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by bhaak 1622 days ago
Your link discusses classic or traditional roguelikes.

OP's blog post is from 10 years so I can't blame them. But today "Roguelike" is usually something slightly different.

A roguelike these days is a game that has (at least some) procedurally generated content and permadeath without meta progression.

A roguelike purist would call these roguelites.

1 comments

I would be more forgiving to hand over the term "roguelike" to roguelites and other PGC-based games if I had a term to replace it. The problem is - what's a better term than "roguelike" to mean "more like Rogue than the other things which are (sometimes only very slightly) like Rogue"?
What's wrong with "classical roguelike" or "traditional roguelike"?

Definitions change over time, often you can't do anything about that. But I would expect those two not to deviate too much in the future (hopefully).

"Classical roguelike" usually means "direct descendent of Hack/Angband/Larn/Moria" (Rogue itself produced very few descendents, I think). "Traditional" excludes several interesting categories which are uncontroversially roguelikes: games not part of the current 'body of practice' like Dungeon Hack; radically different PCG approaches like 868-HACK; and the Japanese design lineage in e.g. Shiren or Baroque which uses a very different approach to progression dynamics than today's roguelites.