Roguelikes: I never met@progression I didn't like

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Roguelikes: I never met@progression I didn't like

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

DalaranJ posted:

Excellent, phase 1 of operation genre switch is complete. Now we just need to convince people that games with procedurally generated elements, permadeath, an item IDing minigame, and intricate tactics/character builds are called "bullet hell shooters".

Shooters now refers to fps games instead of the horrible 'shmup' for the original japanese shooters :mad:

Granted, 'roguelike' is just as horrible as shmup, so I guess thats ok :v:

(seriously roguelike is a terrible terrible word for a genre)

# ¿ Feb 3, 2014 01:16

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# ¿ May 20, 2024 09:09

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Does it add a 'holy poo poo crafting is awful' fix? :v:

# ¿ Apr 26, 2014 02:00

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Jeffrey posted:

I've been keeping a secret from y'all, but I've reached a point in my life where I can no longer hold the truth inside. I have to come out and live my life proud as who I am. So, I will resoundingly say, I don't like the item id minigame.

It's crap.

Actually as I get older I find I'm less and less patient with the more, um, 'prickly' aspects of roguelike games.

One turn instadeath? Lame. Item id? Lame. Death from moving too quickly? Lame. Proper way to play is be a coward for 1-10+ hours of gameplay? Lame.

I'm appreciating ezmode roguelikes and roguelike elements creeping into other games more and more :v:

# ¿ Apr 28, 2014 19:37

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Dungeonmans is on Steam :siren:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/288120/?snr=1_702_4_

We have a (somewhat woefully outdated) thread here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3558729

It's early access, so if paying for such bugs you, stay away.

That said, it has wonderful music (really), charming art, very simple controls, and lots of mans to bash monsters in various ways. I'll never get tired of watching loot literally spew out of monsters.

# ¿ May 29, 2014 18:18

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

I really can't think of anything off the top of my head, at least anything that would be considered a 'major' game in the genre. There's gotta be at least a few smaller titles out there with some sort of persistence.

I get the feeling that among the diehard roguelike dev crew, the idea of making the game easier for 'failing' is anathema, but I could be wrong.

Me personally, I love it. It retains the fun aspects of roguelike gameplay, lets you shortcut the most boring part (weak earlygame), and is a sort of built in difficulty setting - better players will finish with less (or no!) academy development.

I'll love it more once he's got Dungeonmans to a place where the scaling of the player is matched by the scaling of the world, so you can potentially go and explore areas that are progressively more lethal no matter how buff you think you are.

(insert angry oblivion/skyrim scaling argument here)

# ¿ Jun 6, 2014 22:19

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Mercury_Storm posted:

Well if you put it that way...

brb programming SuperMRL, where the character sprite changes color and is assigned a new name every game.

Now just change the ?s to give randomized loot...

# ¿ Jul 23, 2014 10:56

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Didn't see a thread for it, but Dungeon of the Endless apparently came out a few days ago: http://store.steampowered.com/app/249050/

# ¿ Oct 29, 2014 07:50

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Finished a game of Dungeon of the Endless (on Very Easy!) with a friend.

MP is a ton of fun, but be warned you cannot pause and cannot save, and it takes awhile to win.

That aside, if you enjoy thoughtful tower defense with a dash of rpg/rng, give this a go.

It's a lot less roguelike/dungeon crawler, and a lot more tower defense with a very clever skin, but it's quite well executed.

It's also hard as hell, at least as newbies, we failed 6 games on easy before we tried (and beat) very easy (which is a lot easier).

Most important starter tip: Use your heroes to block unpowered rooms from spawning enemies.

My biggest gripe, the pixel art is wonderful, but you're going to spend a ton of time staring at the boring strategic map past the early levels because it's easier to zip around and move heroes where they need to be, which sucks because the art is great.

Ran into a few annoying bugs where we couldn't equip, sell, or buy items, which caused problems.

There's also a fair amount of stuff that isn't immediately obvious or outright confusing, but that should fade with more experience, and most of it is fairly straightforward.

I'd expect we'll do better on the higher difficulties (Easy :v:

) once we figure out better combinations of turrets.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2014 11:43

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Sproggiwood is hard :saddowns:

# ¿ Nov 2, 2014 16:35

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

edit: Quoting for usefulness

Nintendo Kid posted:

Besides selecting easy difficulty, here are some useful tips:

1) Invest as many coins into the HP increase, XP gain, and shop price decrease things first.

