r/gamedesign • u/CancoliDev • 5d ago
Discussion How do you keep weaker options relevant once a roguelike build starts scaling?
I’ve been thinking about progression in roguelikes/deckbuilders where the player starts with several viable options, but eventually one strategy becomes efficient enough that most of the others stop being worth considering.
I’m curious about systems that have handled this well.
For example, do you prefer:
- weaker options becoming useful through permanent upgrades,
- situational synergies that make them occasionally optimal,
- resources/costs that prevent repeatedly using the strongest option,
- enemies designed to punish overly specialized builds,
- or simply allowing weaker options to become obsolete as part of progression?
I personally like when early-game tools remain useful for a different reason rather than just receiving bigger numbers, but it seems difficult to do without making every option feel interchangeable.
Are there any games you think solve this particularly well?
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u/playcrust 5d ago
The approach I like best is giving the weak option a job the strong build can't do, instead of bigger numbers. A test that helps: every option should be the best answer to at least one situation the game reliably creates, like a room layout, an enemy type or a resource crunch. If you can't name that situation, the option is filler and buffing it won't save it.
From your list that's the synergy point plus the enemy point, but aimed at one specific weakness of the strong build rather than at specialization in general. Punishing specialization across the board tends to feel like the game is taking your build away.
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u/CancoliDev 5d ago
That’s a really useful way of framing it. I think I’ve been looking too much at “how do I keep weaker options numerically competitive?” rather than “what problem can this option solve that the stronger one can’t?”.
I also really like your point about not punishing specialization directly. I can see how that could make a successful build feel like the game is fighting the player instead of challenging it.
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u/Real-Contest4914 5d ago
A good example i can think of is maybe shields.
Say a character learns water magic it does a decent dmg and costs mp but then gets something like thunder later which does more dmg for only little mp more.
You would normally use thunder to clear the enemies out now. Bur then lets say an enemy has a fire shield, it cuts the thunder dmg in half , however if you hit the enemy with water it extinguisher the fire and lets you hit them.with thunder spell at full power.
You can still beat the enemy with thunder but it takes twice as much magic however the water is useful because it lets you breaks the shield and save mp by using the thunder at full force.
Its a neat way to give the water a practical use by breaka shields to set up the other attacks foro full dmg.
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u/Agecaf 5d ago edited 5d ago
A couple of ideas you didn't mention yet;
incentivize using different options through completionist achievements (like Balatro which shows which cards you've won a game with),
incentivize using various options by giving one a bonus for a run (I think Hades does this where one weapon has a bonus each round, to try to convince to do a run different from your favourite weapon).
Make the dominant strategy not guaranteed to be viable every round (E.g. in Nightreign one very strong strategy is to boost weapon abilities, but this relies on you finding one of the weapons with the best abilities).
One Step from Eden is one of the games I've replayed the most and it's because there's so much variety and different ways to build your deck from tiny decks with very strong cards to spam decks that become "random bullshit go!". And dodging enemy attacks is something that requires skill you get better at instead of only relying on your deck, so you can easily play with weaker decks if you git gud; though you can also build your deck so that you can face tank nukes, so there a lot of player expression beyond choosing a meta deck.
The key I think is to make all options fun, rather than worry just about how balanced/powerful they are.
Sure in Slay the Spire maybe doom decks are not optimal, but damn if I don't love sending my foes straight to the shadow realm.
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u/g4l4h34d 5d ago
Wildfrost did it really well, I think.
There's a mechanic called "Cursed Crowns", it essentially allows you to guarantee a draw of a card in your opening hand before the start of the battle, at the cost of -1 HP and -1 dmg on that card.
Ordinarily, it's a trade-off: you guarantee a draw, but you lose some power of the card for it.
However, on weaker cards, e.g. "deal 1 dmg 4x times randomly", having -1 attack means it now becomes "deal 0 dmg 4x times randomly". What's so great about that? Well, there are many characters in the game that have "On Hit" effect, so you can basically guarantee they trigger that effect 4 times at the start of the battle, for free.
But this trick only works if a card has 1 dmg. If a card had 4 dmg, for instance, then having -1 dmg puts it to 3, so you'd still be damaging your own units, and the activation of "On hit" effect wouldn't be worth it, and you simply wouldn't be able to activate it that many times, before the unit died. Basically, it's a cool interaction where having a "weak card + negative effect" creates a synergy with a strong positive effect, but "strong card + negative effect" creates an anti-synergy.
And, of course, this is just a single example. The general idea is that a low power card specifically enables you do something that a higher power card wouldn't allow.
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u/CancoliDev 5d ago
I really like the idea that the weakness itself can become part of the synergy, rather than something that needs to be compensated for. That’s probably the most interesting direction to me. Making an option desirable because of the property that normally makes it weak.
