Last week, we took a brief look at some of the more painful random dungeons of the past decade or two and spent a few moments reflecting on their common miseries. If you’ve already read that article or you’ve slept through any of .hack’s random dungeons, you’re probably wondering if there’s any redeeming qualities to this design trick at all. Worry not, random dungeons have been entertaining gamers for 30 years, and some are still strong today. So without further ado, let’s see some games.

Roguelikes
The great granddaddy of all random dungeons is Rogue, an ancient game (1980) that took a series of rectangular rooms, filled them with randomly positioned enemies and rewards, and connected them with a series of unpredictably winding passages. Though it doesn’t sound hugely different from the punishing random dungeons from last week, Rogue and its direct descendants are a triumph of random dungeon design.

For proof, you need look no farther than NetHack. Using much the same graphical interface, randomization, and fundamental design principles as Rogue, NetHack has not only survived for the twenty years since its 1987 inception, but it continues to be developed and modified by an active community of open source developers.

Both Rogue and Nethack are notable for relying on ASCII characters to provide a pseudo-graphical dungeon crawling experience. Your heroic “@” winds his way through a twisty series of hyphens and pipes to fight monsters that look suspiciously like “E” and “M” by bumping into them. While immensely primitive by modern graphical standards, the simple graphical design meant that the game could (and still can) be played on any computer that can produce a unix terminal window.

Aside from the visual interest factor, it might not seem like a game’s graphical engine should bear overmuch on how enjoyable a random dungeon is. However, the block characters that compose Roguelike environments provide a series of regular tiles that serve as a sort of random building block. So, instead of generating random dungeons by arranging stereotyped rooms, Roguelikes are capable of generating random rooms with randomly shaped interconnecting passages. The tile design also allows for a truly unpredictable placement of enemies and loot that the player can discover. So, unlike the environments in Rogue Galaxy’s ghost ship, the player won’t know what to expect immediately after entering a room. Indeed, it’s unlikely that any two players have ever seen the same dungeon.

What this means is that Roguelikes capture the joy of exploration by preserving an element of mystery. Players don’t start with a map of the entire floor of a dungeon–they discover it by pressing through unknown dangers and searching for hidden passages. The uncertainty of whether the next room contains treasure and/or monsters (or if it even exists at all) and the decision to investigate makes for compelling gameplay.

Disgaea
Disgaea is a turn-based strategy RPG developed by Nippon Ichi and released in 2003 that, despite inheriting the random tile arrangement design philosophy implemented by Roguelikes, takes dungeon randomization in a somewhat different direction. As a strategy game, the gameplay focus in Disgaea is slanted away from exploration and toward the careful exploitation of the random terrain to win combat vignettes. So, a game like Disgaea has little to profit from a sense of mystery and discovery (which tend to feel like unpleasant ambushing in a strategy game).

Instead, Disgaea uses the arrangement of random tiles and enemies to create unpredictable tactical starting positions and strongholds throughout a given battle map. For example, some maps contain steep rises accessible only to characters that can literally teleport from place to place. Once entrenched on one of these towers, a ranged character can rain holy hell down on all the other combatants in relative safety. This means that a player looking for further strategic gameplay after the campaign is complete can access these random dungeons with some expectation that they will be challenged in unpredictable ways. It’s much like a Rubik’s Cube–you may not be familiar with the particular arrangement of the elements, but you play the same game each time.

Even more puzzle-like are the arrangements of geo-panels. Each of the tiles in the random dungeons has a chance to be overlaid with a particular color (green tiles, blue tiles, etc). When special colored items called geo symbols are placed on one of these colored tiles, all tiles of that color inherit a status effect that ranges from improved defense to random teleportation among like tiles. Critically, if a geo symbol is destroyed while sitting on a geo panel, all the panels explode, damaging anything on the tiles and changing all the tiles so they inherit the destroyed symbol’s color. What this means is that, by carefully arranging symbols on tiles, it is possible destroy another geo symbol when its tile explodes, culminating in a cascade that can homogenize the field’s tiles, wipe out enemy forces, and even eliminate all the geo panels from the field (with corresponding bonuses for achievement).

Taken alone, the randomization of terrain, enemy type and placement, and geo tiles would provide substantial amounts of novel gameplay. However, when all three of these gameplay elements are randomly combined and meaningfully contribute to the best strategy for a given map, the random dungeons in Disgaea are surprisingly rich and deep gameplay experiences.

