All of that doesn't address and sort of goes against my initial point though - that not even the people who are saying what ISN'T a roguelike can reach a real consensus on what IS one. As long as people keep making stipulations and excuses to discount this and that game, it's pretty difficult to take any of the criticism as serious or credible. It just comes off as yet another person with yet another set of rules for what a roguelike isn't.
I’m not saying the concept of a roguelike hasn’t gotten confused in the past dozen years—but that’s largely because of people who didn’t really understand the term misapplying it to everything and anything. I’m saying that in these situations, where things have become nebulous, it’s best to look back at the origins and evolution of a term. What is Rogue? What games were called roguelikes before the term became vague? What sorts of games preceded roguelikes and lead to the development of the genre?
Rogue came out in 1980. In that 42 year history, the genre has primarily been defined by games like Moria, NetHack, Angband, ToME, and ADOM, at least until roughly a dozen years ago when games featuring permadeath and procedural generation as their only common feature with the games that came before became mainstream. Historically speaking, roguelikes are a subgenre of RPG. This isn’t a personal definition.
We also have to consider what constitutes a genre—as I’ve said before, it can’t be one or two gameplay elements that can be applied independently or together to any genre; there have to be enough distinguishing elements to make the category distinct from other genres, or else there’s no point in trying to distinguish between genres in the first place. To borrow a previously mentioned example, metroidvanias are probably most distinctive for featuring backtracking through previous areas, but that alone can’t define the genre, because any genre can feature backtracking. But the only things that unite every game that’s been labeled a roguelike in the past decade are permadeath and procedural generation, which are insufficient to define a genre. This is the reason the term roguelite started to get thrown around—as a way of categorizing these games that share only superficial similarities to the genre, but that don’t actually constitute a genre in themselves. It’s the same thing that happened when the term “RPG elements” started to get thrown around once everything started to adopt some form of leveling mechanics.
Am I actually saying that roguelikes are as tightly defined as I asserted earlier in the thread? Eh, kinda sorta. I was being half-sarcastic—half because that’s partially how I would actually define a roguelike, but sarcastic because I recognize that there’s no such thing as perfect consensus on the definition of any given word or phrase and no true definitive authority. Regardless of my personal definition, however, I think anyone who looks at the history of the term and fully considers what might define it as a genre would recognize that roguelikes are defined not merely by procedural generation and permadeath, but by their relationship to RPGs, keeping the player in the dark with each subsequent playthrough, and level-based exploration.
ing ridiculous (in this case for 10$ top tier a link gets the link originator 1.50$ while the charity gets a measly 0.50$)
