-
-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 12
Where's the Fun?
Rule 0: This should be fun.
This game falls close to the simulation end of the simulation-arcade spectrum. I'd like to think the realism-fun spectrum is a false dichotomy, however, we want to be careful to remember: you are choosing to spend time escaping from the real world here, so fun should be the right choice each or most times. Fun is different for different people, and some things that get too over-simplified and arcadey will break suspension of disbelief for some.
"Complex systems that require me to be strategic and tactical at the same time. Also building tons of characters and playing around the game.
Also, YASD."
-- https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/85tj6g/why_do_you_love_roguelikes/
"They're not carefully controlled structured experiences like most games, without their mechanics being too out of whack to enjoy. Or in other words, you get to learn them."
-- https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/85tj6g/why_do_you_love_roguelikes/
"If you think about it, the reason why roguelikes are so based on procedural generation and general randomness is because their creators fucking want to play the game too - without knowing where every secret is and how to win each battle before-hand! It's a bit egocentric if you want to think of it that way, but that doesn't mean it's any less of a great game design or player experience!"
-- https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/85tj6g/why_do_you_love_roguelikes/
"I love exploring all the different aspects of the character build space, and the decisions I have to make about my setup. Then I love the challenges that come along and threaten me, and require clever solutions.
What I dislike most is the game duration. Roguelikes tend to have really long runs, and there are famous classics of the genre that have run times that make me unwilling to even try them. Shorter games like Brogue, and even D**mRL and The Ground Gives Way, are still too long for me to casually bop out a game when I have a small crack of time in my life."
-- https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/85tj6g/why_do_you_love_roguelikes/
"Most games guarantee success, so you never really achieve it. In roguelikes, you earn it, it's real.
Roguelikes have actual consequences to your actions. Every decision matters, and it can all go to shit with one wrong one.
When I turn a corner and see a dragon or something big, it's a pants-crapping moment. It fulfills the fantasy of all those books and movies I saw growing up. When I see a dragon or something big in most other games, all I see is a bigger goblin."
-- https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/85tj6g/why_do_you_love_roguelikes/
">it can all go to shit with one wrong one
This is also a weakness of roguelikes, in my opinion, because this can be taken to extremes that are not strategically meaningful, fun or interesting - especially if a game is designed or coded so that it can be relatively common.
One example I have is in r/DCSS - you can be breezing through a branch, completely obliterating everything on your path with ease, taking out dozens of enemies at a time because you're over-powered for the current level and then you die because you didn't notice that there actually was an out-of-level creature among the dozens of fodder in your screen. Or you realize too late that you're in trouble because your HP just went to 10%.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for keeping players on their toes and never giving you a feeling that you're completely secure, anywhere you may be, whatever step of overpowered either. My problem with that is that the game requires you to mash buttons constantly to get rid of dozens if not half a hundred monsters in some levels, yet at the same time it requires you not to mash buttons because an overpowered monster that is "hidden in plainsight" could kill you in two turns if you do one-too-many mashes when you shouldn't. That's just shit-head design."
-- https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/85tj6g/why_do_you_love_roguelikes/
"Roguelikes are the ultimate tactical experience - not even games like X-Com do it better, in my opinion. That's my initial draw to RLs, I think. They are rich, fun, challenging, not too fast but not too sluggish either, mentally engaging, with high stakes and high rewards...
They hit that sweet spot that is defined by one of my favorite game design principles: simple elements combining with each other to create very complex situations. Be it different items that you're holding allowing you to make strategic plays or two different monsters that on their own are simple to deal with but when combined make you really stop to think how to handle the situation - you just never exhaust the possibilities. Even if you play the same character build and game for ten years, the way roguelikes are designed, it's almost guaranteed that you'll always come into a novel situation once in a while - or an old situation that you are now seeing with new eyes and new ways to approach it!
The fact that the complexity of RLs comes from simple individual elements also means that you never have to read the manual before beginning.. which you definitely can't do with chess, for example, or Magic: The Gathering! Each individual concept is very simple - sure, a RL may have hundreds of wands, scrolls and potions, but you don't need to know any of that in advance, all you have to do is try your new thing once, learn what it does and then you're good to go for next time. It's all very intuitive and lets you learn while you play, which is amazing - but at the same time, as all rogues here know, it gives birth to a level of complexity and richness that is almost unmatched in the gaming scene... it's a bit of a miracle of game design, to be honest."
-- https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/85tj6g/why_do_you_love_roguelikes/
"Impermanence - I think the reason to play roguelikes in general, and NetHack in particular, is what it teaches you about the impermanence of all things. This is such an important life lesson that many Eastern religions make this a focal point. For example, take Tibetan Buddhists. They have a ritual where they painstakingly craft an incredibly detailed sand mandala. The work takes days. Then they destroy it.
Many modern roguelikes downplay the pain of permadeath by making the game fairly short. If you die, then you lose 20-40 minutes of work in a worst-case scenario. NetHack embraces the philosophy of permadeath. You can put in 12 hours or more carefully crafting a character. You are extremely careful to be fully mindful at all moments. You’ve thought about all 40,000 keystrokes that you’ve made to this point. Then maybe you get impatient and press left one too many times and die.
Maybe you stop paying careful attention for just a tiny moment. Maybe you just didn’t realize that a sea creature could grab you and pull you in. Maybe it is completely out of your control and a black dragon spawns due to pure randomness and blasts you with disintegration. All your work is gone forever. Maybe I just think about stuff too much, but when this happens to me it really forces me to confront the idea of impermanence.
