Rogue Legacy 2 is an across-the-board improvement of a gaming classic
Cellar Door's sequel goes light on reinvention, heavy on refinement (and "Super IBS")
Games Features Rogue
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
How do you make a sequel to a game that’s supposed to go on forever?
It’s a question that’s gotten quite a bit more relevant over the last 10 years of gaming, as a number of trends—the rise of the procedurally generated rogue-like genre, the advent of microtransaction-powered “Games As Service” design, and a general focus on updating existing games long after their initial release dates have come and gone—have collided to create the perpetually sought after Forever Game. (That is, a game that can be picked up and played forever; in hindsight, we probably didn’t need this parenthetical to spell that concept out, huh?) And the Forever Game has no need for sequels; it is, in fact, a refutation of the whole concept that further game could ever be needed, or desired.
Rogue Legacy, released by Cellar Door Games back in 2013, wasn’t quite a Forever Game as they exist today. Despite a procedurally generated castle, and a variety of patched-in features designed to get players to revisit it, the game itself had a finite goal and a clear ending: Kill the four bosses lurking deep in the haunted castle, beat the boss, save your family from an endless curse (and their wide variety of run-defining mutations and quirks). Even so, its sequel, which exited Early Access back in late April, is a fascinating look at how you can take a game that’s functionally already “more of the same, forever” and render it somehow fresh.
On a zoomed-in level, and just generally at first glance, Rogue Legacy 2 plays almost identically to its predecessor, albeit with a snazzy, cel-shaded new coat of paint. Players still guide members of a family with a lot of genetic drift through the halls of a randomly generated castle, with death (and fortune) the inevitable outcome. The money from each run is then pumped back into the family estate, allowing each generation of explorers to be a little stronger than the one that just bit it. Choosing your new character means selecting an heir, weighing their class, choice of magical spell, and a whole bunch of those aforementioned quirks—most of which change how the game plays in meaningful, sometimes hilarious ways—against each other to try to set yourself up for success (or an interesting, “Super IBS”-afflicted failure).
On first blush, Rogue Legacy 2's approach to these systems appears depressingly copy-and-paste. Not least of which because Rogue Legacy’s power loop—genuinely fresh nine years ago—has since been copied extensively, to the point that it’s now a cornerstone of the “Do a run, get stronger, do a slightly better run, etc.” genre sometimes known as “roguelites.” Seeing Rogue Legacy 2 trod that exact same territory when you first boot it up is a serious bummer (especially when we first checked it out in early access, before most of the game’s more interesting twists had been implemented). Once you push past those opening impressions, though, you begin to see how Cellar Door has expanded that basic premise—and pushed itself, design-wise—to make something meaningfully different from the game’s predecessor.
The first major change to reveal itself is the game’s level design; although RL2's initial castle levels could have been CTRL-V’d from the original game, every subsequent area feels radically different, from a horizontal bridge built around long-distance jumping puzzles, to a snowy mountain that ramps up the danger of environmental traps. Each room also feels far more meticulously designed, built to take advantage of the game’s quick-flowing movement and test your abilities. “Thoughtful,” in fact, is a word that keeps popping up in our analysis of RL2, as we also started to unlock classes which fundamentally change how each run plays out—and which reveal that Cellar Door has clearly been thinking about their combat systems behind the simplistic hack-and-slash of the original. Even the manor-building mechanic—still a simple skill tree—has become more planning-focused and mechanically robust, forcing you to genuinely think about which investments will keep your horde of heroes alive long enough to grab a precious extra sack or two of gold.
Rogue Legacy 2 isn’t a seismic shift of a sequel like, say, Risk Of Rain 2, which essentially adapted its side-scrolling parent title into the framework of a 3D exploration shooter, maintaining shared items and language while radically altering the core gameplay. But it justifies its existence by being, on almost every metric, a better version of the systems created for Rogue Legacy 1, and also just a better game in general. It’s a fascinating example of what nearly a decade of improvement can look like: Refinement, rather than revolution. We might not be playing it forever, but it’s a pleasant addition to the canon today.
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I don’t really have any games “on the go” this weekend, so I might dip back into Just Cause 4, which I play for a few hours every now and then when I’ve got nothing better to do. Also potentially on the docket: Silt, which I might save for the plane ride I have to take next month.
