This week on Semi-Ramblomatic, Yahtzee's interrogating his own reactions to a game being a roguelike..or [sic] lite... or whatever either of those things means.
Transcript[]
Once again, I find myself wanting to interrogate a reaction I've been having lately. Whenever I go to the communal Steam account, I go through the recent additions and check out their store pages. It's happening more and more often that I'll see:
"We're a melee brawler with RPG elements!"
"Ooh!"
"And our setting is such-and-such!"
"Ooh, I like such-and-such!"
"And also we're a roguelike."
"Ohh!"
But what is it that's provoking the "Ohh!" reaction? Is it just that there are so many of the bloody things now? You're a savvy viewer; you, of course, know what a roguelike is. "Yes, Yahtzee, it's a game that's like Rogue." Huh. Okay, maybe you don't know what a roguelike is.
The name has stuck, but the validity of the comparison to Rogue has only gotten fuzzier. Suffice to say, what we mean when we say "roguelike" these days is basically anything with procedurally-generated gameplay that resets upon every failure state, which could refer to everything from Binding of Isaac to FTL: Faster than Light to Mullet MadJack to Balatro to Blue Prince; all games with otherwise bugger all in common. Roguelike is not so much a gameplay genre as it is a format; a means of delivering the gameplay; an alternative to the other established methods, that is to say, a finite pre-designed linear sequence threaded together by a story or sense of escalating challenge (as in most singleplayer games) or a theoretically infinite supply of identical challenges presented in no particular order (as in most PvP online multiplayer games). Roguelikes are a medium between those two. The sense of escalation and progress of the former and the endless gameplay model of the latter. Theoretically, that's why roguelikes are so appealing: it's the best of both worlds. Our lizard brain gets to cathartically grind the gameplay forever while our higher brain gets to appreciate the big picture.
But roguelikes are also appealing prospects for developers, because making a roguelike is quite a lot easier than making a narrative game in the traditional sense. It means not having to handcraft every level grid square by grid square, texture by texture. You don't need to carefully consider at what rate and order the player should find resources and unlock upgrades because you can just randomise that, and if the player ends up with an unbalanced build, who cares? Start again, better luck next time. Basically, all you need is to come up with a fun primary gameplay loop, program a few level-designing algorithms, and away you go.
Now, I'm not going to make any inconvenient blanket statements I can't take back, like "making a roguelike is lazy". I mean, I've made roguelikes. I am extremely lazy, but that's unrelated. Yes, you only have to come up with a fun primary gameplay loop, but that's like, 90% of the work of designing a fun game. And as for not needing to design levels, guess what: when you're having to explain to an algorithm how to create a functional level, what you're doing there is a little thing called level design. I also won't say that the roguelike format creates an inherently inferior environment for narrative gameplay. You know me and my love of immersion narrative and finding ways to escape the boring old formats of beginning/middle/end. I can name multiple games where a roguelike element is vital to the intended narrative effect. Hades leaps to mind. Outer Wilds... although that's more recursive than roguelike.
The other reason roguelikes are so endemic is because it gives developers a fighting chance. If you only have to worry about a primary gameplay loop, you can put more effort into other things. You can't make a AAA-level game, but you can at least look the part. Look at something like Battle Shapers. It being a roguelike enabled it to put a lot of effort into the visuals. Some might say too much; it's so packed with pointless detail even the crates have more polygons than remake Lara Croft's booty shorts, but at least its screenshots can stand next to Overwatch without feeling self-conscious. With indie games constantly flowing into Steam, all struggling to be noticed, it's a lot more economical to make a roguelike as opposed to a full-length, handcrafted masterwork that you put years of mental investment into, only for it to struggle to hit 100 user reviews. Not that I'm saying you can't put heart and soul into a roguelike (Hades again leaps to mind), but I know I'd have a lot less creative pride in myself if all I was doing was throwing the switch on the Level Generate-o-Tron.
So that's—in a nutshell—why roguelikes are so popular in indie games. And after all that, I suppose my fatigue with them really does come down more to excessive volume than any inherent problem with the concept. But having said that, I see a lot of recurring issues in the world of roguelikes that stoke the fire of my mounting boredom. For one thing, the comparison to the original Rogue has gotten less and less valid. As I said, and one thing to note about Rogue was that it randomised everything each run; not just the layouts of the dungeons. You had different items, different monsters, the effect of all the potions changed; every new run required a different approach and involved a whole new process of discovery. Some of the early modern roguelikes like Binding of Isaac reproduced that pretty well; you could end up with entirely different basic combat abilities from one run to the next.
Maybe there's some sample bias at work, but a lot of the new roguelikes I've played, it feels like the notion that every playthrough should be different or involve having to rediscover things appears to be downplayed, if not absent. They feel more like grinding out identical gameplay over and over again, just in different-shaped rooms. And I don't want to say that's always a less valid experience; I've been really enjoying Haste lately, and I wouldn't say the gameplay of that changes much run to run, but in most cases, games like this really highlight the notion that some developers choose the path of roguelike, not because it's vital to their creative vision, but because it's easier to churn out. I know I'm not the only one getting sick of roguelikes, 'cause I've noticed several cases where non-roguelike have used the word handcrafted as a selling point in their marketing copy, like it's an artisanal fruit bowl. Sure, you can get a plain factory-made fruit bowl, identical to the 500,000 other fruit bowls made that day, and it'll function as well as a fruit bowl as you could ask for, but when everyone and their cat has that fruit bowl, you might start wanting to pay extra for a bit of unique flare. That's what roguelikes are: production lines. The trend for them is a production line of production lines.
While I still hold that the primary gameplay loop is the thing that matters most, there's always going to be something about procedural levels that comes across as soulless, even if it's only in a small, hard-to-pin-down, uncanny valley, AI art kind of way. You aren't aware of all the subconscious cues that add your own personal stamp to the way you design an area. If you were designing a high street, what would you put next door to the pie shop? Maybe you'd think "well, obviously, the dog track goes next to the pie shop", but why was that your first instinct? Is that how it was in your hometown? Do you just associate dogs with pies? All of this is part of the wonderful tapestry of you that you are ostensibly making this artwork to express, and it would be lost if you were deciding all of this with dice rolls. Do you get what I'm saying? No? Fair enough; I'm not sure I do. But you know what, if the high street in my hometown had been laid out with dice rolls that would fucking explain a lot.