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a lot of games have come out in the meanwhile that have done the formula way better and if they're not going to improve on things then they're probably going to get a week of time in the spotlight before people rapidly stop talking about it
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Aug 17, 2020 23:30
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I've played Rogue Legacy to whatever counted to completion at that time and spent way too much time on it. I played Dead Cells for 110 minutes, quit the game to do something else and never booted it up again Bring on RL2
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Aug 17, 2020 23:42
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Rogue Legacy has a very clean, tight feel to it; Dead Cells feels a lot more subtle and mushy in comparison. I'm not sure how much of that is the actual game and how much is just the art style. I found Rogue Legacy much more fun when I started playing it with an arcade stick. Of course, it's definitely also true that Dead Cells is a better-crafted game than Rogue Legacy was (and also that the very concept of a Metroidvania roguelike is stupid, which is why Dead Cells doesn't really try to be that), but I can see why RL still has fans.
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Aug 18, 2020 00:03
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you say clean and tight, i say it feels like dragging a slug behind you with a rope
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Aug 18, 2020 00:07
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nrook posted:Rogue Legacy has a very clean, tight feel to it; Dead Cells feels a lot more subtle and mushy in comparison. I'm not sure how much of that is the actual game and how much is just the art style. I found Rogue Legacy much more fun when I started playing it with an arcade stick.  
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Aug 18, 2020 00:45
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I know when I think of clean and tight game design, I think of my character randomly being denied map access on chargen. Or being denied colour vision. Or having to play the game upside down.
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Aug 18, 2020 00:49
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the guy i was watching today got "adds a cooldown to spells and skills" which also affected his main attack. he could attack once every ~5 seconds.
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Aug 18, 2020 00:51
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roguelegacyposting never fails to entertain 
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Aug 18, 2020 00:51
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nrook posted:Rogue Legacy has a very clean, tight feel to it; Dead Cells feels a lot more subtle and mushy in comparison. loving WHAT?
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Aug 18, 2020 01:00
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yeah that's one of the most baffling opinions I've seen in awhile
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Aug 18, 2020 01:02
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rogue legacy is a bad game, like pretty much objectively so
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Aug 18, 2020 01:03
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I guess by “subtle and mushy” they might mean that Dead Cells’ controls are intentionally generous - if you fall a little short of a ledge you clamber up, if you delay a jump a couple of frames too long you can Wile E Coyote it, timing windows on parries are fairly wide, that sort of thing. But I can’t understand why someone would consider that bad? It’s just a well-established way of guaranteeing that when you gently caress up it always feels like it’s your fault rather than the controls’ fault. I think there was even a devblog at some point showing what gameplay looked like when all these things were taken out, and it was hideous.
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Aug 18, 2020 01:13
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I find Rogue Legacy's art style and general aesthetic to be extremely ugly so that's the main reason I won't be playing that
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Aug 18, 2020 01:15
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roguelike metroidvania is a reasonable idea for a game, in isolation. like, if somebody devoted their life to making one, dwarf fortress style, it would probably be among the best games ever made. it just doesn't work at the indie scale; you end up with severely same-y rooms and layouts because the effort needed to make quality procgen for a metroidvania is immense. and it doesn't fit AAA sensibilities, so infinite budget isn't going to go toward solving that problem either. the various randomizers for actual metroidvanias are probably the closest anything has gotten to the platonic ideal; their only real issue is that, for example, super metroid randomizer only has one set of norfair rooms instead of many sets that vary between runs. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Aug 18, 2020 |
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Aug 18, 2020 01:35
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Maybe I'm just a big ol' dumb dumb but roguelike and metroidvania seem almost like exact opposites. The main thing about Metroidvanias is that you are steadily becoming more powerful over time and adding more tools to your arsenal. Roguelikes can do this in a bite-sized way and emulate the moment-to-moment combat but then you aren't getting any sort of meaningful progression.