2) The best weapons to have are generally the X of Dancing Flames or the X of the Wisp King (since dancing flames shoots a ridiculous huge pillar of flame and the wisp king ones get you 2 HP back for every enemy you or an ally kills) If you can't afford these yet, Vampiric X (1 HP per kill) or Fire Whip X are generally good and cheap

3) This tip is broken down for each class:
Farmer: Go for pumpkin bomb as your first ability, then the pitchfork, and upgrade both until you can get cornucopia. After that, you'lll want to get the 4-way pitchfork throwing upgrade as your priority.
Warrior: Always get cleave first, nothing beats being able to hit all 8 surrounding squares at once. You'll also want to next get charge - it's very useful to get the drop on some enemies, and of course get dervish as soon as it's open.
Archer: Shoot Arrow is of course your first priority. Then you'll want to upgrade piercing shot all the way if possible, but don't forget to also do at least one instance of roll - it can be really helpful in certain situations, especially when you're boxed in by enemies.
Thief: You'll want to do Juke as your first level up thing, and then upgrading fire traps most likely. Don't forget to get backstab.
Vampire: Honestly I prefer to just have identity crisis as my auto equipped potion so I can swap in some better actions for it. But if you don't want to do that, it's usually best to get enthrall first, then drain life, then upgrade enthrall as much as possible while still getting Feeed right away when it unlocks. It's also particularly important to get your vampire good weapon and armor as soon as possible because he's stuck with mostly melee.
Wizard: Do magic missile first, then summon yeti, then teleport, then fireball. Choosing which of the first three to upgrade more is really up to you, but I'd prioritize yeti and magic missile over teleport

4) For armor you're going to find Armor of the Master Potter the most useful most likely, since you get free 3 or 4 hp healed for every pot you break with it. If you haven't found it or can't afford it yet, the armor of the Potter does the same but less hp which is still useful, and the Fireflare (pretty high chance to blast pillars of flame out in all directions when hit) and Stormguard armor (same deal as Fireflare, except with lightning attacks) are useful to have. The armors that teleport on hit can generally make melee fights hard to deal with, and the ones that just give a bunch of extra hp usually aren't worth it.

5) Always try to kill/close spawning entities first (spider nests or portal doors) in rooms with them, then focus on the creatures that came out later.

6) Always try to get a large slime, especially the dark blue/black ones that can respawn from puddles, into a hallway before you kill them. This usually means they'll only plop out 1 small slime on death which will be easier to deal with. Except for the acid slimes and the slimes whose death leaves an electrical slime area - you'll want to try to kill those in corners or centers of rooms so you can avoid needing to step through them, taking damage, to get to another room. (However if you're a wizard with teleport, an archer with roll, or a warrior with charge who can see an enemy on the other side of a pool of hurting slime, you're able to get past them without issue)

7) I find that if you can get the Key to the God's Hearts or whatever it's called, it's the best item to have equipped if you've also done the upgrade in town to ensure more prayer altars in dungeons. Being able to use each altar twice is usually much more helpful than harmful.

Good lord, that's a lot of tips, thanks.

I'm up to the fourth dungeon, clearing the first three up with the Thief now.

I went XP first, buying up cost reduction now, I figure once that's done I can start splurging and it'll get way easier.

Also discovering + is levelup on the keyboard made the game about 10x less annoying. I hate reaching for the mouse in games like this :v:

# ¿ Nov 2, 2014 18:14

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

madjackmcmad posted:

I forbid you from playing Dungeonmans

# ¿ Nov 2, 2014 19:41

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Crypt of the Necrodancer is amazing!

My hand hurts :ohdear:

I need to bug my friend who was a DDR fiend, I think he has the hard pads around somewhere.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2014 20:28

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

How do you deal with those purple backstabbing assholes on the third floor? The only way I can see to attack them normally is digging into a wall so they chase you and get into range, but that's too slow when you're dealing with a screen of other monsters.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2014 18:54

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

I kind of get the feeling I need to play DoomRL some more. None of what you guys are talking about resembles anything I remember :stare:

# ¿ Nov 8, 2014 04:30

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Has anyone played Crowntakers?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/294370/

# ¿ Nov 9, 2014 01:53

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Last Word has 8 rounds :colbert:

# ¿ Dec 3, 2014 05:16

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

There's a PDL with those mechanics, but I can't recall the name of it offhand.

Dungeonmans has a lot of player abilities and monster abilities that mess with space and movement in interesting ways. Unfortunately the enemies didn't end up using quite as many time/dodging/things you can react to type attacks as I was hoping it would from earlier alphas, but it feels pretty dynamic compared to a lot of 'bump alphabet' combat systems that are boring as hell in other games (hello Crawl melee).

