The Roguelikes Thread

[empi]

Fuck yeah, just won ADOM again, dark elven priest

 

[Monstrous Bat]

Has anyone here played Frozen Depths? I came across this game a few months ago but haven't got the time to play it. Is it any good?

 

[Damned Registrations]

You need to fully explore a lot of levels in ToME for other stuff though, like the bits of lore. And hell, just finding the stairs can be a total pain on a lot of levels without it. The maze is a perfect example, aside from the forests (and theres plenty to go in to.)

 

[SerratedBiz]

You need to fully explore a lot of levels in ToME for other stuff though, like the bits of lore. And hell, just finding the stairs can be a total pain on a lot of levels without it. The maze is a perfect example, aside from the forests (and theres plenty to go in to.)

Which is rightly painful, yes, but somewhat alleviated by the auto-explore button (default: Z). It'll basically take your character to explore every unexplored (derp) area of the map, pausing upon items (once for each, so you can safely ignore one and it won't stop upon it every time), 'intereresting terrain' (such as the exits, doors, portals and such) and upon sighting enemies. By the time you've fully explored the area and checked over every item, pressing it will take you directly from one exit to the other (unless you run into traps on the way, in which case you'll have to press the button again and you'll keep going towards the exit you were originally heading towards).

All in all, I'm quite pleased with this feature. Yes, the Maze is outright painful without it.

 

[Zed]

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

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

 

[Castanova]

Tome4 is a total snooze-fest. Way too influenced by terribad modern RPG character systems like in MMOs and BioWare games. If it acts as a gateway roguelike for newcomers who don't know any better then I guess it'll serve some purpose, though.

 

[Rpgsaurus Rex]

You need to fully explore a lot of levels in ToME for other stuff though, like the bits of lore. And hell, just finding the stairs can be a total pain on a lot of levels without it. The maze is a perfect example, aside from the forests (and theres plenty to go in to.)

Lore serves no in-game purpose, though. Stairs are almost always easy to find. The Maze always has them in SE corner, just click your way through it. Trollmire and the other Forest always have stairs on the Eastern side. On levels where stairs are randomly placed (usually "dungeon" types like the Kor Pul and the tower with the Master), auto-explore doesn't make you find them any faster, it just makes you explore every single bit of the level. And other than finding lore (which I find poorly written, and so I ignore it), there's no reason to explore them.

 

[mr.doo]

Broken bottle is pretty good too.

 

[Roderick]

I'm liking Infra Arcana (the Lovecraftian roguelike)

 

[Stabwound]

I'll update the first post in the near future since people seem to want it.

It's nice to see the fact that the genre is becoming more and more popular by the day. Who would have ever guessed that there would even be a roguelike podcast, roguelike game-development contests, online play servers and literally hundreds of games (even if most suck and are never to be developed again)?
It's the solitary offshoot of CRPGs that is more than .

 

[Lord Rocket]

Has anyone here played Frozen Depths? I came across this game a few months ago but haven't got the time to play it. Is it any good?

It's alright. Very simple. It's free - why not give it a go?

 

[PorkaMorka]

Tome4 is a total snooze-fest. Way too influenced by terribad modern RPG character systems like in MMOs and BioWare games. If it acts as a gateway roguelike for newcomers who don't know any better then I guess it'll serve some purpose, though.

I dunno, I think it is pretty enjoyable to play a melee fighter and actually have some character abilities besides bump attacking. I'd like to hear a more in depth criticism of the concept he is using for character builds, if you care to offer one.

IMHO, it is a strong point of the game, as it gives the player more things to think about. I would say that the problem with TOME has much more to do with the way levels are designed (they're not actually very random).

 

[SerratedBiz]

IMHO, it is a strong point of the game, as it gives the player more things to think about. I would say that the problem with TOME has much more to do with the way levels are designed (they're not actually very random).

