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Why has nobody created a truly modern Roguelike?
Sorenson
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Registered User regular
So as some of you folks have probably noticed there's been quite a bit of hubbub on the forum front page what with Pata introducing us to Elona and after taking it for a spin and being raped horribly in that way that roguelikes tend to it got me thinking and realizing that for all of the RPGs and the like that've come out over the years that very few (if any) have really tried to try and get in on the rogue style of gameplay. We've had traditional RPGs, action-RPGs, strategy RPGs, massive RPGs, virtual tabletop RPGs - but not really that many..."spelunking" RPGs, so to say.
Of course, I'm sure there are plenty of examples that you'd just love to bring up to show how this is really sort of false (after all, what is an RPG without a sojourn into some deep, dark den of evil where riches are said to lie?) so it might help us to first set out what particular attributes define the archtypical roguelike game:
EMPHESIS ON EXPLORATION AND CRAWLING: The roguelike is, above all else, about the final frontier, of probing the mysteries of lands and structures that no mortal eye has seen and lived to speak of. It is about the allure of undiscovered riches and powers beyond one's wildest dreams, about the lengths to which men will gp - and kill, and steal, and die, usually - and about the hardships and horrors they face, and the heroes and legends that emerge through all of these efforts and troubles. Above or below ground, it matters not, though most roguelikes focus upon the subterranian locales.
TACTICAL AND LETHAL NATURE: The roguelike is known for, above all else, being one of the hardest game genres ever conceived, perhaps even to the point of being downright sadistic. Nobody is safe in a roguelike - while other games are all too eager to heap upon you special attacks and spells and development curves that let you swat away most anything in your path like an insect, the roguelike is all too eager to remind you that you're nothing special, and the only thing keeping you from winding up like the dozens of corpses you'll pass by is a good lot of preperation, intellect, and luck. And not only must you think about combat, but then there's the matter of your own basic needs as well - thirst, hunger, and fatigue, among others, all have to be taken into account and dealt with. Naturally, this is one of the biggest points of contention - making it too hard makes it downright unplayable, but making it too easy kills off part of the roguelike spirit, thus causing much variability amongst the different offshoots of the Rogue concept.
EXTRORDINARY BREADTH, DEPTH, AND VARIABILITY: The roguelike is remarkable for, above all else, having some of the deepest and most extensive gameplay concepts of any genre, still unsurpassed even by modern-day games. In what other genre are you able to have your feet ripped clean off by a vicious trap and, in begging for aid from your patron diety, are rewarded for your faith by being given new feet made from solid iron? In what other gametype are you able to maticulously and carefully take your opponent apart limb by limb and organ by organ? In what other genre are you able to encounter a virtually unlimited number of different attributes and items and creatures and locales? In what other genre are you able to adventure for what can be virtually forever so long as you maintain interest? Virtually none, I say.
With those foundations laid down, it's far easier to show how there us such a dreadful lack of these titles. While the Diablo games (1 moreso than 2 and likely 3) and their various fauximiles are certainely candidates point 1 and potentially 3, their focus on over-the-top action and abilities disqualifies them. The Elder Scrolls games could potentially qualify, but the current paradigm puts limits on the variability and replayability of the roguelike, and whilt its dungeon explorations fit the roguelike bill perfectly[/o] the addition of overland quests and such sort of pull away. The Neverwinter Nights games are perhaps the closest to modern roguelikes, but being that playable material is almost entirely user-generated barring the odd Random Dungeon Generator mod and that said material is subject to the standard rule of user-generated content 9 of 10 times being shit, that will eventually lead to one having gone through all the worthwhile Rogueish modules available.
So with all that said, why hasn't a good, competant developer made an honest-to-goodness modern roguelike with all of the bells and whistles of current titles? It's certainely not due to lack of capability to replicate on the modern scale those fundimental aspects of the roguelike - numerous titles have been able to create randomly-generated dungeons with some level of decency in their design, and numerous titles have been able to provide that extrordinary amount of content and variability both through inherent systems and those created by modders, and numerous titles have succussfully deployed minimalist/low-grade curves in their power scale that require more emphesis on thought and tactics. Yet nobody has been able to combine all of these characteristics into a single title with all of the Rogue spirit and none/few of the Rogue nuances and programming limitations.
