The next evolution of Roguelites is finally here by Jakub Remiar

It's something that you get from this run, and all the runs suddenly make complete sense of like to really, really work for them.

Because again, like you're getting these super good cards that, like, this can be your next best deck that you can build out of it. It's perfect.

And compared to something like Survivor IO, where you already know, like, which tech you're following, you either get it or not.

It's 4 a.m. and we're rolling the dice.
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Hello, hello, this is two and a half gamers again.

Another solo episode that we're gonna do today.

This will be

pretty hardcore one because what I want to talk today is pretty much the state of roguelide games. Not only like I would say the next evolution rather than the state.
Yeah.

because i've been tinkering with this for quite some time now pretty much searching for some answers and going around few games and some solutions where i really like the rogue genre we all know it's extremely popular just as we covering pretty much a roguelide game every single month now uh from like i guess start of survivor io or vampire survivors uh yeah so this channel definitely not going anyway the big question again, of course, is how it's gonna evolve.

Uh yeah, I've been saying this for quite some time, but again, just want to kind of do a solo one on this because, yeah, this is getting finally I think streamlined and we'll see.

Anyway, let's go and get into it.

What we have in mind. So the main problem in my opinion with the whole genre, if we go, let's say one of the most typical

examples of a roguelite game would be Survivor I/O,

really, the big one that really, which is pretty much the

layman's terms, mobile version of Empire Survivors, where we have our hero, it's this kind of shoot-em-up setup. The core doesn't really matter.

In this case, honestly, what matters is the rogue light system.

So, we kill the enemies. Maybe let's go a little bit further here.
Yeah, so we kill the enemies. There's this kind of repeating XP bar.
You collect

coins or whatever these crystals, you level up and you choose some of the abilities. And you do this, you pretty much do your run, pick up your build.

Your build is kind of at the same all the time because, yeah, there's randomization and stuff around that, where again, these things can change, of course.

But in the end, you're trying to follow your strategy because your gear is built towards a build. So you're going for, I don't know, this specific setup, this evolution, so on and so forth.

You continue, you do your run, you kill the boss or whatever, it's pretty much at the end, and then you get your rewards, which is, for instance, this.

Then your run ends, and you need to start from scratch.

And the only thing that's kind of the roguelite part, which is like you don't lose everything, you can get some stuff into it, are the resources.

That's why it's rogue light, not rogue-like, as the game rogue, which was the one with like you would reset everything that's start from scratch. Yeah, and that's it pretty much.

And this is the problem because there's not enough of a

transition of of like progression moving forward, the accumulation of stuff. Like of course there's resources and everything, but you need to repeat this over and over again.

And the worst part for me is that again, you get to this point where you have this like giant invincible build where you're like killing everything, you're super powerful, you work hard for it for like 20 minutes, like 18 minutes like you see here, and then it's gone.

It like goes away. and could be very lucky could be like only at this part of the run you got this da da da da da da It's it's gone.
Like, we reset that.

So, this is the one of the main problems that I think this kind of genre suffers from. If we continue, because we have the one of the biggest answers here on the block, which is umamusume,

which uma musume does is that as you train the girl, the horse girl, at the end of her year, you get an imprint of the drun, and then you can use her in other modes of the game, which is uh pvp mode, the daily mode or whatever multiple the game is geared towards you creating different kind of imprints of or like

i don't know even how to call it but pretty much the thing that you do during your run is saved and then it's packaged as some kind of character that you can use later which is that like our all effort which like yeah this takes like 30 minutes to finish like don't get me wrong to get through this whole process it's kind of tiring even though we go like super fast and skip all the races and everything so we get this character, all the roles, and all the randomness, and all the right decisions, and bonuses, and everything.

We get this packaged, and then we can use it later. We can use it as a parent, we can use it in PvP, we can use it in daily missions, we can use it in the cup.

The game runs these specific tournaments every month. Where you get, like, and people literally build these for these specific use cases.

Like, they go to extreme lengths to kind of get the specific abilities, specific stats, everything. It gives so much

longevity towards the progression. But yeah, this is the ultimate solution.
The problem with the solution is it's extremely complicated. It's a Japanese game.

It's one of those few games that actually made it into the Western market in the original form. Yeah, hats off to these guys, but let's not be kidding ourselves.
It's very, very complicated.

I like it. Lots of people like it, but the mainstream market would like it.
This is not mainstream material. But the idea and everything,

it's great. So, if we move forward, let's move to the other game that we just covered recently, which is Cow Zero Nightmare, which currently is faring pretty okay-ish, I would say.

They're doing still something like 130, 120 KDA. Of course, there will be a bump, right? I guess, during the time you watch this, because there's gonna be a new gacha character release.

You know, these things, gacha games, go in spikes because this is pretty much Honkai style progression. So, yeah, that's that's not that big of a problem.

Or even if you use the active users, it's kinda still kind of stable.

