HRose
1841
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.
HRose
1843
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.
Would the Monsters’ Den series be considered party-based roguelikes? Book of Dread, in particular, feels like playing turn-based Diablo with a party to me. I’m hoping Godfall will have the same feel once the adventure mode is added.
I love Monsters’ Den, but it is super light, and asks for next to zero thinking once you have your “sequence” set in place. It feels closer to something like Oasis than to any Rogue clone, to me.
HRose
1847
That’s a blobber. Of course you can do everything you want and there are ways to make it work. But the problem is always to use what is best for an idea. The classic roguelikes have a certain elegance to their design.
Having a party for example means multiplying the depth of character creation, and again micromanaging (equipment, skills and whatever else there is). If you lose the movement positioning in battle you are already loosing a good thing that the system offers. And if you thought and organized all your party composition then you’d be less willing about doing short runs, all that effort would be wasted unless you build some reusable templates.
There’s the example of Caves of Qud someone made above. When you have a game with a lot of interesting content and a more involved character building then you are less willingly to abandon everything and restart. If instead you have on your hands less variables and less deep customization, then starting from scratch doesn’t erase anything too valuable. It’s lower on persistence. That character is built to be more disposable in the economy of the design of that game.
There’s always that tension that is part of classic roguelike design, quick and short but replayable, versus expansive that has you fully satisfied even if it’s a single run. If you put 50 hours into a single run then the permdeath hits very hard and can sour the experience more than enhance it. Yet it doesn’t stop someone to craft that hardcore experience. It’s just that it is less “elegant” than designing around certain strengths of the concept. I see a party system the same way. It’s not that it cannot be made successfully, it’s just that its features would run counter to the elegance of the overall design.
It’s about trying to find a balance between two opposites, and the party system is a push in one direction that isn’t a typical domain of the roguelike concept.
So you pick up those problems and craft your own solutions. For example I’m aware of that Caves of Qud problem, so my intention would be to retain some of those features (the uncertainty and tension) without fully making it permdeath. And my choice would be to instead use a system maybe similar to Dark Souls where there’s a single save state, you cannot reload, but if you die you are pushed back to the previous “checkpoint/bonfire”. With some penalties attached so that the player will feel some tension without losing everything (when the game is supposed to be very long instead of replayable).
Summarizing: it all plays on the same “range”. On one side you have the high replayability and variance, on the other you have the long playtime and amount of discrete content. The classic roguelike concept is elegant because it all leans on one side, games that play fast and where the character is a tool that you change often. The more you invest on that character and deepen the options, the more you ideally want a stickier experience. You are investing on that character, so it makes sense that you want to keep it for much longer. A party composition makes this aspect stronger, and so pushes further the need to lengthen the experience and move away from the quick runs.
Clay
1848
This pretty much defines Brogue.
HRose
1849
Yeah, but because Brogue follows closely the classic pattern. Cogmind does exactly the same.
I consider those as meta-games. In a RPG the subject is the character and the player immersion in the story & setting. In classic roguelike the character is just a tool because the subject of the game is “meta”, the subject is the player. And the game is focused on mechanics.
Whereas the character is erased every time you die, and when you start the game this happens very frequently, the player’s “experience” is instead preserved. There are games where for example the player will remember to identify certain potions because of experience from previous runs. So the game is more about the player than the character, or the fictional layer.
HRose
1850
By the way, Cogmind nails PERFECTLY that recipe (even if not my favorite flavor):
-
There’s no frontloading of character creation as what you become entirely depends on assembling together the parts of the robots you destroy. It’s all about scavenging, and so the focus is fully on what you dynamically find on your path and the tactical choices you make about it.
-
The single run never takes more than a few hours, and is built so that veteran players can go very quickly through the initial levels. So it’s built on getting very quickly to the meat of the game when you’re done with the learning experience. Without the slog through trivial content.
This is 90% off for the Lunar Year sale. Has anyone tried it? The name and the roguelike part intrigue me, but the fact it’s a port of a F2P mobile game is a major downer.
I guess it depends how they went about removing whatever monetization scheme was in for the mobile version, and how that affected the gameplay.
From what I had read a while ago, while it was a fine attempt at removing the vampiric coat of the mobile version, it was pretty much abandonware and rigged with bugs — which seems to fit fine with that 90% off deal philosophy, sadly.
Still, it’s a little tempting.
Really cheap, ‘mostly positive’ on Steam (though only 84 reviews, most negatives are just upset about the genre), and a Wizardry skin over a Mystery Dungeon type game.
peacedog
1855
Very meh. They disabled a lot of whatever it was that made the mobile version evil (as @Left_Empty notes). I didn’t spend a dime on any thing and didn’t feel the need to for progression’s sake.
But it’s a mediocre game, with lesser systems relative to the property it game from. There was some ugly RNG in there too. e.g. the game gives you, as a plot reward at some point, a higher tier hero for your party. This hero can level up farther because of that tier. But there was RNG in his stats/certain abilities and it swung him from being “good for awhile, but replaceable” to “one of the best party members you could hope for” or somesuch and that was a one-time roll. You could live without the uber-version or whatever. But it was silly that this could happen.
TimJames
1856
That’s good to hear. (Maybe that’s standard for most modern roguelikes?) I’m putting it back on my maybe list.
Why was it off your ‘maybe’ list?
No idea anymore. Probably too many roguelikes as it is.
Thanks for the impressions, guys. I finally pulled the trigger --it was just too damn cheap-- after lowering my expectations to “casual RNG-heavy RPG-lite diversion banking on the name of a venerable franchise”.
Has anyone talked about In Celebration of Violence? It’s excellent and only $5.99 for the next 40 hours. Be warned, though, that this game will not hold your hand, which is awesome, because the discovery is one aspect that makes the game so satisfying. From the dev:
Before I do all the marketing stuff below I want to get the basics out of the way. This is like if The Binding of Isaac and Dark Souls got smushed together. And Rogue Legacy is is there too. Also Hammerwatch. The combat is weighty and deliberate, the story is vague and largely nonexistent. A successful run through one of the branching paths could take three hours.
In Celebration of Violence is meticulously unclear. The most you get are the basic controls. All other items, secrets, and mechanics are up to you to decipher. It is difficult, and much of the challenge comes from figuring out the systems at play. Thanks for the interest in my game, I hope you get a chance to play :)
If that bit entices you, read the entire Steam page to fully understand what this game offers. It’s an absolute steal for $5.99!