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Aug 18, 2020 01:58
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Jazerus posted:roguelike metroidvania is a reasonable idea for a game, in isolation. I disagree, even taking your extended hypothetical into account; almost literally everything that makes Metroidvanias compelling comes from hand-placement of enemies and obstacles. Leaning on pure combat without that designed world gets you a repetitive, boring game every time, even if the gameplay is good. (Which it often isn't, and even when it is you have to ask yourself "but is it Hollow Knight good?") e: like solving this problem isn't just a question of man-hours or money, it's "can you create an AI to replace game designers" e2: roguelike combat works because a) the arenas are extremely simple and granular and b) the dirty little secret is that, a lot of the time, the space you fight in matters less than order and priority of abilities, resource management, etc. basically the kind of gameplay that turns into Slay the Spire if you remove the grid and present roughly the same choices in an abstract context Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Aug 18, 2020 |
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Aug 18, 2020 02:34
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A Robot Named Fight is a pretty good roguelike metroidvania, imo.
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Aug 18, 2020 02:39
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:Maybe I'm just a big ol' dumb dumb but roguelike and metroidvania seem almost like exact opposites. The main thing about Metroidvanias is that you are steadily becoming more powerful over time and adding more tools to your arsenal. Roguelikes can do this in a bite-sized way and emulate the moment-to-moment combat but then you aren't getting any sort of meaningful progression. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to do a roguelike metroidvania, and like Jazerus I believe that basically to do it properly you'd have to be able to dedicate an enormous amount of effort to a passion project. But I don't think it's fundamentally impossible. A Robot Named Fight is a roguelike metroidvania (like, it's very clearly based off of Super Metroid randomizers). You can play a game in 1-3 hours depending, and it has the whole power and capability progression that's the hallmark of the genre. It lacks variety and depth (IIRC you get precisely 4 or 5 progression upgrades over the course of any given run, which isn't a ton). Variety and depth are really where things start getting difficult in procgen; hence the "properly" weasel word in my first sentence. IMO, and I want to stress that this is my opinion, to do this properly, you need to have:
I have ideas on how to do a lot of these, and legit one of my retirement plans is to try to do a Metroidvania roguelike to my satisfaction. But it's not something I can in good conscience work on while I'm still also working for a living, because it's never gonna be done. EDIT: Tuxedo Catfish posted:I disagree, even taking your extended hypothetical into account; almost literally everything that makes Metroidvanias compelling comes from hand-placement of enemies and obstacles. Leaning on pure combat without that designed world gets you a repetitive, boring game every time, even if the gameplay is good. This is a legitimate concern. But e.g. Spelunky proves that it's possible for an algorithm to generate interesting variations on enemy/obstacle placement, at least at the micro level. I don't think it's completely impossible to solve, but it is a big part of why this concept is hard to do well.
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Aug 18, 2020 02:45
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packetmantis posted:A Robot Named Fight is a pretty good roguelike metroidvania, imo. I got gifted this game and spent like two hours trying desperately to find something to like about it before giving up.
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Aug 18, 2020 02:53
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:Maybe I'm just a big ol' dumb dumb but roguelike and metroidvania seem almost like exact opposites. The main thing about Metroidvanias is that you are steadily becoming more powerful over time and adding more tools to your arsenal. Roguelikes can do this in a bite-sized way and emulate the moment-to-moment combat but then you aren't getting any sort of meaningful progression. Tuxedo Catfish posted:I disagree, even taking your extended hypothetical into account; almost literally everything that makes Metroidvanias compelling comes from hand-placement of enemies and obstacles. Leaning on pure combat without that designed world gets you a repetitive, boring game every time, even if the gameplay is good. You could probably create dozens of good metroidvania games in the time it'd take to produce an AI which can randomly generate a decent one, and I think I'm lowballing the time it'd take. I mean, unless you just hand-generate a bunch of large chunks of the map and figure out which ones go together well and so forth, in which case you... basically HAVE made a bunch of different games.
