Comment on The Weekly Discussion Topic - Rougelikes [1]
drasticpotatoes@lemmy.world 11 months agoMost of it boils down to death as a core mechanic. I’m also a pretty casual game player and most of the games I like are fairly laid back, so the difficulty is also a factor. Although I do like difficult games sometimes, I don’t like games designed to kill you easily, if that makes sense. I dislike grinding and most leveling systems, so making a game have grinding as a necessity for someone like me who’s going to need it is frustrating. I feel like I’m just dying a bunch to get “level ups” so that I can actually play the game. Feel free to ask clarifying questions on this. It’s a bit difficult for me to explain, I’m finding.
For the record and to hopefully explain with an example, I do like that they exist for people that like them and some games are fairly clever with it. Hades, for instance, makes a lot of sense to have a death mechanic because you’re trying to escape the underworld. It’s also a really clever game in general and I wish I could get over the difficulty and meta progression thing to play it. If it was a less difficult ARPG I’d personally like it more, but it wouldn’t contain the thing that makes it what it is and I think I’d rather it exist as it does for people who like that. I also love the idea of descendants being your respawn that they used in Rogue Legacy.
TheSpookiestUser@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Oh I know. I apologize for the negative response you’re getting, but I really do appreciate outside perspectives from people who don’t like the thing - it can point out flaws that may be missed otherwise.
For your first paragraph, this is mostly a feature of the modern roguelike, or rather roguelite - the metaprogression in general. Some roguelikes that aim to be truer to the original classification forgo this, like Pixel Dungeon and its variants - you could win on your very first run, the only thing holding you back would be the lack of accumulated knowledge and skill. All still involve a good amount of dying, though, which can be a turnoff - early runs can feel bland if the balance isn’t right, and even later on the first part of each run can feel similarly bland if the game is more item-and-build based, as most don’t give you much in the terms of starting items. I’ve felt this especially hard in games like The Binding of Isaac - outside of characters that deviate more from the standard, a lot of runs are a painful slog where you get a not very impactful item on the first floor and have to make you way through with base stats for a while.
If you want a random off-the-cuff suggestion from an internet stranger about a game in a genre you don’t like, I tried out the demo for Wizard with a Gun during the last Steam NextFest. It is by some measure a roguelite, as it has a run based structure, but each run is rather short and if you don’t die, you can escape back to a hub area with all of your resources, without losing anything, and continue the next run from there. It has crafting and building elements (resource gathering and a research tree, but no hunger system or anything like that) and I quite liked it from what little I saw.