This. After playing a few hours (like two whole days, damn you roguelikes) what I'm mostly irritated with is the lack of variety. It's always Starting Area -> Old Forest -> Maze or something like that, same old enemies and same old terrain. Unfortunately, it's very bland company to the character system (which I have enjoyed, as straightforward as it is).

Now I'm looking for another RL. Fucking thread.

I'm liking Infra Arcana (the Lovecraftian roguelike)

It's a nice concept but really unpolished. LARPing your character along with the descriptions taken from HPL is 90% of the fun in the game.

 

[Castanova]

I dunno, I think it is pretty enjoyable to play a melee fighter and actually have some character abilities besides bump attacking. I'd like to hear a more in depth criticism of the concept he is using for character builds, if you care to offer one.

IMHO, it is a strong point of the game, as it gives the player more things to think about. I would say that the problem with TOME has much more to do with the way levels are designed (they're not actually very random).

Well, for sure, the levels and world contribute significantly to the game being boring. On the character front, however -- it's been a while since I played it but I don't think that necessarily more character abilities = better. The abilities in the game felt extremely MMO-esque. Like, "hit the enemy for 110% dmg and have a 15% chance to stun" and then when you level up you can spend a point and it becomes 111% dmg and 16% chance to stun. The ability offered me basically zero tactical decision-making. Basically, if I was fighting someone tough, I used it on them every time the cooldown was over. In other words, dump points into a few abilities and then just use them every time the cooldown ends. Yawn.

For DC:SS, for example, a melee fighter's tactical choices revolve around world positioning (Tome's world is a random mess of trees... at least the beginning) and using items intelligently. Again, I have a hard time remembering but I'm pretty sure the items I found were mostly useless and/or boring enough to forget them.

 

[Damned Registrations]

If you're using your stun every time it leaves CD you're doing it wrong. A lot of enemies have powerful healing or defensive abilities and you need to use a stun to keep them on cooldown right when they need them for greatest effect.

ToME also has much, much better tools for tactical positioning than most roguelikes. Blinks, dashes, pushes, pulls, swaps, 1000% speed bursts, all sorts of crap.

My biggest gripe with the game is actually the loot. In almost all other roguelikes, the first few magical items you find are both important, game changing discoveries, and feel like valuable treasures. Even if they devolve into monty hauls later on, the first decent items you get always feel exciting. But I never get that in ToME4. Every item, from begining to end, feels like such a minor imprvement that I can't really be excited over getting it. Boots of speed in toher roguelikes give you 50-150% speed boosts, in ToME4 the equivalent items give you like 5%. Ditto for resists or most anything else. You need a whole outfit of similar gear to accrue a significant bonus, and any single piece of that outfit is mostly replaceable and unimportant.

 

[Rpgsaurus Rex]

If you feel like like ToME's combat feels stale try picking an exciting class with a huge array of active skills: Shadowblade, Archmage, Anorithil, Paradox Mage, or some such. If you cba to unlock all this shit just use this:
http://forums.te4.org/download/file.php?id=568 and but it in Your Name/T-Engine/4.0/profiles/offline/modules/tome.

And yes if you pick a very simple class like Archer you won't have as much variety.

I feel very excited to see what unique item a boss has dropped, since it can mean a huge difference especially in the earlygame (like getting that +% confusion club on a 1-handed melee character, or getting an early Bill's Tree Trunk on a 2-handed goon.) Items may not be as key as they are in Nethack (where there's a pretty fixed set of shit you'll need to get at some point), or Crawl's +resistances before you dive some levels, but they're far from unexciting.

 

[Monstrous Bat]

Has anyone here played Frozen Depths? I came across this game a few months ago but haven't got the time to play it. Is it any good?

It's alright. Very simple. It's free - why not give it a go?

Thanks. I will look into it when I get the time.