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Aug 18, 2020 02:56
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pumpinglemma posted:I guess by “subtle and mushy” they might mean that Dead Cells’ controls are intentionally generous - if you fall a little short of a ledge you clamber up, if you delay a jump a couple of frames too long you can Wile E Coyote it, timing windows on parries are fairly wide, that sort of thing. But I can’t understand why someone would consider that bad? It’s just a well-established way of guaranteeing that when you gently caress up it always feels like it’s your fault rather than the controls’ fault. I think there was even a devblog at some point showing what gameplay looked like when all these things were taken out, and it was hideous. I think he means the actual mechanical controls of moving your character, yeah, and not like design-wise. I've always been baffled by the complaints that Rogue Legacy has 'loose' and 'floaty' control of your character; I feel like it's very tight. You move your li'l dude, when you say to stop moving or jump they do it instantly. Dead Cells was way harder for me to enjoy because it feels like at any moment the momentum system is going to break and you're going to lose control of the character - something about the way the camera moves combined with the weighty feeling of all the rolls and falls. Don't get me wrong, at this point Dead Cells is designed well enough that I like it, and I like all the progression a lot more than incremental stat upgrades in Rogue Legacy, but the incremental stuff was never why I liked RL in the first place. I liked the arcadey feel of the enemies in the levels, the music, the little challenges to get new customization parts, the postgame bosses...
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Aug 18, 2020 03:10
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:Maybe I'm just a big ol' dumb dumb but roguelike and metroidvania seem almost like exact opposites. The main thing about Metroidvanias is that you are steadily becoming more powerful over time and adding more tools to your arsenal. Roguelikes can do this in a bite-sized way and emulate the moment-to-moment combat but then you aren't getting any sort of meaningful progression. roguelikes are not all bite-sized. ToME takes hours; in fact, i'd comfortably be able to say that i've had ToME runs that were longer than a run of super metroid, or symphony of the night (inverted castle excluded), or the first two GBA castlevanias. Zereth posted:I mean, unless you just hand-generate a bunch of large chunks of the map and figure out which ones go together well and so forth, in which case you... basically HAVE made a bunch of different games. yeah this is what you'd have to do. perfect for a Toady-type developer, insane by any reasonable commercial estimate.
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Aug 18, 2020 03:18
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Jazerus posted:yeah this is what you'd have to do. perfect for a Toady-type developer, insane by any reasonable commercial estimate. Oh god, now I’m imagining the Dwarf Fortress Metroidoidvania
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Aug 18, 2020 04:58
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LordSloth posted:Oh god, now I’m imagining the Dwarf Fortress Metroidoidvania I swear I've seen a turn-based ASCII platformer before, probably as a 7DRL submission. It might've also been a Mega Man game?
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Aug 18, 2020 05:04
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Dead Cells has a big design problem - it wants to be focused around combat and every aspect of the game system pushes you to play as tediously as possible. I've written about this a lot but I'm always surprised it's held up as a good example of design, obviously the animations and mechanics of the player character are good but it's completely messed up by a system that promotes tedium and basically nothing else. Risk of Rain's weird unintuitive design is a result of trying to create a combat-focused platformer and actually aligning the game in a way that promotes dynamic play. The way the game works is as time passes enemies get stronger so you're basically in a frenzy the entire run trying to do as much as possible. To its credit, the game also forces a little bit of downtime by generally making the beginning of levels slow by not spawning in enemies, and enemies effectively bottleneck how much you can get done as they're the means of getting currency for the level. (My biggest complaint about the game right now is they seem to give you the characters in opposite order, you start with characters and abilities that scale really well and eventually unlock characters and alternate loadouts that are strong early on in runs, when you'd think the opposite would be more fun for new players) Roguelike metroidvanias almost inevitably become combat-focused because exploring the same or similar environments repeatedly does not lead to much excitement. Platforming sections in games are generally developed in a very careful sequence and are impossible to algorithmically make interesting, it would be like trying tell an interesting story via AI. Randomizers are a totally different beast, they are dynamic routing optimization puzzles where knowledge of the map is effectively required (and part of the skill that is being tested). (As for Rogue Legacy, I have no problem with its design, number go up is a tried and proven way to make a game people enjoy and it + the straightforward combat makes it appealing to play one more and believe you'll do better next time) No Wave fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Aug 18, 2020 |
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Aug 18, 2020 05:27
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robot name fight i didn't like shooting the weird meat things and found the weird meat things gross and it made me not like playing the game
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Aug 18, 2020 05:41
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I swear I've seen a turn-based ASCII platformer before, probably as a 7DRL submission. It might've also been a Mega Man game?
