Rogue-likes vs ARPGs, from someone with a lot of authority to make the distinction.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Or is it rogue-lite? I have a bitch of a time with these terms, and I'm pretty sure I've seen publications refer to the likes of Hades and Slay the Spire as 'rogue-like'. The latest No Man's Sky expedition (ie league) is all about dying to progress through the loops, and Hello Games call that 'rogue-like' as well, so maybe 'rogue-lite' just died on the vine of inconveniently similar terms, with the broader one 'rogue-like' winning the day.

i always interpreted the term "rogue-lite" to mean rogue-like with permanent progression, such as inherited power. so rogue-lites are a specific subset of less punishing rogue-likes

I'm not convinced that tactical content, mini-games, puzzles, and the like are absolutely verboten in an ARPG. Puzzle mechanics with fairly clear rules and simple expectations (and a good helping of feelgood zoomzoom fighting mixed in for all who engage with it) can be highly successful.

Betrayal had some depth to it that some players didn't like, but it can't be said that the mechanic was worthless to all but the most tryhard stringboard strategists. Syndicants gave good xp, dropped crafting recipes, and had deterministic loot. YOu didn't need to be Almighty God on Wheels to benefit from engaging with it. And, if you were a spreadsheet neckbeard you could do that to your heart's content.

Harvest and synthesis were probably the extremes in that they sucked if you didn't have a good build and didn't go full galaxy brain strategist. They were hard to make work for you if you engaged with them during acts. The most rewarding parts of Synthesis were locked behind an arbitrary wall of slogging through story-driven memory management; early items came out of the synthesizer and got dropped on the ground.

In Harvest people got frustrated with the hydraulics and layouts and quit bothering with it. Dabblers soon learned they needed wayyyy too much low-seed grinding to support the few endgame crafts that were worth getting. It really was the golden age of grid-plotting neckbeards with civil engineering degrees. It was a stupidly good league for SSF and for people who wanted to Factorio, but really off-putting for folks who just wanted more monsters in maps, because not only was casual engagement a CHORE, but it was a time-consuming CHORE that took you out of your mapping rotation and created additional storage constraints that would stop even casual engagement.

Heist and Delve are less puzzle- and tactics/strategy-oriented than they seem. They shunt you out of maps but still present you with loads of monsters to mow through. Not all content is casually engaging, and the fact that most heist contracts stay on the ground where they drop is sort of an indictment of the mechanic. Casual engagement with either has a steep initial learning curve that feels bad. I suppose Delve is technically a rogue-scaling mechanic since unless you're Crouching or Tuna, you'll hit a point where you just can't make any more progress. But then you go sideways and it's all cool.

I suspect Sentinel is trying to hit the sweet spot where Synthesis started to not feel shitty, but frontload that a bit. I've not looked at league trade so Idk how common decent multi items are listed, but the memory nexus that we knew and loved/execrated is no more, and the new learning curve is "don't pop a spicy sentinel over a pack of possessed empowering minions necromancers". Just like you saw those spinning cages in archnemesis and were like "nope nope nope" as you built your Innocence-touched guy.

I dislike trying to categorize things, whether it's games, music or anything else. On the other hand it's necessary if we want to communicate and have a general idea what the other person is talking about.

If I read a review, I understand that whatever categories they use are fuzzy. It gives me a very rough idea about things. If someone compares a game to Candy Crush, or Skyrim, or Flight Simulator, or Diablo, I have a starting point to decide which one(s) I'll look into further. It served it's purpose no matter how fuzzy the definitions are.

Unfortunately, since about the mid-90s more and more games started becoming hybrids. Gameplay, sound, and graphics all became much more complex - and expensive. Games became big business with a lot of competition. To "appeal to a wider audience" developers moved toward hybrids. Marketing moved even more in that direction. They tried to make it sound like the game had something for everyone, whether it did or not.

If there was ever such a thing as a "pure" [fill in the blank], by the mid-to-late 90s there were very few of those around. They were niche markets.

