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!

Planetside 2 War Stories

So the dev's working on Planetside 2 decided recently that their game was too damn gorgeous to be crippled by horrendously low framerates, and set out to fix just that. This update has made the game run as if it weren't running on a burnt-out 2-slot toaster but in fact running on my moderately powered ASUS laptop, and as such, it's playable for me now! So I got myself sucked in to some raging battles and it got me thinking about how much fun it is to play even though it can get more than a little crazy. You know what it boils down to? Planetside 2 is fun because each time you play you come away from it with some wild virtual-war-story to tell your friends.

Isn't it pretty?

I remember back on Indar...
Listen up, and let me tell you a tale of glory. The enemy outnumbered our brave soldiers, but we still managed to take that damn bio lab at Allatum. It was a long and hard-fought battle but in the end we drove them right out of there and they couldn't take it back. Ah, those were the days.

I could go on like that for pages with all the cool stuff that happens in this game. Because of the fact that Planetside 2 takes place between three giant armies fighting over three giant continents, there exists a level of large-scale strategy that just isn't there in other shooters. Other shooters involve fights where they pit two small teams against each other for ten minutes in a map the size of my dorm, but not so with Planetside. Here, instead of matches, where one team wins and you do it all over again, we have full-blown campaigns. The game encourages the creation of platoons, with four squads the size of a Call of Duty team or larger, and a coordinated platoon is a force to be reckoned with. It's hard to not be impressed when you're part of an armored column on a northward rampage, taking the enemies' bases as you go. The fun of it is being part of the group, and how much organized chaos you can achieve with even a minimum of leadership. There are some flaws with this game experience though which become apparent, not surprisingly, when you're on the losing side.

How to Enter a Doorway
The issue with this MMO design is that often it presents insurmountable odds for the unorganized side, whether they lack leadership or sufficient amounts of cannon fodder. The game often degenerates into each team stuck on either side of a door, usually the exit from the defenders' safe zone, while the bullet-to-oxygen ratio of the atmosphere becomes increasingly bullet-heavy. These stalemates aren't much fun for anyone, as they can go on for hours. It's like World War One except there's no trenches:

Planetside 2 101: The "Throw More Men at the Problem" strategy.

Yes, we did eventually win this battle. It makes for a great story. It was kinda amusing, in hindsight. But was it fun at the time? What about the other team? Unfortunately for Planetside 2, these moments are common. But hey, that doesn't mean it's a bad game. Any multiplayer online game like this you play is going to have moments such as these, where your experience stops being interesting and entertaining and starts becoming an exasperating slog. In my opinion, though, there are enough of the awesome moments to make all the time spent respawning worth it, if you've got the patience. And for those with patience, you might make it out alive to tell all of your crazy, exaggerated war stories to everyone!

Check out Planetside 2 here.

Pondering my Dark Souls Addiction

Hello! I'm Erik, a guy in college who seems to always be doing one of two things- gaming, or writing. I figured I'd combine the two into one totally random blog where I can write about my experiences in the crazy world that is video games. Be warned, I write whatever the hell is on my mind at the moment and I sidetrack more than a squirrel caught in a pinball machine. But enough of the introductions, let's get started right away.

Addiction of the Year: Dark Souls
Admit it. If you're a gamer, there's probably one game in particular at any given moment that you're hopelessly addicted to. Be it Call of Duty or World of Warcraft, when you decide to sit down and play some games you're probably going to play that one. For me, for the past few months, my addiction has been Dark Souls. It all started, like a lot of my gaming interests these days, from a lets-player on YouTube playing it. This particular playthrough is being done by the foofin' hilarious Heartless, and from the get-go I couldn't stop watching. Something about the combat and the world drew me in, despite the rumors that it'll melt your brain from the rage-inducing difficulty before you reach the first boss. So when the playthrough went on hiatus, I really needed another hit of Dark Souls. The best way to get my fix would be to actually play the game, so I manned up and bought it. It did not disappoint. 80 hours of gameplay later, my magical katana-wielding iron-clad warrior made it through the end of the game, but I wasn't satisfied. No, I must be some sort of masochist because after struggling to beat every boss and recover from every frustrating death, the first thought I had was "Let's do it AGAIN!". So I did.

Challenge Squared
As any Dark Souls fan who goes anywhere on YouTube does, I discovered the legendary OnlyAfro and learned that people actually do fun things with this pain-fest of a game. That's a thing? Fun? Yeah, I was surprised too. So I decided I would play the game again, only with a sort of roman soldier/ spartan build. Kind of like this guy except shirtless:

Fortunately for my character I could fight without quick-time events.

Anyways, it added more difficulty to an already brutal game. Who needs armor when you have pecs? Dying in one shot made it pretty damn hard, but there is something strangely awesome about stabbing a giant lizardman repeatedly with your spear and then fist-pumping over his scaled corpse. So I hacked, slashed, and of course, died my way through the game once more.

What's Fun About Failing All the Time?
Good question. I'll be the first to admit sometimes a game like this makes a guy want to break everything within arms reach. But why did I stick with Dark Souls to the end and back again? I'm still trying to figure out why it's so fun. It could be because of the learning curve, not only in difficulty but in the type of learning you do. Remember those old-school boss battles where it was you against a towering dumb monster who knew a grand total of, say, three attacks? Remember how you kept dying to the same ones, over and over, until you could dodge those attacks with one hand pinned behind your back? Dark Souls provides that same experience every minute. Play through the second time and you'll know what I mean.  You feel like you've become the best gamer in the world. You remember all the timings for your rolls, all the locations of your favorite items, all the patterns of the bosses. This feeling of accomplishment is every gamer's favorite drug, and Dark Souls is the purest form of it. Once you go Dark Souls, you'll never go back.

Now let's see if I can beat Volgarr.