@ Play: An Introduction To Some Rogue-s
August 6, 2006 5:02 PM |
['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre..]
Before we kick off this column on the niche-but-awesome genre of roguelike games, it should help to define what is meant by that term.
Roguelikes are dungeon-exploration computer games, patterned after their classic namesake Rogue, and set in a randomly-generated world. They are known for their tremendous difficulty, unpredictability, permanent character death, and the large number of methods they use to inflict that death. They were most popular in college computer labs in the 80s, and while they never achieved widespread success, the genre nevertheless persists to this day, and its dedicated cadre of devotees will argue night and day that these are the greatest computer games ever made.
(Click through to read the full, inaugural column from Mr. Harris!)
Just in case it isn't obvious by now: I am one of those devotees.
"Is that a computer game or bad ASCII art?"
From one perspective, the roguelikes are throwbacks. Here is a class of games, not really mainstream but not obscure either, that have largely resisted modernization. While it might be difficult for someone looking at Colossal Cave to connect it with being of the same kind as, say, Telltale’s recent Bone games, roguelikes, by and large, look the same as they always have.
Although two of the three major roguelike games have color graphic modes, they also retain their classic ASCII mode, and practically all other computer roguelikes use an ordinary text console window as its sole display. Nethack has inspired a number of attempts to give it fairly modern graphics, yet possibly the most-played form of the game even now, twenty years after it came into being, is on public telnet servers with hundreds of players, not tremendously different in appearance from Rogue itself back upon its release in 1980.
But while there is an air of the Neanderthal surrounding these games, they've survived for so long because, even after all that time, they're still so startlingly modern. Since Rogue was created, the grand parade of computer games is supposed to have advanced in every respect. Their graphics now approach the point where they are indistinguishable from reality. So it is damning indeed that most of them are not more interesting to play than an old terminal game that has barely changed in 26 years.
"But it helped me last time!"
Perhaps the best explanation for roguelike longevity arises from the fact that they are randomly created each game. Every play, the dungeon levels are generated anew, so the player must again explore the mazes in order to make progress. But these days this isn’t as innovative as it once was, as a good number of other games have featured random dungeons since then. Many of them were directly inspired by Rogue or one of its descendents. Diablo, one of the biggest software success stories on the past ten years, remains quite popular. And yet in almost all cases, those games reveal only a glimmer of understanding of what makes Rogue so interesting.
Instead of random dungeons, the defining feature of the roguelikes is likely that the items generated during the game are also randomly selected, and their appearance is scrambled each game. That is to say, when you find an unknown potion lying on the floor of the dungeon, you don’t know at first what it will do when you drink it. One game it might heal you, the next it may rob your character of sight making you easy prey for wandering monsters.
That by itself isn’t so interesting, but what is is that the appearance of the various items in the game is consistent within that character's life, so all orange potions will be the same type, and the same goes for all cloudy ones, for milky ones, and even plaid ones. The game’s interface recognizes this too, so that if you drink a blue-green potion and get healed, all blue-green potions will be automatically renamed "potions of healing." Some of these items are less obvious in their effects (what the hell is ‘makes you feel warm all over’ supposed to mean?), so for them the game will ask the player what he thinks the item did, and will then use that name until the player can find a better one. Discovering items through experimentation, in this way, is an important process in any real roguelike, and its lack is what prevents Diablo, for all its admirable traits, from being as good.
Part hack and slash, part scientific method
All the potions and scrolls in Rogue, and most of its descendants, work that way: the player drinks or reads the item, it is used up, and its effect upon the world is described as well as the player’s character can see. But there is usually one type of item, the scroll of Identify, that will infallibly name an object. Since some items are so subtle in their workings that the player is unlikely to ever figure out their use through trial and error, Identify scrolls are valuable treasures. But the player can only ID things he’s carrying at the time the scroll is read, and he can only pick which item is to be ID'd, not pick the effect. If you’re dying to discover which potion is extra healing, only chance can bring that knowledge to you.
There are other types of random items in Rogue too, which are even more difficult to figure out. Rings have subtle effects that are very challenging to discover through observation, and wands are dangerous to play around with. Even in a winning game it is unlikely that the player will see all the items that can be generated, let alone figure out what they all do. While there are plenty of other things to like about Rogue and its descendants, in the end it is this need to discover the game world anew every time that makes them fascinating. In a roguelike, the monsters are just one facet of a dangerous game world ready to do you in on a moment's notice, and sometimes the beasties are less likely to end a game than the player's stuff itself.