Lessons for Life - All of the scenarios I just listed have corresponding counterparts in real life. Maybe you are a really careful driver, but in a moment of impatience you don’t look both ways and you are in a serious accident. It only took that tiny moment. Maybe you didn’t realize that the intersection gave the other person the right of way. Maybe you were careful, and randomness put you in a position where the other person was drunk.
The point is that your actions and choices have consequences that are sometimes irreversible. Randomness has consequences that are sometimes irreversible. Just as the Buddhist ritual teaches you this lesson and lets you think about it before the consequences are real, NetHack also teaches you this lesson. This may seem silly to people who haven’t experienced putting a whole day of effort into something that gets lost forever, but it really makes you think about these issues and which of your choices led you there."
-- https://amindformadness.com/2014/06/why-play-roguelikes/
(Dark Souls too kinda) and Dead Cells mixes roguelike elements with traditional metroidvania levels resulting a unique “roguevania” style that encourages exploration throughout levels and finding hidden pathways to new areas.
-- https://www.thefactorytimes.com/factory-times/2019/4/4/the-appeal-of-roguelikes
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/123031/Analysis_The_Eight_Rules_Of_Roguelike_Design.php
"Berlin Interpretation defined roguelikes as having eight specific design tenets: random map generation, permadeath, turn-based combat, grid based movement, complexity to allow multiple solutions, non-modal so that all actions can be performed at any time, resource management, and hack 'n' slash combat. In order for a game to qualify as a roguelike based on the Berlin Interpretation, a game must meet all eight criteria."
-- https://screenrant.com/roguelike-roguelite-difference-permadeath-hades-rogue-slay-spire/
"The point of a good rogue-like is never about getting to the end, but all the varying ways the middle can turn out differently."
-- https://game-wisdom.com/critical/zelda-rogue
"Here’s the thing: replicating that old school RPG feel isn’t just about clattering polyhedrals and +1 to save vs funge. The real magic is in carefully navigating an unknown world where danger lurks around every corner, anything is possible and no one, not a solitary soul, cares if you live or die. That’s what Dark Souls absolutely nails."
-- https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-best-bit-of-dark-souls-isnt-the-boss-fights-its-everything-else
""Mystery" would be the easy way to describe it, but really it's "the excitement of not knowing, or rather, of knowing there's lots to know, but not knowing it yet, and knowing you could know but nobody's expecting you to know (so nobody will know that you know when you do eventually know)," he laughs. And the place where that excitement is felt most strongly is when you're right in the middle of discovering one of its secrets.
"The lifecycle of a secret, or really learning about anything in a video game can be separated, I think, into three phases," he explains. "You start not knowing the thing. That's the ignorance phase. [Then] there's knowledge, where you know something exists but you don't understand it. And then eventually you do understand it. Understanding is closure. That's where something has clicked and you turn mystery into comprehension. It is now a solved mystery."
But it's the knowledge stage that Shouldice likes best - when you have "the bits of a jigsaw and you want to fit them together," as he puts it, in order to reach that level of understanding and sense of accomplishment. "I like having lots and lots of paths in my head when I play video games, lots of loose ends that I'm excited about, and I think the reason is that curiosity and speculation is fun," he says."
-- https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/how-tunic-was-born-from-a-lifelong-obsession-with-zelda-secrets-and-hidden-object-games
"And even meta-strategies, such as deciding that every time you encounter a certain powerup or enemy type you will abandon the goal of beating the game, and instead focus on learning everything you can about that element through experimentation."
"“difficult-but-fair”. This fairness, so foreign to the real world, reminds me of the romantic take on sex, violence, and other tropes we see in movies and read in books. They are the way our culture WANTS the world to be. So when a game subverts the foundational design ideal of fairness, it’s like the gritty, realistic movies and books that don’t pull punches; that expose the inaccuracies of common tropes by pointing more directly at reality. When I have a ‘bad run’ in a rogue-lite I need to be able to emotionally cope with that. Or I could rage quit and start a new game. But every time I persevere I’m teaching my brain a good thing. I’m learning to cope, in some small way, with the unfairness of life. I’m teaching myself to make the best out of a bad situation. And that skill is applicable to the larger issues that life throws at you."
-- https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/rogue-lite-life-lessons
"So the game is about undisciplined adrenaline freaks who want to get rich without doing an honest day’s labor. By presenting an adventure hook in such a game, a Referee means two things: “There is a carrot here!” and “By
chasing after this treasure, you are giving me permission to screw around with you so bad and do my best to beat you to death with this stick!” And the players will take it and they will like it (if both the stick and the carrot are interesting enough!), because what else could they possibly expect playing characters that crawl
into dark holes, armed to the teeth, preparing to slaughter and loot?"
-- James Edward Raggi IV
The purpose of games is, ultimately, to have fun. But worrying about the
“fun” of any particular detail of the game is the surest way to suck the fun
right out of it. When preparing an adventure or a campaign, when running
a game, don’t worry about “fun.” Never ask if something is “fun.”
Worry about whether it’s good. Worry about whether it’s interesting.
Worry if it advances the ideas you have about your campaign.
A well-run, interesting campaign will provide unlimited hours of fun for
all involved. A campaign expressly designed to provide the most “fun”
will likely succeed for only a certain value of “fun.”
Don’t micro-manage the fun right out of your game.
-- James Edward Raggi IV, "LotFP Referee Book"