What Is The Difference Between Roguelike And Rogue-lite?
What Is The Difference Between Roguelike And Rogue-lite?
We asked the Dead Cells and The Rogue: Prince of Persia developer to enlighten us.
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Nothing...literally nothing.
It's the same thing that people misheard
Incorrect. Rogue-lite allows you to collect upgrades that are permanent between runs. Roguelike makes you start from square one every time.
It’s literally why they invented a separate term.
That's how meanings have shifted. Originally roguelite meant anything that borrows stuff from roguelikes while not playing like the original rogue.
Stuff like Nethack, Dungeon Crawl (Stone Soup), Pixel Dungeon, ADOM, Mystery Dungeon,... were the true roguelikes. If you ask the purists, they'll probably throw the freaking Berlin Interpretation at you.
The Binding of Isaac muddled the popular definition of roguelike (because frankly, it was not on the radar of many people before that).
Now everything using procedural generation and maybe a hint of permadeath gets to be called roguelike.
Like in every language terms evolve and it's basically outside of personal preferences. Original definitions and where the term came from are basically optional info.
This are terms that are used for one main purpose: categorize so it's easier to search that term instead of "games like x". And for that purpose, roguelike as in "no progression between runs" and roguelite as in "some unlockable stuff" works wonders.
Rogue-lites are usually games with only a few elements of Rogue. Mostly what differentiates them is that you can often unlock things that persist between lives, unlike a true Roguelike where you start over 100% from scratch with each character/new game.
Pixel Dungeon is a Roguelike. Hades is a Rouge-lite.
So Balatro is a Rogue-like and Elden Ring is a Rogue-lite?
I don't know anything about Balatro, but I suppose one could say souls likes are a bit rogue-liteish. The other element of roguelikes and lites alike is RNG. Which only occurs in souls likes through drops and what move the enemy decides to use, and not really the level design to a point where death is still a massive setback toward progress in the overall game.
Ah my bad, I forgot about the rng part. I was confusing the dying over and over to "git gud" with it. Yeah, Balatro is pure rng and you start from scratch every run. And I hate it. The rng fucks me every time lol.