Roguelike and Roguelite games are becoming more and more popular each year. Roguelite games are more accessible than roguelike games, as although they inherit some of the gameplay elements from roguelikes, most of them are less difficult and carry some meta-progression to make subsequent runs easier.
Roguelike vs Roguelite – Differences
Hades, one of the more critically acclaimed and popular games in the genre is roguelite as it has lots of meta-progression involved. However, sometimes the term roguelike is used as many of today’s roguelite(like) games have some sort of meta-progression that is carryover in-between runs (after death). Sometimes just the general broader term ‘roguelike’ is used. If you Google ‘Hades’, you can see the term roguelike appears in its description.
Sometimes if a game doesn’t have meta progression and but remained unchanged (not procedurally generated) it will be considered roguelite.
There are other aspects to this but I do want to spend more time talking about the popularity of the genre and the issues with it, and more precisely in the next paragraph, the game Returnal, a PS5-exclusive roguelite game. And later talk about the future of roguelite games and how to make them better so they can reach a broader audience and get out of their niche spot.
Returnal
Returnal is a roguelite game. It features changed environment structure, random drops, enemy positioning, etc–each run. It has permadeath, which means that when you die, you lose (almost) all of your items and progression.
For example, your suit integrity upgrades, weapons, weapon upgrades, and weapon proficiencies—none are carried over. There is an exception like being able to be resurrected by an astronaut figurine or a reconstructor (can be used only one time per run).
Returnal, being the first AAA roguelite and probably will lead a new trend in the industry with more companies getting into it. It’s also a PS5-exclusive, and many people bought this game because of it.
That being said, as of July 18, 2021, the game had sold over 560,000 copies. Some look at it as a success, considering its niche genre, lacks of marketing, new IP and PS5-exclusive game. But still, many players opted not to buy it, as they were very much aware of the difficulty of the game.
Some others bought it because it was a PS5 Exclusive, only to realize the mistake they had made (based on their own reaction).
Adding a difficulty option is a Big NO. All idea of these games is built around permadeath and doing sequential runs, getting better, carrying a bit of thing over and trying to beat the game in a single run. Boss fights are very brutal in this game and for many, it will take quite a few runs (deaths) to be able to beat each boss.
Why Hades Was Such a Big Success?
So how do you take that great formula and bring it to the masses? Well, you need to tackle a few of the issues that cause frustration in the first place.
I can tell you that most of the reactions that I read suggest that most players don’t mind the difficulty per-se, but they don’t like starting from the very beginning. For many, this gets boring fast, and feels like the game doesn’t respect their time. Many players just don’t have that time and when they do sit to play a game, they want to get entertainment value out of it, not frustration.
Hades was one of the roguelite games that reached a big audience, and sold 700,000 copies within three days of its official release, and reached a total of more than 1 million copies sold.
I played Hades, and it’s by far the more forgiving and accessible roguelite game that I ever played. Each full run can take around 1-2 hours whether with returnal it’s doubled. Which one reason lead to a big frustration for many players.
In terms of game length, many players reported finishing the game between 50-120 hours mark (source: trueachievements.com), for some it took much faster or much slower.
Thing is that Hades brought a great story and progression in between, also something that lead to it being more accessible and motivated players to stick until the end (I wish we knew the drop rate of Returnal).
Now let’s not forget that Hades won plenty of awards and also won the Game of the Year award at the 2021 Game Developer Choice Awards and DICE Awards, as well as plenty of other awards in 23 other categories. This also leads to even more sales and interest in the game.
Hades was among the first to truly break the barrier and bring roguelite to a broad audience. This of course led to many other companies trying to do the same and try to release a more accessible roguelite game and reach a broader audience.
Attempt to make Souls-like/Roguelite Games more Accessible
I think one of the best examples of a game like that, although doesn’t fall into the roguelite/roguelike category is a game yet to be released—Elden Ring.
I wrote about the reason why it will be very popular in this post.
There I mentioned open-world game structure, variety of magic abilities, being cross-platform, vibrant settings, more forgiving spawn locations, etc.