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Aug 18, 2020 05:46
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No Wave posted:Roguelike metroidvanias almost inevitably become combat-focused because exploring the same or similar environments repeatedly does not lead to much excitement. Platforming sections in games are generally developed in a very careful sequence and are impossible to algorithmically make interesting, it would be like trying tell an interesting story via AI. Randomizers are a totally different beast, they are dynamic routing optimization puzzles where knowledge of the map is effectively required (and part of the skill that is being tested). I don't know--I think the big strength of, like, Spelunky, is that it basically just uses the monsters as mobile platforming obstacles. I agree that static randomized platforming would get old real fast, but randomized static levels mixed with randomized dynamic things that move around/can be jumped off of/etc stays fun for a long long time.
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Aug 18, 2020 05:59
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Awesome! posted:so if you didnt like rogue legacy 1 it doesnt look like rogue legacy 2 is going to do anything to change your mind Now with video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3IW4_AeOaQ
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Aug 18, 2020 09:55
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No Wave posted:Dead Cells has a big design problem - it wants to be focused around combat and every aspect of the game system pushes you to play as tediously as possible. I used to feel this way about Dead Cells and it made me put it down for a while; when I came back I spent a bit of time trying to understand what the game wanted of me, and now my Dead Cells gameplay is basically nonstop jump-rolling through levels, only stopping to slice the poo poo out of something before moving on. Even if I'm doing a ranged build I try to keep the speed up as much as possible and it's a much more satisfying game. If I find myself stuck with a slow weapon like the Nutcracker or Symmetric Lance, though, the fun I have goes waaay down.
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Aug 18, 2020 11:11
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No Wave posted:Dead Cells has a big design problem - it wants to be focused around combat and every aspect of the game system pushes you to play as tediously as possible.
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Aug 18, 2020 11:30
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Only tangentially related to roguelikes, but in one of the console threads someone mentioned that one of the Dirt (or at least Codemasters) games had a hook of randomly generating levels? I asked if this was true (it was said sort of sarcastically) and never got an answer. Anyone heard of this? Sounds extremely my thing.
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Aug 18, 2020 11:56
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No Wave posted:Dead Cells has a big design problem - it wants to be focused around combat and every aspect of the game system pushes you to play as tediously as possible. I've written about this a lot but I'm always surprised it's held up as a good example of design, obviously the animations and mechanics of the player character are good but it's completely messed up by a system that promotes tedium and basically nothing else. Dead cells design has lots of systems to push the player into a fast aggressive (and fun!) playstyle: -the rally effect: you can recover some health you just lost by dealing damage to the enemies quickly. This allows for a somewhat fast, aggressive and fun style within a game that otherwise is hard enough to be better to play conservatively. -death prevention: if someone would kill you in one hit when you are over 25% hp, you are left with 1 hp and with a time slow down, enough to save the situation. -interrupt system/breach: you can briefly stun enemies by dealing a big amount of damage to them while they are doing an attack or defense animation. Some weapons are better/worse in doing this, and some enemies are better/worse at resisting it. -speed bonus: kill several enemies in a limited amount of time, and you win a speed bonus, which allows you to maintain the bonus even more time. -it features very forgiving platforming, so it never gets in between the player and the combat. -movement actions needed to advance to new subareas don't interrupt the flow of the action, but are part of it, like breaching a door or stomping a floor.