# ¿ Dec 7, 2014 01:24

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Cardiovorax posted:

People like you make me feel embarrassed about myself. I have never beaten any roguelike, ten years of playing them regardless.

It took me years and years to get my first roguelike wins (Nethack and ADOM).

After that it got a lot easier. Mental block + easier games + learning to play them better. Years later, I beat Crawl within a week or so of first picking it up.

If there's anything universally lovely I can say about roguelikes it's that cowardice is almost always the safest way to play, and that can get both boring and tiring.

It's hard to maintain the mental focus to treat every encounter like a total wimp and flee at the first sight of danger.

You tend to cross a threshold at some point in most roguelikes where your power becomes such that you can plow through most encounters, but that point varies wildly from game to game, and some of them you never reach it.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2014 19:45

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Bouchacha posted:

Learning a new roguelike is hard.

gently caress Brogue :saddowns:

# ¿ Dec 8, 2014 19:51

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

my dad posted:

My biggest problem with conventional roguelikes is that I lack the patience to play them properly. I know what I need to do, and how I need to do it, but at some point the tweaks and strategies and estimates I have to make to survive begin to feel like I'm playing an infinite city sprawl civ game. The optimal strategy is mind-numbingly tedious. Crawl suffers from a bad case of this, for example. In the end, I either have to win by spending hours not having fun (hell no), or I spend an hour or two having fun only to get frustrated because of a loss I technically could have prevented by being tediously conservative (gently caress that).

Fast paced roguelikes like FTL and the ones that allow some sense of legacy between (failed) characters are fine, though.

Dungeonmans!

# ¿ Dec 8, 2014 20:55

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Stelas posted:

I lose so many games because I'm hammering on the left or right key and don't notice an enemy. DoomRL especially, where a couple of moves too many can get your rear end killed instantly by a mancubus.

I'm waiting for a game that has some built in sanity stops to prevent tedium from killing you. Autoexplore is one such tool, there are quite a few others.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2014 21:08

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

icantfindaname posted:

I always thought Crawl was easier than Nethack. The sheer tedium of writing Elbereth on the ground 1000 times made it unplayable for me. Dungeon Crawl is slow, but Nethack is absolutely intolerable.

I think the only time I ever used Elbereth was on a Wizard

Just play a Samurai and kill the poo poo out of all the things

# ¿ Dec 9, 2014 00:14

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

ToxicFrog posted:

I think my Nethacking days are pretty much behind me; even with the NAO patches, it's just too clunky for me to enjoy these days. But I did like a lot of the changes SLASH'EM made. I think I'd enjoy a take on it with a modern UI and balance that's less "throw everything in and see if any of it works".

Nethack was an incredibly unique game, dumb and bad and awful and amazing all at the same time. I think it has too many janky and very very old references/gags/etc to be universally appealing anymore.

Brogue feels like its rightfully hateful little brother to some degree.

I can't think of another game quite like Nethack in terms of world interaction though, I really wish some roguelikes would focus on toys and tools to interact with the world rather than obtuse and complicated systems for making @s and Ds have alphabet sex by bumping and grinding in melee combat.

I almost think games like Terraria carry on that legacy better than roguelikes have.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2014 03:02

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

icantfindaname posted:

Speaking of Brogue, I don't think it's actually possible to win more than like 50% of its games. You're not guaranteed to get a workable set of equipment, and even if a good set gets spawned you have to correctly predict what you're going to get in the future because with the hunger clock being what it is you can't go back to pick another item from vaults. And even if you do get a good set of items, for the last few floors you can't really do anything but dive blindly and hope to get lucky

As ever, I'm sure there are some dudes on the Brogue forums with some hilariously high win rate

My major gripe with the game turned out not to be that, or the nasty deaths, or equipment management... nope, it was the pets.

I hate pets, in basically any game. And managing them well in Brogue is really powerful. It's also fiddly as all gently caress because, well, pets.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2014 05:05

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Jack Trades posted:

Design of LifeRL is pretty bad in general. Not only is the a crap ton of grind but also because all mechanics are needlessly overcomplicated you can't really plan your strategy and it makes it way too difficult to make a comprehensive Wiki on it.

Hey, last century they didn't even have a wiki :v:

# ¿ Dec 9, 2014 20:18

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

I'll never understand why this topic fascinates this thread so much :psyduck:

It's trying to pin jello to a wall.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2014 20:15

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

That is an absolutely baffling decision on all levels :psyduck:

# ¿ Dec 17, 2014 21:47

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

The entire concept of drm on a roguelike is completely hilarious to me

# ¿ Dec 18, 2014 02:34

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

That video makes me sad for some reason

# ¿ Dec 18, 2014 22:15

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Tollymain posted:

maybe we should just have a roguelike daily challenges thread for all the daily challenges stuff

Brogue

# ¿ Dec 20, 2014 04:39

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Tollymain posted:

does brogue have daily challenges now?