Far Cry 6. A genuine surprise, this one, because after 5 I was severely worried that the series was nosediving hard. Specifically after the Acting Simulators that the last few had been – 3 and 5 especially – 6 is…well, gamier. And I don’t mean in the venison sense. Finally, the Far Cry series seems to be happy to let the game be a game, not a fucking movie, and trust its mechanics and systems, and the let the player…play. So far – I’m barely a quarter of the way into it, so please no spoilers – there’s been none of the infamous on-rails over-scripted bullshit of the last three games, where ludo-narrative dissonance was king (“Why did my character just walk into this room full of bad guys and let them knock him out?”)Most of the main missions, instead of relying elaborate scripting that makes no organic gameplay sense now instead simply you and maybe an NPC use normal gameplay mechanics to proceed. There was always a great gameplay loop at the core of Far Cry – mostly thanks to FC2 – in the base mechanics, but 3, 4, and 5 didn’t trust them enough to let them carry the game. The shooting’s always been great.And there’s a ton of QOL improvements, like simply being able to capture vehicles for future use, and most things being unlockable through exploration, not just grind or story progress, are great. It’s not all gravy, however.
The clothing mechanics have replaced earned stats, which means you can’t have more than 5 active at a time. What this results in is tedious juggling of items in a menu system that’s way too many clicks deep. You’re legitimately meant to manage the fashion of your character on the fly.Similar with the new ammo systems, which is almost broken: you now have a half-dozen different rounds, but each one is only useful in only one specific scenario, and utterly useless in the others, resulting a tedious game of scissors-paper-stone as you juggle different rounds. Armour piercing, for example, will do practically no damage to an unarmoured target. Explosive rounds – practically no damage to anything that’s not a vehicle yet nekkid humans are pretty much immune, and so on. Swapping ammo is tedious, since it cycles the reload animation, but you’re expected to do it.
Silencers that overheat and go loud are just a bad idea all around. Surprisingly, while Ubi’s still continuing their love for annoying NPCs (this one’s for you, Tyler Rodriguez), since they’re in the background more they’re not nearly as painful. You’ve still got the idiot quirksters and Obvious Betrayers, but since the game is more focused on organic gameplay than scripting, it’s not as bad as Yogie & Reggie from FC4. All in all, it’s a pleasant surprise, and I’m glad whoever did FC5 either learned from their mistakes or was fired.
I worked on that as an audio programmer. Glad you’re enjoying it!
Hope you didn’t rape anyone and/or cover up for the raping of anyone.
Sorry for the late reply, but I was working and couldn’t let this slide:HOLY CRAP, A GAME AUDIO GUY. You got the one game player on the planet who actually gives a shit more about game audio than graphics :). I still buy sound cards, dammit. Ambient occlusion? Meh. Audio occlusion? Yeh!Yes, I wander around games and notice the occlusion, obstruction, reverb, and positioning. It’s been pretty good since FC5, when they switched to Wwise (were they still using Anvil for the prior games?) 3DPA is something I’ve been watching religiously since, well, since bloody Dolby ruined game audio.Having said that, it’s gotten better in the last decade when Dolby managed to discover object-based audio. You know. What old gaming PCs had in the 90s. I laughed my arse off when Dolby announced it had this “breakthrough” when they released Atmos. (Having said that, I urge everyone on Win10 to buy the Dolby Access and DTS: Sound Unbound apps if you’re a headphone gamer – it’s well worth it for both immersion and gameplay – especially positioning threats around you.) You did well. Good positioning, great environmentals; if there’s one gripe I have it’s that the amigo footsteps are a bit loud, but I understand that was done so you know where they are even if you can’t see them. One thing I studiously listen for is dropped voices and virtual voices – a hangover from the dark old days of the 7th gen consoles – and I’ve not noticed any drops or 2d-ification.Oh, and you haven’t played silly buggers with HDR – I love that there’s an option to tweak it.I’d rate it higher, but my standards are ridiculously high for game audio.Ya done good, matey. Ya done good.