Is the roguelike a genre that will be forever confined to independent and small-scale developers? Or is there hope that someday we will have a grand, epic, modern roguelike that will bring the genre forefront and finally bring salvation to us spelunkers?
Of course, I'm sure there are plenty of examples that you'd just love to bring up to show how this is really sort of false (after all, what is an RPG without a sojourn into some deep, dark den of evil where riches are said to lie?) so it might help us to first set out what particular attributes define the archtypical roguelike game:
EMPHESIS ON EXPLORATION AND CRAWLING: The roguelike is, above all else, about the final frontier, of probing the mysteries of lands and structures that no mortal eye has seen and lived to speak of. It is about the allure of undiscovered riches and powers beyond one's wildest dreams, about the lengths to which men will gp - and kill, and steal, and die, usually - and about the hardships and horrors they face, and the heroes and legends that emerge through all of these efforts and troubles. Above or below ground, it matters not, though most roguelikes focus upon the subterranian locales.
TACTICAL AND LETHAL NATURE: The roguelike is known for, above all else, being one of the hardest game genres ever conceived, perhaps even to the point of being downright sadistic. Nobody is safe in a roguelike - while other games are all too eager to heap upon you special attacks and spells and development curves that let you swat away most anything in your path like an insect, the roguelike is all too eager to remind you that you're nothing special, and the only thing keeping you from winding up like the dozens of corpses you'll pass by is a good lot of preperation, intellect, and luck. And not only must you think about combat, but then there's the matter of your own basic needs as well - thirst, hunger, and fatigue, among others, all have to be taken into account and dealt with. Naturally, this is one of the biggest points of contention - making it too hard makes it downright unplayable, but making it too easy kills off part of the roguelike spirit, thus causing much variability amongst the different offshoots of the Rogue concept.
EXTRORDINARY BREADTH, DEPTH, AND VARIABILITY: The roguelike is remarkable for, above all else, having some of the deepest and most extensive gameplay concepts of any genre, still unsurpassed even by modern-day games. In what other genre are you able to have your feet ripped clean off by a vicious trap and, in begging for aid from your patron diety, are rewarded for your faith by being given new feet made from solid iron? In what other gametype are you able to maticulously and carefully take your opponent apart limb by limb and organ by organ? In what other genre are you able to encounter a virtually unlimited number of different attributes and items and creatures and locales? In what other genre are you able to adventure for what can be virtually forever so long as you maintain interest? Virtually none, I say.
With those foundations laid down, it's far easier to show how there us such a dreadful lack of these titles. While the Diablo games (1 moreso than 2 and likely 3) and their various fauximiles are certainely candidates point 1 and potentially 3, their focus on over-the-top action and abilities disqualifies them. The Elder Scrolls games could potentially qualify, but the current paradigm puts limits on the variability and replayability of the roguelike, and whilt its dungeon explorations fit the roguelike bill perfectly[/o] the addition of overland quests and such sort of pull away. The Neverwinter Nights games are perhaps the closest to modern roguelikes, but being that playable material is almost entirely user-generated barring the odd Random Dungeon Generator mod and that said material is subject to the standard rule of user-generated content 9 of 10 times being shit, that will eventually lead to one having gone through all the worthwhile Rogueish modules available.
So with all that said, why hasn't a good, competant developer made an honest-to-goodness modern roguelike with all of the bells and whistles of current titles? It's certainely not due to lack of capability to replicate on the modern scale those fundimental aspects of the roguelike - numerous titles have been able to create randomly-generated dungeons with some level of decency in their design, and numerous titles have been able to provide that extrordinary amount of content and variability both through inherent systems and those created by modders, and numerous titles have succussfully deployed minimalist/low-grade curves in their power scale that require more emphesis on thought and tactics. Yet nobody has been able to combine all of these characteristics into a single title with all of the Rogue spirit and none/few of the Rogue nuances and programming limitations.
Is the roguelike a genre that will be forever confined to independent and small-scale developers? Or is there hope that someday we will have a grand, epic, modern roguelike that will bring the genre forefront and finally bring salvation to us spelunkers?
Sorenson on
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I think I've found the problem
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http://godwars2.org/
(Even if it's not what you're looking for, it surely is awesome.)
