>over a decade of indie roguelikes and roguelites and the best we get is stuff like Hades
Granted the art is nice, but why aren't indie devs using their independence to be more experimental with their games? It's just an action game with more RNG than usual. Where are the crazier games like roguelike racing games, roguelike RTSs, roguelike fighting games, and so on?
Hades was good but having only three areas was really fucking lazy. It needed at least a couple more.
The experimental part was the story-telling and world-building through the roguelite format.
>The experimental part was the story-telling and world-building
Rogue and other procedurally generated dungeon crawlers had that so that's not really experimental.
I believe pyre was actually a pretty unique game. Definitely my favorite one.
I hated how every critic spooged all over this game. It's not a good roguelite.
How would those work, though? I can see roguelite racers and rts working, but how would you combine fighters with the rng progression of roguelites?
Perhaps instead of a roster, you customize your fighter with skills and equipment that you obtain randomly while playing a dungeon crawler mode, so you can build a fighter with a custom moveset and even tweak stuff like the hitboxes with stat distribution or something. It would probably make pvp more random and interesting too.
True. Even one more area would have been amazing.
I'm a simple man
I see rougelike, I skip game
Based
Eh the runs being too long would have fucked up the loop of returning to base to progress NPC stories, which is what the game was really built around. Wasn’t for me but I can see why people liked it
Honestly I think I don’t even like roguelites I just like what Isaac does with having a single attack and a million power ups that can modify it in different ways. Can’t find another game that does that, they’re all just basic dungeon crawlers with random buffs
roguelike the racing game!
roguelike the real-time strategy!
roguelike the fighting game!
>over a decade of indie roguelikes and roguelites and the best we get is stuff like Hades
Definetly wouldn't say Hades is the best. It is the best in terms of story, but roguelites don't really need that.
>why aren't indie devs using their independence to be more experimental with their games?
They are though?
Noita is a roguelite that has insane levels of wand customization and a world that can fully be destroyed.
Moonlighter combines Recetear with roguelites
Demoncrawl is Minesweeper turned into a roguelite
A robot named Fight is an actual metroidvania turned into a roguelite.
And these are still relatively popular, go down to barely played games and you'll see even more experimental shit.
>Where are the crazier games like roguelike racing games
I can't say much on these since I haven't played them, but Bloody Rally Show
>roguelike RTSs
Rogue Command, FTL if you think that's an RTS
>roguelike fighting games, and so on?
Wasn't able to find one, but, again, if you look for them, you'll find crazy games. They won't get popular because people are getting sick of roguelites and not everyone will enjoy these niche combinations, especially when not much effort is put into them.
Overall,I just think it's dumb to call a group of games uncreative and start off by mentioning one of the most popular and dumbed down roguelites.
You can't just slap roguelike onto anything like it's open world
Roguelike is a very specific formula that aims to make doing the same activities fun instead of reptitive, somethings like action games and card games and bullet hells work well with the idea, something like a fighting game does not
Hades worked because it was a studio experienced in isometric RPGs making a roguelike variation, not simply because it was a roguelike
Because aside from a few stand-outs, roguelikes are mostly made by one of three groups:
>Just-starting-out developers who don't have the chops to make anything more than, say, a platformer, a shooter, maybe some sort of simple puzzle game
>Total hacks who don't WANT to make something mechanically interesting
>People who are incredibly particular about the definition of "roguelike" and only wish to make turn-based tile-based RPGs that so happen to have permadeath and procedural generation
You'll notice that the basic gameplay of Hades is very simple, and everything that can actually be meaningfully different (both moment to moment and run to run) is very modular. It's kind of similar to the immersive sim playbook, except they didn't have to make an immersive sim world, just a few dozen rooms for each of the four layers. They didn't have to make any non-combat uses for your skillset, just enemies. Roguelikes are essentially a way for developers to create more variety out of less work put into otherwise time and labor-consuming fields.
Hades worked because the devs already knew how to make the genre work. They had the basics down fucking pat, and they didn't need to make one single contiguous and big world to create the amount of gameplay variety they wanted to showcase. Simple as that.
rogue tower is a roguelite tower defense game
It's also important to note that the modularity is where roguelikes all thrive. Issac, Spelunky, Slay the Spire, FTL, Hades, all their mechanics are extremely simply, but modularity and variance bring the right amount of complexity to keep a lot of people addicted. It's what allows for that one more run feeling, because seeing things fall into place is nice. And not every game type works well with that design philosophy. I don't think a character action game could ever work as a rogue like, because that basic starting point would be beyond boring for a DMC or bayonetta
Actually, I can see character action MAYBE working.
>Players start with the bare basics, something in the neighborhood of a light combo up to three attacks, a heavy combo, and a single heavy attack.
>You collect new moves, but it's not just "you get to an Item Opportunity and pick one of three options"-
>You choose where in your toolkit each move you collect goes
>Is it a new branch of one of your combos? An extension? Its own new input? The core concept of a move adapts to where it is placed, creating its final form
>You get passive modifiers that apply to moves in certain slots, the opportunity to change and customize them, and in the background, the way you play shapes opportunities for further bonuses like "ultimate techniques" that always fill a certain slot
It'd be a lot of work but with the time saved on level design and story I think some more animations and "adaptive" attack properties might be workable.
This shit had no reason to be a "roguelite", all runs are the same, is just a 1 hour game with insane grinding, you finish the game once and you are left with 0 reason to come back to the game
if you want a hack and slash you have going under