I’ll pass this along to our team (I was one of two audio programmers) and the sound designers will be chuffed by your positive feedback. I can’t comment on specific technical details, but your appreciation of the audio realization is appreciated!It’s funny you mention being so particular about dropped voices and virtualizing/devirtualizing emitter artifacts – I know *some* players are paying this level of attention but it’s a nice reminder to run into somebody in the wild who does ;)One specific thing I built that I’m proud of in FC6 is the system that plays all the falling rain loops that take into account the surface material types and their positions around the player. (As procedural rain was new to the FC brand in FC6.)At any rate, thanks for the kind words!
I’d be more than happy for you to pass this along. Thank you for your work!What’s that joke about game design teams? 75% coders, 20% graphics artists, 5% miscellaneous? Congratulations on being part of that 5%. 🙂 It’s funny you mention being so particular about dropped voices and virtualizing/devirtualizing emitter artifacts – I know *some* players are paying this level of attention but it’s a nice reminder to run into somebody in the wild who does ;)Oh, I notice. I legit love strafing in and out of doors to check obstruction and how smoothly it’s transitioned.Lord knows I’ve been killed by enough baddies in games simply because I did not hear them as they were gnawing on my leg. (I’m trying to remember what was the worst example of that – it was actually quite a recent game, I think). Worst example of virtual-voicing for me was – wait for it – Battlefield Bad Company 2. No, really. I know the BF series get praised for their sound, but this was the worst. The tank level has battle sounds that are meant to be coming from some distant part of the map…except no matter which way you turned your head that looped explosion sound always played in your right ear, and that burst of machine gun in your left…(Best modern sound in a game definitely goes to Dishonored – it’s the inheritor of Thief, after all. The nuance in that is the best use of Wwise ever.)The seventh-gen was a nightmare, as that’s when the 360 took and MS killed off hardware audio for good, and then sound had to fight for resources on the CPU. Lotta dropped voices, zero effects. This was the age when the first thing FMOD told you in its marketing blurb is “USES LESS THAN 2% CPU!” which was apparently the most important thing about it. But, of course, they still boasted about having “200 voices”…without mentioning that about 184 of those will be 2D only, depending on CPU load at the time. And sound is last in line behind AI, pathfinding, and achievement monitoring. The Sound Blaster X-Fi had a dedicated 400Mhz CPU that could handle 128 3D voices with four simultaneous effects on each of those, all at once, in 2005. By 2009, Borderlands was shipping with a voice count of just 32 (Unreal engine, bless it, you could check it in the INIs. I did.). Sound went backwards. One specific thing I built that I’m proud of in FC6 is the system that plays all the falling rain loops that take into account the surface material types and their positions around the player. (As procedural rain was new to the FC brand in FC6.)Holy shit – you’re bringin’ wavemaps back? Seriously, I don’t think that those have been a thing since back in the Aureal A3D days. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t notice this specifically, but I did notice that…I didn’t notice the rain, which is almost the same thing. I do notice if it’s just the same rain loop. I will be listening for this now you mentioned it. Is this only for PS5 – I know Sony wanted to do something like this with that console.Do you have any technical articles on this I could read? I know the PS5 was looking to do something like this. It’s strange, being a game audio nut, and watching the majority of gamers – visual creatures, graphics nuts – boasting about all these developments, and the audio side had them (well, the sound equivalents) for years already. Ambient occlusion? Sound had occlusion.VR for full 3D? Sound had that since the eighties.Real-time shadows? Obstruction’s always been a thing in audio – there’s a reason why Bilodeau and Songy discovered Carmack’s Reverse before Carmack did. Raytracing? Had wavetracing since the 90s.
Huh. I booted into the game and was at Patriot’s Peak, it was raining, and yeah, I do notice the different surfaces and positioning now.I admit that I probably didn’t notice before partly because I wasn’t expecting that, but also because a lot of games fake it by just playing a different rain effect when you reach a different location – which I suppose would be easier in linear games where it’s predictable where the player’s gonna be during the rain. But in an open-worlder, you need to mix that in real-time, on the fly, reacting to the player. Well done. It’s a simple* thing that brings me joy. *All right. Probably punishingly complex.
