We need to decide on a genre name for Vampire Survivors-like games before a really terrible one sticks
We need to decide on a genre name for Vampire Survivors-like games before a really terrible one sticks
It's an autoshooter isn't it?
Vampire Survivors would be a rogue-like autoshooter.
Like Backpack Battles is an autobattler.
Edit:
As raised in the comments, actually a rogue-lite as VS has meta-progression.
I've also heard Autoshooter. Seems as good of a genre name as any.
I don't know why people keep calling it rogue like. Rogue-likes have a lot more randomness than an easily manipulated item drop system. I don't know that a random map is a necessity but it certainly needs something along those lines.
Rogue had you start from scratch with a new character in a random map every time.
Rogue-like games initially meant you start from scratch in a new random world, but you incrementally improve your experience by small buffs you can buy, or changing your starting equipment / skills (sometimes by changing out which character you start as).
Rogue-like has slowly changed to mean "start over regularly but slowly unlock new items/buffs/equipment/characters/etc to help you further explore a world which may or may not be random"
So it applies to games like Risk of Rain (and 2), Balatro, Dead Cells, and Rogue Legacy, just to name a few examples (though 3 of those are 2d platformers with randomly generated worlds if I remember right...).
But yeah it seems to have morphed into a broadly used term for games where you get better over time through purchasing permanent buffs and whatnot (as well as natural skill), but are forced to restart any time you die.
Vampire Survivors and other similar style games have you constantly restarting when you die so I think the term fits as a partial descriptor.
Maybe we could adopt the idle/clicker game term Prestige, but that's more of a voluntary restart when you hit a wall and can't progress, so I don't think it quite works.
For a while people tried to differentiate roguelikes, which maintained the lack of metaprogression, with roguelites, which did have progression. But that was pretty clearly a losing battle, the two names were far too similar to stay distinct as long as one or the other took off. Some few pendants still try to maintain the distinction, but that ship sailed ages ago.
It's a really stupid way to differentiate the two as well. Rogue like is the original term and will obviously be the blanket term, but people want to insist that a subset of such games are not actually a subset ("it's not a rogue like, it's a rogue lite") because of the addition of a feature. When in reality most people view all rogue lites as rogue likes.
Just an addendum:
Risk of Rain does not have randomly generated maps. The maps are from a predetermined set, I believe 6 for each biome.
Oh that makes sense. I also now just realized all the RoR2 maps are pre made, you just randomize the order you see them in, and the enemies that spawn there (within a fixed set)
They call it a rogue-like because there is meta-progression even though you "start over" each run.
Yep definitely is. I guess OP hasn't heard of brotato and deep rock survivor either.
