I can understand that perspective in the context of an MMO where other players are talking to “you” (and strangers can be weird/creepy toward female avatars), but don’t get it for single-player games.
Maybe I haven’t played the right MMOs, but I can’t help but think they’re awful for RPing. So many of the choices and events and outcomes are railroading linearly through the theme park ride. Isn’t that a challenge for the way you prefer to play?
I have identified with characters in some games, but never in MMOs. That genre has always been a third person experience for me.
Heh, I think it’s interesting that’s how you remember Gone Home, because you’re actually NOT playing the character you’re talking about. You’re playing as her sister. That you remember it the way you do speaks volumes to how effective Gone Home was.
-Tom
Maybe immersion is a better way to say it than RPing. I’m not talking about MMO RP in the traditional sense. I’m talking about the sense of a character being an avatar of yourself extended into the game world. I carefully design my MMO characters to that end so that I end up with a gaming skin that I feel comfortable inhabiting while I play. I remember one time in WoW I made a female Draenei mage and played her up to around level 12 or so. Every time she’d get hit in combat she’d make these sad little squeaks and I finally just gave it up and went back to my Deathknight. Too much of an immersion breaker for me, I guess.
More often than not, RPing in an MMO has more to do with the use of it as a social space providing a shared history and context than actually playing through the game in character, though that isn’t always the case. For instance, City of Heroes was a game that lent itself to playing in character quite well.
My daughters love it when I play a game as a female character. I don’t mind either way but I get a kick out of making them happy so…
Max Payne, Sonic the Hedgehog, and who else?
Sarah Palinonetta of course
The Boss in Saints Row games. ;)
Hey you’re right! :)
This might be a personal issue too. When I start reading a lot of media by someone I really get into their character. So a deep dive into someone’s history will have me identifying with them. Since your character in the game doesn’t have a ton of story and it’s all about the sister, my mind naturally identified with them and then made the connection between subject of the game to protagonist to player character. Whoops!
And you’re definitely right that the design of the game is what led me to do that.
I’m not digging Tangledeep at all. Maybe I’m just sick of dungeon-crawl roguelikes. It’s very pretty and accessible - so it might be a blast for someone new to the genre but it’s not doing anything for me.
Tales of Maj’Eyal does most of what this game does, but better.
Could you be more specific? Is it too easy? Are the classes/skills/loot/monsters uninteresting?
Its not for me either. It seems quite messy. The levels are weirdly designed, and its quite difficult to figure out where to go to get anywhere. Now, granted, I’ve never played those early games this seems to be based on, but I do like roguelikes and dungeon crawling quite a bit, but this just leaves me cold.
Not a rogue like at all, at least so far.
But a bigger problem is the interface is not good. And there are decisions here that were clearly an attempt to capture gaming from a bygone era that I can’t stand. E.g. no diagonal movement or apparently no diagonal melee attacks.
Very true.
I’ve been fiddling with the design of this concept for a while but, as others have said, it requires leaving behind substantial features of a ‘roguelike’.
We’re in this weird situation where a non-roguelike might still feel closer to a roguelike than an actual modern roguelike, if you know what I mean… (see Legerdemain, my favorite non-roguelike, let’s call it inverse-roguelike)
Having a party requires even more micro-management and slower combat, so all basic features like permdeath and quick runs become its antithesis.
But the idea is, who cares about genres? You can take the parts you like and leave the rest behind. So the concept is a persistent world (not random), long single playthrough with harsh death penalties but no permdeath. Losing those two features of a roguelike, but preserving everything else.
My idea was to move the usual ‘@’ in a dungeon representing the whole party, like a dungeon blobber, but when a monster is detected then the combat is initiated and you get to deploy the party members on the map (a certain radius), and from that point onward it’s turn based with movement points and playing closer to something like Final Fantasy Tactics. So a semi-non-modal (because every action is available but there’s a slight difference).
In combat you’d move every party member manually and individually, out of combat you move the party as one. And whenever you want you can manually activate combat even if no monster is in sight, so that you can perform actions individually like maybe some puzzles that might require party members being on different parts of the map. Or even carefully planned ambushes!
It’s a nice idea because it opens up lots of options.
That sounds a lot like Helherron, actually.
Or the old Ultimas, or the Goldbox games. But those where completely modal.
The usual approach to a “party-based” Roguelike is something like the various Mystery Dungeon games, where you still only directly control one character at a time, but can have other characters follow behind you in a train, and can sometimes switch between which character you control. You can usually set the AI so that the rest of the group will fan out in rooms or even explore freely, but you still only have direct control over a single character. Whether or not this actually counts as a “party” the way people seem to want is up to you; I would argue that the smaller groups typically seen in these games are more disqualifying than the AI-controlled party members.
Yeah, but it’s ease of use. Imagine in a ASCII roguelike having party members continuously getting in the way or trampling over objects you want to see/pickup. It would be too crowded. (or dealing with pathing in narrow corridors)
A semi-modal system would be a good abstraction. I also like that it opens up some mechanics. For example you could model things of pen&paper systems like “surprise” and initiative, so that if your party is surprised then it’s automatically deployed in a narrow area, whereas if you win initiative you could deploy manually and across a larger areas for more accurate positioning.
The thinking about party rogue likes here is too limited. One need not literally represent each character in world all the time. It could still be a “combat arena” system where the party is represented by a single icon. Also, one need not adhere to things like “you can only pickup that which is in your tile”, instead going to a much saner “aoe loot” with possible restrictions (e.g. no aoe loot with enemies in sight, or actively engaged, or whatever). But the point is nothing about “Rogue Like” means that one couldn’t do these things. It’s the procedural content, the uncertainty in immediate progression, and the way randomization dictates choices that drive the genre. It’s not 1UPT.
There’s nothing stopping one from doing a party based RL with just a couple of tweaks. It’s just that nobody does one. I t seem to recall a few aborted attempts along the way in the 90s and aughts. Of course doing it the Mystery Dungeon/Cladun/etc way is fine. But it’s a space that needs more exploration.