Roguelike Rant

I remember when the term "roguelike" got me excited for a game, but lately it's everywhere in indie games, and usually seems to be a marketing term for "I just didn't want to create levels myself".

Rogue was a fantastic game. But one reason the randomness was so awesome is because I only owned three games at the time. I now have over 300 games in my Steam library, I haven't even played half of them, so what's my motivation to keep playing random levels in the latest "roguelike" offering? In some games I'd fail then try again to overcome an obstacle, but now the obstacle is gone when the level is regenerated and I have to start from square one. In Rogue there was an objective to aim for at the end of the dungeon, but in many new games it's just one random level after another. And when Rogue was written multiplayer games were rare, nowadays if your game doesn't have multiplayer today I can only play it when no one else is around, which is practically never.

That's not to say I don't enjoy some of the newer games I've played, but they don't keep my attention very long. And none of them are better just because they have "proceduraly generated levels", in fact most of them are only good enough that I want to beat them once and move on with my life, which unfortunately is not practical with purely random levels.

Rogue is one of my all-time favorite games, if you're going to use that as inspiration you need to be using the concept to build off of, not as an excuse.

As an example, take Diablo. It's roguelike in many ways, but it built off the concept to make an interest new take on the genre. They built a full satisfying game, then used randomization to make it more replayable. When you hit an obstacle and fail you can return to try it again, because even though the world is random it's also persistent for the session. They also brought in roguelike concepts like permanent death, but made it optional because sometimes replaying the first three levels over and over gets tiresome. And multiplayer, which is the reason I still replay the original Diablo today from time to time. By leveraging some of the best elements from Rogue and then integrating more modern features like multiplayer, Diablo did something so compelling it spawned a whole new genre of "action RPG".

What are the new "roguelike" games bringing to the table? Too often I think the only thing they're spawning is another level that looks just like the one before.