Let's not kid ourselves. This is still driven mainly by Japan.
So, yeah, it's like that's how it is. Not much sense to it.

Also, if you go to revenue, revenue is still US first, but again, only by a small margin over Japan and South Korea. So, yeah, you see the countries.
You're still mainly Asian game.

Anyway, but the thing that I want to talk about regarding them, as we didn't really cover in our review of the game that well, is actually how they do the imprints.

I think here we have a much more streamlined solution and we're getting there. It's still kind of hard, again, but we're getting there.

I think we're just one step away from Western game implementing it properly. So what we have here is that we have these characters, typical waifus, as always, like nothing related to it.

And these characters, this is basically in continuation Slide the Spire for those who didn't know. So this is a deck builder game basically.

You have these characters and these characters have their like starting card stats.

So, you have your starting cards, you have your other cards, and then like these can evolve, so and so forth, and then you can change those, so on and so forth.

So, as you progress during the the roguelite modes of the game,

which are either

mission uh sorry, not not missions, sorry, not missions, the chaos one, where you actually you know, deck build your your deck, you are able to remove cards, duplicates, like do some like pretty much bread and butter deck building with it.

If you finish this run, this run is then saved as saved data, and then the save data can be used in all the other main modes of the game, such as main missions, the battle missions,

the simulation, which simulation is basically your daily grind for resources. You spend energy here.

So, if I go here, again, whatever, this one, you see that I can select the save data of my characters and like pick one that I do.

If I go into the missions, sorry, the rogue glide one, that's the chaos one.

Yeah, if I pick one,

you see that I'm not selecting these because these start from the default deck. So we are not selecting that.

But again, most of the game is done with the save data and only a few parts, the rogue glide ones, are the ones we start from scratch.

Even though they are really the most important ones, but like, yeah, let's not kid ourselves. So how this works here.

So we have our characters taken here and let's go to her save data so this is again an imprint like it's something comparable to umamusume and it's much more expanded because it's not only the deck that you have built there the cards there it's also artifacts that you have collected there are three slots which is very important but you're getting there this is pretty much the casual version because like yeah artifacts we covered collected those that's great why not uh and then there are the cards as you see you can have very different combinations of cards for instance here we have just six cards which means this deck is much more faster we have here eight cards you see that i basically duplicated some of the cards or we can have these i don't think so i have it here on this character let me maybe show you another character Yeah, for instance, here we have even nine cards and there are even special cards that are neutral, that are outside of this character, like base or advanced cards, and you can add them into your deck with just numerous combinations and possibilities how to kind of run this

but again it's this kind of imprint that you see here there's there's many of them like lots of them they have this kind of a base rating of how strong they are so again the more more higher you go the better they are let's go back and you see how again this can be modified to your like cookie cutter build or whatever because for instance in this one the one that i'm using currently i removed a lot of cards from the deck so for instance you see that there are base cards cards, I don't have the shield anymore.

I don't have this two

energy card that like, yep, it's kind of useless for her. Stuff like that.
So if we go here, you see that I had this like, let's say this new one. This is like the evolved version.

They call it Epiphany.

And what happened, I actually have two of those because you can duplicate those. Same goes for this like zero energy darks.
You see the replicated.

So what I actually did, I like drew out the shit cards and then the good cards that I got, I even multiplied, so I can get more of them into my hand, which is perfect. This is how it should be played.

So,

and again, this combo that I have here, I can then use in different modes of the game because I worked so hard on it. Like, it took a lot of time.

It took literally, like, the run took nearly an hour to finish. So, if I go again,

either in the missions or either in the simulations,

yeah, where we go here for instance i think there should be some new unlock stuff uh

where we are there we are yeah so if i go here again we have the same data angle and even this can have even auto play and i can then again use this

so it's extremely valuable and it's really good that you can again this this takes like a lot of rng also because

When I'm building the deck, you need to have special occasions of like

the game needs to give you this specific drop of a character. Like, again, like it randomly chooses which card to evolve.
It needs to drop for your main character.

You need to invest a lot of resources into it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, you know, it takes time. It's not just like, okay, I just built this deck and like, it's so easy.
No, it's not.

There's lots of RNG, which again prolongs the time until you get the deck. But again, it's something that you get from this run.

And all the runs suddenly makes complete sense of like to really, really work for them.

Because again, like, like you're getting these super good cards that like this can be your next best deck that you can build out of it it's perfect and compared to something like survivor io where you already know like which deck you're following you either get it or don't whatever Here it's much more on the much more like, you know, sunken cost fallacy, or basically you're much more invested into the run.

Because again, it could be the run that's like give you the best cards or even like even better than the cards that I have now, which could replace my deck. So you really, really wanted to succeed.

And again, we have another mechanic of this kind of Rogue Run imprint, which is a little bit more casualized because it's on different core.

But again, it's one of the answers of like we don't reset the build of the character. We can still use it in different instances of the game and different modes.

