Two Player in a Roguelike!?

Discussion in 'Conquest of the Wizardlands' started by Arron Syaoran, Mar 1, 2014.

  1. Arron Syaoran

    Arron Syaoran Member

    I just logged on today and saw the Conquest of the Wizardlands Title Screen on the Main Site. It got me wondering... What if there was a 2 Player Mode in Dungeons of Dredmor? Both the Browed Guy and Girl Clearing the Dungeon Together? It just made me realize that there has never been a simultaneous multiplayer Roguelike. I've heard of save swapping(kinda like what they did in boatmurdered), but imagine a roguelike where 2 people can clear the dungeon twice as fast! They would share the loots and if one of them died, the other will go on alone(and possibly give the other a good burial, lest he be haunted by his comrade's ghost).
     
  2. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    You mean like the Diablo games and Torchlight 1+2? They are pretty much roguelikes with a story and multiplayer and action. There's also Wazhack, and probably several others that I can't think of atm. I can't think of any turn-based ones off the top of my head though. They probably exist, but I can't think of any.
     
    Last edited: Mar 1, 2014
  3. Arron Syaoran

    Arron Syaoran Member

    I wanna play Darkstone. That's a really fun Diablo-like that isn't too hard. Diablo 2's difficulty is decent until the act bosses, then becomes almost impossible without town scroll abuse. As for Diablo 3, it's a bit too gory and horror themed for me. Transformation horror really drives me nuts. Never seen what Torchlight was like.

    When I said multiplayer roguelikes, I meant turn-based ones, probably even in ASCII too.
     
  4. Bohandas

    Bohandas Member

    Well, it would be pretty simple to have a game where you control a party of adventurers instead of just a single one, and once you had that you could easily play the game using a hotseat system, passing the controls back and forth to a person sitting next to you so that each of you controls a set character or group of characters.
     
  5. Arron Syaoran

    Arron Syaoran Member

    Why does order look like a Pentagon?
    Why does chaos look like an apple with the letter K on it?
     
    Alistaire likes this.
  6. SamuelMarston

    SamuelMarston Member

    I'm actually developing a two player roguelike.

    It's got couch co-op, and as long as you keep inputting commands it basically looks like real time. As soon as both players stop issuing commands, the game stops and you can input commands one step at a time.

    I still need to play with the timing, but it was a lot easier to implement than I thought.
     
    Vitellozzo likes this.
  7. Bohandas

    Bohandas Member

    The pentagon symbolizes the Pentagon building in Washington, DC.
    The apple represents a mythical engraved solid gold apple that causes the wedding of one of the gods to degenerate into a riot atop Mount Olympus in an ancient Greek myth.
     
  8. Alistaire

    Alistaire Member

    It doesn't say ti kallisti though.
     
  9. Arron Syaoran

    Arron Syaoran Member

    Apparently everyone thinks that American Defence and Tactics are the Paragon of Order. As for the apple, who ended up eating it in the end?
     
  10. Bohandas

    Bohandas Member

    Aphrodite, who gave Helen of Troy to the arbitrator brought in to settle things as a bribe (leading, as a side-effect, to the Trojan War, according to legend)
     
    Last edited: Mar 6, 2014
  11. Wootah

    Wootah Member

    When I was a kid i always wondered if it would be possible to have a turn based 2 player rogue like in something like Moria. I remember my old 8088 freezing up when the flies or lice had multiplied too many times and the computer started to lag as it had to go through the turn for each entity on screen. And It was a struggle to make the choice of whether to hit something that was blocking your path or try to move around it diagonally to get out the door so that you could close it and speed up your computer.... ah memories.

    anyway. i think that there is an elegance to the turn based roguelike that is lost when you become click based diablo type game. Don't get me wrong, I like diablo series and am playing D3 daily these days, but there is definitely some appeal about seeing your turn based death a few turns out and having to make many very perfectly selected moves to avoid (or fail to avoid) death.
     
    Arron Syaoran likes this.
  12. Bohandas

    Bohandas Member

    On a related note, I think that the term "roguelike" is thrown around far too much and too loosely these days.
     
    Arron Syaoran, Giygas and Haldurson like this.
  13. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    You have to realize that advertised categories of many products, whether you are talking about games, music, books, movies, and so on, are more for marketing purposes than for informing the customer.

    In my mind, I don't care if someone calls their game a 'roguelike' IF the description is good enough that it also describes features that are quite unlike Rogue. In other words, describing a game like "The Binding of Isaac" as a roguelike is not sufficient. I prefer "Action roguelike" as it both compares and distinguishes itself from traditional turn-based roguelikes. I'd prefer a game like Desktop Dungeons to be described as a 'puzzle roguelike' or a 'roguelike-like'. The problem with being too inclusive is that it renders the category to be less meaningful, and thus the word for it carries less and less information about the product. Simply adding qualifiers or creating subcategories gets around that issue.