Personally I was playing games for at least 30 years before I even heard the terms rogue-like or dungeon crawler. To this day I barely know what those terms mean, and don't really care.

I don't see how someone can have the authority to distinguish between genres. It's like grammar. People determine language through usage. A professor at Oxford or Harvard can make up word categories and "rules" all they want, but ultimately it's the people who determine language through usage. If enough people use a word in a certain way, then that's what it means. The dictionaries and professors have to change if they want to stay aligned with usage.

I didn't really address the question of rogue-like vs ARPG, because I don't know. But I know it's fuzzy enough that it gives me a starting point, which requires further investigation.

By authority I simply meant, he's industry and works on probably the best ARPG around, so if anyone can make the distinction between those and roguelikes, it might as well be him.

My goodness, my choice of words really is causing some unforeseen friction. I suppose that's appropriate, given the very heart of this issue is how the application of certain words can create a lot of dissonance.

That rant I ctrl-a, ctrl-xed? It definitely raised Betrayal as an example of That One Time GGG Really Tried To Make PoE Something Other Than Diablo2+. I loved everything about it from testing onwards, except for the one thing that mattered: the overtuned difficulty of campaign-era syndicate encounters. It always comes back to that, doesn't it? PoE is like the posterchild of too much of a good thing: so many amazing ideas and variations, almost all of them smothered in an incessant need to be ridiculously fucking hard. I have no desire to whip that ex-horse any further, but it does bear casual repetition here: the power creep of PoE was a given once GGG decided their game just had to keep getting harder and implemented that with a dearth of design finesse and an excess of almost predictable brutality. What happened with 3.18 makes complete sense when you look at it that way.

And if, as Shags said, Rogue was 'designed to beat you', then I have trouble not seeing at least some of that iconic game's DNA woven into whatever mad hybrid of ARPG and murderous, joy-crushing intent PoE turned out to be. But as I said, it feels fair in a Roguelite because death is not the end.



In a roguelite, death in the face of unfair odds isn't a bug, it's a feature. Not only might you fare better next time around -- you might not even face the thing that ended you (at least not at the same time). In an ARPG, where strategic character planning should trump any other gameplay 'skill', I'd say death in the face of unfair odds is definitely a bug. Were it not, 3.18 wouldn't have landed with the resounding splat even I heard, all the way over in Ancaria or Heathmoor or Eorzea or wherever the fuck I was at the time. Exiles, I think, are right to expect a certain sort of unfair that tells them 'you can switch your support gems around, change your gear -- try that before giving up', even if sometimes 'trying that' still isn't enough and it's back to the drawing board. Perhaps that's the roguelite loop to PoE, with said drawing board being the de facto town/castle/home base, to which the Exile returns a little stronger in a post-Nietzschean sense: what does kill you makes you stronger, with the understanding that the first 'you' is the character, the second the player.

I say 'perhaps' only because I think there are far too many sudden deaths and too little information of what causes them for death in PoE to be the great instructor it should be not in roguelites but in games where dying DOESN'T intrinsically make you stronger. You know the types I mean. Prepare to Die.

Ironically most of the times I've seen where the cause of death in PoE can be discerned is when a streamer does it and armchair Maplords can point out the thing that streamer missed and OH MY GOD HOW COULD THEY BE SO STUPID LOL. Hey, buddy, got news for you: they're the ones streaming and making bank off of it and when they make an unforced error after otherwise professional-level gameplay a lot of people notice, whereas when you do it not even you do, so...uh, who's the stupid one? Man there's a lot of schadenfreude involved in being involved in this game.

Anyway. I guess that's another reason PoE abandoned its roguelite experiment. PDL running with a fairly low chance of significant progress is nowhere near as good Twitch viewerbait as watching a pro map grinding just waaaaiting for that fuck-up. Or a mirror dropping. Same thing really: a moment to savour.

