Game News Rogue - Earliest Victim of Piracy & Graphics Whorism

[Jason]

Tags: Rogue

Gamasutra slapped up <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4013/the_history_of_rogue_have__you_.php?page=1" target="blank">"The History of Rogue"</a>, a retrospective on the game that put the rogue in roguelike.
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<blockquote>Unfortunately for Epyx and the Rogue team, the commercial versions of the game failed miserably. Wichman blames rampant piracy, but it's likelier that the humble character-set graphics in most versions turned off gamers who were accustomed to advanced sprite-based graphics.
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Also, 1983 saw the release of Origin's Ultima III (see book Chapter 23), a game that many considered to be the best role-playing game ever designed for a computer. Its colorful graphics and smooth interface must have made Rogue seem primitive by comparison. </blockquote>
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Spotted at: <A HREF="http://www.gamasutra.com/">Gamasutra</A>

 

[Wyrmlord]

Rogue would have its vengeance.

Garriot's company would go dead.

And Rogue's grandson, Diablo would become far more successful than the heirs of the Ultima line would ever be.

 

[Andhaira]

But Gariott did end up having the last laugh; he already made his millions.

 

[JarlFrank]

So basically it's just like today.
Everyone likes free roguelikes but nobody would pay for them.

 

[getter77]

So basically it's just like today.
Everyone likes free roguelikes but nobody would pay for them.

Not as many of us as one would hope at least Primarily this is on the PC side of things though, as sales for Wii, PS2, and DS Roguelikes overall manage optimistically versus some others despite the trickle of games that exist period and even less that make it stateside.

I do lament the sentiment described for ASCII purists though, can't they see the potential boons to the gameplay that comes from a foundation in more expressive visuals? Stone Soup does this to great effect being able to see what kind of weapon a humanoid creature is roughly wielding before engaging them directly.

I find it nifty that S.C.O.U.R.G.E. got namedropped and a footnote, especially strange lacking POWDER and Stone Soup in the "modern" developments section.

 

[Chefe]

Graphic whores of the 80's.

That was a very good read.

Some people were almost openly hostile towards the idea of a graphical frontend."[10] Purists continue to insist that the essence of Rogue is its gameplay; all efforts to "improve" the audiovisuals merely amount to a distraction, rather like trying to play chess with extremely elaborate pieces.

I'm not in the roguelike community, so I have no idea if this is a true statement. If it is, it seems incredibly unreasonable. I can understand keeping things pure and simple but there is such a thing as too basic. You don't see any "purists" clamoring that we should still program exclusively in machine code. Playing an ASCII game where everything is represented by @, Q, K, 6, etc. is an acquired taste, like artichokes or sadism, but is no way the "correct" way to do things.

I think the reason they don't sell well is because of the graphics of course, you need something, but also because of the price tag. Take the recent Mines of Morgoth. Not a bad game, but it costs as much as freakin' Eschalon! It's incredibly unpolished, has grating sounds, and still does away with the mouse despite requiring the mouse to select options on the title screen, so you still are required to use all the keyboard commands exclusively. It features one piece of animation (your character) with pretty poor visuals that feature only the basic masking layer.

Garriott's company might have died, but the legacy still lives on. He's a millionaire, went to space, Ultima Online is still online, and is credited with creating the RPG genre.

 

[Silellak]

Rogue would have its vengeance.

Garriot's company would go dead.

And Rogue's grandson, Diablo would become far more successful than the heirs of the Ultima line would ever be.

I assume the creator(s) of Rogue also have their own castle, then?

 

[Damned Registrations]

The problem with adding graphics to a Roguelike isn't that it's distracting, it's that you'd need to compromise too much to do it well enough for anyone to care. Take Nethack as an example. There's well over 200 different monsters (Lots of roguelikes could triple that). Just drawing different sprites for all of them would be a nightmare. Now imagine animating all of them as well, even with only 5-6 frames each in total. Now add sounds. And weapons and armor for all the humanoids (Who care wear/equip anything you can) Now consider there's also about a dozen different races to cross with a dozen different classes, and a dozen different suits of armor to go on any of them. Diablo 2 managed what, 5 different characters with maybe a half dozen different armor overlays + a bunch of pallette swaps. And a lot of those armor overlays were shared between each other even. Add in a couple dozen unique rings, gems, potions, books, wands, spells, scrolls, artifacts, traps and about a hundred unique circumstances, like falling rockpiercers, polymorphing monsters and items, changing terrain, things phasing through walls, being yanked by throwing a ball and chain attached to your foot, etc. And lets not forget, you'll need a lighting system on top of all of this that clearly reveals/stops revealing things with a border of about one or two tiles.

So instead, you get either tilesets (which look like crap and have little or no animation) or a very dumbed down game (Chocobo's dungeons, Shiren the Wanderer, Tower of Druaga) with a tiny fraction of everything that should be in the game. By contrast, walking down stairs with the ball and chain dragging behind you and having the message pop up "You are crunched in the head by an iron ball. You have died." gives a wonderful mental image. And sound too. You'd end up spending a lot of time just adding death sounds for all the monsters. Unless you don't mind a dying sewer rat making the same noise as a dying dragon, dying beholder, dying lich and dying elf.