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Aug 18, 2020 12:04
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pumpinglemma posted:I don’t think this is true - playing tediously works very well at low difficulties, but at 4BC almost all the enemies start teleporting to you so spamming traps/the homunculus rune from a safe position no longer works. Meanwhile there are a lot of mutations like combo, weapons like crowbar, and biomes like forgotten sepulchre that push you to move quickly from one fight to the next. Epsilon Plus posted:I used to feel this way about Dead Cells and it made me put it down for a while; when I came back I spent a bit of time trying to understand what the game wanted of me, and now my Dead Cells gameplay is basically nonstop jump-rolling through levels, only stopping to slice the poo poo out of something before moving on. Even if I'm doing a ranged build I try to keep the speed up as much as possible and it's a much more satisfying game. If I find myself stuck with a slow weapon like the Nutcracker or Symmetric Lance, though, the fun I have goes waaay down. Turin Turambar posted:Dead cells design has lots of systems to push the player into a fast aggressive (and fun!) playstyle: No Wave fucked around with this message at 13:02 on Aug 18, 2020 |
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Aug 18, 2020 12:58
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You shouldn't judge a game by the very optional, locked-at-start, using a special-mechanic-to-make-it-more-hardcore, loving-fifth difficulty of said game. Looking at achievements most players haven't played it. It's like judging Doom taking in account the infinite respawn of Nightmare difficulty.
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Aug 18, 2020 13:14
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No Wave posted:Dead Cells has a big design problem - it wants to be focused around combat and every aspect of the game system pushes you to play as tediously as possible. I've written about this a lot but I'm always surprised it's held up as a good example of design, obviously the animations and mechanics of the player character are good but it's completely messed up by a system that promotes tedium and basically nothing else. The timed doors and scroll system means optimal play for people later on is usually going through levels extremely quickly so you can grab every scroll/elite and make it to the timed doors. I think the disconnect might be that if you don’t make it to the higher levels of play it can feel like slow play is better. E.g. if you’re not comfortable with the combat yet, it can feel like progressing slowly with traps or smth is the best way to play. IMO that’s not the case - it’s only the best way to play if you’re not mechanically able to play fast yet. I really thought this was an issue with Dead Cells as well at first until combat clicked and I started rolling through levels super quickly. E: wow beaten hard, totally missed those later posts. Yeah on five BC this breaks down (or at least definitely does for me), but I agree that’s not rly the main way the game is intended to be played so much as an optional challenge mode.
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Aug 18, 2020 13:15
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Timed doors were basically removed from the game lol. The rewards they have were changed to be completely inconsequential and endangering yourself to get one is a misplay.Turin Turambar posted:You shouldn't judge a game by the very optional, locked-at-start, using a special-mechanic-to-make-it-more-hardcore, loving-fifth difficulty of said game. Looking at achievements most players haven't played it. Dead Cells does not make its harder difficulties seem optional/masochistic and the last level, only available on BC5, probably has the most (only?) fun boss fight. The game shouldn't totally break down at this difficulty level.
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Aug 18, 2020 13:31
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Maybe the door rewards got changed in a recent patch? The timed door rewards are the same as the streak door rewards (a choice of three items significantly above the usual gear level of the biome plus some gold and cells), and I find those are often really useful.
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Aug 18, 2020 13:45
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They have almost no outcome on whether I win the game or not... usually you don't even want/need the items you're offered and in terms of timed doors you are often putting yourself at extreme risk to get them so the payoff needs to be big to actually make you not feel dumb losing a run to chase them. They more or less got obsoleted by merchant categories which are, tbh, op. (In addition, streak doors are more common and just as strong so isn't it better to play glacially and secure those instead?)
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Aug 18, 2020 14:24
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I feel like merchant categories are less useful than they used to be, now that they sort by gear colour instead of by item type. You can easily go in needing a melee weapon and get nothing but items, shields, and ranged weapons instead, even after re-rolling repeatedly. Tried firing up a game of DoomRL on ToxicFrog's server and I can't figure out how the hell to make the font play nice in browser; the whole play area just scrolls clean off the side of the window. Can't even seem to manually zoom out using browser commands, either. Does anyone know how to fix this? I want to listen to the excellent soundwork and banging level tracks while I play  e: Figured it out! Resizing the browser window scales the display area, so manually setting up a wide and shallow window makes everything fit nice. Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 14:33 on Aug 18, 2020 |
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Aug 18, 2020 14:29
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