The Roguelikes Thread

[Damned Registrations]

I got pretty dissillusioned when I went to their forums and suggested that they make melee combat more transparent the way spellcasters are. You know, how you can look at an enemy and know it's weaknesses and resists, look at your spells and know their noise, damage, success rate and mana cost, look at enemies and know their basic magic resistance, but have no idea about their dodge, armour, melee damage, number of attacks, hit rate, attack speed, or your own hit rate, damage, or attack speed. I brought this up and was basically met with 'We don't want to do that. We want the game to be difficult to understand (except for spellcasters.)'

Pretty much gave up hope of it moving in a good direction in the long run at that point.

 

[Stabwound]

I've played since the early days of Stone Soup when it was being developed by a few hardcore fans of the original Dungeon Crawl. At a certain point most of them quit actively developing it, but then opened up development to anyone that can code. At this point people make changes on their own personal whim, and I feel like the game has taken a sharp turn for the worse since then.

I don't even feel like getting into it, and most people probably don't even care, but we have things like the rapid nerfing of gods with every release, adding fucking stupid races like Felid, which doesn't fit in with the rest of the game at all, etc. Worst of all was the addition of a factor of randomness to how monster/player turns work and how monsters can sometimes randomly get 2 turns in a row.

Whatever. I just don't like the way the development has gone.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Oh god I hated that change. Trying to decipher the arcane ritual that determines turn order in most roguelikes is bad enough. Adding randomness to everything is a fucking sin. And of course it fucks over melee and stabbers more than casters, who at worst have an enemy one tile closer than they expected, as opposed to getting hit one more turn than they expected.

I think stealth mechanics still have a lot of room for improvement in roguelikes. DCSS and TOME4 both have some good takes on this, but both also have some really bad and strange flaws. I'd love to see a roguelike that had a really good stealth system. It's the perfect format for it, since it's turn based and low on resource requirements theres a ton of room for under the hood calculations to take into account things like light sources, sound, different senses, multiple skills and stats, distance, etc. It's rather ironic that the namesake of the genre had pretty much no stealth aspect at all, and even after all this time we've still only reached what I'd consider to be adequate, even though lots of other things have become truly exceptional ( item interaction, character building, world scope, and even combat mechanics if you include DF.) I'd love to play a roguelike centered around stealth, where you can tell the difference between being heard or seen, and AI behaves differently for each, and you can hide again effectively under proper circumstances, background noises help you stay hidden instead of magically alerting monsters that are either sleeping or hunting you down, stuff like that.

 

[desocupado]

They changed it so that one of those actions has to be a move action, so you don't get attacked twice anymore.

It helps the monsters catch up with you if you're running, tho.

 

[Damned Registrations]

You still get screwed though, if for example you were two paces away, moved towards the enemy to get the first attack (vital for dangerous enemies) and get screwed by having the enemy double turn you and get the first attack off.
Casters have no such problem. Worst case scenario, an enemy ends up next to them when they'd planned to have a space between them, but they still get their free turn to attack/flee/heal/whatever. Melee characters have to take action after they've already been hit- which may well have one shotted them or caused level draining or something. It's bad enough having to take into account the chance your attack will miss or roll badly; having a chance of being preemptively struck too is going too far imo.

 

[DakaSha]

Incursion
The game is based on the open source D&D licence. The current version is more a demo (but still long and huge in scope and features). The creator supposedly is porting the whole game to a new engine, but hasn't posted any news in one and a half years.

He posts in the google group and its still being developed. Which is awesome because it has the most incredible mechanics ive seen in any CRPG

 

[Lord Rocket]

Does anyone have any experience with The Slimy Lichmummy? It sounds interesting but vi keys are shit and the procedure for changing them is very poorly documented. Trying to decide if it's worth the hassle.

EDIT: autohotkey derp

Also here's a stealth based roguelike, seems like it would be fun if more than the tutorial area was finished. Can't really tell if it's still being developed though.

 

[Stabwound]

I've been playing Tales of Maj'Eyal again tonight and I'm pleased to see that they finally added auto-explore. After playing Crawl so long I find it almost impossible to play a roguelike without this feature. I've been playing ToME4 off and on since it was released and it's nice to see that it's really been progressing a lot.