Elaborating a bit: Manually controlling all limbs in combat, a fuckload of weapons and styles of combat, multiplayer (including pvp and sparring), merciless dungeon crawling and a movement system that is.. wonderful, once you get used to it. Also you could play a demon, who specializes in ripping off body parts and beating you opponent to death with them.
We need more games like Castle of the Winds, that are possible to play almost completely by clicking, and when you aren't clicking it should be extremely context-sensitive.
Why do we have seperate Wear, Put On, and Equip commands? (ok, so that's pretty much nethack specific.) Why can't I just go into my inventory and pick an item first and then decide what to do with it? Design it like an OS, let me right click for a context menu with the most common commands, like Equip, Eat, Throw, maybe a generic Use?
Redesign the interface. Make it like Diablo only turn-based, or something.
I'm curious why you feel that a dev should "make it like Diablo only turn-based". Does a good roguelike need to be turn-based? Can one not design a roguelike to be realtimeish ala Neverwinter Nights? For that matter, does Rogue need to still adhere to its D&D play-by-the-dice roots? For all of its faults, Oblivion's combat demonstrated that it's quite possible to move beyond the whim of the allmighty Random Number Generator and have melee that is both engaging and in complete control of the player, and I salivate at the thought of a good Roguelike with full-on tactile combat.
*coughcough*twopostsabove*coughcough*
But I really do think agree that the common roguelike's worst trait is the needless complexity. And it just oozes through every aspect of the UI design, if you can even call it that. I'm a firm believer that part of the game shouldn't be to figure out how to actual do stuff, so you can get to actually doing said stuff (Unless you're talking Dwarf Fortress) and it just seems that the unix-roots of the games are hindering them at this point rather than doing them any favors.
Man, I'd prefer a good parser any day to some of these "interfaces".
EDIT: Oh, wait. That's what you were getting at.
I agree that changing the control schemes would help makes the games more accessible. But you know what? People making these kinds of games are catering to a niche crowd. They don't give a flying fuck about appealing to more people.
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Xbox360 Gamertag: Emuchop
In God Wars, I can target a guys actual hand to cut it off, then parry and counter his strike by pulling him closer with my other hand and shatter his skull with a headbutt. All in real time and devastatingly described..
In terms of tactile textbased combat, the combat immersion in there will have your heart racing...
EDIT: Ninjaedit!
However, it's not exactly a roguelike, I must admit.. I just have to bring it up every time somebody is looking for a good textbased game. However, rereading your OP it seems like more of a debate thread, reather that a suggestion one, so I'll just stop cluttering it up!
I think this is a major part of it. The people who play newer roguelikes are probably people who are already into the whole rogue mindset, so why they hell would they change anything?
Not to say that it's the most modern Roguelike there is, just that I've never played one since then.
Outside of the Japanese, who tend to take a liking to this stuff, and the American niche that's always enjoyed them, I don't really think you can really mass-market a Roguelike without having to turn it into, well, Diablo.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Of course it will still take a developer with the will to develop this.
Just look at borderlands and spore, procedural generation allows them to create a huge array of diversity. Imagine a game that randomly generated enemies ala spore, and weapons from guns to daggers. Charater traits and appearance could also be procedurally generated. Different dieties could have different powers that could be aplied to you like the different companies have different traits common to all their guns in Borderlands. The possibilities are eldless, and making the game totally open ended would be almost to easy.
Think about the sheer amount of visual content you'd need to make. In our free or low-budget roguelike expectations, you can just say, "you're missing feet now, and then you eviscerated a <thing> and are examining its anatomy, and you dig up a <thing>" in text and it's fine. Would you be happy to have all these detailed rendered to you in JUST text in the kind of lavish game you'd like? Probably not. And while in roguelikes we're perfectly comfortable with palette-swapped monsters since there are tons of different breeds of the same monster type, but imagine seeing some lavish 3D production with gorgeous lighting and shader effects and... tons of palette swapped monsters. Yeah, not so hot.
An answer to that content bit might be in using procedurally generated stuff to make distinguished breeds or varieties of the same monster family. But in order to make it all look good without too much repetition, it's going to be work. It might not need to be as wildly adaptable as what you've got from Spore, but would you be happy if your massively genespliced dogcatasurabearyeekyoungersister pet wasn't realized in some believable fashion visually?
