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To me it mostly comes down to just three things that give the roguelike experience. There needs to be permadeath, there needs to be some kind of clock (traditionally hunger) that encourages messy solutions and exploration, and the player needs a lot of tools (inventory) to be able to come up with creative solutions to problems. A lot of these action roguelikes are mostly lacking in giving the player a lot of tools and encouraging them to experiment, they are a lot more like build slot machines that are mostly about good physical execution and understanding basic synergies. These games are still fun but not really the same vibe as a classic roguelike. But a realtime roguelike can be done, I’d argue Barony is just that.
I think the Berlin Interpretation is quite outdated and was not even good at the time, but I will defend it on this one point. It does not provide a threshold for what is and is not a roguelike, the Berlin Interpretation just lists criteria that are important to consider when determining how roguelike something is. The heap paradox is an exercise for the reader.
A roguelite is ostensibly something that has enough features of a roguelike to be noted, but not enough to be considered one. And I’d argue there is way more to what makes a roguelike than permadeath with no meta progression.
Also Slay the Spire has less meta progression than Issac. Hades is in a whole nother ball park.
Nobody is forced with a gun to play a game with a toxic community either, does that mean it’s not worth complaining about? Perhaps the article should mention the supposed tradeoffs required to police such a community. I say supposed because I’ve played far less toxic games than Vallorant and League that don’t require such invasive software. Perhaps Riot should do some introspection and ask why the games they make foster such bad behavior instead of harming nontoxic players with their policing methods.
It’s relevant because the article acts like strictness is a unimodal thing. Riot decides how far they want to push it and some people will fall on one side and believe chat is overly sanitized while others will fall on the opposite side and believe that chat is overly toxic.
This makes it sound like the only reason someone could take issue with Riot being zealous with their policing is because that person wants to see these toxic behaviors in their game. The article quickly mentions hardware bans like they are magic, even though something like harder to spoof hardware is one of the reasons Riot would give for requiring invasive software.
And similar to how I won’t accept a game requiring such invasive measures I also won’t accept an article glossing over these things. Just like there are many players who see no problem with toxic behavior there are also many players who don’t see any problem with Riot’s measures or are simply uninformed, and the article should be more informative.
Tales of Maj Eyal is a roguelike that is on the scale of an epic adventure rather than a single dungeon delve. It has some of the most unique class design I’ve seen in a game. It has great automation features that let you set trigger conditions for skills. The game has received persistent updates for over a decade now.
Crystal Project is a relatively new JRPG that features some of the best exploration I’ve ever seen in a game. Also like ToME it has interesting class design. The end game bosses are fun, and actually make you think about your team design, they are generally not brute forceable.
Both games are well received but have less than 10k reviews on Steam, where indie darlings such as Cuphead or Hades have over 100k.
Disco Elysium lacks grinding and battles but is very much a roleplaying game with a compelling story and characters (including those in your head).
Crosscode is an ARPG which will certainly scratch that itch for Zelda like dungeons. Combat is skillful, but easy enough that you don’t have to grind out the best gear and levels, though there is the option to grind a lot if you were to want that. The story is also really nice.
Crystal Project is the best JRPG I’ve played in a gameplay sense but it will require you to level classes and consider abilities. The reason I’d recommend it is because combat isn’t really just bigger numbers, end game combat encounters especially are like puzzles where you need to use the right tools in the right order. Also I’d say half the game is about exploration, the game embraces sequence breaking and going your own way, and has fun though occasionally frustrating voxel platforming. If you want a JRPG that is more story focused then I think Mario RPG is great, and you don’t have many choices to make as there are only like 5 characters / classes, it also has some voxel platforming and comedy.
I like Gunfire a lot but it doesn’t have story and av comparable to Hades and doesn’t have the replayability and difficulty of Dead Cells. A better comparison would probably be Risk of Rain 2, another game with a lack of story and budget art, that isn’t as replayable as its betters, but still an enjoyable experience.
The model makes no sense.
Consider how it affects $60 AAA games vs close to free $1 games, it’s wildly disproportional and somehow the $1 game dev starts paying significantly earlier. Now consider how it affects games that make far less than a dollar per user, this is true of many free-with-in-game-purchase mobile games.
Then consider demos, refunds, piracy, and advisarial attacks.
It would have been simpler, more balanced approach, and have none of the pitfalls if they had just gone with a profit share scheme.
7000 people is misleading. Being a general purpose game engine it has to be everything for everybody. An engine developed for a single game can be simpler, and once it is done, making the game will be simpler than it will be in Unity. Also those 7000 people are doing way more things than develop an engine.
That said, an engine like Unity can save a massive amount of time, especially for games that are medium scope. It’s these games where developing engine code and tooling would both take a lot of time and the advantages would likely go unnoticed.
I really did not enjoy Risk of Rain, RoR2 however I played many hours of.