In the coming months, we’ll be investigating many of the most interesting aspects of this venerable and challenging genre. We’ll take a look at the most popular games, and many lesser-known ones too. We’ll take a tour through the strange and exciting world of user-created Nethack patches. We’ll investigate the phenomenon of the popular Japanese series Fushigi no Dungeon, the closest that roguelikes have come to mainstream gaming anywhere. We’ll even dip into the vaults to investigate some of the almost-forgotten games that used to be played late into the night on college campuses, but are now all but lost to history.
We’ll do all this and much more, so be sure to come back in two weeks. Look for the guy waiting by the downstairs, whistling for his dog.
Categories: Column: At Play
22 Comments
I am terrible at nethack, but end up downloading it every 20 or so months for a quick play. There is no doubt that roguelikes have some odd appeal.
d | August 6, 2006 2:29 PM
This is going to be cool. I love rogue-likes.
Corey | August 6, 2006 4:12 PM
Will you include things like the quest mode from Tobal 2? Ehrgeiz' quest mode could also apply.
Or Azure Dreams, which is a bit similar to the Mysterious Dungeon games, but focused on breeding monsters.
Baines | August 6, 2006 4:33 PM
do URW! do URW! It's one of my top 5 favorite open-ended Finnish survival games of all time! Everyone should play UnReal World. It's great.
Joel | August 6, 2006 4:36 PM
I'm obsessive enough to respond to comments so....
The whole point to the column is that the appeal of Nethack is not odd at all. I encourage you to play Nethack every day, but be sure to get your doctor's permission first!
Baines, I'm aware of a good many games that have randomized dungeons, Diablo among them but there are plenty of others, that are not true roguelikes because they lack its scrambled-item ID system. Roguelikes also have a heavy emphasis on resource management, even above the building of character experience. While I am not as familiar with those games you mentioned as I'd like, the degree I *have* read about them seems to indicate that they lack these aspects, thus I probably won't be covering them, although as I investigate them further I could change my mind.
I'll have a look for URW, I've heard of it before (on Boudewijn Waijers' old Roguelike sites) but have yet to play it.
John H. | August 6, 2006 5:18 PM
You know, it never occurred to me that the randomized item ID system is what makes roguelikes so replayable and unique. It never really struck me as being a defining feature; it just seemed natural, even logical.
I always felt that the most interesting thing about them was the number of ways one could interact with the environment and with other creatures. Charging swordfirst at an enemy isn't the only way to handle it (and, in fact, is often ill-advised) - you could distract it with food, throw a (possibly still unidentified) potion at it, or even attempt to tame it!
In my opinion, that's what's lacking from Diablo-type or Mysterious Dungeon-style games - more so than scrambled-item IDing or resource management, at least. (In fact, many of Mysterious Dungeon-style games do actually seem to have item-ID randomization, but they tend to be a lot more forgiving in terms of how difficult it is to identify them.)
Sorry for the word-spew. I'm looking forward the next column!
Six | August 6, 2006 7:35 PM
Beyond the lack of unknown items in Diablo, it also has a different pace from roguelikes. In Diablo, if you are in a tough fight, you have to keep moving, keep hitting. The best you can do is pause. In the turn based roguelikes, I can be sick and turning to stone (long story), and I can think it through. I can have a master mind flayer right next to me, and I can think it through. Knnn can fill a whole level with Archons and Ki-rin, and he can sit and think it through.
Diablo seems mindless compaired to nethack. In nethack, you can lose your Bag of holding underwater. In nethack, you can become a dragon. In nethack, you can choose to be atheist, or illiterate, or a pacifist. Diablo is so much simpler and more structured.
Quote | August 6, 2006 8:16 PM
There certainly are other interesting things about roguelikes Six, but I tried to pick something that applied to all games deserving of the term. Your observation is definitely valid, although it applies to the Nethack branch of RLs more than the Angband or ADOM branches. The genre is rich enough in interesting things that I'm sure I'll have no shortage of things to talk about in the coming weeks!
Fushigi no Dungeon, in its Torneko and Shiren the Wanderer incarnations at least, is definitely a true roguelike; the recent fan-translation patch for Shiren turns it into a game that's arguably an excellent introduction to the genre for English audiences. I'm less sure about some other versions of Fushigi no Dungeon, though.
On real-time roguelikes: I see you've seen the tale of Knnn's epic mistake and subsequent battle against a level literally full of Archons. It's a story that will be spoken of in electronic taverns for years to come.
