The Tavern

Could Dark Souls 1 be co-opted into fun traditional roguelike? Assume that bonfires would be removed.

There are more branches in Dark Souls than crawl and each branch tends to have a specific challenge and rule set. Players tend to be able to choose from several branches at any given time - but because the challenges are so particular and the enemy sets so small, the challenges would be predictable and therefore boring perhaps.

The attribute system as a gate for items and spells is certainly stream lined but probably not so interesting compared to crawl's skill system.

Would it make for a replayable roguelike or get dull like Nethack after a couple ascensions?

As a note, the Ultima Ratio Regum developer has mentioned before that, once he finally gets to the game part of his game instead of working on his cool procedural generation stuff, he plans to add "Dark-Souls-esque combat mechanics." He's shooting for next January for that bit of implementation, but other than that one line of text in the development plan, I don't know that he's spent much time talking about what the gameplay will actually be like, though RPS called it "4x" in one review.

I was following URR for a while, until he said "Combat will be extremely rare" or something along those lines, and I just walked away, deeply disappointed.

I'm sure there are people out there who are interested in a roguelike historical art theft mystery, or whatever exactly it's about, but I like my roguelikes bloody!

I dunno, the guy seems really deeply into a lot of weird competitive/twitch gaming scenes, and he has talked in a complementary fashion about DCSS. I get the feeling that, however the game turns out, it'll probably be interesting and fun to play. Plus it looks so rad.

dark souls is a buzzword

If the roguelike radio episode is any indication, URR will be procedurally generated Carmen Sandiago.

More importantly, so is "roguelike."