Roguelike Returns - How to Revive a Genre - Extra Credits

The last 2 years have seen the triumphant return of the games we dub roguelike. Games with randomly generated levels, permanent death, and ever-increasing difficulty. The genre was revitalized by Spelunky, made a smash hit by FTL, and continues to ride high on the back of games like Rogue Legacy. But this type of game has been around for over 20 years. It's actually one of the oldest types of video games ever created. People played the original Rogue on the old mainframes at universities and lost hours to Sword of Fargo on their C64s in the '80s. So why did this genre disappear from the mainstream? And more importantly, why did it return? Well, the first answer is actually fairly simple: usability. The return of roguelikes may be the best argument for the power of usability that the game industry has ever made. I mean, Dwarf Fortress may be one of the best roguelikes ever created, but its impenetrability has kept it from being the worldwide success it should be. Contrast Dwarf Fortress with many of the modern roguelike games. If you look at today's roguelikes, you'll find that the most successful ones all share one thing in common. They pull in elements from

other genres and apply them to the roguelike in order to make it more immediately approachable, familiar, and understandable to players. The clearest examples of this can be found in games like Rogue Legacy and Risk of Rain, where they took the conventions of the platforming genre and applied the permanent death and randomized maps that roguelike games are famous for. This gave them something that was immediately recognizable to players that also rooted usually unwieldy elements of the genre like abilities and item descriptions in simple physical things that a player can immediately understand, allowing for descriptions like makes you jump higher rather than the more complicated set of math and statistics that we're used to from roguelikes. Even in games like FTL, they used the JRPG convention of instantiated combat encounters to simplify things, and then they streamlined rooms into just being single events, and dropped most of the statistics that could have easily gone into a spacefaring roguelike game. So while I do love me some roguelikes such as Sword of the Stars, The Pit, and Tales of Maj'Eyal filled with statistics and hundreds of items to discover, we've not seen these games gain the traction that many of the other modern roguelikes have. These games have come a long way from the genre's ASCII beginnings, and especially in the case of things like

Sword of the Stars: The Pit, though they have made a clear effort to make the traditional form of the genre as usable as possible, they still don't have nearly the reach of a game like FTL. I've only got rough sales numbers, but it seems clear that adoption rates are fairly corollary with usability. So, what does that tell us? What does it mean that as soon as roguelikes became more usable, they garnered a great deal more success? Well, it tells us one thing. People want roguelikes, they just don't want to have to put in quite so much work to understand them. So, we have to ask why. Why are roguelikes powerful? What makes them such a compelling form of play? And to answer that question, we have to look at their two main elements: randomized maps and permanent death. So, randomized maps, and by that I mean randomized space, events, encounters, and loot. What do they give us? They give us a dynamic problem to solve every time we enter the game. The game becomes more about learning how to use the systems and mechanics you've been presented to adapt to whatever a particular run throws at you, more than it does memorizing things or even finding specific answers to problems. That's compelling. It continuously challenges our problem-solving abilities in new and interesting ways, while also

giving us an opportunity to exercise our creativity, finding novel and unique solutions to odd combinations of random events. It also gets us to really dig into the systems in ways that most games usually don't. By presenting the player with random problems, roguelike games continuously push the player to discover new facets of the game's mechanics and come to a deeper understanding of the rules that govern play. But, randomization also does one other thing. It makes every game feel fresh and exciting because it creates the unexplored. There's always the hope for that great run, and the fear that just around the next corner will be the challenge that stops you in your tracks. Each step forward feels like a discovery. Each step has that thrill of the unknown. The other central element to roguelikes is permanent death. In the old days, dying in a roguelike meant starting the game over completely from square one, losing everything. But, many modern roguelikes have begun to feature some limited persistence that carries over between playthroughs, either through unlocks or minor character improvements that persist past death. And with apologies to permadeath purists, the developers of these games have found that having that tiny bit of persistence still leaves the player with much of the benefit of a permanent death system, so I'm including them in this

discussion. So, what does permanent death add to roguelikes? Well, first off, it adds meaning to the game. Each life is important. It's not just your standard disposable video game character life. It's something you're invested in. Second, it wipes the slate clean each game. By starting you back as a blank slate every time, and then presenting you with randomized maps, challenges, and resources to work with, the game forces you to find new to the problems it presents. It forces you to adjust to the things presented to you instead of having you fall back on old skills or habits that you've come to rely on with a character you've built up over time. I expect to see roguelike elements make their way into more and more games in the future, and I think we'll see roguelikes continue to experiment with other genres to make themselves more approachable and accessible. But, will this be as ubiquitous as the RPG-izing of everything that we've seen over the last few years, the slapping of experience bars over every type of gameplay? I doubt it, but be on the lookout. I expect you'll see roguelike elements creeping in where you least expect it. See you next week.