If you were tuned in to The Game Awards 2020 livestream earlier this month, you might have seen the major announcement from Sega and Amplitude Studios about their upcoming game, Endless Dungeon. Set in Amplitude Studios’ long-running Endless series that started in 2012 with Endless Space, Endless Dungeon is the studio’s first rogue-lite game.
What is a rogue-lite, and how does it differ from a rogue-like, you ask? Well, we’ve previously covered the differences between the two in our article on the past decade’s best rogue-lites, so you can check that out if you want to know more in detail.
To put it briefly, rogue-likes are games that offer procedurally or randomly generated elements, and typically demand a lot of resource management and mental gymnastics from players. They’re as fun as they can be tiring, which is why despite many rogue-like games’ great gameplay, they’ve never quite hit the mainstream because of how taxing they can feel to play. The rogue-lite is its nimble younger sibling: it’s just like rogue-likes but shorter, simpler, and in some cases more fun. Rogue-lites offer all the RNG-related fun of rogue-likes while being less taxing on your time and energy.
Amplitude Studios has been no stranger to the rogue-like genre, with their 2014 hit Dungeon of the Endless being a great rogue-like experience. Endless Dungeon, which may or may not be a sequel to its rogue-like predecessor, is packing lite this time around by taking cues from the great rogue-lites that have come out in recent years. Games like Hades, Darkest Dungeon, and Into the Breach have all managed to achieve the balance between RNG, quick gameplay, and replayability to bring a satisfying rogue-lite experience, and with Endless Dungeon being marketed as a rogue-lite rather than a rogue-like, it’ll undoubtedly take influence from these games.
While details on Endless Dungeon’s gameplay and plot are still sparse, its trailer and official announcement have revealed that it’ll be a team-based dungeon crawler. You’ll be commanding a team of characters that you can choose from a sizable roster, and as you fight your way through hordes of enemies and explore the dungeon, you can upgrade your team with various items, equipment, and enhancements.
What makes Endless Dungeon’s upcoming release so exciting is that the rogue-lite genre is finally set to take the limelight with Sega, a major publisher, behind it. Rogue-lites have been around for a while, but they’ve almost always been indie games with modest but devoted followings. Over the years, rogue-lites have slowly crept into more mainstream gamers’ tastes, and the success of this year’s Hades is an indicator of that.
With Endless Dungeon, we might just see more major game studios and publishers follow suit with their own takes on the rogue-lite genre, and who wouldn’t want to see a rogue-lite game made with a triple-A budget?
Endless Dungeon is set to be released on all major platforms, but you can get yourself a free skin for the PC release by signing up for its newsletter. If you sign up for a free Games2Gether account and link it with your Steam account, you can also get the Endless Space Collection for free.
For more news and updates on Endless Dungeon and other upcoming releases, be sure to stay tuned to our website and Facebook page.