| Late reply, but I'll bite. I was under the impression that BI was a few years older than it is, so thanks for making me check. Actually, the fact it was made so recently and by people so familiar with the diversity of the genre makes me less forgiving of its weird specifics and priorities. I do not and never did think Diablo single-handedly upended the definition, but I do believe it (and its sequel): 1) Took so many of its design elements from roguelikes that in the context of its time, it was not unreasonable to consider it a new take on that genre's formula 2) Was a major, if not definitive influence on many of the roguelites that would follow afterwards Actually, if Hades and Angband were both called "diablolikes" instead, there would probably be much less fighting over it. ("Less" not implying none. Genres can always be fought over and naming genres after specific works rarely works well anyway) As for Wizardry, EotB, Megami Tensei, I genuinely think they look closer to a quintessential roguelike than a lot of roguelites do. If those are the smart-ass edge cases, I'm pretty happy with my wording. I didn't even intend the description to be synonymous with roguelike, but "turn based dungeon crawler" seems to include almost all games I consider to be true roguelikes and less games I don't consider roguelikes than the most actual attempted definitions of roguelike I've seen around. If it turns out that first-person dungeon RPGs with combat-specific interface are actually an especially prevalent subset of the turn-based dungeon crawler category, I might have to start differentiating the ones with top down perspective or non-modal gameplay. So far I haven't found that to be an issue. |