Risk of Rain and the Evolution of Roguelikes

Is this a "roguelike?" What is a roguelike, anyways?



Roguelike is a term that has been tossed around a lot recently. Especially in the wide and wacky world of indie gaming, roguelike has become less of a genre and more of a gameplay element. It can mean a lot of things, but most roguelikes have at least randomly generated levels and permanent death. But as developers continue to experiment, even these generalizations are broken. Risk of Rain, a genre-defying platformer, is supposedly one such roguelike, but it looks nothing like the the original Rogue itself. So, without further ado, here's a brief look at how we got from there to here.

Rogue: We started here...



Yep. This is it- Rogue. It was created back in 1980, way before I existed, let alone started playing games. It seems to have been quite complex for its time- it had varied monsters, items, and many randomly generated floors of nine rooms each. But, by today's standards, it was rather simple, which makes its evolution into modern roguelikes that much more interesting.

Powder: Still the same genre
The first roguelike I had the pleasure of playing was a freeware game called Powder, developed for basically any platform the developer could get a port to. It's been around for a decade now, and is very much meant to be a roguelike above anything else. Take a look:

An example of bad play- this dude's already a lost cause.

It's not too hard to tell that this was supposed to be a 21st century Rogue. What makes it different is simply that it has more variety. The mission is actually the same in Powder as it is in Rogue- make it to the bottom of the dungeon, get a powerful magical item, and backtrack up the way you came to escape. It's horribly difficult to do so, and it's not just because of the random monsters who want you for dinner. Playing Powder, you are one of your own worst enemies. The items you find have different, undiscovered effects every time you play. This means a red potion can be a healing beverage in one game, but if you drink a red potion in the next game it might end up being a potent acid! Combine that with the possibility of cursed equipment binding to you with crippling effects and the numerous gods who reward or punish your actions on a whim, and you get a game in which nothing ever goes according to plan. And that randomness is what gives the genre it's immense replay value.

Rogue Legacy: The fourth cousin, thrice removed (or third cousin, four times removed)

Rogue Legacy calls itself a "Rogue-Lite". It's certainly not like the games mentioned above, and not just because it's a sidescrolling platformer like Castlevania. It has a progression system which persists between playthroughs, as you spend the hard-earned gold of your deceased adventurer to improve the skills of their equally adventurous next-of-kin. Rogue Legacy shows us what has become of the roguelike genre- it's an old genre that has left a legacy for other game genres, as it were. Developers are not creating "roguelikes", they are making games in other genres with "roguelike elements". Rogue Legacy in particular combines the replayability of randomized castles and character traits with the sense of accomplishment found in making your characters stronger the more you play.

Risk of Rain: ... and we got to here.

Risk of Rain has rapidly become one of my favorite games recently. It's an action platformer where the player has crash-landed on a hostile planet and must fight through each of the levels to find a teleporter to try to return to their ship. Along the way they must pick up items, dropped from enemies and salvaged from the ship's former cargo, to alter themselves and their weapons in order to survive. Surviving is a challenge due to the games most innovative and original mechanics- the difficulty increases not as you complete levels, but as time passes. Every second wasted means it's going to get harder, which adds a tension that is completely absent in the turn-based roguelikes of old. Risk of Rain is not a roguelike. Not even close. For one, the levels are pre-made and played in a set order. But many of it's key features are taken from roguelikes; the enemy spawns, items, and teleporter locations are randomized, and death is permanent. It even takes the replayability offered by these random elements a step further by offering characters and backstory unlockable via achievements, as well as a high-score system for those wishing to challenge their friends. And speaking of friends, the game includes online multiplayer. However, players must use the archaic system of connecting through the host's IP address, and even then the multiplayer suffers from various bugs such as desynching and massive framerate drops. The game is still in active development, though, so I'm holding out hope for fixes and perhaps steamworks integration. Problems aside, Risk of Rain is a great game that I would heartily recommend to anyone. It wasn't made with a certain genre in mind, but instead shows how developers can integrate the elements of roguelikes and other genres to create games that are more than the sum of their parts. And for us players, I think it means we're going to see more innovative games being made as a result. Not only will this be fun, it'll give me more to write about!

Thanks for reading!

P.S. Risk of Rain has a soundtrack equally as awesome and equally as genre-defying as the game.
Check it out here.

Battlefield 4

Battlefield 4 went on sale for half-off during Thanksgiving and Black Friday. I've played through the (thankfully) short singleplayer campaign and played several hours of multiplayer before I go back to the dorm and have to deal with their unstable connection again. So here are some of my opinions on the game, one tiny voice among a veritable sea of louder opinions with actual followings.
TL;DR? My opinion: BF4 is pretty good.

