User blog:Pseudobread/Guided Tour: Roguelikes

Guided Tour CSS

With over 72 million monthly visitors across over 320,000 wikis (and counting!), Wikia is a hotbed of passionate expertise on an incredibly diverse range of topics. With such a plethora of information to sift through, breaking into a new franchise or genre can seem a tad overwhelming. To help break the ice, we're going to be asking experts from various communities to tell us what it is about their area of expertise they find so captivating -- and the steps they recommend beginners take to set themselves on the path to geekery.

We're calling the series "Guided Tour," and our topic this time is the Roguelike video game genre.

If there’s one term in gaming that’s thrown about now more than ever, it’s Roguelike. It’s nearly impossible to find an upcoming game that doesn’t include the term somewhere in its description, no matter how dubious the claim may actually be. So what is a Roguelike? As with all difficult questions, the answer hinges on who you ask.

The term Roguelike stems directly from the 1980 computer/Atari game Rogue. Rogue was a fantasy RPG that featured the following traits:
 * Randomly generated dungeons
 * Randomly generated item locations and functions
 * Turn-based combat
 * Single-player gameplay
 * Permadeath that forces the player to start over from the beginning

Games that adhere to all of these rules are considered Classical, or Berlin Roguelikes. The vast majority of modern Roguelikes though, tend to to deviate from this formula in one way or another, which is where the ambiguity starts to pop up. Many Roguelikes blend action gameplay with some of these elements (Rogue Legacy, Risk of Rain), while the super popular building genre (Minecraft, Rust, Starbound, Don't Starve), all use randomly generated environments, but vary wildly after that.

There's even another term, "Roguelite", to describe games that actively try to forego the crushing difficulty of most Roguelikes. Basically, if a game includes any one of the above mentioned traits, people feel comfortable calling it a Roguelike, even if it really isn’t.

That said, a lot of the design choices pioneered by Rogue are great on their own, and they add a huge level of re-playability and surprise to games at a time when many of them are accused of being too linear and predictable.

Seeing how subjective the term Roguelike can be, it only makes sense that we turn to some of Wikia’s Roguelike gaming communities to see what they think the word means, and what some of their favorites are.

Only a few years ago Roguelikes were an obscure niche genre many people had never heard of, but recently they've become one of the most relevant in modern gaming. In defiance of modern game design's slip into overly cinematic, choreographed, and inflexible experiences designed to rigidly limit the player to a pre-defined sequence of events, Roguelikes focus very heavily on creating organic gameplay.

Among the key features of the genre are the randomization of your character, the environments, enemies, and power-ups that can appear in each run. Roguelikes also put a focus on making sure these dynamic gameplay mechanics interact smoothly with each other. This creates an original and un-staged set of challenges for the player to face that can never be predicted or rehearsed. Unique game sessions are given real stakes due to the risk of permadeath and the brutal difficulty these games are known for.

The events that occur, the choices you make, the risks, the successes and the crushing defeats are all given legitimacy because they're real. This is why Roguelikes are such a compelling genre. You can play for hundreds of hours and still not see everything or get tired of it. You never know what you're getting into, whether the game will reveal a powerful combination of items that synergize well and let you invent new tactics, or face you with a devious series of dangers that force you to fight desperately to save everything you've achieved. It really is a potent formula for a game that remains engaging even after a long time of playing it.

Roguelikes have evolved over the past thirty years as developers modernize the genre by adapting design theories to other games. Some of my favourite iterations of the genre are the hybrid games, the 'rogue-lites' that apply Roguelike qualities to new frontiers. Platformers, shooters, stealth and adventure games have all helped inspire game designers to create unprecedented concepts, releasing a welcome slew of new games into a tired market of rehashed ideas and derivative sequels.

Want to learn more about Roguelikes? All of our experts provided a number of links to help you dip your toes into their exciting, ever-changing world. They also recommend you reach out to them via their message wall, wiki chat, or talk page if you have any questions. Here's the syllabus:


 * http://nethack.wikia.com/wiki/Rogue_(game)
 * http://spelunky.wikia.com
 * http://dont-starve-game.wikia.com
 * http://rogue-legacy.wikia.com
 * http://minecraft.wikia.com
 * http://bindingofisaac.wikia.com
 * http://ftl.wikia.com
 * http://etrian.wikia.com
 * http://riskofrain.wikia.com
 * http://pmd.wikia.com
 * http://eldritch.wikia.com
 * http://dungeonsofdredmor.wikia.com

Got any questions about Roguelikes or a favorite Roguelike to recommend? Leave a comment below!