ErikH2000
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A nice read, and a small victory to see the term "stepping game" being used.
https://zenorogue.medium.com/what-to-say-instead-of-roguelike-96a68c595912

Written by Zenorogue - not me.

-Erik

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The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

Kalin
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Soeaking of stepping games, has anyone played Smart Moves? The trailer definitely looks DROD-like.

Lucky Luc
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I haven't, but I will! This looks super neat. Thanks for sharing!

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[Last edited by Lucky Luc at 04-08-2021 02:09 PM]

Someone Else
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It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine that some people don't consider permadeath an integral part of roguelikes. ADOM, Nethack, Angband (I don't know if I've ever played Rogue): these would be (are) entirely different games without permadeath. It changes the nature of the game. Many newer games inspired by roguelikes definitely have some elements harkening back to the early years of the genre, but most of them are not truly like Rogue or its immediate descendants.

I don't know if there's any real fairness to my criticism, but I dislike linguistic shifts by words slowly adopting similar meanings (because it means that specificity is harder to attain), and that's exactly what this is. Essentially, someone who learned about roguelikes recently is likely to have a very different view than someone who's known about them for a long time, and I tend to take the view that the newer meaning is not merely different but wrong.

Yes, taking out permadeath broadens the appeal of the genre. But broadening the appeal does not make it better. Frequently, the traits that make people like something are the traits which it does not share with other similar things. That doesn't mean that things with a broad appeal are bad, but that they're less good for the people who liked the original.

Or maybe I'm just a grouchy old man inside.

Anyway, it is neat to see "stepping game" being used!

Xindaris
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I fundamentally disagree that permadeath qualifies as any kind of "game design" whatsoever in the first place. It's really just the lack and/or crippling of a basic feature that most genres of video game consider normal to have available. It would be kind of like if I took a Super Nintendo game and made the A button not work and did nothing else to it but then said, "Hey look, I redesigned the game!"

If you, the player, want permadeath, you can have it in any game at all by just deleting your saves after a death. It is and should, in my opinion, be a self-imposed challenge. So there's no good reason for the designer of a video game to dictate permadeath to players who might not want it. The only justification I would accept is that a game has no "saves" implemented in the first place because it's functionally more of an arcade game intended for brief sessions than something that expects players to spend multiple consecutive hours on a single successful playthrough.

It takes a lot of conditions for me to tolerate a game having permadeath of any kind these days, and even then I tend to tire of such games more quickly than I would the exact same game without it. I've gone through a steady progression of the years from being happy and excited about the possibility of endless gameplay that procedural generation promises, down to how I am now, where I barely want to touch them because so many are happy to erase all semblance of progress with permadeath and also because procedurally generated gameplay almost always feels so shallow and meaningless to me compared to something a human actually, intentionally designed. I'm sure part of it is because the "sense of progress" is something that motivates me to play a game, and its loss does just the opposite.

That said, I have no particular opinion on whether people should be "allowed" to call any specific game a roguelike or not. I prefer to think of games that rely on procedural generation as "procedurally generated games" to clarify and distinguish the fact that I don't believe permadeath to be a really meaningful part of the game's design.

____________________________
109th Skywatcher

Here are some links to Things!

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 04-08-2021 10:03 PM]

Pinnacle
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Removing permadeath from a roguelike absolutely would change the game for the worse. All decisions about whether to attempt something risky are replaced with a trivial "try it and reload if things go wrong". Any unidentified item is just a quicksave and quickload away from knowing exactly what it is. Can permadeath theoretically be a self-imposed challenge? Sure, but so can a health bar.

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Once (adv.): Enough.
Twice (adv.): Once too often.
~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Xindaris
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So, what, your argument for permadeath is that it prevents save-scumming? If a player enjoys save scumming, then they have a right to do that (I feel the same way about basically any form of cheating in any single-player game too). If you don't enjoy save scumming, then I think you're probably not going to do it, regardless of whether there is permadeath or not.

I think part of my issue is that permadeath is not internal to the gameplay at all, the way that a health bar or something is. It's a meta-gameplay element no matter what, because it does something to the player's saves, not the player character. Hence why I would compare it to breaking the player's controller.

____________________________
109th Skywatcher

Here are some links to Things!

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 04-09-2021 12:43 AM]

Pinnacle
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Xindaris wrote: If you don't enjoy save scumming, then I think you're probably not going to do it, regardless of whether there is permadeath or not.