I'm not sure just how much a powerful rig can handle, but another concern may be physical simulation, especially across the world in places where you aren't. I love it when buildings fall apart naturally and people are susceptible to rocks flung into the air from explosions. In Elona, whole cities might be engaged in some life-or-death struggle with aliens wholly unbeknownst to you. I imagine the burden of simulating that fully across the (many) towns of the world would be steep, and what's more, you aren't even seeing it (though that saves on the GPU, I guess)! Not every roguelike has a world outside of its dungeon, but could you possibly give up that element of simulation after experiencing it yourself in Elona?
I think it all comes down to questions of "how big", and "how big" itself is a question with a lot of aspects: What do you want to have simulated? To what extent will those things be simulated/represented? How do you deal with monotony in some of the simulated aspects? etc.
EDIT: beat'd and in much fewer words by verpakeyes
Man that is not going to be true much longer with procedurally generated content.
Edit: Damn Verp beat me.
edit: Fireflash's description sure seems to make that question a "no"
Either text game or damn ugly graphic game that can rape you and force you to start over at every and any corner, often without warning or logic. But also filled with a lot of exploration, items and little things to discover.
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So they're like a video game substitute for an abusive spouse, ugliness included.
The 17th century is most definitely not modern.
I am so sorry.
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hey i found the answer to the title
EDIT: Yes, this.
Go look at the Boulderlands thread. The videos are really neat. At one point during a demonstration, the guy presenting it (developer?) just starts spamming the "spawn random gun" button, gets like thirty completely different guns, and announces that he's never seen any of the weapons before.
Personally, I tried nethack. The interface convinced me to go play something else. I looked at a few things to try and figure it out, but there was just too much to jump in.
I avoided it once I heard it was just a single-player crappy Diablo, but I may look into it now.
For me the attraction of a roguelike is the concept that you can do nearly anything. You can equip any item as a weapon and start bludgeoning people with it...and it might actually be effective! You can throw potions that would have a certain effect if you drank them, and instead they'll bestow that effect on whatever you hit, for good or ill. In Dwarf Fortress, you can become a coin-flicking god, killing whole hordes of enemies by flinging individual copper pieces at them that pierce their skulls and exit through their neck.
You can turn into a gelatinous cube, and eat/absorb any item as sustenance, and you may get to keep the properties of that item intrinsically thereafter.
You can kill a cockatrice, pick up its corpse and go around hitting monsters with it, turning them into statues with each hit. But make sure you're wearing gloves first...and do your best not to trip and fall on it.
How to get across water? You can train up your swimming, or turn into a swimming/flying monster, or use boots of water-walking, or cast an ice spell at it and freeze it to walk across.
You can solidify magma, and then dig through it, downwards to the next floor even. In some games, liquids will flow through these holes from floor to floor.
All these little touches, interacting with each other simultaneously and logically. It's the closest thing we have to a cohesive mini-world, and not just a bit of programming and stats. It's extremely detailed and would probably be too taxing or extensive to do in a fully 3D, real-time game. Hell, Dwarf Fortress taxes brand new computers, with all the processing going on...and it's ASCII.
Heavy emphasis on exploration and map making, with a high level of difficulty without being broken. The large number of classes and skill combinations make it very deep, as does the 'guild' structure for your party.
Huge ammounts of gameplay too, I think I'm on hour 40 atm, and am only 2/3 of the way through the regular game.
LoL: BunyipAristocrat
No no no.
The maps are not randomly generated, it is in first person, most battles are totally random and with multiple enemies, you can't see and target the enemies wherever they are at in the room, the items are not randomly generated and nothing has to be identified, and in fact it is a traditional jrpg in every sense of the word.
:P
Well, Baroque has action-based combat instead of turn-based combat which makes it unlike most rogue-likes, but it:
has brutal difficulty complete with death equaling the loss of your XP & stats.
has randomly generated levels.
has a food system. Vitality is kept up by eating things. If Vitality drops to 0, you start to lose HP.
has gameplay with heavy reliance on items. There's no magic in the game: you're limited to a few attacks with your equipped weapon and throwing and using a host of items.
I got it from goozex and enjoyed it for a few hours although in the end, I traded it back.
