Monday 29 September 2008

Rogue

I'm creating a roguelike definition that is partly an answer to rather poor one they made in International Roguelike Development Conference 2008. Then I heard that Rogue didn't have player classes. At least the original Rogue which I actually had never even played. My only contact to Rogue was in Atari ST era when I played a commercial Rogue published by Epyx. It had graphical tiles and I could swear it was more complex than the original (I guess it's 3.6 from Roguelike Restoration project).

The problem in my definition is that it makes Rogue itself a non-roguelike game, because you can't select a player class. Yeah, it's kind of funny. In my definition Rogue is an adventure game. I had this idea of building the definition on top of role-playing, but it seems that Rogue itself is hitting this definition hard from beyond the grave. My first contact to "roguelikes" was Nethack so it was always my idea of a true roguelike and the foundation of the definition.

The absence of role-playing in Rogue makes it harder to define a roguelike, but maybe it's still possible to create a decent definition including adventure games (simple form of role-playing).

1 comment:

Nicholas "Numeron" Ross said...

Evolution is a natural process of software. Im sure there are many games that spawned the creation of what is now FPS and RTS without ever really having been that themselves, just like (religion aside) monkeys can't really be considered like us anymore even though that was the origin of our species. I see no reason why a genres forefathers should belong to the genre once its grown and changed to a certain point. Perhaps what the Roguelike genre *really* needs is a new name.