My takeaway is that it’s only original Rogue fans that care about the delineation of the terms. Is there a modern (i.e. post 2000s game) that matches the definition of a roguelike as given in the article?
My takeaway is that it’s only original Rogue fans that care about the delineation of the terms. Is there a modern (i.e. post 2000s game) that matches the definition of a roguelike as given in the article?
I’ve stopped using the word “roguelite” because most people who play roguelites just call them “roguelikes” and adding “lite” to the end makes it feel like those games are “lite” versions of roguelikes.
When I play Nethack, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Cogmind, Brogue, etc. I call them “classic roguelikes” or “traditional roguelikes” which feels a lot more precise than having a distinction between “like” and “lite” and it also feels a lot less combative to “roguelites”. It feels like the term roguelite exists mostly to just correct people who incorrectly use “roguelike” and be like “unm, actually that’s not a roguelike 🧐 only my game is a roguelike 🤣”
Most people call roguelite games “roguelikes”; it should be on the fewer people who play traditional roguelikes to change what they call their oddly specific genre.
Also, for those who have never played a traditional roguelike, I highly recommend Brogue. It’s free and has much easier controls than most other old roguelikes, and the graphics are also pretty good for ASCII.
Your method makes more sense to me.
The need to gatekeep a genre which - by now - I reckon has far more entries that don’t match the definition of a traditional/classic rogue-like game just seems unnecessary.
Giving a qualifier to ‘roguelike’ to delineate the classic versus more flexible/modern style makes more sense.
If everyone treated it like you do, this wouldn’t be an issue at all. But these days everything with permadeath gets the roguelike label and that makes it hard to find the traditional roguelikes if you don’t already know about them.