Pretty much, yeah. The genre was called “Rogue-like” because of Rogue, where your runs were all unique. “Rogue-lite” happened when devs wanted to add persistent progress to the game.
This is my preferred version. Anything else is overly specific on arbitrary features. It doesn’t matter to me if levels are procedurally generated or randomly chosen from 100 different hand made levels, the result is the same.
Rogue-like: each run is unaffected by any previous run.
I would tweak this slightly. Each run does not have upgrades that carry over into future runs, but you might unlock new characters to play or items to encounter.
I would call FTL a Rogue-like, but arguably a new run can be affected by a previous run if you’ve unlocked a new ship design.
The conversation around the two really wears me out. IMO, there's no need to be so restrictive. We can call them traditional roguelikes, platform roguelikes, whatever, and I think that's fine. If anything, I think we should have better terminology to differentiate games where the runs are isolated and those where there is meta progression. I don't think roguelite a good name for the latter.
The conversation around the two really wears me out.
Sorry! I came across a game and realised that there were two distinct terms that I had heard/seen over the years, and so I wondered what the difference was. Never come across discourse over it before, so that’s why I posted.
Nothing against you specifically! It would be more accurate to say that the people who will die on the hill of roguelike being something very specific wear me out. I certainly didn't intent to make a dig at you, so sorry about that!
Sure, that’s fine if people were actually specifying any sort of modifier. But calling everything a roguelike makes it hard to find the traditional roguelikes for those that like them. I’d be ok if the terms were standardized with modifiers like “Traditional Roguelike”, etc, but they aren’t. Everything with permadeath gets the label roguelike these days.
We can also just call them all rogue-likes. Everyone intuitively understands there’s a huge space in that by now, and the games can wildly differ. It’s fine. We know that no two MMORPGs are alike, and now two rogue-likes are alike.
They both have random generation of runs, doesn’t even have to be a dungeon crawler. The only difference is that a roguelite has meta-progression: you in some manner earn resources from each run that allow you to gain advantages on future runs
Well, these genre names are rarely chosen intelligently. People were initially just saying that certain games are like Rogue, and that eventually just started to include more and more. In recent history, we’ve also had “Souls-likes” which started out similarly innocent.
I mean, sometimes there’s a relatively intuitive name that people standardize on, like “Jump’n’Run”, but that wasn’t really possible with Roguelikes, as people hardly knew which parts of the Rogue formula were genre-defining.
Well, and it’s also just a rather abstract genre. Even retrospectively, we could only really call it “Permadeath’n’ProceduralMapGeneration”.
There basically is. “Run based games”. Stuff like FTL also fall into that category.
But also? Just because you like Stoneshard doesn’t mean you like Shortest Trip to Earth. Just like how “action games” covers pretty FPS and TPS and Platformers. Or how “FPS” covers arena shooters, Call of Duty, and milsims.
Likes are a pretty strictly defined genre. Lites on the other hand can be almost any genre. You could categorize both as “Run based games” but that leaves you with a very vague definition that says almost nothing about a game except that it´s … run based.
Don´t get me wrong, I don´t mean to gatekeep (I in fact play lites, not likes). However, a useful orientation when you want to know if a game is a like or not, is in my opinion the Berlin Interpretation
Yep, that’s the only answer that makes sense to anybody who actually plays and likes roguelikes.
As a rule of thumb I like say that if it needs a pause button it’s a 'lite. This doesn’t come close to covering the criteria but it’s a good shortcut to weed out a lot of them.
Off the top of my head, pixel dungeon, golden krone hotel, caves of qud, cogmind, zorbus & tangledeep all fit the strictest definition IMO. Probably Jupiter hell and maybe spelunky too
For me at least, the definitions are:
A roguelite is a permadeath, generally procedurally generated game, generally with a metagame over the runs
A roguelike is that, but in addition it’s also a turn based dungeon crawler RPG. I’d say the metagame is a less common aspect with traditional roguelikes
Dead Cells, as far as I recall. What a f****** awesome game.
Oh, and Hades, except that had a lot of dialogue, which this is saying true roguelikes don’t have. But f*** off, Hades is one of the best games in years.
Definitely Dead Cells covers all of those bullet points in the definition though, and I played that for about as long as I played Hades, 120 plus hours or so.
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