And this is the misstep. There's a principle in game design that says "given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." If something is optimal but unfun, the overwhelming majority of players will gravitate towards it and resent the game for making it optimal, rather than play suboptimally even if that suboptimal way of playing is more fun. This means, perhaps counterintuitively, that removing the option makes a better game.

Clarifying edit: Optimizing in this case usually means minimizing the game's cognitive load. Take level grinding in JRPGs. When faced with a tough boss, a player can either rethink their strategy, or go back and grind, then stomp the boss. Even though the former is far more satisfying and rewarding (and even usually faster!), 9 times out of 10 people do the latter. The fact that this option is always viable means all the strategic depth in the battle system might as well not exist.

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Once (adv.): Enough.
Twice (adv.): Once too often.
~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

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[Last edited by Pinnacle at 04-09-2021 01:06 AM]

Xindaris
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Save scumming, however, is also a meta-game action, so it's not really comparable to grinding or other in-game forms of "optimizing". It's more comparable to cheating via external methods, because it's a behavior that's clearly not intended by most games. Frankly, if a game makes me want to save scum just to play through it the first time, then it's doing a bad job in ways that have nothing to do with the presence or absence of permadeath.

If a game has permadeath, but it's still physically possible for me to back up saves to nullify that, then I would feel both justified in doing so and annoyed that the game forced me to go through the extra step by crippling a basic functionality that it already has. That's what I used to do when playing Dungeons of Dredmor, for example. When that's not possible, and the game effectively expects me to spend hours of my life playing through with the possibility that it will prove to be a complete waste of my time (I mean "waste" in terms of in-game progress, just so nobody objects with "but playing games is wasting time!") due to all of that progress being reset, that's even worse and makes me not want to play the game at all (see: Spelunky).

I guess this is something where I find myself on the opposite side of the argument from how I feel about putting a "win-for-me mode" in a game. I feel like if someone enjoys playing a game with a broken save system then that's their right, but why ruin the fun of people like me by imposing that on all players?

____________________________
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[Last edited by Xindaris at 04-09-2021 01:19 AM]

Dragon Fogel
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Pinnacle wrote:

And this is the misstep. There's a principle in game design that says "given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." If something is optimal but unfun, the overwhelming majority of players will gravitate towards it and resent the game for making it optimal, rather than play suboptimally even if that suboptimal way of playing is more fun. This means, perhaps counterintuitively, that removing the option makes a better game.

Clarifying edit: Optimizing in this case usually means minimizing the game's cognitive load. Take level grinding in JRPGs. When faced with a tough boss, a player can either rethink their strategy, or go back and grind, then stomp the boss. Even though the former is far more satisfying and rewarding (and even usually faster!), 9 times out of 10 people do the latter. The fact that this option is always viable means all the strategic depth in the battle system might as well not exist.

I am skeptical.

First I'm skeptical if this can even be reasonably measured in terms of effects. Second, I'm skeptical, even if it's true, if it even means anything more than "9 out of 10 players have no strong preference for refining strategy over grinding".

Not to mention that even if someone *is* measuring this somehow, putting it in crude terms like you are throws away the difference between "players who grind instead of using any strategy" and "people who develop a strategy up to a certain point and then grind enough to make it work".

And it's the same with permadeath. Give the game a save and you'll have players who never reload a save period, you have ones who reload only if they die, you have ones who reload if they take a risk and it goes very bad but not just slightly bad, and so on. But if you just say "X percent of players are reloading saves, therefore allowing that is hurting the game" you're not really evaluating any of that impact.

In short, I think any player who "optimizes the fun out of the game" doesn't feel all that strongly about how fun the intended gameplay loop is in the first place. Either that or the optimizing is the part they find fun, like the occasional eccentric who grinds to max level in the starting area just because they can.

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[Last edited by Dragon Fogel at 04-09-2021 02:03 AM]

Someone Else
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Dragon Fogel wrote:
And it's the same with permadeath. Give the game a save and you'll have players who never reload a save period, you have ones who reload only if they die, you have ones who reload if they take a risk and it goes very bad but not just slightly bad, and so on. But if you just say "X percent of players are reloading saves, therefore allowing that is hurting the game" you're not really evaluating any of that impact.