EDIT: The Etrian Odyssey games are dungeon hacks which are close relatives of Roguelikes, but not quite the same.
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It doesn't have those features, but if you think a story lite game with heavy emphasis on dungeon exploration is a traditional JRPG, you don't know what a JRPG is.
It does lack the qualities you listed that are common to roguelikes, (although the game is basically 3rd person, you navigate by the map mostly, not the first person screen) but EO is a classic dungeon crawl western rpg, in the vein of the original Ultima, which is where roguelikes get a lot of their inspiration.
LoL: BunyipAristocrat
The hurdle to get over is the difficulty of allowing for nearly infinite gameplay permutations with conventional game programming, so I think that the folks mentioning the possibility of procedural stuff being the solution here could be on the right track, too.
When the mario series was 'modernized' it became 3D and fundamentally became a differnt genre. The New Super Mario bros has been very popular because it was a new game in the pre 'modernized' mario design. No one would claim that the new Mario games are bad, but merely by modernizing the series, they lost the gameplay elements that made the original series what it was.
LoL: BunyipAristocrat
I don't understand why it's necessary for every roguelike to look and control like pure ass. I don't think we need a "truly modern" roguelike, we just need something playable.
There's so many good ideas but the developments on most of the major ones seems to have ground to a halt.
JADE seems to have resurfaced for a bit and TOME 3 is still being made but both are takin eons
I don't think that a roguelike needs to be as insane as Dwarf Fortress for it to be a good roguelike.
I like the tons of stuff to pick up and interact with, but I don't see that as one of the ultimate points of a roguelike, either.
The way I see Shiren, there are a lot of things they consciously put in or did not put in to give it a more focused puzzle-like nature. There are no skills for you to invest points in, no character classes or races, and you can't just grab any rock lying around and try to squeeze orange juice out of it. I think that's perfectly fine. Pretty much all roguelikes make trying to survive a major part of the game, but how they do that can be varied. Trying to survive in Shiren is definitely more than just picking which monster to hit in what order or which to run away from, and if you don't believe me, just ask them Shiren players in the thread.
Chocobo's Dungeon is a different sort of game, with simplifications made so that it's more accessible. That's fine, too. Just like how not every good FPS game is WW2 Online, nor is every good FPS Quake, and that should be a good thing.
Somebody please tell me that I'm not the only one that thinks that such a niche thing as roguelikes can and ought to be varied.
These are my thoughts as well. A "Modern" roguelike would necessitate "modern" graphics in order to have marketable appeal. However, modern graphics are simply not powerful enough to describe a universe that a good roguelike would require.
2D Versions are feasible, but again, 2D games do not have the same marketability as 3D games. Especially if we're talking about a very very difficult game that probably already has niche appeal.
I think Will Right is on the right track with Spore, for example. He hired many coders from the "Scene" to help write the game's procedural code, which as we have seen with creature creator, is certainly not flawless by any means. It comes down to the fact that there is a very short supply of programmers this talented, and they are already working on games with greater mass appeal.
I agree, I real amazing 3d roguelike would be fantastic. But it would require engine technology that simply does not exist yet.
Wearing an item, putting it on, and equipping it are all handled separately in the games' rules. You need separate commands because (e.g.) putting on a ring is different from wielding it.
Context-sensitive item use commands are a bad idea for a roguelike, because they both limit the number of ways you can interact with an item and immediately reveal all possible uses for it. Discovering uses for items is one of the key pleasures of Nethack, for example (discovering that you can #rub a lamp, or throw rings down the sink, or write on the floor with wands, or kick a throne...). One of the most compelling trade-offs in a roguelike is deciding whether to spend a turn using an experimental command on an item, possibly destroying the item in the process, or to stick with your tried-and-true method of obtaining value from the item. In roguelikes that have context-sensitive item menus (like Shiren), this dilemma never arises, and the games are weaker for it.
The interface challenge here is that while there are a finite number of commands that are valid with any item, it must appear to the player that there are an infinite number of such commands. When you look at it that way, the hodge-podge of keystroke and parsed commands almost seems ideal.
You could click on the item and then a little menu would pop-up with "Wear, Put on, Equip" that are all clickable. I maintain that the interface of these roguelikes all suck and are the sole reason I can't stand playing them.