I don't know what it is about ToME but I want to like it so bad and I really don't love it, it's just okay. I actually really like how the online profile system works, unlocking races/classes, the game is polished nicely etc. I think the skill system and heavily cooldown skill-based combat which is obviously heavily influenced by MMORPGs and most likely Dragon Age is one of the more annoying parts of it. Not to mention that it's structured like a linear RPG more or less, so that you have to play through the same tired shit over and over if you die, which will probably happen since I refuse to play on the non-permadeath modes. At least the developer seems to understand that and made the beginning zones shorter in depth than they used to be.

The game is pretty fun until you start dying and have to retrace your steps again, but I guess that's when you should try one of the different character combos. I don't have many unlocked yet but it seems like diversity is one thing the game has going for it.

 

[Zed]

What's auto-explore anyway? Sounds very popamole.

 

[Zdzisiu]

A feature that lets you press a button and then your character goes to a nearest unexplored tile and then to next one, until every tile on a map is explored. Sometimes it also automatically picks up stuff. Of course it stops when you encounter an enemy ect. All in all, it takes the tedium of manually clicking and exploring the whole map away.

 

[Castanova]

What's auto-explore anyway? Sounds very popamole.

It's not popamole, really. It does remove some tedium from the game but at an expense: the autoexplore algorithm is always more inefficient than exploring manually so by autoexploring you're wasting turns -- i.e., wasting food (assuming the game has a hunger mechanic). Also, if you're trying to beat the game quickly (from a turn count perspective) then you can't use autoexplore much either.

EDIT: also, I don't have the DC:SS pedigree of Stabwound by any means (I started on version 0.6 and only have like ten wins total) but I don't have TOO much to complain about with the development going on. I do think it's unfortunate that they nerfed a few classes (Transmuter R.I.P.) and I don't like the Shoals but overall the game still feels fun. Almost all of my deaths are still because I'm lazy/not thinking.

 

[Zed]

Alright. I guess it's kind of what I thought it was, but you convinced me it wasn't all too popamole.

Also here's a stealth based roguelike, seems like it would be fun if more than the tutorial area was finished. Can't really tell if it's still being developed though.

Now that looks really cool.
Man, if I could only arsed creating a FoV I could make a roguelike myself.

 

[Stabwound]

Yeah, autoexplore sounds popamole for sure, but it really isn't. Castanova summed it up pretty well: it just cuts out an extremely boring aspect of the game at an expense. Not only is the algorithm very ineffecient like mentioned, but it also doesn't care at all about strategy. So while a good player might hug the walls as much as possible to have a defense and possible escape if they run into a deadly situation, the autoexplore might just blindly run into an open area which is almost always a bad idea in Crawl. I was excited to have it in Tome4 because some of the maps, especially forest areas and an absolute pain in the ass to manually navigate after you've been through them several times.

Don't pay too much attention to me bitching about the current versions of Crawl. Part of it is because I played it so much and am just sick of it and most of the changes are things people don't care about.

 

[SerratedBiz]

Damn, ToME has sure come a long way since I last played it (when it was Tales of Middle Earth). Definitely gonna give it a whirl, see if it's evolved any for my Dwarven whateverthefuck to destroy.

 

[MisterStone]

Bros why are people even still developing Crawl. It's already fucking awesome, it's been largely bug free for a few releases (as far as I can tell) and it seemed to have perfected balance some time ago. Why do people have to keep fucking with something that doesn't need fucking with?

I sort of wish someone would just take an older clean release with all of the features that most reasonable people like, de-bug it a bit, and release it as DUNGEON CRAWL ULTIMATE PERFECTION EDITION 1.0. No further work would be done on it, except bugfixes.

FFS, the game was awesome before the last release. It still is, but perhaps less awesome. I think someone needs to just seal it up in carbonite and leave it in its perfected state for posterity before more retarded furry stuff gets added to it, and god knows what else.

 

[Stabwound]

Yeah, that's basically it. The main goal of Stone Soup, as far as I know, was to fix the bugs of the last official release of Dungeon Crawl and expand on a few areas that needed to be expanded on. At this point they're just trying to fix things that aren't broken and adding a bunch of bullshit that the game doesn't need. And since they have so many people working on it and add so many random new things, it ends up breaking or unbalancing things and now it's like a dog chasing its tail as they try to fix the things they break that weren't even broken to begin with.