Not exactly, but I remember they were doing same-seed challenges on the forum, I'm not sure if it became an 'official' integrated feature or anything, would be trivial to set up.

I kind of gave up on Brogue though, it's a great game, but gently caress pet management forever.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2014 04:50

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Justin_Brett posted:

"Man I haven't played FTL in a while, why is tha - oh yeah, now I remember."

I consider myself fairly good at games, but how good you do seems even more up in the air than it usually is with roguelikes in this game.

I kind of burnt out on it also. Like most roguelikes I suck at, there are plenty of people who seem to have a pretty good win rate at it though.

I got sick of repeating the early game, my least favorite part of just about any roguelike.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2014 10:54

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

It's very much worth the :10bux:

, get your dungeonmans or womans on

# ¿ Dec 25, 2014 22:07

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Kanfy posted:

Theoretically speaking if you automated every single "meaningless" thing that you'd do manually anyway from exploring non-threatening content and defeating all enemies that can't realistically kill you to auto-equipping all upgrades and looting everything worthwhile and so forth, most games would end up as a series of threat rooms and boss fights.

That's exactly what FTL and similar games are - a series of interesting encounters (for some value of interesting).

I'm ambivalent to autoexplore, I generally prefer it for two reasons - RSI and the shittiness of dying in a roguelike because you moved one square too many. The latter related also to my hatred of 1hkos and UI unfriendliness.

Something I'd really like to see implemented in more roguelikes is a threat indicator that shows you exactly what an enemy is capable of, down to showing you 'hey, if this dude hits you next turn, he'll deal X damage with Y ability'. The process of getting to that point naturally tends to either result in a) losing lots of characters the first time you encounter anything new or b) playing like a total coward at all times under the assumption that everything can one shot you.

There are a few that have varying degrees of that info (Brogue does precise hit info iirc, at least from the player's end).

Basically my attitude is making informed decisions and dying because you made poor decisions (short or long term) is more interesting than dying because of incomplete information, where you made what seemed like reasonable decisions but weren't due to a hole in your knowledge.

Clearly I'm not much for the delight of discovery :v:

(I view most combat-centric roguelikes as 'arena' toys in the same way that a good Doom map is enjoyable to play regardless of your intimate knowledge of the game, the play is the thing, so to speak).

A lot of that is also related to problems I have with vertical rpg progression, something that causes all sorts of lovely gameplay in many, many games.

# ¿ Dec 29, 2014 18:17

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Get sproggiwood and/or dungeonmans

# ¿ Jan 1, 2015 03:01

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Is the steam release of Qud going to be 'winnable'? I was under the impression that you could play to the end of the current story and then faff about the wasteland or something similar, but given that I don't have any real time with it, I could be totally off here.

Very much looking forward to trying the tile enabled version though, we need more sci fi roguelikes badly.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2015 06:07

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Everyone who reads this thread should play Dungeonmans, it's like essence of roguelike and has an irreverent brand of humor that hit the mark for me a lot better than Dredmore did (and the designer is right here, so once you start getting annoyed with little poo poo, you can gripe to him directly, just like Qud and Sproggi!).

# ¿ Jan 3, 2015 07:10

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Cuntpunch posted:

The Dredmor team are on the forums as well, mind you.

Fun Dredmor Fact: I believe it's the second floor which can spawn crypts, which include coffins with unique inscriptions. A *majority* of the beta testing team for Dredmor were goons, and the notable testers were all memorialized as specific inscriptions on those coffins.

I didn't know that, I blame goons for the terrible elemental system then :v:

I like Dredmore ok, but it didn't keep my interest past one completion (and that was with short/small levels or whatever and I still found it dragged a bit).

Funny because Dungeonmans is probably a good bit longer overall, but it manages to feel faster just due to the pacing.

I also wasn't a big fan of Dredmore's skill system (and by extension, Dungeonmans! I don't like a la carte skill systems much I guess, I prefer class based in general).

# ¿ Jan 3, 2015 11:13

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

One Way Heroics is a charmer too, I'm not sure how much attention it got here since I binged on it a long while back and wasn't reading this thread. Dirt cheap on steam and very fun though.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2015 15:57

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# ¿ May 20, 2024 09:09

victrix: Oct 30, 2007

Input

# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 03:38

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