I did a small write-up off my understanding here, but that’s coming from someone that’s only dabbled in both and I may have missed some stuff.
He/Him, with a tendency to ramble on about any given topic.
I did a small write-up off my understanding here, but that’s coming from someone that’s only dabbled in both and I may have missed some stuff.
Yeah, I’ve been there. It’s just so aggravating, but I try to find comfort in knowing that at least I wasted a small bit of their precious bandwidth!
I hadn’t even considered the quantity of ads on those sites… Any time I accidentally find one, it’s a long column of text that starts off with a bunch of filler roughly related to whatever I was searching for, maybe a couple of lines with an answer (right or wrong is a different matter), then breaks down into a bunch of self-contradicting nonsense. I just don’t see the ads because of uBlock Origin, so I never see how bad they are. AI generated sites are completely aggravating.
From an admitted non-expert, the way I understand it is this: A roguelike is turn based, procedurally generated to some extent, has some form of time/turn crunch tied to a carried resource (food/hunger is pretty common), and has leveling involved as part of the core gameplay loop. The idea being that you try to balance out luck (with the items/equipment you find, enemies that spawn, how well you’re doing in a particular combat, etc) with skill (knowledge of the game systems, knowing how to build, knowing when to cut your losses and run, when you have enough resources to gain some levels, etc.). There is also perma-death: Once you die, your run is over and you have to start fresh.
A roguelite involves some of these aspects, but plays things much looser. Typically there’s some level of perma-death in that a run is over when you die, but there’s also a meta-currency to allow for progress/power upgrades between runs (like increasing starting health per run by using items that have a chance to drop during a run). They are often not turn-based, and don’t necessarily have the same time crunch. The similarities lie in the fundamental idea: balance luck introduced by randomization/procedural generation and skill from game mastery, and if you fail then you have to start a new run. Different folks will have different criteria for the two terms (I saw a purist say that it’s not a real roguelike if it has anything other than ASCII graphics), but that’s how I summarize them.
This was the moment that cemented my choice to move away from Reddit. My plan initially was to see how the blackouts would play out, but this showed even more clearly than the initial thread about Apollo’s woes with Reddit just how garbage the decision-making at Reddit is.
If you and your partner enjoy RPG’s, I highly recommend Divinity: Original Sin (and Divinity: Original Sin 2, though we haven’t finished that one yet). Very story-driven, the tactical combat is a blast when you get into strategizing and collaborating, and there are all sorts of non-combat shenanigans you can get up to as well (the second even more so than the first).