And yet another: PDLs don't encourage trading. And oh boy do we all know how enamoured GGG are with PoE's (in)famous economy. In fact, PDLs don't encourage much player-to-player interaction at all, since they're all about solitary progress from iteration to iteration. It really is a style of game aimed at misanthropic gaming veterans, ie most gaming veterans, eventually.

And I think that's also why we see the PDL approach across a number of existing genres: it's a sort of rebuke to the earlier attempt at making everything multiplayer, and a return to a purer PvE of you vs the game, rather than US vs the game or You vs me vs the game (and in this case I am using vs in the adversarial sense). AND I suppose that's also why I could sometimes fool myself into approaching PoE as a roguelite: it's probably the least multiplayer-friendly online-only game I've ever played. Probably because the online-only has fuck-all to do with meaningful multiplayer and everything to do that aforementioned economy, an illusion of equality between players, mtxes and, I think most importantly, GGG being very rightfully jealous of their control over a unique and clearly valuable product.

One last related observation: I just tried to search steam with the tags 'roguelike' and 'roguelite'. I got 1,236 matches and recognised most of the really big ones.

Add the tag 'free to play' and the count drops to 26, with most of those being demos or 'prologues'.

Meanwhile, 'Action RPG' gives me 2,231 hits (with not many of those being true ARPGs). Add the 'free to play' tag and it's still 152, with several big titles that are indeed complete, long-running games -- but funded by mtxes.

So even with the proviso that steam tags are quite a mess (Warframe's an action RPG, guys, as is a turn-based Disgaea game and Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall) , that difference seems...noteworthy. Roguelites do not a profitable Game-As-A-Service make.



Fun fact: as I was googling various articles and sites for this thread, I didn't even have to scroll far down the hits to get suckered into reading what started as a legitimate discussion of how awesomely fair PoE is as a free to play and ended up, four paragraphs down, nothing but a subtle ad for an RMT site ('and best of all, you can make real money just by playing the game!' as a link to said site)...I fucking loled.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Ironically most of the times I've seen where the cause of death in PoE can be discerned is when a streamer does it and armchair Maplords can point out the thing that streamer missed and OH MY GOD HOW COULD THEY BE SO STUPID LOL. Hey, buddy, got news for you: they're the ones streaming and making bank off of it and when they make an unforced error after otherwise professional-level gameplay a lot of people notice, whereas when you do it not even you do, so...uh, who's the stupid one? Man there's a lot of schadenfreude involved in being involved in this game.

Anyway. I guess that's another reason PoE abandoned its roguelite experiment. PDL running with a fairly low chance of significant progress is nowhere near as good Twitch viewerbait as watching a pro map grinding just waaaaiting for that fuck-up. Or a mirror dropping. Same thing really: a moment to savour

Yep. These peak moments cause reactions and GGG farms those quite well. In return there are a lot of PoE streamers. It's a back-and-forth thing, but it will mean that this will always be core. Like gambling over deterministic crafting, because gambling gives the Oooh's and the Aaah's (and maybe some Ouou's?).

And yea, schadenfreude. Though I gotta say there's also a lot of effort from players and streamers to help others. Plus the tools from the community. I think all in all GGG enjoys overall great support.

It sometimes goes both ways though. If GGG messes up, you can bet on quite some pissy reddit stuff they can go and stand in for a while.

this is an interesting topic. my favourite 2 genres of pc games are arpgs and roguelikes(lites), and when i say arpg i dont mean it in the broadest sense of the word, but rather diablolike (isometric looter with rng out the ass, with a strong culture of permadeath). my relationship with roguelikes however is a little different. i have strong appreciation for the design elements that goes into them. the unforgiving deaths, the sometimes unfair no win scenarios and the repetitive gameplay loop. i dont play many different games and i tend to dedicate upwards of a decade to the games i decide to play, so maybe i just havent gotten around to playing more of them yet.

however, something that was touched upon in this thread by shags how rogue was designed to beat you, and later related to poe here

