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Yeah, I'm with you on this one. "Roguelike" was, for more than twenty years, essentially defined as a game that is turn based and grid based in the vein of Rogu

Yeah, I'm with you on this one. "Roguelike" was, for more than twenty years, essentially defined as a game that is turn based and grid based in the vein of Rogue, centered around traversing procgen levels and usually with permadeath and dungeon crawling as key focuses. It wasn't until game journalism sites and their fans started going "um... roglik is when hard..." that use shifted, and the current use describes basically nothing. I think the Berlin interpretation puts too much weight on periphery aspects of the genre, but this shit is just ridiculous. If you use the standards these people do to define Roguelike with anything more popular, it becomes plainly obvious how absurd it is. You could call the Warhammer 40K tabletop a Doomlike because it has chainsaws, demons, the ability to be customized, scifi guns, the firing of said scifi guns and space marines, despite not even being a first person shooter or a video game.

prox 5y ago
I started playing Project Zomboid, and for me as I learned it, Zomboid is rogue-like. Not sure if that is true, but I always equate it with permadeath. Not really sure how I picked that up.
- Der_Einzige 5y ago
  Project Zomboid is based off of an ACTUAL rougelike by the name of Cataclysm, Dark Days Ahead. I highly recommend that you check out CDDA.
  - prox 5y ago
    Will do, thank you!
- usrusr 5y ago
  Because in the wake of story driven games taking up almost the entire single-player market, "try this part again" has become so much of a default assumption that its exclusion would inevitably become a focus point. And the other big element, a strong element of randomness, that's really just secondary to permadeath, because permadeath without random would be a tragically repetitive slog (unless you make memorization the entire point) and random without save/retry would be kind of wasteful, as players would rather proceed even further than restart. When you don't aim for replayability, the xkcd random number implementation ("4") would be as good as any.
  - morelisp 5y ago
    "Permadeath without random" is a fundamental feature of STG design, and I think we're about ten years out from some overbudgeted influencer deciding to call those "roguelikes" and it sticking.

prox 5y ago

I started playing Project Zomboid, and for me as I learned it, Zomboid is rogue-like. Not sure if that is true, but I always equate it with permadeath. Not really sure how I picked that up.

Der_Einzige 5y ago
Project Zomboid is based off of an ACTUAL rougelike by the name of Cataclysm, Dark Days Ahead. I highly recommend that you check out CDDA.
- prox 5y ago
  Will do, thank you!
usrusr 5y ago
Because in the wake of story driven games taking up almost the entire single-player market, "try this part again" has become so much of a default assumption that its exclusion would inevitably become a focus point. And the other big element, a strong element of randomness, that's really just secondary to permadeath, because permadeath without random would be a tragically repetitive slog (unless you make memorization the entire point) and random without save/retry would be kind of wasteful, as players would rather proceed even further than restart. When you don't aim for replayability, the xkcd random number implementation ("4") would be as good as any.
- morelisp 5y ago
  "Permadeath without random" is a fundamental feature of STG design, and I think we're about ten years out from some overbudgeted influencer deciding to call those "roguelikes" and it sticking.