I agree about Diablo's mindlessness, but don't think that real-time play is necessarily poisonous to the roguelike style. There was a project several years ago called Interhack, that seems to have dropped off the face of the Net since, that claimed to have hacked Nethack to provide real-time play. I seem to remember the developer having an ego meltdown however, with him picking up his ball and going home.
John H. | August 6, 2006 9:20 PM
woohoo, roguelikes.
i actually don't play text-based roguelikes much anymore, preferring fushigi no dungeon 2 because the range of variables is much smaller.
anyone who doesn't think mysterious dungeon games have depth is strongly encouraged to play fushigi no dungeon 2.
dessgeega | August 7, 2006 4:36 AM
One of the other issues with Diablo vs Nethack and most roguelikes is random monster spawning. Any game where you kill things and know you are then in the free and clear in that area loses a lot of tension. Nothing like running away into a worse situation than you started off in.
sawtooth | August 7, 2006 4:07 PM
I think the main thing that appeals to me in NetHack is not the randomized items but the famous TDTTOE - the devteam thinks of everything. The ways the objects, monsters and dungeon features may interact with each other are countless.
Dying is probably the best example - in NetHack, you can die in thousands of ways. Here are just a few of the little less typical ways: Killed by a contaminated potion, Committed suicide, Killed by using a magical horn on herself, Choked on a cockatrice corpse, Killed by brainlessness, Fell onto a sink, Killed by a riding accident, Killed by an iron ball collision, Killed by sitting on an iron spike, Killed by an electric chair, Killed by wedging into a narrow crevice, Dissolved in molten lava, Burned by molten lava, Killed by molten lava, Killed by axing a hard object, Killed by colliding with the ceiling, Teleported out of the dungeon and fell to her death. They are all real deaths as recorded in NetHack, so ponder these for a moment. :)
ZeroOne | August 8, 2006 4:14 PM
The devteam's legendary foresight counts for some of Nethack's appeal (and a good bit of its uniqueness among other roguelikes), but do not underestimate the importance of the player's need to discover the game's world.
The necessary steps before the player can use a found random item is: identify it, and know how to use it. The latter, once it's known, is known forever, and can be easily obtained by visiting spoiler sites. But the former is different each game.
A hypothetical perfect roguelike would also randomize how items are used, which there are elements of emerging from the soup. (That may or may not be interesting applied to a whole game. It'd be interesting to try to write.)
John H. | August 8, 2006 4:38 PM
Understandable distinction, which is why I wondered how far the column would diverge from the accepted core of a Rogue-like.
However, Tobal 2's quest mode does have a scrambled ID system and forms of resource management.
Potions in Tobal 2 are randomized. There is also a potion mixing system based upon the colors. And though almost never worth the trouble, there is even a way to heat a potion to lighten its color. (Not worth the trouble because you can only do it in a dungeon and you need to use an invisibility potion so that you can stand inside an unspawned monster flame.)
Gems are un-ID'd objects that give bonuses (and negatives when cursed) to an ability. You can build stronger gems by merging them and can use certain tricks to help ID them.
Food is a constant concern, as you can starve to death. In particularly evil fashion, there is a relatively early dungeon where you can level your defense insanely fast, except that dungeon is populated by robots that can't drop food. (And the game seems to expect you to boost your defense there...)
Beat all the dungeons, and you face the final challenge... All the dungeons back to back without the break of a town between them. And your stats reset and you lose all objects upon entry. This is...difficult... You need every trick that you've learned just to have a chance.
It's main objection is that it is at its core a fighting game, not a turned based or even mouse-click strategy/action game.
Baines | August 10, 2006 6:46 PM
"A hypothetical perfect roguelike would also randomize how items are used."
How would that be done? In one game a potion of healing would need to be quaffed and in another you'd have to break it on your head for it to work?
ZeroOne | August 10, 2006 7:20 PM
Good question, ZeroOne.
There aren't many ways to use objects in most Roguelikes. Many could reduce functionality to a single "Use" command, in combination with automatic use in combat and maybe a separate "throw" command.
I could see randomizing how effects work, so that you don't know if a potion of healing may also cure poison, heal cuts, or fix burns... Or whether a magic missile spell will fire a single missile, multiple at one target, or fire an arc in front of you. (Similar has already been done to a very minor degree in some Roguelikes, with random artifacts and even sometimes random spell designs. Though most such systems are still quite restrictive in that you know what to expect from a particular type.)
