Roguelike game design: Choice/Emergence/Strategy
Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2012 8:15 am
Hi! This isn't a complaint - I like the game, love the theme, and enjoy the challenge. It feels a bit unpolished: but in the same way Rogue feels unpolished compared to Nethack.
Rather, it's a game design reflection on what makes great roguelikes great. By 'great', I mean properties like:
- endless replayability
- very emergent gameplay
- determinism on player choice[/list]
By replayability, I specifically mean each game involving different decisions. Something like Nethack, by taking the cross product of all the classes and ways you can play them and events that can happen, allows each game to be unique. Dwarf Fortress is another example: each game is different enough to require completely different choices, even if preferences are built up over time.
The way such depth is achieved in a sane amount of development, is making everything in the world interact with everything else. Items and enemies and abilities synergize and anti-synergize and affect each other, and whole new areas of gameplay (often unexpected ones) emerge.
Now, all of this overwhelming variety and complexity, hinges on the decisions the player makes. The world is extremely random - but the player is given so many choices, that it can be made non-random with the application of knowledge.
The impression I'm getting after ~10 hours of FTL, is that there's a lack of variety in the choices available. There's no "inventory full of scrolls and wands and potions and tools oh my" cornucopia available, to reign in the roll of the dice. On Normal (haven't tried easy, maybe additional salvage increases variety which would be ironic) you're forced to specialize quite heavily. Crew members are precious and locked into their roles, drones require an expensive (and not immediately found) upgrade to even use, and even the inventory system is focused on a small group of choices.
There's no wide variety of choice. And thus, there's a lot less emergence. And thus, randomness is truly random because you don't have the ability to reign it in - because you can only be a specialist, not a generalist.
The end result is... Very arcade-ey. Which is neat for casual short-term play, but killer for long-term replayability. Arcades tend to be intensely twitch-skill-based to compensate, so there's a satisfying endgame mastery to pursue. With practically turnbased combat, that's not the case.
So - I'm entertained for the moment but doubt it will last. And see room to improve and deepen the game, to make it leave a lasting mark on the world. As it is, it seems to miss the mark of what makes roguelikes roguelikes.
Rather, it's a game design reflection on what makes great roguelikes great. By 'great', I mean properties like:
- endless replayability
- very emergent gameplay
- determinism on player choice[/list]
By replayability, I specifically mean each game involving different decisions. Something like Nethack, by taking the cross product of all the classes and ways you can play them and events that can happen, allows each game to be unique. Dwarf Fortress is another example: each game is different enough to require completely different choices, even if preferences are built up over time.
The way such depth is achieved in a sane amount of development, is making everything in the world interact with everything else. Items and enemies and abilities synergize and anti-synergize and affect each other, and whole new areas of gameplay (often unexpected ones) emerge.
Now, all of this overwhelming variety and complexity, hinges on the decisions the player makes. The world is extremely random - but the player is given so many choices, that it can be made non-random with the application of knowledge.
The impression I'm getting after ~10 hours of FTL, is that there's a lack of variety in the choices available. There's no "inventory full of scrolls and wands and potions and tools oh my" cornucopia available, to reign in the roll of the dice. On Normal (haven't tried easy, maybe additional salvage increases variety which would be ironic) you're forced to specialize quite heavily. Crew members are precious and locked into their roles, drones require an expensive (and not immediately found) upgrade to even use, and even the inventory system is focused on a small group of choices.
There's no wide variety of choice. And thus, there's a lot less emergence. And thus, randomness is truly random because you don't have the ability to reign it in - because you can only be a specialist, not a generalist.
The end result is... Very arcade-ey. Which is neat for casual short-term play, but killer for long-term replayability. Arcades tend to be intensely twitch-skill-based to compensate, so there's a satisfying endgame mastery to pursue. With practically turnbased combat, that's not the case.
So - I'm entertained for the moment but doubt it will last. And see room to improve and deepen the game, to make it leave a lasting mark on the world. As it is, it seems to miss the mark of what makes roguelikes roguelikes.