| Title | Din's Legacy is also Depth of Peril's lonely legacy |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Game reviews |
| When | November 6, 2019 |
Red Faction: Guerilla not only introduced the idea of a fully destructible world, but it remains the only example of it 10 years later. It could have been a revolution. But fully destructible worlds are hard to do..
Fantastic article. It also bugs me when big developers refuse to look and learn at what fantastic gameplay dynamics indie groups put into place.
@tomchick: Not to be grammar police, but you have a rogue apostrophe. “As a genre, it’s most common trope”
You mean steal ideas from!
Hey, if it gets me the game I want - steal away LOL.
Great article, and I agree. I adore Din’s Legacy, but it’s no Drox Operative.
It’s all because of Tom: as long as he’ll go along with Ubicrap collectathons, they will keep making them!
It’s a real shame that the mutation points are so common. It could have been far more interesting and challenging if they were rare, and I kept giving that feedback, but a sufficient number of beta testers already got used to having a character editor mechanism. Steven spent ages adding more and more mutations, but of what interest is it if you can just remove those you don’t want?
And to think that this game was conceived as a generational rogue-lite. THAT version of the game could have been something that really stood out.
You make it sound like Steven played Caves of Qud!
Hey, please be grammar police! As I’ve said before, not pointing out a typo or grammatical error is like not telling someone he has lettuce in his teeth after lunch.
Sometimes you should listen to your creative impulses instead of your beta testers. :) Seems to me the whole point of mutation is that it’s out of control.
Wait, what? No, don’t tell me. I don’t need my heart broken.
-Tom
How dare you! When have I ever poo-poo’ed rogue-likes? Or -lites, for that matter? I don’t see how anyone can be dismissive of rogue-likes. They’re psychologically engineered for people to like them! I’m not even kidding!
The three P’s of the modern rogue-like: permadeath to create a sense of stakes missing from most videogames, persistent progression to flip the inherent discouragement of death into encouragement to keep playing, and procedurally generated worlds to cultivate the feeling that you’re exploring something new every time you play. What’s not to like?
-Tom
I dunno for some reason I got the impression, I think from the podcast, that you used to be against them. Or maybe it’s because you didn’t review the classic ones, like Isaac or Spelunky or Rogue Legacy.
Isaac and Spelunky are lacking the double Ps so dear to Tom, Persistent Progression.
To me, it’s what makes them the best, but to some it’s a no-no.
:o
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Because Tom doesn’t know how to spell roguelites doesn’t mean you need to put the blame on others.
Totally fair!!! Sorry Bluddy, I should have scrolled further up.
That said, everyone (ahem) knows that “persistent progression” (one too many words for “unlockables”) is just a thing a lot of modern games have, and is not unique to (or descriptive of) roguelikes.
But it’s totally fine if it’s one of your favorite aspects of certain roguelikes!
Unlockables actually push games a little farther away from what a roguelike is, though, since a key feature of roguelikes is success being dependent on player knowledge and skill, not dependent on grinding better gear from multiple playthroughs.
(Unlockables that provide WORSE gear, though – requiring the player to demonstrate ever-greater knowledge and skill to succeed with the new, worse gear – that’s my kind of unlockables! Not enough games do unlockables this way! Into the Breach does!)
The trick with that second P is how to execute it. If you slowly make the player stronger just for playing (Rogue Legacy), you make the game be about grind. If you just unlock cosmetics, skills or new ways of playing (Spelunky, Isaac, Necrodancer, Streets of Rogue etc), you generally keep the difficulty of the gameplay (though some rare skills could trivialize it, but that’s part of the randomness) and just keep the player engaged.
I think Invisible Inc and Streets of Rogue kinda fit this as well. Most of these kinds of games that unlock characters will have different playstyles for them, which could sometimes be harder. Streets of Rogue really nails the multiple playstyles thing for roguelites. Also, if I repeat Streets of Rogue enough, Tom will have to throw away his computer and buy a new one.
Absolutely, re: Invisible Inc. One of the first two characters you get is arguably the most powerful in the game. The other one is kind of a chump but he plays very straightforwardly and is easy to understand. All the other characters are interesting and cool, but complicate things, and certainly do NOT make the game easier.
Invisible Inc is not a roguelike – it’s completely beyond genre, because Klei just went ahead and created their own genre with that game because they friggin rule – but that’s the way to do unlockables!!! In ANY genre!