I agree on the lack of mouse interface being stupid though. Slashem has one, and it makes inventory shuffling and backtracking through areas much easier, even for someone very accustomed to roguelikes. ToME's automatizer and customizable windows are another godsend. Elona's graphics allow for some neat things, like decorating your own cave/house/castle and using maps on the overworld to find buried treasure. But even Elona doesn't look or sound good enough for the mainstream to even consider it.

 

[BethesdaLove]

Tilesets for Dwarf Fortress are nice:

http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/inde ... t_Tilesets

 

[getter77]

Graphic whores of the 80's.

That was a very good read.

Some people were almost openly hostile towards the idea of a graphical frontend."[10] Purists continue to insist that the essence of Rogue is its gameplay; all efforts to "improve" the audiovisuals merely amount to a distraction, rather like trying to play chess with extremely elaborate pieces.

I'm not in the roguelike community, so I have no idea if this is a true statement. If it is, it seems incredibly unreasonable. I can understand keeping things pure and simple but there is such a thing as too basic. You don't see any "purists" clamoring that we should still program exclusively in machine code. Playing an ASCII game where everything is represented by @, Q, K, 6, etc. is an acquired taste, like artichokes or sadism, but is no way the "correct" way to do things.

I think the reason they don't sell well is because of the graphics of course, you need something, but also because of the price tag. Take the recent Mines of Morgoth. Not a bad game, but it costs as much as freakin' Eschalon! It's incredibly unpolished, has grating sounds, and still does away with the mouse despite requiring the mouse to select options on the title screen, so you still are required to use all the keyboard commands exclusively. It features one piece of animation (your character) with pretty poor visuals that feature only the basic masking layer.

Garriott's company might have died, but the legacy still lives on. He's a millionaire, went to space, Ultima Online is still online, and is credited with creating the RPG genre.

The purists exist...definitely. I tend to keep clear of them since I don't haunt IRC or some other nook where they predominantly wail. They tend to pop up other places here and there though, but there's really nothing left for conversation when you get down to the level of dogmatism they've reached on the subject.

Variety is an essential trait. Primary thing that matters it stuff being fun and "working" roughly correctly. It swings wildly too...for all bewildered at the current state of Mines of Morgoth, go check out LambdaRogue to see the other direction random projects discovered can happen upon. http://lambdarogue.net/index.php

Worst thing purists can do is decry a project before it "gets there". Stuff can turn around and change TREMENDOUSLY in terms of Roguelikes so it is best to take it in stride and let people try their thing and get help as needed.

 

[Gragt]

I'm partial to ASCII and the absence of sounds in roguelikes but I do not reject the other options.

I remember that when I started to play NetHack, I felt that tiles were the way to go and that ASCII graphics were a thing of the past. It's only later that I got that I understood the beauty of ASCII: it indeed allowed the devteam to worry only about the gameplay and left the dungeon open to interpretation by using only symbols, so you could get a functionnal bird-eye view that, while plain, wasn't ugly.

Yet I've seen some very nice tilesets that I would certainly use if I didn't like ASCII so much now. And sounds and musics, like those in AliensRL, can certainly add a lot.

In the end, ASCII is a tradition when it comes to roguelike, and it is still justified today, but graphical roguelikes can certainly bring a lot to the table.

A note about the mouse: again I do not mind having to use it but if the game uses a lot of keyboard commands, I do not want to be switcing from keyboard to mouse every five seconds but use exclusively one setting or it would break my rythm.

 

[AzraelCC]

Then there's the issue of difficulty. Most friends I try to goad into liking roguelikes see them as too easy and "boring" at the beginning then they die seemingly arbitrarily. Of course, as newbies they fail to see that its all about caution and preparation rather than an in your face test of skill. Incursion is a promising roguelike in this regard with the wealth of options available even early on (combat feats and use of skills to traverse dungeon geography), but again, the issue of archaic interfaces arise again.

 

[elander_]

I'm working on a roguelike at the moment and i find it a lot easier to use simple vectorial graphics than to use chars. It takes some effort and imagination to create the icons with Inkscape but there are advantages. It scales well with different screen sizes and we aren't limited or have to find work around solutions for the 256 ascii char limit.

Also i don't se any reason for not using a modern user interface with menus and widgets. Sound and music isn't much of a problem either. You can find tons of sounds that are free to download from the net. If you own a game that provides musics in a playable format (like Fallout) a roguelike should allow the player to mod those musics into the game.

 

[muds_animal_friend]

I'm no graphics ho, hell ... I even like Spiderweb games. But to be honest, after a day at work, ASCII is the last thing I want to look at. I never could get into Dwarf Fortress despite it's merits. Fifteen years of looking at ASCII as a job - I'm not doing it for entertainment. It's simply too wearing on the eyes.

Thanks to you guys working on the DF frontend. I may finally be able to get into that game

 

[Luzur]

heh, i have both Rogue for Amiga (on a disc somewhere) and Sword of Faergol CIB.

nice article though.