Balancing Randomness and Player Agency

One lesson I’ve learned from looter-ARPGs is that over-balancing can kill the sense of player agency. If every area has the same drop chances and no clear way to target specific rewards, it can make loot feel meaningless. Developers have started addressing this—games like Last Epoch and Diablo 4 now include deliberate target farming in endgame design to give players more control.

While roguelites don’t have loot farming in the same way, the core idea still applies: player agency within randomness. Roguelikes and roguelites are built on unpredictability, but well-designed ones ensure that skill and decision-making matter just as much as RNG. Games like Hades and Slay the Spire excel at this by offering enough variety for skilled players to adapt, even if their run doesn’t go as planned.

This requires soft synergies, which can be tricky to design. My latest pivot has been to fully embrace divine domains as the core system for both synergy and player agency. Everything—talents (divine echoes), divine treasures, remnant echoes, skills, and spells—belongs to one of eight divine domains, each tied to a god with distinct stats and themes. Domains are also the most visible element on the map, allowing players to pick paths that increase their chances of finding buffs, treasures, and abilities that fit their build.

Right now, I’m refining how tightly domain influence should shape random generation. There are multiple possible approaches:

  • Keep it fully random, leaving it to the player to optimize their build by choosing paths wisely.
  • Introduce act-specific or run-specific domain emphasis to ensure greater build diversity between runs.
  • Let initial divine echoes (talents) or early-game choices subtly shift later RNG, making domain-aligned rewards more likely.

The challenge is balancing variety, adaptability, and player control. Every run should feel different, but players should still be able to nudge their build toward preferred playstyles without being locked into a single approach. There needs to be high-risk, high-reward decisions, but not so frequently that it becomes exhausting.

This system is still evolving, but the goal remains the same: a roguelite where randomness drives meaningful choices, not frustration.

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