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And if, as Shags said, Rogue was 'designed to beat you', then I have trouble not seeing at least some of that iconic game's DNA woven into whatever mad hybrid of ARPG and murderous, joy-crushing intent PoE turned out to be. But as I said, it feels fair in a Roguelite because death is not the end.

is something that i appreciate in poe. i am certain i am in the minority for enjoying these elements of "unfairness" that has slipped into poe, but it was something that initially attracted me to poe beyond the initial "its like diablo 2, but more" hook. i have a long history of playing extremely hard mods and romhacks which feature design elements you would never see in a commercial game, and do a lot of hard self imposed challenges (which is why i turned to speedrunning later on).

i enjoy running into challenges that are so absurd that they make you laugh, and take great pleasure in overcoming obstacles that you werent even meant to be able to get past. so while i love the grind, the loot and the progress, i also enjoy from time to time seeing the abominations of challenges that arise from the designer wanting to beat you, and not just giving you a good relaxing time.

when discussing mmos, in the context of pre and post wow era, with a friend, i came up with a way to categorize them. does the game feel like an amusement park or a post apocalyptic wasteland? in the amusement park you pay the entry free and you get to ride all the rides (the content), where as in the post apocalyptic wasteland you are left to fend for yourself with minimal help from the developers, at the mercy of other players and unexplained game mechanics.

i think this distinction between games can work for more than just mmos, and can be related to this idea that the developer is trying to beat you. poe definitely falls more into the post apocalyptic wasteland category of games, and so does the archetypal roguelike.

however, most of what may seem unfair at surface level in poe, is not really unfair, just obscured in the numbers. there are so many random number generators working together which leaves you with a disutribution of difficulty where the vast majority of the time you live around the mean where you get tricked into thinking you are safe because you are strong enough to handle the average, but get swiftly deleted once you run into the creatures residing 2 or 3 sigmas away from the mean. i like this overhanging threat of the numbers that can at any moment manifest itself, and i would honestly probably be bored a lot quicker if the distribution of challenges was tamed to be more predictable. these elements were definitely already present in diablo 2, and i got an amazing demonstration of this during this first ladder season of d2r when i got to watch steelmage run into a room with a collection of fanatiscism, might, extra strong, cursed monsters during an uber run which removed him in just about 1 second.

when i first found poe i think it was pretty clear what kind of game it was. it was a game which wanted to expand on the complexity of diablo 2, as well as the unforgiving nature of the slot machine. archaic design elements which most of the industry wanting to design amusement parks had abandoned were considered desirable features. let the players fend for themselves and see if they can figure out how to die less, and i love it.

I think I'd enjoy PoE a LOT more if I could believe the roguelite-style unfairness was planned and not the result of the hydra getting away from Chris and co. That they abandoned their one real attempt at doing a PoE roguelite doesn't encourage that belief in the slightest.

And to me, a key component of the roguelite is the chance of something dropping that completely breaks that run. Consider my unique items as nods to that: if you found Tipua Kaikohuru/The Goddess Bound *at level 7* on a fresh, zero twink character, you'd be laughing. That thing does stupid damage for its level, even now I believe. And if it's a longer race, you might even get to forge it into The Goddess Scorned which can last even longer. At least, last I checked. Let's ignore the blip of AN rares for the time being.

In fact, Chris told me he once found The Goddess Bound in a Descent run (that aforementioned short-lived roguelite mode) but lacked the dexterity to wield it at level. Very frustrating but in a hilarious way.

Unfortunately everyone kept finding the damn thing at high level, and of course it was useless by then -- which is why I came up with a stronger sword you could make from it, and then an even stronger one that was meant to be endgame-capable (The Goddess Unleashed). That didn't quite work (but damn we had fun trying to figure out the vendor recipes for them based on riddles written by Rhys, GGG's 'codewarrior' and token American Monty Python fan) so I went back to my original plan: a low level sword that grows with you. GGG originally denied me that idea back in 2012 because they wanted players, ironically, to play the game more like a roguelite than a true RPG in that they wanted us to be constantly upgrading gear and not getting attached to this weapon or that piece of armour. Boy, did they ever misread the room there.