I strongly doubt this is the case, unless the game is permadeath by default and opinionated on that matter. I can't think of a game with saving where I've deleted my save after death except for a few where I've beaten the game multiple times and am looking for a challenge.

In short, I think any player who "optimizes the fun out of the game" doesn't feel all that strongly about how fun the intended gameplay loop is in the first place. Either that or the optimizing is the part they find fun, like the occasional eccentric who grinds to max level in the starting area just because they can

I can say that this is false, at least for me. Years ago, I did a lot of savescumming in ADOM. This definitely made the game worse, and I eventually regretted having done it. I never did beat the game that way, either, because playing like that teaches the wrong lessons in how to actually progress in the game.

I think most players who "optimize the fun out of the game" are removing something they dislike without realizing that they're also removing the fun parts of the game. A game without cheat codes can be fun for a long time. A game with cheat codes is rarely fun for long because it's not designed to be fun like that.

Xindaris wrote:
Save scumming, however, is also a meta-game action, so it's not really comparable to grinding or other in-game forms of "optimizing". It's more comparable to cheating via external methods, because it's a behavior that's clearly not intended by most games. Frankly, if a game makes me want to save scum just to play through it the first time, then it's doing a bad job in ways that have nothing to do with the presence or absence of permadeath.

And that's possible. But it's entirely possible (and I think, likely) that roguelikes (in the style of the 80s roguelikes) appeal to something of a narrow market. Which is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. There's no reason a priori that a roguelike should appeal to you. Maybe if the game makes you want to save scum it's just not your game.

Which, I think, is my point. There are people who want something that feels like the original. That's what I'd naively expect roguelike to mean: like Rogue. Rogue without permadeath isn't really like Rogue. If you insist that all games should have the option to continue after death, what I think you're implicitly saying is that games should not be designed to require the careful, focussed play of a roguelike.

Xindaris
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The problem for me comes down to two things:

1) While there are plenty of genres that "just aren't for me", and which I don't usually even talk or think about at all, procedurally generated games have developed a very special, "love/hate" feeling for me that makes me feel compelled to cry out against permadeath in hopes that someone, somewhere will produce a game without that..."feature." Because I think that procedural generation has huge potential, and that that potential is too often squandered (in my eyes) by a game that I would otherwise enjoy a lot having non-optional permadeath. Lenna's Inception is a decent example of my ideal for this kind of game, where there can be a lot of variety and I get to actually experience everything that got generated by a particular seed, instead of possibly just one mistake (or worse, something I had no control over in the first place) stealing away that whole experience.

2) If you want your player to think carefully and strategize well, there are so many better ways to encourage or require that, no matter how the game plays, other than hitting it with the huge, blunt hammer called "permadeath". I guess it's a problem of granularity: I'm okay with "start the level over" or "start the battle over", but "start entirely over" is too extreme of a punishment for me in most games (i.e., anything too long to be reasonably thought of as "arcade-styled").


But I should probably duck out of this conversation; I think I pulled it off-course to begin with, and am sorry for that. I actually agree with not calling procedurally generated games "roguelikes", for completely opposite reasons from people who enjoy "True Real Actual Roguelikes" with permadeath: I strongly dislike "procedural generation" being closely associated with "permadeath" in game devs' and players' minds, and prefer to think of them as two completely separate concepts. But I only really apply that standard to my own speech, not really asking it of others.

____________________________
109th Skywatcher

Here are some links to Things!

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 04-09-2021 04:18 AM]

kolbesag
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My feelings regarding rouglikes definitely share the sentiments Xindaris mentioned. Way more a fan of games you can complete and disliked rouglikes with a passion but mellowed out recently. Mabye I would've enjoy spelunkey and other roguelikes more if you took the rng and permadeath out but you be left with alot of mediocre games.

Permadeath certainly peeves me of in games which are stubborn in letting you make progress, especially if its a genre that would typically have save files, but it has its place in design as the final evolution of running out of credits you'd get in the arcade. SHMUPs are actually structured pretty similarly to the run like gameplay of roguelikes yet I like one genre but loath the other, showed for me how important the context of framing mechanics can be for the player.

My pet theory of roguelike designs popularity is that developers only need to focus on the structure for one gameplay loop and once that's polished enough new content can easily be added as new variables (Binding of Issac is still getting new DLC). Players also get a game that isn't beaten in 10 hours (most of my favourite indies ) but can potentially be played forever in the same way that social media keeps you coming back to their endless feed of different but familiar content.

