LogFAQs > #956819653

wolfy42 posted...

Honestly a game doesn't need to be short to be a roguelite, and a good one could be made that would take years to finish.

It kinda does. The point of roguelites in particular (that is, roguelikes with significant meta-progression) is that you have a steady sense of progression with each attempt. If done right, that drive to progress sucks the player right back in after every run, since there's always the knowledge that something new and interesting can be unlocked by playing another round. If an attempt takes several hours, though, it's a lot harder to create that sense. The reward is very distantly separated from the decision to start a run, so it's a lot harder to harness that motivation.

Fundamentally, rogueli(k/t)es are also built around the assumption that the player will fail initially. That's fine with shorter runs, especially when there's some manner of meta-progression to make that failure feel worthwhile, but investing 20 hours into something that's all but guaranteed to end in failure is pretty disheartening. That's even more true when that 20-hour failure isn't because you've failed as a player, it's because you haven't had enough other 20-hour failures to level up your stats enough for success to be reasonably achievable (and if you're investing 20 hours into each upgrade, those boosts are going to have to be large enough for that to be the case in order to feel worthwhile).

Perhaps I'm just biased, since I've never really seen much appeal in playing hardcore in ARPG's (it always just seems to promote slower, more defensive play, which generally isn't all that interesting, and after investing that much time into designing a character, I like to keep them around), but the idea of trying to stick a meta-progression system on top of a game that takes tens of hours per clear just seems like padding for padding's sake, not an actual interesting way to add replayability.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.