Talk:Major roguelikes

IMBO ToME as more than enough players to not fall in the "stable but not much played" category.

JADE

I think, it isn't Major yet. Jolly Roger 11:29, 18 June 2012 (CEST)

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There has been some miscommunication if it is believed that the Stable_games category means that the games are not much played! I have been opposed to this hierarchy from the beginning due to just this sort of problems.

I think this category should be reserved for genre defining roguelikes. I do not have any clear criterion for determining this (which is why I think trying to categorize this way is foolish and likely to just lead to bad feelings), but I do not believe ToME is there.

One approach to make this more systematic would be just to limit Major Roguelikes to those with USENET groups. This would remove Crawl, but if it allows us to move forward without needless infighting, I'm all for it.

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Perhaps the category should be renamed to Influential Roguelikes, where the game's influence is defined by how much the game is being copied by other popular games and having other popular games derived from the game.

This would have a bias toward games with sources available and licensed to allow derived works, but that seems reasonable to me. The more open a game is, the more it CAN influence other game developers.

So, if we look at the tree that was just put on the Major Roguelikes page, everything with a child node influenced its children, and should count as an Influential Roguelikes. List the leaf nodes in the Stable section, including Adom, Crawl, SLASH'EM. ZAngband seems on the border to me, since it seems to have spawned as many variants as Angband has.

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1. Influential isn't driven by open source. One hardly needs the source code to be influenced by another game!
2. I like the idea of branching based on evolution/game type. I'm most interested in branching based on game type. This is the reason for the HackLike vs Band distinction.
3. I'm curious as to why you include Nethack on the list but exclude Adom. If you count variants based purely on code, both are equally sparse and should be crowded out by ZAngband and other Angband Variants. If you count variants based on style, however, I would contend that there is no shortage of Adom deriviatives. Avanor, for example, clearly lists itself as Adom inspired.
4. I think any organizatin of Major Roguelikes should at a minimum include the rec.games.roguelike.* "approved" roguelikes.

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If you can find popular games that copy Adom, then by all means put it in! My explanation in that last paragraph was working from the tree diagram, which focuses more on what I called the 'derivation' aspect of Influence, as opposed to the 'copying' aspect.

I think Usenet should be ignored, because the games listed and omitted there are chosen more by accident of history and bureaucracy than they are by merit. The rec.games.roguelike hierarchy is a historial artifact, but this page is attempting to describe the way things are now.

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Okay, I have moved the Usenet listing to the end, and having the free-for-all listing as the first. With luck, the number of roguelikes added to the canon this way will be small enough that we don't need to get sucked into arguing what constitutes "popular" or "influential".

Suggested addition

Hiya, I'd like to add Dwarf Fortress to the lis of Major Roguelikes. It has a very large fanbase and I hink it is deserving of such status. Also, it is a new genre of roguelikes.--GlassInMyEyeguy 23:13, 23 March 2009 (CET)

Wii bowling has a large fan base. Wii bolwing is not a roguelike. Dwarf Fortress is not a roguelike, its more of a resource micromanagement simulation. Stu 01:16, 24 March 2009 (CET)

Your argument is not backed up well (i.e. at all) by the "What is a Roguelike?" definition given on the main page. Moreover Dwarf Fortress can be played in 'Adventure Mode' which has pretty much everything you'd want from a strict definition of roguelike. I was initially tentatively against including Dwarf Fortress on the basis that it has not been around long enough to be sure that its popularity will be lasting. However I changed my mind when seeing that the Dwarf Fortress Wiki has around 6 times as many visitors as RogueBasin itself does. Perhaps it would introduce a little fresh air to have a modern Major Roguelike in the list. Afterall this is already a genre which has a tendency to stuffiness and conservatism. PaulBlay

I'm sure you'll add it to the list and the world will keep turning, because we cant have a list that has not been updated in a while, despite that nothing worth adding to the list has come along (maybe powder but I'm not sure it yet qualifies as major roguelike). To be a major roguelike, it needs to have had great influence over current roguelikes, and nothing really hits that outside of what is currently the big ones (nethack, adom, *angbands, crawl). The great majority of DF players don't even bother with the tacked on adventure mode (its like a 5:1, 6:1 ratio of posts in the dwarf mode to adventure mode forums). Stu 03:41, 24 March 2009 (CET)

There's no need to be 'sure' about it - didn't you notice the word perhaps in there or the fact that I was initially inclined against it? If you are going to switch the basis of your argument to the 'Historical approach' then that, at least, has a little more logic to it. As one possible option of how to divide major from stable roguelikes the historical approach does have something to say from it (c.f. my original comment about how long Dwarf Fortress has been around), but I don't see why current popularity shouldn't be a factor as well. PaulBlay

The article name is confusing. When I've read 'major roguelikes' I really expected here such games like Dwarf Fortress. It really is a major roguelike. The work put behind it is incredible. In fact, the whole project is incredible. Not much of a roguelike? You got to be kidding. Rogue was published ages ago. I also suggest adding Unreal World here. --Gradir 01:54, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Dwarf Fortress absolutely is a Roguelike, and it absolutely is a major game. On the What a roguelike is page, it meets nearly every requirement. It has an ASCII character display, narrated action, frontloaded commands, and keyboard-based interaction. It has random world generation (which you get to watch! Whee!), spatial consistency, little storyline, world interaction (granted, it's mostly the world interacting with YOU in Dwarf Mode), grid-based motion, permadeath (lots, and lots of permadeath), freedom (particularly in Adventure mode), turn-based action (even in Dwarf Mode, time progresses in frames, which can be advanced individually), dungeon hack (in Adventure mode only), and tactical single character play (in Adventure mode only), as detailed as allowing the targetting of specific body parts. Furthermore, the "no one plays adventure mode" argument is just nonsense. If no one played it, its dedicated forum wouldn't have 40902 posts in 2359 topics. Granted, these numbers are dwarfed by the incredible popularity of Dwarf Mode, but I don't think that should count against DF. Anyone who says that it is not a Roguelike... should maybe play more than just one Roguelike. --Dark Cloaked Figure 00:36, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

The problem is that we don't have a proper definition for Major Roguelike. BTW if we include DF what about Diablo? IMO a Major Roguelike is one that has had a significant influence on the RL community and a considerable fanbase. DF and also Diablo fail the first. For historical Major Roguelikes I'd count Rogue, Hack, Moria and Omega. For modern Major Roguelikes: ADOM, Angband, DCSS (not the original Crawl!) and NetHack. But I know not enough about ToME and Zangband to categorize them. --Bhaak 14:43, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Dwarf Fortress is *still* a Beta Project. How can it be major in this state? --Waz 25 March 2012

Dwarf Fortress is in "perpetual beta", at least for the next ten or twenty years. IMO beta status is not important, ToME4 is still beta and is also listed as a major roguelike. There is no objective standard for rating software as alpha, beta or stable, it depends on the developer and as such is not a valid metric for rating importance. XLambda 14:02, 25 March 2012 (CEST)

Powder

I think Powder may be deserving of major roguelike status one day seeing as it has the 2nd most posts on R.G.R.M. after DCSS.

CataclysmDDA

While I do work on CataclysmDDA so I might be biased. I think that CDDA could be an addition to the major roguelikes. It has gotten pretty stable and big in scope. And there are quite a few players. (if you look at the subscribers of the reddit for example). --Soyweiser (talk) 16:53, 29 August 2016 (CEST)