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If you're doing triple-A, the way you add gameplay time is to build more levels, more enemies, more everything. That's a threat to the Skyrims of the world. Through clever design, Rogue Legacy can take a small, inexpensively made game and turn it into a 100-hour Skyrim-scale experience.
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ROGUE GALAXY WALLPAPER MENU TV
But that's changing, too, as more players find out about new games not from TV ads but from social media, Let's Play videos, etc. So when a Steam user has to click "Buy Now," there's more chance they'll go for what's already familiar. (If Microsoft ever changes its stance on self-publishing, the same could be true of the Xbox One digital game store as well.) As we shift more and more to buying games digitally, we'll more and more encounter these even playing fields where Activision and some dude in his garage have their games sitting side by side on the digital "shelf."Īctivision (e.g.) still has the advantage in this scenario, because it can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create brand awareness. Getting games onto physical retail shelves is an insurmountable hurdle for all but the largest corporations, but a wide variety of indie developers can get access to the Steam store, just as they can with the Wii U eShop and the PlayStation Store. And right next to these triple-A blockbusters you can find indie games like Bastion and Fez and even indie-r games like Time Gentlemen, Please! and Rogue Legacy. But Steam is an even playing field, or about as even as the game industry has ever gotten. As I write this you can buy Deus Ex: Human Revolution for $3 and Saints Row the Third for $5. We're currently in the middle of the Steam Summer Sale, in which games on Valve's digital distribution platform are selling for highly discounted prices. So why should Rogue Legacy be causing makers of big-budget games to – if you will pardon the expression – shit their pants?
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But adding options for tweaking character stats is less time-consuming and therefore less expensive than creating entire new levels, art, and enemies to extend the life of a game. Since your character can be one of many different classes and have a variety of traits, there's a lot of gameplay balancing that must be done to make sure everything works properly. This doesn't mean that it's easy to take a tiny Castlevania and turn it into a Rogue Legacy. So you never know what's around the next corner. To add even more variety to each replay, the castle is randomly generated: There's a large list of hand-designed rooms, but they're joined together in a different arrangement every time. But you can use whatever gold you found to buy upgrades that make you stronger, and the next time you go in you'll get a little bit farther, and a little bit farther, etc. To do this it borrows, as the name suggests, from the roguelike genre: The first time you enter the castle, you will die pretty much immediately. So what Rogue Legacy does instead is to rejigger the gameplay to make the absolute most out of that small amount of content.
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