It's possible to have too much in a game, and that is exactly what's happening to DC: SS as far as I'm concerned. The game doesn't need 50 different gods with unique bonuses and 500 different mini-boss characters with mystery powers so that you have to pause playing every 5 minutes and look up their stats so you know that they move 3x faster than a normal monster and have the "rip your head off and shit down the hole" spell.

 

[Malakal]

My favorites are DCSS, ADoM (not playing it extensively anymore but had a lot of good times) and Incursion.

Especially Incursion is a gem that will shine (unless abandoned). Complicated game mechanics, lots if items, powers and spells based on a very expanded system? Hell yeah.

 

[DakaSha]

My favorites are DCSS, ADoM (not playing it extensively anymore but had a lot of good times) and Incursion.

Especially Incursion is a gem that will shine (unless abandoned). Complicated game mechanics, lots if items, powers and spells based on a very expanded system? Hell yeah.

It just needs to be polished and seeing that his Testbed version was already more fun then most games i dont see that becoming a problem.
He has health problems though. I dont know what they are but they seem to be at least moderately severe so offer your sacrifices of popamole and hope the bro is well

 

[Stabwound]

Incursion is like the most frustrating tech demo ever. It's basically a very cool game system without a game to go with it, and it's been going on so long that I doubt it will ever be finished. I had no idea he had severe health problems either. I hope he decides to release the source at some point so that other people can maybe take up the reins on it.

 

[Malakal]

I had loads of fun in Incursion just trying different builds. Its that good for mechanic nerds like me.

 

[Bruma Hobo]

I guess I don't get it. Rougelikes are almost all tactical combat games, not RPGs. Play Ultima if you want an RPG.

Ban this fucker

 

[Rpgsaurus Rex]

ToME4 is just the most accessible roguelike atm. It's so easy to have fun, it has great graphics, spell effects, sounds, a ton of different character classes with unique builds and even a semblance of a plot. It's the one I play most these days, although the early levels to grow stale after a while.

Nethack will always hold a dear place in my heart as the most "heart-felt" roguelike. It has so much little detail in everything, it makes you actually feel as part of a different world and not just playing someone else's fantasy.

Crawl is kinda... I don't know, it feels too "mechanical". Too focused on balance. You can't just have fun clicking things to death you have to pay attention at every level or you can die after 1 mistake even on a strong char. I guess it's fun when you want a challenge, but after hundreds of hours spent on it I don't really feel like going back.

ADOM feels like a thing that could be truly great but is too unpolished, a RPG/roguelike hybrid like ToME4 but one that got stuck at one development stage and never got further.

Incursion is just really original and the prettiest ASCII roguelike, but again too unpolished to really get into (I remember last time I played it I got to like level 8 at which point there were SO many enemies on screen I had to wait minutes before taking each action, and that's on a powerful PC).

Dungeons of Dredmor I fell in love with at the very start what with the huge number of builds you can choose, but after 4+ levels I saw that every level is just a dumb rehash of the previous ones with 0 challenge so I quit. A real disappointment, and I thought that one was a real gem.

 

[Rpgsaurus Rex]

Yeah, autoexplore sounds popamole for sure, but it really isn't. I was excited to have it in Tome4 because some of the maps, especially forest areas and an absolute pain in the ass to manually navigate after you've been through them several times.

I think it's kinda excessive for ToME to have autoexplore, in Crawl sure you want to explore every nook and cranny for key items/shops/food and to get xp to not die at the next level, but in ToME it's just about finding the ladder to the next level since unique loot just lying on the ground is extremely rare, and most XP/unique loot comes from bosses that are always at the last level of the dungeon. (There are exceptions like the Ancent Elven Ruins or some such, where it makes sense to explore everything just because the loot there is so imba, but that particular level is just very intutitive to explore manually).

And you don't have to explore any forest levels either, except for Trollmire (where you need to find the 4 scrolls to progress to the "secret" level)

 

[Gord]

Stabwound: Are you going to edit the first post in this topic to provide a list of the games that came up here?

 

[Shannow]

Yeah, then we could put it up as a sticky.