Baines | August 11, 2006 5:52 PM
I think that the tremendous power of modern computers is wasted on advanced graphics. I mean a single DVD contains a HUGE amount of information, so why is it that the games they contain seem so small?
I think roguelike games, or text-based games in general, could harness that power in incredible ways. Instead of dedicating so much effort to graphics, it could be used to create data. Tons and tons of data, making a hugely advanced and realistic and deep text-based adventure game.
For example, a character could have fears and allergies. This potion contains mushroom, so it heals you but since you're allergic to them it also gives you a rash that makes it uncomfortable to wear rough clothing. Wool from a certain type of sheep could be more durable than other types. When you meet a shopkeeper, you don't get a penalty for having a low charisma because the shopkeeper is short-sighted and you have a nice speaking voice. If you learn to sew, you could choose to sew a shirt in an Oriental style, which people will have a positive or negative reaction to depending on their prejudices. Fighting in the cold might be difficult because the cold inflames an old arm injury. Maybe you're a bit slow-witted when you're dehydrated (I know I am). You can remember names but not faces. You can pretend to sleep, so that when your companions sleep you can steal all their stuff and run away. Or you can pretend to sleep so that you can catch someone else when they try to do the same. You hate the taste of onions, but you force yourself to eat a meal containing onions so the person who cooked it isn't offended. Or you feed it to the dog when they're not looking. And so on.
I have plans for making a game like this, but don't really have time for it right now. The engine might take a while to develop, and the AI, but after that I think everything could be added in modules which wouldn't take that long to make (individually) because the engine can figure out the rest. For example if the module for a chair says that it is bulky, flat, light and made of wood, the engine automatically deduces that a chair won't fit into a backpack but can be thrown, set on fire, broken down into splinters that can be used for weapons or stood on to change a lightbulb. And the AI knows this too, so that when you've got someone cornered and all they have is a chair, they could stand on it to jump over a fence or break it down and stab you with it. And the player won't be expecting this because normally AI doesn't have all that data to work with and all the processor power is dedicated to graphics.
Playing with randomly generated characters in a game like this would be way more fun than the normal Cha 14, Str 11 stuff. My character is a tall lesbian female with a short attention-span, an intense fear of spiders, a sweet tooth, near-perfect eyesight, no sense of smell and bad hearing in one ear. This would make any situation a lot more interesting to think about - even buying a newspaper could potentially be adventure.
David Thomsen | August 15, 2006 3:19 AM
I'm looking forward to this column. I've only recently discovered and started playing Roguelikes, and I can honestly say they have perfectly filled the gaming void I've been lost in for a few years.
Sabreman | August 19, 2006 2:35 PM
[In response to David Thomsen's post above:]
I do agree with your point in many respects: the lack of graphical complexity, and the ensuing space saved, does allow for much more complex interactions. However, adding much of the stuff you described can also grow the game to occupy a large amount of space, especially if done in an open-ended, modular manner. This, I think, is potentially very harmful to Roguelikes in reducing playability.
Case in point: My personal favourite moment in a Roguelike was not (finally) ascending in Nethack, not by a long shot. Instead, it was clearing out a throne room with an earlier character, while sitting on the toilet. I play the game on my Ipaq, a modest handheld PDA with 32MB of persistent storage, of which Nethack takes up more than 2MB by itself.
Another issue: It has been observed that blind people are more than able to play Roguelikes, given relatively standardized equipment for interacting with the computer. The wealth of information you propose to add to the game would require carefully thought out methods to reveal it to such players, without severely limiting the experience.
Though more complexity can be incredibly fun, it also limits the ubiquity in ways that, as others have pointed out, graphical complexity has already done to mainstream games.
Deathkin | August 21, 2006 11:49 AM
I would like to add a feed for your roguelike series to my feed reader. Is there a way to do this without getting the rest of this site?
Paul | September 9, 2006 9:13 AM
I just found this series; thank you for doing it.
I wanted to point out gearhead to you: http://www.geocities.com/pyrrho12/programming/gearhead/
It's a bit hard to get used to, bit it's got some *great* features; very different from other roguelikes.
-Robin
Robin Powell | November 9, 2007 7:47 AM
I just want to say this is a great blog! Very fun, interesting and well-written. But like all roguelike players, a bit obessive :p
gracefool | October 20, 2008 2:27 AM
Truly charismatic blog blurb.
house season 5 | July 27, 2011 9:42 PM