Singleplayer: Let's just get this out of the way.
It's no secret that these days, the multiplayer experience of modern shooter games is the most important (if not only) draw for players. I'm not going to hate on it too much, but I think anyone who played Battlefield 3's singleplayer campaign would agree that it left something to be desired. BF4's singleplayer is basically more of the same, with a few added bells and whistles to spice things up.

I went into the game expecting to answer some questions I had from the multiplayer. Why exactly were the United States, Russia, and China each fighting against the other two? Unfortunately for me, this question was left unanswered because the story of the game focused on the plight of the USS Valkyrie, an aircraft carrier inexplicably trying to fight its way out of enemy waters after picking the player character Recker and the rest of Tombstone Squad, who were retrieving some intelligence from Azerbaijan, also for some inexplicable reason. The gameplay is no more complex; the goal is the same throughout: shoot your way through hundreds of bad dudes to reach the objective. I gotta hand it to the developers, though, the gunfights were varied in scale and location and offered me chances to try out new playstyles. I liked that supply crates were placed throughout the levels, because I had a lot of fun switching to different guns to see how they differed. As far as pacing goes, there were some quiet moments to make the fighting seem more intense by comparison, but they could have used many more to make the story feel less rushed, which is something I dislike about a lot of shooters today.

And what is it with Battlefield games and killing off characters? Within the game's seven levels, four important characters and one important bad guy either died or went missing in action. There was never much character development to begin with, so there wasn't much of a chance to feel bad for these guys. The music and the sad, slow-motion death scenes tell you you should feel bad. But you only end up feeling kind of silly because you do not, in fact, feel bad at all. As a sort of storyteller myself, this lack of character development annoys me. It's almost cliche to kill off a character too early now.

Despite all this, I enjoyed the singleplayer experience somewhat in the same way I enjoy poorly-thought-out action movies- they're simple, blow-stuff-up fun. Now, enough of the singleplayer. It's time to hear about the real game!

The Conquest gamemode on the map Rogue Transmission

Multiplayer: The next big thing!
Battlefield 4 was marketed as the first-person-shooter to dominate all the competition. Seeing as the only competition with close to the same size of advertising campaign was Call of Duty: Ghosts, I think it was successful. It's not too far off from the experience of Battlefield 3, but there's something to be said about the freshness of BF4. If you remember the blue-orange filter that made the previous game look cold and lifeless, you'll be happy to know that this filter has been completely removed. I'm not saying it looks as lush and vibrant as Far Cry 3, but it certainly is nice to see some color for once. The classes have had a slight rework, as have some elements such as suppression and gun customization.

Suppression was a gameplay element introduced in the previous installment of the Battlefield series designed to emulate the terrifying effect that bullets and shrapnel whizzing by your head can have, but a lot of players hated how it was represented visually. If someone missed your face with a sniper round from 400 meters away, your screen would go all blurry as if your eyes had suddenly developed astigmatism. In Battlefield 4, being suppressed makes you aim like a drunkard but you still see as if you were sober. It's nice that it keeps your screen clear of obnoxious blur effects but I've found it's hard to tell if you're suppressed or not until you start missing targets from 10 meters away.

They've added a completely new gameplay element to try to encourage team cooperation: Commander Mode. This lets a player see the battlefield from above as a real-time strategy game, and order each squad of players around, give them supplies and airstrikes, and in general try to coordinate them to fight more effectively. I played as Commander for a few rounds of Conquest, and it was a lot of fun but was only effective when I was commanding a team that actually wanted to follow orders. It appeared that most players wanted to strike out on their own rather than stick to my planning, and there was a significant lack of feedback from the squad leaders on what exactly was going on down there. I think that as more people purchase the game and become acclimated to the Commander system, there will be more willingness to work as a team.

But what about the guns? Apart from the fact that you can now have four attachments to pimp out your favorite firearm and give it a wide variety of paintjobs, there isn't much of a difference in variety or mechanics. Pull the trigger and bullets come out the front, it's not that complicated. Many of the guns carried over from Battlefield 3, and still have almost the same statistics. So if you liked shredding people in half with an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon in BF3, your wish has been granted because it hasn't gone anywhere in BF4. Personally, I think the guns look and feel better in BF4, from the amazing sound design to the modernized Chinese and Russian weaponry.

Should you buy this game?
Give it a bit of thought first. Read some reviews. Watch some videos of it, because this game has a lot of flaws. For one, at least on PC, there are a lot of bugs that DICE didn't fix before release, so you'll have to deal with crashes and glitches until they're patched. If you were looking for a game that takes the gaming industry in a new and exciting direction, don't get this game. It's a very solid first-person shooter, but in the end it's nothing more. I am having just as much fun with it as I had with BF3, so think of Battlefield 4 as the same sort of experience, but fresh and new again.

P.S. Here's a screenshot I accidentally took at the moment of being shot in the face:

It's like chucking a rock into a flatscreen TV!