Does every fucking game nowadays really need to be some variant of "rogue"-something?

[kane_magus]

I know I've ranted about this before, but...

Seriously, it feels like half or more of the games that show up in my Steam Discovery queue these days are something of the "rogue" variety, and I'm well past the point of getting sick and tired of it. I loaded up a list of all the tags on Steam, and there are no less than six different variants of "rogue"-something tags: "Roguelike," "Roguelite," "Action Roguelike," "Roguelike Deckbuilder," "Traditional Roguelike," and "Roguevania."

There really, truly does not need to be that many variants of "rogue"-shit. It is ridiculous. It is fucking asinine. Please stop, video game industry. Just stop.

Comments

[owsf2000]

While I don't mind the occasional rogue type (essentially meaning, I believe, randomly generated levels and one life where you lose most/everything when you die, but can get crazy powerful each run) I am starting to lose interest in them.

To me it feels like many devs are just using that to avoid giving much thought into actual level design and game progression in an attempt to increase replayability of the game.

In my opinion Adventure got the mix just right by offering a training mode, a proper static adventure mode, and a rogue-type mode to keep the game fresh.

Nowadays everyone just gets lazy and does Mode 3.

[kane_magus]

Yeah, if you make a random dungeon generator (regardless of how shitty the random levels end up being) and give the player one life to make it through (regardless of how unfair the game may be), then congratulations, you've made a "roguelike." But these days, even those characteristics (or, at least, both of them together) aren't necessarily required to be there for a game to be mislabeled as a "roguelike."

[scissorsevered]

to this day I still have no idea what a "rogue/"roguelike" even is in regard to video game genres.

[kane_magus]

Ostensibly, "roguelike" means "a game that shares (at least some) characteristics with this one old computer game from 1980."

But what the term actually means these days is "dumb marketing buzzword that has been severely diluted into worse-than-uselessness via extreme overuse through having been misapplied to so many games that have almost nothing at all in common either with each other or with that original game for which the term was named."

If a game has permadeath and/or randomly generated levels (with heavy emphasis on the "or," there), that's pretty much all it takes to get the "roguelike" label slapped onto it nowadays. The Wikipedia article also mentions some other characteristics like "being turn-based" or "resource management" or "hack-and-slash," but all that stuff seems to have fallen by the wayside long ago.

It's kind of telling that Steam has a "traditional roguelike" tag that is separate from and in addition to the "roguelike" tag. (Though a bunch of games just have both tags applied to them, so what's even the point?) And "roguelite" is basically just "roguelike, but even less so," which is ludicrous given how little meaning the term "roguelike" itself even has anymore.

[goldpseudo]

But if they don't use the Rogue* tags, however would you know that the game sometimes might have a random element in it maybe? That's super important to know when buying a new game.