What we have here, because again, this is slight Spire

core gameplay, therefore we need to adjust it for it because those are the cards and everything.

Yeah, this is just the deck builder. But again,

it's not unheard of that, like even in current form, let's say, Survivor IO could implement the same setup. I don't see a problem with it.

Like you finish your run, you save it, and then you can use it in different modes. Again, very specific ones only.
Of course, not the main one or whatever. This is the progression rocket one.

But you could use it.

They could use it. I don't see a problem with that.
Like they can implement this feature.

My guess is that as we go forward, we're going to see more and more of these, especially for the mobile games ones.

Because if we take take even like some of the games that have been just trending on the Steam Chart that we covered recently, either Mega Bonk or the Balloon Rogue, like what they did with this whole kind of evolution thing here, yeah, here with this kind of fission, fusion, and evolution where you collect the skills and like mutate them into it.

Again, it's even more advanced what these other guys are doing. But again, they don't save the run.

You need to start from scratch always. You get some progression overlap with these characters, they get like unlock new skills, new slots, da da da da da.

But again, that build that you last time built, which was the awesome one, the best one, yeah, you can't use it anywhere else.

Which, in my opinion, is yeah, like a missed opportunity because like these things kind of work so well, in my opinion.

And the best kind of example, like why this system is so sturdy, and why I think it will be eventually like could become mainstream with the roguelike genre, like to have this kind of imprint mechanic pull into it is again umamusume because umamusume itself like last six months you can see they're pretty consistent yeah it's not anymore 50

revenue outside of japan it's like the two 51 revenue inside of japan but still if we go again it's gacha based so like you these these things kind of just come and go

revenue wise yeah they're doing pretty well let's do it's a last

yeah 12 months but again let's do six months because, like, it's just six months in the West. That's why.
So they do pretty consistently good. Like 30 million a month.

Yeah, that that's that's perfect. And uh the active user base is actually increasing.

If we go here,

um

yeah,

so once the again,

the US version kicked in, you can see how it's been faring pretty well. So it's not a problem.
It's also don't

forget that the game is also on Steam, where it is still pulling quite serious numbers. Where

the DA is pretty stable, something like 20k day. That's not bad for a free-to-play mobile game on Steam.
So, yeah, it's getting pretty good traction.

And you see how strong this mechanic and the setup is. with the game itself, even though the core is, of course, very unique and everything.
So Uma Musuma is pretty much nearing what?

2 billion in overall lifetime revenue on mobile so yep it proves a lot that like again this mechanic just needs to be streamlined so we are waiting pretty much for empirison puzzles to kind of um usum as puzzle and dragons so again this can be implement like in my opinion this could perfectly enrich hubby's template so you could use those imprints over run like all these setups like they don't have a problem with implementing it's one of the main features there that could work pretty well again can be very casual but also like just like a different setup of roguelide mode and roguelite genre itself to kind of bring it around of these mechanics like if we go again into house zero they have it as one of the core features of the game here it's really really core in umamusume i wouldn't say it's like it's also core but making the girls is still much more important than using them later you can skip this if you want like you can pvp the events and tournaments they're kind of more player-driven, but the main bulk of the game you can do is here.

You need to do it even for the main game. Like, there's no PvP, basically.
So, it's one more step towards being more prominent of a mechanic and going more to the center of the course.

Again, a little bit more streamlined, a little bit more,

I guess, casualization of like making it more easier to understand, probably with a different core. Because I spired deck building core is kind of

pretty hardcore by itself. so we'll see.

But uh, yeah, I'm definitely guessing that this is not the last time and the last game that we covered that is using a mutation of this like rogue light imprint mechanic.

And I'm guessing that the next six to

three months we'll see more. I don't know if RPGs, but like different games using this because the rogue glide is super popular.

As I said, we are pretty much covering a new hit rogue light every single month. Either it comes from Steam or it comes from the mobile stores.

Hobby is having three games in Soul Splunge, which are roguelide even now on WeChat.

They pretty much turned the

Clash Quest, the old killed Supercell game, the puzzler, into Roguelite. Like, again, so we'll see.
There's definitely stuff for iteration.

But it's really interesting to me, like, how these dynamics kind of continue and evolve some of the genres.

Because from, again, by doing these iterations, you are able to literally hit gold, like a gold mine.

Because again, if you push it very easily, again you don't need to rain and everything from scratch you just rain and these 20 30 percent of the game which creates a completely different game and that's your biggest usp and advantage and you know you break the market like umusume did so yeah we'll see i'm definitely looking forward this was the update from the roguelide genre and its evolution and i guess it's coming evolution so again looking forward to more games and more roguelide games with imprint systems let's call it imprint system that would be like a good good genre definition that we'll be covering, that we will be definitely covering next year.

I'm guessing two to three games for sure. It's gonna happen.
Anyway, this was it. See you in the next one.
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Ciao.