although you’re right, i’m not sure this battle is worth fighting anymore tbh. i used to care about which word to use, but it kinda seems like splitting hairs now.
i don’t think the distinction between the two matters to most people anymore, especially since most modern titles fall into the -lite category rather than -like.
Yeah, this is not the hill we should die on. Also, according to a post I saw recently, a true roguelike needs to fulfill a bunch of very specific requirements that already disqualify 99 percent of the games in the genre, so why even bother?
Games evolve, that’s a good thing, let’s not start gatekeeping genres too much.
If you are talking about the Berlin definition, that was decided by the roguelike dev community for their own use in discussions.
The more points of the definition, the more roguelike. Roguelites are games with fewer of the criteria fulfilled.
It’s really not a matter of gatekeeping and more a question of having a definition to stop endless discussions in the roguelikedev community on that same subject.
Supergiant is the only studio to consistently deliver. Even their hands-down least interesting game, Pyre, isn’t a bad game, it’s just not for everyone. Everything else they have released has been golden.
I can’t support prepurchase. Not even for supergiant. The industry has killed that for me. But yeah, I’ll probably be there day 1, too.
They did trade-off good, impactful stories for tight, action-packed gameplay. Neither Pyre’s nor Hades’ core stories have been that interesting, despite the excellent voice acting, music, and gameplay.
The fact that they are doing a sequel to Hades immediately suggests that the trend is going to continue, because that’s where the money’s at. It’s a rather risk-adverse decision.
That’s fair. Hades wasn’t as much my jam, story-wise, as bastion or transistor, for sure. It leaned heavily on tight mechanics and beautiful art, which were also staples of bastion and transistor. So in a sense, I agree. I think there is only so much creativity you can have in a storyline based on something like Greek mythology, and so I’d like to see them return to more original plots.
I would disagree with the choice of words here, yes their stories are often not super deep or intricate, but I do believe they are extremely interesting, specifically because they are presented in such an appealing way.
Just the elevator pitch for Hades sounds amazingly interesting, “you are the son of Hades fighting his way through procedurally generated dungeons to escape hell”, fuck yeah! Tell me more!
And the impact is definitely there as well, because while depth is missing, the qualities you described make what little story there is quite impactful.
Of course this is all just my opinion, but you can’t tell me that “you participate in ritualistic basketball games to free your comrades from a prison wasteland” doesn’t sound interesting.
I would disagree with the choice of words here, yes their stories are often not super deep or intricate, but I do believe they are extremely interesting, specifically because they are presented in such an appealing way.
I’m not talking about Supergiant as a whole. Bastion and Transistor had great stories. It’s just that, afterwards, they started to lose their ability to tell an impactful story, and dived head-first into worldbuilding (especially Pyre) and character development. Those sort of things are good to have, but not as the main focus of the story.
In Bastion and Transistor, worlds were falling apart. In Hades, some dude was pissy about his father and figured out who his real mother. <Insert Star Wars “family” meme here>
I just hope seeing the end doesn’t involve “beating” the game fifty times while getting dribbled one line of new dialogue every time that usually didn’t even mean anything.
YouTube exists, bros, who are you kidding
…
I am obviously getting 2 though, so I guess they’re kidding me.
My main file has 418 plays (I think the highest heat I’ve cleared is 23-24 maybe?), and I got the game mid-2022. Drip fees me that plot, Supergiant, because I AM the target audience.
The first game became significantly easier as more stuff was unlocked, so beating a round wasn’t quite so tough by the end.
I know you were exaggerating, but I think it was 10 completions that were required in total, with new stuff unlocking pretty consistently past the first, so much so that the strategy was evolving significantly between the first and the last.
Didn’t they also release a god mode version if you just wanted story as well?
It’s 10 clears to actually reunite with a certain someone, it’s literally 50+ to finish the epilogue (you can probably streamline that, but that seems to be the community consensus for epilogue timing)
And I don’t know about you, but I usually read the epilogue of a book.
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