So what’s the heart of the fun? Much as with Rogue, the randomization in Disgaea doesn’t modify the core gameplay, but it does significantly impact the player’s decisions on a moment-to-moment timescale. Whereas games like .hack and Parasite Eve stretch the same random battles and exploration across a small pool of repetitious experiences, Disgaea takes a small pool of gameplay elements and randomly recombines them into emergently different tactical problems. So perhaps it’s the impact that randomization has on player agency that separates good random dungeons from the bad.

Diablo 2
Diablo II is probably the most commercially successful game we’ve looked at. With a GameRankings score of 88%, and the honor of being the model on which essentially every MMORPG is based, Diablo II is one of the very few 10-year-old games you can still find on store shelves.

Diablo 2 is an action-RPG whose gameplay is largely driven by random loot and character advancement. Players plumb the depths of random dungeons, meet interesting monsters, and kill them in a potentially unending quest for the gear that will get them through the next dungeon. While it’s undeniably addictive and the game’s success speaks for itself in terms of compelling gameplay, the game’s draw isn’t really found in the dungeons themselves. Much as with Rogue Galaxy, Diablo’s dungeons are generally made of a random arrangement of eerily familiar rooms and connecting passages. The random placement of monsters who have a variety of randomly determined properties (i.e. resistance to elemental attacks) don’t really interact in the same way that they would in a tactical game like Disgaea.

So, why does Diablo 2 work where Rogue Galaxy, .hack, and Parasite Eve fail? One reason may be the generic character of the random elements. Diablo 2 isn’t quite so graphically rich as any of those games, so most of the randomly arranged rooms and corridors are so generic that they’re not terribly salient. That is, the random dungeons in Diablo are dull unto irrelevance. It sounds like damning with faint praise, but it works quite well in Roguelikes. It doesn’t really matter how many floors you explore in NetHack, all the walls are made of hyphens and pipes. When this happens, the layout of those unendingly repeated elements becomes their interesting property, and bears the load of maintaining player interest. So, by having visually boring dungeon components, Diablo shifts the emphasis from the repetition of the elements to their novel property: layout.

Another reason is that the real-time character of Diablo’s fluid combat system and ridiculously large enemy swarms make exploitation of the regular character of the environment a gameplay feature. For example, the assassin class can place traps in environment bottlenecks with the expectation of leading a pack of skeletons to their explosive demise. So, while there may not be a great deal of pleasure in exploring each new dungeon’s layout, a lot of fun can be had from testing new character abilities in semi-familiar environments.

A final reason is that the dungeons in Diablo 2 aren’t so ridiculously large as they are in Parasite Eve and Rogue Galaxy. So, while the dungeons may be made of some recognizable components after you’ve seen them fifty times, any given dungeon won’t consist of more than 5 or so floors and you may not see all those components in a single dungeon. So, by simply recognizing the limitations inherent in a small pool of randomly connected rooms and accommodating them in the dungeon constraints, Diablo 2 may have avoided much of the monotony inherent in bad random dungeons.

The Rub
So let’s look for similarities:

*Roguelikes: Randomization creates some mystery in the exploration process. The balancing of risk against reward in the quest to find the bottom of a random dungeon makes the act of exploration meaningful and makes the gameplay fun.

*Disgaea: Randomly arranged geo tiles and randomly shaped environments have an impact on the strategy that will be employed for a given random map. That is, the random elements make an impact on the player’s agency in the game world.

*Diablo 2: Random dungeons work in Diablo 2 because they’re visually unobtrusive, their regularity can be exploited to player advantage, and they don’t outstay their welcome.

The common theme among these games is that Random dungeons impact the underlying gameplay. Games like Disgaea, Roguelikes, and Diablo 2 all have remarkable and compelling gameplay that can be influenced by randomized elements. Games like .hack, Parasite Eve, and Rogue Galaxy take gameplay that is completely divorced from the properties that are randomized (dungeon layout) and expect irrelevant randomness to somehow keep the gameplay fresh.

So, when you’re thinking about whether or not to tackle the next random dungeon you see in an RPG, ask yourself: “Does the randomization make any difference to the gameplay?” If the answer is no, save yourself the monotony and go play Disgaea instead.

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