If The Goddess Bound/Scorned/Unleashed was my nod to that 1 in a million find that can completely screw with a roguelite run, then Oni-Goroshi is my attempt at making an MMO style legendary grind in early game PoE. Where my original three swords started with a huge burst of luck, acquiring OG requires absolutely no luck, just time. Time. Patience. Time. OG, amusingly, is one of the few non-quest items in all of Path of Exile that has a 100% droprate chance. The trick is finding the monster that does it. Do that and you're set. 1 handed 6L sword that gains innate damage every character level and has a dangerous 'activation' cost for even more power. Again, no idea where it fits into the current meta -- I don't see a thread discussing the grind so I'm guessing...not well. Oh well, had a good run, she did. OG won't be 'in' the PoE '2' campaign so I figure that's the hard date for her official retirement.

So four swords, 3 that were actually 1 representing a lucky-as-hell roguelite early game find that takes a major component of the game off the cards (no need to upgrade your main weapon for ages, provided you work with it), and 1 that was actually 3 representing the MMO notion of early game grinding to be ahead of the curve for a while but then probably behind it before you know it.

And all of them were aimed at SSF even before that was an actual mode. Racing was by default HCSSF, after all.

So technically all of my uniques represent non-ARPG gameplay and are my gentle if eventually ineffectual rebuke of so much that PoE was destined to become: trade driven, shooting spam rather than meaty CQC, punctuated by endgame grinds for lower level power items that then go into the legacy style of being handed down or added to the market (pre 3.18 HH, Mageblood, etc.), and so on. You'd have to deny so much of the game's core components to treat it like a roguelite. Which, as I said, is why the 'designed to kill you no matter what and often instantly' difficulty feels unfair rather than encouraging.


There's at least one Exile I know who plays PoE like a roguelite and he gets all sorts of excited to reach act 4 (he also likes to grind for my sword, unsurprisingly). And that was BEFORE 3.18. I should check in and see how he's doing...

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

By authority I simply meant, he's industry and works on probably the best ARPG around, so if anyone can make the distinction between those and roguelikes, it might as well be him.

I fucking loled.

He is wrong. Everyone Is Mixing Up Roguelikes And Roguelites, including your so called experts.

I already stated this before. Diablo 1 is a roguelite, so is Path of Exile. People like calling them roguelikes. It is also a problem calling Diablo-like the "ARPG" genre. The Dragon Slayer series laid the foundations for the action role-playing game genre not Diablo, influencing future series like Ys and The Legend of Zelda. Legend of Zelda is more authentic "ARPG" genre. POE is the Roguelite Diablo-like genre.

Crypt of the Necrodancer is a real time game because rhythm is really not a turn but a repeated pattern of movement or sound. It's not really turn based but it's rhythm based.

He already stated he doesn't like that POE REALLY isn't roguelike but LIKE TO BE CALLED THAT.

Why are people feeling "offended" by other people calling roguelites "rogue-like"?
Roguelikes are a somewhat niche genre, people don't play those. Roguelike is a very specific categorization and actually finding real roguelike is difficult. Roguelites developers like their game being called roguelike. There is advantages of association so they mislabelled their games. If they keep doing it when they know that is wrong, I would go so far as saying sometimes it is deliberate and intentional.

Roguelites developers are calling their Roguelites Rogue-likes because the word ROGUE-LIKES appeal to people more than the word ROGUELITES. It is marketing.

We found the guy off the obscure subreddit, I can feel the crypt of the necrodancer rage

To classify as Roguelikes there are 4 distinct Key Design Elements.

1. Permanent death (You keep NOTHING)
2. Procedurally generated environments
3. The randomization of item
4. Turn-based gameplay, grid-based movement


The Binding of Isaac considered a roguelite.

No arpg can be a roguelike because it contradict the fouth design element of a roguelike.