Over the last 5 or so years, you’ll notice the effective rebirth of the roguelike genre. People really seem to like it but I have to disagree.

This is not being negative or trying to stir the pot. This is what is happening and me seeing the writing on the wall. They started out strong with games like Hades or some people point to the Risk of Rains.

I was fine with both of those games because they were Indie, unique, and brought interesting stuff to the table. Roguelikes became an issue when the AAA devs started doing them.

When AAA devs started making Roguelikes, it became a hustle. It allowed devs to put in less effort and then casuals would eat up. Roguelikes serve as cop outs to devs and publishers, allowing them to reuse the same levels over and over with a few changes in the name of RNG, modifiers, and you can lose your stuff.

People loved Prey Mooncrash, why? I’m not sure. One of these fanboys said it was an evolution of the immersive sim. As a Deus Ex fan I have a ton of issues with this and what this could mean for a sequel. Mooncrash changed some things but, it doesn’t dramatically change a level enough to where it would serve as a substitute for having more levels.

Deathloop used its roguelike time elements to force players to replay the same four small maps over and over. You would think if they were skimping on the level content, they’d make it up to you in other ways like AI, level designs, unique powers, unique paths to the objective or something. Nope they added rarity to the guns, something we’ve seen a million other games.

There’s an even more egregious example in Hitman. These dudes took all the levels from the trilogy and rolled them into a new game mode called Freelancer. You’re literally going through the same levels getting loot and without dying. You’re hunting down random targets and I/O couldn’t even be bothered to change the story or level of the game. You still have the story mode target and lines of dialogue that’s in the main story in Freelancer.

Rogue-liking the Hitman games literally allowed them to recycle old content, while using a random NPC to serve as the target. We waited all this time for you to do this? Was it because they were building that base of operations you launch the missions from? As that’s literally the only new thing in this mode. All the crazy stuff around the levels you could use to kill, are supposed to be collected to use in other levels. Plus a system of modifiers and the alerting of guards on the next map,if you fail. Which should’ve been in the base game.