No, it means you don't understand what a roguelike is. (and since you've been fooled, I don't blame you)
> rogue-like was effectively hijacked from the beginning.
Not at all. Rogue came out around 1980, and birthed the genre almost immediately. Hack was released in 1982. NetHack in 1987. Angband in 1990. Ancient Domains of Mystery in 1994. Linley's Dungeon Crawl in 1997. DoomRL since 2002. In 2008, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup ranked as the #1 roguelike. Brogue started in 2009. Caves of Qud in 2015. And Cogmind has been in development before 2017. These are just the ones I know about, but they clearly represent a descent from Rogue. Play any of them and it's obvious what they have in common - not just randomization and permadeath but also turn-based tactics.
If my memory serves me right, it was Spelunky in 2008 that was really the first game to "borrow concepts from roguelikes" and place them in a decidedly non-roguelike context. Note that Spelunky never advertized itself as a roguelike. It is now tagged as such by users on Steam, but even its creator knew it wasn't in the genre.
I don't know who or why was inspired to start misusing the term roguelike so heavily since then, but it's become a plague.
>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
No, it means you don't understand what a roguelike is. (and since you've been fooled, I don't blame you)
> rogue-like was effectively hijacked from the beginning.
Not at all. Rogue came out around 1980, and birthed the genre almost immediately. Hack was released in 1982. NetHack in 1987. Angband in 1990. Ancient Domains of Mystery in 1994. Linley's Dungeon Crawl in 1997. DoomRL since 2002. In 2008, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup ranked as the #1 roguelike. Brogue started in 2009. Caves of Qud in 2015. And Cogmind has been in development before 2017. These are just the ones I know about, but they clearly represent a descent from Rogue. Play any of them and it's obvious what they have in common - not just randomization and permadeath but also turn-based tactics.
If my memory serves me right, it was Spelunky in 2008 that was really the first game to "borrow concepts from roguelikes" and place them in a decidedly non-roguelike context. Note that Spelunky never advertized itself as a roguelike. It is now tagged as such by users on Steam, but even its creator knew it wasn't in the genre.
I don't know who or why was inspired to start misusing the term roguelike so heavily since then, but it's become a plague.