I get the frustration that "true rogue fans" have with the dilution of their genre tag. It's like if the term FPS never existed and they were called DOOMlikes instead and then any game with a first person camera are called DOOMlites or sometimes both cause they sound too similar. If I were a big fan of DOOM in this alternate dimension I'd be pretty annoyed to have games like Proteus or the Witness be given the same genre tag, yet be as far as possible game play wise from the game I actually like.

More descriptive genre tags are good but it feels like the cats out the bag when it comes to the term roguelike since since fans of classic rouge will always be overshadowed by the more popular titles that use the roguelike tag.

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[Last edited by kolbesag at 04-09-2021 09:13 AM]

xpym
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Someone Else wrote:
It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine that some people don't consider permadeath an integral part of roguelikes. ADOM, Nethack, Angband (I don't know if I've ever played Rogue): these would be (are) entirely different games without permadeath. It changes the nature of the game. Many newer games inspired by roguelikes definitely have some elements harkening back to the early years of the genre, but most of them are not truly like Rogue or its immediate descendants.

Well, it's true that no remotely mainstream game is really like Rogue, but I don't think that anybody ever seriously expected traditional roguelikes to escape far from their niche-within-a-niche. To be fair, one small studio called Condor tried to make such a game with a broader appeal in the nineties. They had some inspired/contemptible (choose appropriate) ideas during the development, like replacing turn based with real-time and making permadeath optional. Eventually the studio became known as Blizzard North, the game as Diablo, and the rest, as it goes, is history.

Still, the appeal of the obscure coctail lingered, and in the next couple of decades some of its ingredients continued to be appreciated by a few of the more ambitious indie designers, and true permadeath has certainly been one of them. Even now decently popular games are being released in which there is no between run progression to speak of (Spelunky 2, Noita), or where the main form of progression is about making the game more difficult (Slay the Spire, Risk of Rain 2).

Also, to move even more mainstream, the emergence of the Battle Royale genre was arguably the biggest thing to happen in gaming recently, and it doesn't take much squinting to see that it has many of the same attractions, especially when playing solo - one chance at victory, random loot, unpredictable enemy encounters.

So, speaking as another grouchy old man, I'd say that the "roguelike spirit" has found about as much of a way as could have reasonably been expected, and these days there are much fewer reasons to be cynical about this than say 15 years ago.

Kalin
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Xindaris wrote:
Save scumming, however, is also a meta-game action, so it's not really comparable to grinding or other in-game forms of "optimizing". It's more comparable to cheating via external methods, because it's a behavior that's clearly not intended by most games. Frankly, if a game makes me want to save scum just to play through it the first time, then it's doing a bad job in ways that have nothing to do with the presence or absence of permadeath.

I'm smiling at the irony here. The most blatant save-scumming I've seen is in a game that automatically saves every turn, and then forces you to restore a save every time you die. Even though it has permadeath (without any perks carrying over between runs), it's actually difficult to truly start over. I'm talking about DROD, of course.

And save-scumming is not at all cheating, not like editing game files. It's cheesy, breaks immersion, and cheapens the sense of accomplishment, but it's really no different than exploiting game mechanic loopholes or min-maxing.

And then there's times when the bug/exploit turns out to be intentional and required to win the game (like the game "Mow It!" on Newgrounds).

Lucky Luc
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I'm kind of amazed how passionately you guys can discuss something that is clearly personal taste.

Xindaris
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Kalin, just to be perfectly clear, you've got your definition of permadeath wrong as far as I am concerned. If DROD had permadeath, then dying one. Time. Would reset all of your progress. If you were in the last room of Level 25 in KDD, and made one single slip-up, your save would be deleted and you would have to start all over again from the very first room of Level 1. That's what permadeath is. And I hope that helps to explain my disgust with it, while I do understand that other people may not feel the same way.

____________________________
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Here are some links to Things!

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 04-09-2021 09:42 PM]

hyperme
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DROD is pretty much as far as you can get from permadeath. Both the undo and save system are incredibly granular.

My general opinion is that permadeath is a tool, and like a lot of tools it can be used wrong. It's also somewhat fluid, with more games with "permadeath" including meta-progression so that each run actually achieves something.