Elden Ring, like other games, from FromSoftware like Bloodborne and Dark Souls franchise, inherits some of their game mechanics from roguelike–but they feature permanent non-changing world but permadeath mechanic plays a significant role there as well.
I am mentioning it because this shows that companies that have long experience in developing such difficult games like FromSoftware—want to try to reach the masses.
Some others were very successful being punishing roguelike games and getting immense popularity without being less forgiving—The Binding of Isaac is a great example of that.
“By July 2014, McMillen reported over 3 million copies had been sold” – Wikipedia
on Steam and more than 1.5 million people own The Binding of Isaac Rebirth.
Making Roguelite Respect Players Play Time
I think that we will see many more roguelite games coming to the market in the upcoming years and their popularity will grow significantly—it’s already is growing very fast.
I the development side, it’s easier to develop a game that was made to be completed relatively fast (with the right gear) but puts hard difficulty to impair progression. It gives also devs more time to perfect the mechanics, and this is why when you play roguelike/roguelite games, the game mechanics are perfected and feel amazing to play.
The way to make these games more accessible for players is trying to create games that the time it takes to fully finish them isn’t too long, but balance that with more challenging combat. Or, balance it so there will be more meta-progression carry over after death and balance it with the difficulty. This way, players feel they at least got something during their run, they feel rewarded.
One way is when it comes to bosses, make the option to get an option, like in Returnal, a random place to respawn one time during the run or maybe allow players (like in Elden Ring) to spawn near a boss fight—but maybe this one is too forgiving.
Another thing is to add story progression, unlock some kind of content like skins that don’t affect the run but players feel they got something for trying. I know this because I play many FPS competitive games and there, although I don’t rank up a lot, at least I get something while trying.
Maybe put some items that are very powerful and make it considerably easier, but it’s very hard to come across those. Maybe subtle progression that after many hours will eventually lead to players being able to successfully finish the game if they just failed over and over and not able to finish it after putting +200 hours.
The goal is to make each failure rewarding to a higher degree.
Even if players fail, they still get a sense of progression and achievement—instead of feeling that they have wasted hours of their life for nothing.
From a roguelike-fan perspective, one of the things you do carry almost always is getting better and skillful. Muscle memory improves and you get better. Still, playing more or less the same thing over and over can lead to frustration and boredom. This is the enemy of poorly designed roguelite/roguelike games, from a casual gamer’s perspective.
There are plenty of other ways to bridge the gap in terms of game design, and by doing so, introduce roguelite games that can be both very challenging, but very enjoyable and have immense replay value.
There are many players that will be over-exaggerating of their love for the game due to all the suffering they have gone through—that’s understandable. But the thing is, that a good design of a roguelite game should have a good balance to keep players always engaged and reduce the frustration part. some might say that that frustration is what leads to the immense emotional elevation of success. This is true, but at the same time, a game that leads to frustration can lead to many players either not picking up the game or just leaving before finishing it.
I think that Hades is one of the games that has done that beautifully and this is the key to its immense success. I wish others would follow that path (with their own unique approach). So we can see more amazing roguelite games being played by more players instead of games that really don’t get to reach their peak because of more restrictive or creative game design decisions.
On a side note. I am among those who love roguelite games, but some games do get me annoyed and there are so many games that I want to play, that I sometimes just take a break and never get back to finish them.
I understand both the roguelite fans’ side and the casual gamer’s perspective. Of course, each one of us is different and some may enjoy particular games better than others do.
In general, I think that roguelite games bring something else to the gaming industry. They introduce games that require more time, patience, perseverance, and have a higher learning curve. But they are also can be more fun and gratifying compared to games that you can easily finish without a lot of challenges.
Haven’t you played a puzzle game and enjoy being able to solve it. Same here. Roguelite games lead to great enjoyment once you are able to master them but some feel like a missed opportunity and I hope we’ll see more roguelite games that can be accepted more by casual gamers while still maintaining the key concept of what makes a roguelite/roguelike game fun and so gratifying.