also designed so that permanent death will be able to work in a way  that is enjoyable.

Permanent death is the ultimate punishment that a game can give to a player. In a roguelike, permanent death is to be expected and frequent. Permanent death used well can be an effective teaching tool. Used badly, and it becomes the reason a player never plays the game again.

Proceduraly Generated Content
Permanent death causes many problems when it is just thrown into a game, one of the biggest being the question of how to keep a game interesting after many times playing through the same content. If a designer is to have any hope of a player playing through the content of a game more than a few times, they must add a fairly large amount of replayability. Without randomly generated content, the game has the possibility of feeling like a puzzle.

Turn Based Gameplay
While it is possible to use a real-time method of gameplay in a roguelike, the success of the other three traits are increased greatly with the use of a turn based system. Permanent death would seem unfair if a character could die due to an inopportune sneeze or a bit of bad lag. Likewise, how random could random levels be in a real time permanent death environment be and still be considered fair? There must be some limit to the amount of unexpected dangerous things that can be thrown in the face of a player all at once.

Thankfully turns allow the player to play at their own pace. They need not be reliant on their own physical skill of controlling a character, but rather they can rely on their command of tactics and the knowledge they have of the game systems in order achieve success. After a player gains a certain amount of familiarity with the game, the turn based gameplay allows an almost calming experience that a real time game of the same nature can never have.


In Conclusion
I could argue that a game using all of these traits should be classified as a roguelike, but I would not go that far. Roguelikes can ultimately be described as games which are like rogue, and while rogue uses all four of these elements extensively, there is much more to rogue than this. In the future I plan on posting more on this and other topics.


Next Time
A common trait among serious roguelike fans is that a significant portion of them eventually try, and some even succeed, in making their own roguelike. My attempt has been more than a year in the making, and not entirely successful, my next post will be on the planned roguelike.

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