>Play any of them and it's obvious what they have in common - not just randomization and permadeath but also turn-based tactics.
the minecraft comment was tongue in cheek because you used contradictory wording between your comments. You asserted that the randomization was key to what made rogue different and not the permadeath because all games had permadeath and restart at the beginning mechanics.
If I understand you correctly now, you are asserting that it is a specific set of seemingly generic features that make up the rogue-like genre and that lacking any of them kicks the game out of the genre.
>It is now tagged as such by users on Steam
This is kind of the point I am getting at. There is something captured by rogue-like that is missing from other games enough for users to begin appropriating it out of necessity. "Its a rogue-like except ...." eventually becomes "rogue-like". So if you want to preserve the rogue-like tag, a new tag still needs to be adopted for the kind of game where you start at the beginning repeatedly without the other requirements needing to be met. "rogue-lite" is already kind of the leading effort to patch the problem, but honestly as a tag it makes no goddamn sense without the history lesson.. it's piggy backing off rogue-like which implies some sort of equivalency
I wish games had their specific mechanics tagged in much higher resolution in general tbh
the minecraft comment was tongue in cheek because you used contradictory wording between your comments. You asserted that the randomization was key to what made rogue different and not the permadeath because all games had permadeath and restart at the beginning mechanics.
If I understand you correctly now, you are asserting that it is a specific set of seemingly generic features that make up the rogue-like genre and that lacking any of them kicks the game out of the genre.
>It is now tagged as such by users on Steam
This is kind of the point I am getting at. There is something captured by rogue-like that is missing from other games enough for users to begin appropriating it out of necessity. "Its a rogue-like except ...." eventually becomes "rogue-like". So if you want to preserve the rogue-like tag, a new tag still needs to be adopted for the kind of game where you start at the beginning repeatedly without the other requirements needing to be met. "rogue-lite" is already kind of the leading effort to patch the problem, but honestly as a tag it makes no goddamn sense without the history lesson.. it's piggy backing off rogue-like which implies some sort of equivalency
I wish games had their specific mechanics tagged in much higher resolution in general tbh