But my cynical opinion is that permadeath's main purpose is cover up the fact that procedural generation is still bad at making good levels. By forcing the player to continually encounter new levels, you can leverage volume, which makes up for a deficency in quality. You don't need to worry about a generated level having no replay value if it can't be replayed. Plus it helps to pad out the game's length, meaning you get way more content from a procedural generator, even if "hand crafted" levels made with the same amount of effort are (vastly (vastly (even more vastly))) better.

The even more cynical opinion is that permadeath is considered a "hardcore" mechanic and therefore comes with a build-in army of rubes willing to defend your terrible design decisions, such as putting permadeath into a game where a single mistake or mistimed input can instantly end a run.

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Someone Else
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hyperme wrote:
But my cynical opinion is that permadeath's main purpose is cover up the fact that procedural generation is still bad at making good levels.

That misses a big part of the picture. There is a group of roguelike fans who criticize ADOM for having too many hand-built levels. I think this points to something surprising: level design isn't important to many roguelikes.

Give me a procedural level from any of the classic roguelikes and a hand-made level that shares some of the same features. If I can tell which is which (I probably can't), I doubt that I'd prefer one over the other. I don't think that it's really possible to make a "better" level with only the tools provided to the generator.

The reason why is simple. The game isn't about the level, it's about your character. The level is only interesting insofar as it challenges your character, and it's virtually impossible to reliably make an appropriately challenging level on the fly, even for humans. Consider how difficult it is to continually make interesting encounters in D&D - and that only needs to work for the specific party you have! Procedural generation gets you in the right ballpark often enough.

The even more cynical opinion is that permadeath is considered a "hardcore" mechanic and therefore comes with a build-in army of rubes willing to defend your terrible design decisions

This is, unfortunately, true, to an extent. But the fact that people defend it for the wrong reasons (it makes the game harder; 'real' players play with permadeath) doesn't invalidate the legitimate reasons (the game would be trivial without it; it changes the experience of the game).

My general opinion is that permadeath is a tool, and like a lot of tools it can be used wrong.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. Permadeath gives weight to your actions and ups the tension, but it also punishes new players and can be tedious. Permadeath suits a game with thin tactical opportunities, but it also means that some (many) deaths feel unfair.

Finally, as a point on the side of "roguelikes need permadeath", ADOM (which allows you to turn permadeath off) calls its modes "standard mode" and "hard (roguelike) mode".

Xindaris
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ADOM sounds to me like it does the right thing. Echoing again that my opinion here is the reverse of how I felt about "win-for-me mode", I'd like it if more games that want to have permadeath would effectively say "Hey player, permadeath is how this game is intended to be played, but you do you," and made it an option (that didn't lock the player out of any of the experience except maybe placement on a very specific high-score table) instead of a requirement. Just like how Celeste does its assist mode. That's "everybody wins" to me.

(I know, I know, I said I'd duck out..sorry.)

____________________________
109th Skywatcher

Here are some links to Things!

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 04-10-2021 02:09 AM]

ErikH2000
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File: gamingHappinessModel.png (396.1 KB)
Downloaded 259 times.
License: Public Domain

Regarding permadeath...

You need to think about playing games holistically, and realize that you will be interacting with games at different experiential layers.

Please...

please...

...refer to my chart. It's important.



-Erik


____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

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[Last edited by ErikH2000 at 04-10-2021 03:48 AM]

Daneel
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Xindaris wrote:
If you, the player, want permadeath, you can have it in any game at all by just deleting your saves after a death. It is and should, in my opinion, be a self-imposed challenge. So there's no good reason for the designer of a video game to dictate permadeath to players who might not want it. The only justification I would accept is that a game has no "saves" implemented in the first place because it's functionally more of an arcade game intended for brief sessions than something that expects players to spend multiple consecutive hours on a single successful playthrough.

Not really. The thing that makes roguelikes different is that the randomization in each playthrough presents unique challenges that you need to figure out, forcing you to constantly come up with interesting an unusual builds. If you added a save feature and people were using it to just play the game in one long playthrough rather than many many failed ones, they are not playing the game as intended.

But letting the player play the game however they want, does not always improve the experience. If you take a game and add a "win this fight" button to it usually won't make it better. Sure, players can choose not to use the shortcut, but it will always be there tempting them, and it may undercut the feeling of achievement if everything you worked for could have been done much more easily just by spamming the win the game button.