I wrapped up Trials of Mana this week, much faster than expected thanks to the New Game + feature that quadrupled experience earned, allowing me to just burn through the other two story pathways. The remake just improved on everything from the original. It’s everything I would want out of a remake and makes me optimistic about what Squeenix is going to do with Live-A-Live, the SFC RPG I joked about getting a remake of for years because they would never, until they announced that they will. Hard to believe that’s only 6 weeks away from release.So last night I started up Dead Rising while listening to the first public Jan 6 hearing and didn’t really connect what I was doing until I had zombies breaching the mall on one monitor while riot footage was showing on the other. For now I’m just re-familiarizing myself with the map and getting some of those easy early level-ups so I can have more than 4 health and 4 inventory slots, pretty well committed to failing the story missions on my first playthrough while I farm experience and get a handle on where Al Fresca Plaza is in relation to the food court, etc., but I’m going to be ready to do some work on these zombies on the second loop.
TINY TINAS MOTHA FUCKING(Although they do not say that this time because they wanted to shoot for a teen rating) WONDERLAND. It is as good as the reviewers say and I, for one, love the stupid Borderlands humor. I know its not smart or witty but it fun to laugh when you are playing a game.A Skeleton just ran at me and said “I want to eat you brains, but not because I am a zombie or something, its just a thing I do”The D&D references are fun and silly although they seem less unique then when we got Dragonkeep for Borderlands 2 a decade ago. D&D has become so mainstream now that I see comedy about it all over. Most of it isn’t even the cringy “Look at the nerds” stuff that we had for the first 30 years or so of the games life
I’m a big fan of the Borderland games, but I found three became a bit of a chore with the constant grinding for the best weapons especially after the mayhem modes came into play.
With that in mind would you recommend Wonderland?
I’m honestly just a few hours in, so I will have to get back to youSo far the setup story and the RPG jokes have kept me far more interested and engaged then 3 did but I’m not nearly to the grind for gear point in the game
In Final Fantasy XIV I have finally reached Endwalker. I really shotgunned most of the post-ShB patch stuff so I’m happy to take things a little more slowly now. Have even gone back to my alts, and it’s interesting to see some of the ARR-era stuff knowing what’s been revealed since. The entire story of A Realm Reborn was basically a first draft since there was no time to do revisions, so it’s remarkable how consistent they’ve been with it. Like the recent patches changed some things gameplay-wise but I think the story’s basically the same. And playing all that did get me interested in one bit of the series’ past- I’m playing Final Fantasy III via emulation/a translation patch. (This was one that wasn’t released in NA- and I know there’s an official PC release but I just prefer the original 8-bit look and sound.) Some of the lore in XIV calls back to this game in specific so I’m on the lookout for that, but so far it’s mostly traditional JRPG adventuring with some grinding. I’ve gotten to the cave full of pirates and it’s pretty fun for what it is, you don’t have the full job-changing freedom of V but you can change a few things around. This was also in 1990 so they were able to play a bit more with the Famicom/NES capabilities, they make a big show of being able to go behind background tiles. I also went back to No Man’s Sky for the first time in a while- this is very much the game I play periodically to check out what they’ve patched in, and just to tool around in a spaceship for a while. Chill times.
Having finished (and very much enjoyed) Nobody Saves the World, I started mining other hidden gems amongst the Game Pass selections.I first tried Maneater for about an hour or two, but found the controls so janky that it just wasn’t enjoyable. Also, I don’t like killing innocent things in games and the intro stage where you eat beachgoers put me off. (I learned this after playing Shadow of the Colossus. I felt so bad killing the colossi who were just minding their own business that I stopped playing after the third one.)I moved on to Monster Train, which is basically “What if Slay the Spire, but more?” It’s very well done and does feel like an unofficial sequel to Slay the Spire. I’ll see if it has legs though. I still have a few more factions to unlock, but it’s already feeling a little repetitive.After that, there’s Carrion and Weird West, so I have a nice queue set up.I also tried the demo of the new Mario Strikers. The tutorial took too long and by the end of it, I just didn’t care. I recognize it as a well-designed game and would’ve been a blast to play in college, but that kind of game just isn’t for me any more.
Monster Train is SO GOOD. SO GOOD. Slay the spire and dicey dungeons are two of my all-time favorites, and monster train has made for some very good company alongside them.
playing Baldur’s Gate EE. I actually had a very advanced game on the original version until I finally accepted that it is too glitchy and buggy to completely enjoy. The EE gives you so much flexibility that I am enjoying it again, though those initial steps to gain levels are as painful as ever.