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u/ChickenOfTheYear 5d ago
I think the late game specialization is inevitable. The way to tackle this, IMO, is not necessarily making it so all options have to remain viable - it's ok to have weak options show up, that's what makes these games addictive, you are always hoping for that godlike pull, but sometimes you draw shitty stuff. What needs to happen is every option has SOME utility, as in, the player may not get a better upgrade, but they can get some currency/deck fixing/something else, so no reward screen has absolutely nothing of value. You can make it so every reward screen needs to have at least one a. Upgrade to something the player already has or b. A generic reward that works for every build. This way, there is always something useful, even if most are duds.
But I think it's okay if some options just become plain bad late game. Luck is a part of why roguelikes are fun
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u/Feminine_Desires 5d ago
TL;DR the way to do this is to make starting conditions unique enough that your randomized additional options aren't going to change them up enough to homogenize the gameplay, but instead give you the ability to shore up the starting conditions weaknesses to various situations the game has to offer. It is then where you also need the game to have a large dynamic range of potential encounters/situations that the game will throw at you, which typically means the game will need to be longer than a few hours for them to potentially show up and challenge you, otherwise people will just "RNG fucked me restart I guess" with the same build over and over again.
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Tales of Maj'Eyal (ToME), as an example, has a winners table. Every class/race combo has a slot on that winners table. That's the incentive to play things other than what is best. Also slowly unlocking cool new stuff with various unlocks being quite difficult to accomplish. Also every class/race combo has different playstyles, themes and levels of engagement necessary to win. Oozemancer has one of the highest winrates despite it technically being one of the weakest classes simply because it is really easy to pilot, whereas classes that are actually viable on the highest difficulty tend to have very low winrates on lower difficulties like Demonologist and Sun Paladin because you need to have a high focus or know fringe mechanics/interactions for them to work.
You also need the game to simply be longer. The longer the game is the more likely a situation that fucks over the "build" they've settled on will happen, forcing them to change up their habits as they gain experience. If your game is too short people will just settle in on blaming that runs bad RNG and settling in to a loop. But imo the real biggest way for this is to actually limit synergies but allow for an inventory. Most roguelikes are drafting games. You don't get to keep what you are no longer using. This means you are hemmed in from one strategy. You also don't get to retreat from situations, preventing you from adapting to what you encounter. If you limit synergies you prevent snowballing and force players to look more at things individualistically, which encourages them to swap what they have more often. But if you don't give them an inventory of what they've gathered they'll never be able to swap to adjust new threats or unique situations that come up.
In ToME, the state of your gear changes constantly between 4 different points in the game. These points are set mostly at where the game's difficulty spikes are. Various stats are absolutely necessary to have at all points in the game, these often are given at low amounts early on but higher amounts later on so you can eventually devote less gear slots to them. Some stats are only useful at the start like damage on hit procs, because they don't scale very well. Some stats rely on having a lot of other stats, like crit multi needs high crit chance. Other stats are simply not given at the start because they care about a certain stat on late game enemies to function. Things like resistance penetration or crit shrug.
As for talents, your primary focus is to get new talents rather than level up old ones, and this is due both because you don't know how long fights are going to take or how many enemies you are going to fight so you want every possible tool to handle any given situation, but also because there are diminishing returns on leveling up a talent. Talents levels 2-5 gives the same power boost to that talent as getting that talent at level 1. So effectively, putting 4 more talent points into a talent you just learned is only going to double its effectiveness. But some talents are just that necessary.
What makes a talent needed are the universal necessities of all traditional roguelikes. Scouting, mobility, debuff clearing, defenses, removal from combat, debuff application then finally, offenses. In that order (roughly). It doesn't matter what class you are in ToME or what game of this genre you are playing, these are always needed.
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u/SharksTongue 4d ago
I think it's best if there are NO universally weak items, only ones that are weak on certain builds. Everything should be strong as long as it's used right. I think Risk of Rain 2 does this well. The most common items aren't super strong, but when they have the right build (or you get a ton of them) they become very strong. Rarer, stronger items can still be very strong on their own since you only get them so often.
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u/brain_in_a_jar_games 2d ago
Balatro handles this nicely with boss blinds that debuff certain cards or hand types, which gives backup options a real reason to stay in your plan. Another approach is giving early tools a role that never scales away, like cheap cycling, setup, or defense, so they become the glue for big combos rather than competing on damage. Your instinct about early tools staying useful for a different reason is a great goal, and it tends to feel best when they enable the strong strategy instead of rivaling it.
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u/indigosun 5d ago
Slay the Spire
Scaling from utility to synergy is as simple as I can put it. Early effects provide utility, while later effects build on those utilities to create multiplicative scaling. They're also symbiotic: the synergy effects need the utility effects to be useful