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Solo indie developer Oren Koren got into game development about six years ago, smack in the middle of the COVID pandemic. A software veteran, he started off by tinkering with the Unity game engine, used to make games in a range of genres, and played a classic indie card: making a giant open-world RPG. "Of course" he chose an enormous RPG, he tells me. But, get this, those are really hard to make, so he scaled down and focused on smaller projects until, eventually, he ended up working in design at the Scotland-based studio of GTA 6 maker Rockstar Games, one of the kings of gigantic open worlds.
Koren "can't say too much" about his work at Rockstar, but the timeline speaks for itself: just over two years ago, as GTA 6 fever persisted through delays, he left the studio to get back to small-scale solo development and focus on finishing his dream roguelike, Don't Lose Aggro. It launched this month on April 15 and is currently sitting at 89% positive reviews on Steam.
I'm a sucker for action roguelikes, but what drew me to this one was its oddball inspiration: MMO dungeons and raids. Essentially, what we have here is the perfect game for people who love tanking in MMOs but hate the stress or time investment that comes with tanking in MMOs.
Don't Lose Aggro is a third-person action game about corralling mobs and bosses in dungeon- and raid-like encounters to defend your party of NPC companions, who stand in for the DPS and healer teammates you'd have in a true MMO. You can deal some damage yourself, sure, especially as you draft random ability and upgrade synergies via roguelike progression, but the focus is on true-blue tanking, and this is a game made by a seasoned MMO raider.
Somehow, this isn't the first time I've interviewed the solo creator of a single-player MMO-like. Koren has played MMOs for 20 years, focusing on World of Warcraft but dabbling in everything from Guild Wars to ArcheAge, and he's always been a tank. Now on his own, he wants any game he makes to be "as serious as it is silly." He also wants his games to "solve an issue," and the issue he saw was clear: the world doesn't have enough tanks. Finally, he wanted a game that could "tap into my strength, which is game design and programming, and less of a visual, story-driven game."
Koren ponders what drew him to MMOs and to tanking specifically. "Maybe it's the feeling that everything's bigger than you," he reasons. "When MMOs peak, there was this thing where you felt insignificant in the world, and I think I really liked it." As a tank, he got to lead groups, "dictating the pace" of encounters and calling shots. Koren loved it, but over time his life obligations made it hard to keep up with grinding gear and wrangling parties in modern MMOs, whose systems have generally grown more treadmill-like over time. So, Don't Lose Aggro is both a solution and love letter.
The hard part was translating that MMO feel to a single-player game. There's nothing else quite like this. Koren tips his hat to Capcom's fantasy RPG Dragon's Dogma for getting "close" to the tanking feel in its warrior gameplay. The MMO template relies on having other players involved. Don't Lose Aggro lets you select NPC party members like a healer, mage, or rogue to approximate this, but Koren can't do everything an MMO would.
"When you say, 'Look, I'm doing MMO tanking but in a single-player game,' everyone's gonna expect everything you see in an MMO in a single-player game, and that is an incredible scope," he says. "So from the get-go, I was thinking, how do we solve the scope in this where I don't have to, from day one, put all these different systems in?"
The roguelike package, with unpredictable but exciting upgrades, does a lot of heavy lifting here. It creates replayability by making familiar levels feel fresh, and for Koren, who says solo development has been "the hardest thing I've done, I think, in my whole life," it also stretches his budget by enabling denser content over more sprawling content with greater scope. You might build into evasion tanking, blocking, taunts, kiting, or all manner of tank archetypes across different runs.
Most importantly, to truly nail the tanking feel, your NPC companions will get mad at you if they take a lot of damage. Thank goodness for that.
I am seeing experienced tanks run through the game five to six times faster
Oren Koren
"For me at least, that's an instant reminder of what it feels like to tank," Koren says. "Because more often than not, a tank is a job where, even if you do your best, you might still get some heat from your group. And I find that very interesting, that I can provide these different social aspects in a single-player game."
Koren's advice for tanking? "Get ready to not be important. If you come with that mindset, I think you'll be fine." And if you do it right, you'll find that you are quite important to the party. Don't tell them I said this, but if the tank dies, we all die; if the DPS dies, we just take longer (assuming no timed wipe, but the DPS always play that card) .
In Steam Early Access, Koren hopes to improve the Don't Lose Aggro experience with much more content, and better onboarding for folks who have never tanked or even played MMOs – which, in play tests, can be the difference between a 5-minute clear and a 1-hour struggle, he says. "I am seeing experienced tanks run through the game five to six times faster," a stunned Koren says.
The launch, and the milestone of shipping a game like this post-Rockstar, has been invigorating. "I think the work is just beginning," he says. "I feel good because it got me to a point where I realized what needs to be done, and it's become incredibly clear what this game needs, and how much it needs, to be a full game."