 

[PorkaMorka]

Well, for sure, the levels and world contribute significantly to the game being boring. On the character front, however -- it's been a while since I played it but I don't think that necessarily more character abilities = better. The abilities in the game felt extremely MMO-esque. Like, "hit the enemy for 110% dmg and have a 15% chance to stun" and then when you level up you can spend a point and it becomes 111% dmg and 16% chance to stun. The ability offered me basically zero tactical decision-making. Basically, if I was fighting someone tough, I used it on them every time the cooldown was over. In other words, dump points into a few abilities and then just use them every time the cooldown ends. Yawn.

Things have improved a bit in this regard since you played it. Most classes seem to have a core of specialized abilities with specific tactical uses and not many of them are based on low percentage procs. For example, the berzerker (a simpler class) has a stun (it tries to stun 100% of the time), an AOE, a move that instantly charges a few spaces and tries to daze the opponent, an AOE warshout that tries to confuse enemies in a frontal cone, an expensive attack that tries to kill enemies below a certain HP percentage, etc.

There are also a few less specialized abilities (sunder armour etc) that mostly serve as extra damage, but you have to be careful not to run out of stamina so you won't want always want to spam them every time they're off cooldown.

It is true that you will probably develop a set routine for most fights, but things get interesting in the dangerous situations.

For DC:SS, for example, a melee fighter's tactical choices revolve around world positioning (Tome's world is a random mess of trees... at least the beginning) and using items intelligently. Again, I have a hard time remembering but I'm pretty sure the items I found were mostly useless and/or boring enough to forget them.

The levels using the "random mishmash of trees" layout are rare. They're less horrible to deal with now that we have autoexplore.

Potions and scrolls were replaced with infusions and runes. These provide healing, curing, speed boosts, teleports and other effects, but aren't consumable. They're on a timer, so dealing with a tough fight requires watching your cooldowns closely. Wands and equippable items with useable effects also exist.

So most characters have a lot of choices regarding what move to make in a given situation.

However, the game is less tightly balanced than Crawl, so there are a lot of easy fights where your choice doesn't matter and a few extremely dangerous fights where the best play is to run away. That's more of a pacing problem than a character system problem.

 

[BLOBERT]

BROS MY FIRST EVER ROGUELIKE WAS IVAN

http://ivan.sourceforge.net/index.html

BROS IT IS PRETTY BRUTAL AND RANDOM BUT IT IS FUN TO CHOP AN ARM OFF THEN BEAT SOMETHING TO DEATH WITH IT

 

[SCO]

I coded in the button of awesome in Tome 4.

http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=33359



Only needing to duplicate the "on left click" talent activation for bump attacks to commit suicide with style.

Maybe stop for uniques/bosses and low hp too.

 

[Castanova]

However, the game is less tightly balanced than Crawl, so there are a lot of easy fights where your choice doesn't matter and a few extremely dangerous fights where the best play is to run away. That's more of a pacing problem than a character system problem.

OK, it sounds like I played the game too long ago. Still, the other comments you guys are making leads me to believe I shouldn't bother trying it now anyway. I'll give it another year or two.

 

[Stabwound]

I'm not a huge fan of some of the design decisions in Tome4. The skill system is not necessarily bad, but when you combine that with the total lack of consumables (potions, scrolls or even wands) and no hunger or similar mechanic to eliminate resting, there are almost no tactics to the game at all. It's one guy's game and it's his decision to do what he wants with it, but I think that removing consumable items removes a lot of the strategy that is the core of the genre.

I also get the feeling that it's more designed around the assumption that people are going to be playing on non-permadeath mode. A good example of this is how "Normal" difficulty was standard roguelike difficulty: you die and you're done. Then it got branched off so that you have to select "roguelike" mode like you would with Diablo hardcore and "Normal" difficulty doesn't necessarily mean you're dead when you die. It might sound asinine to complain about, but the mere fact that it was switched around makes me wonder if the dev considers non-permadeath the "right" way to play, especially since the game has become very popular and more people seem to play non-permadeath than "roguelike" mode.

Has anyone played the orignal TOME, which is based off of Angband? It's a pretty fun game, and probably my favorite of the Angband variants. It's similar to TOME4 in structure, with an overworld and multiple towns and dungeons, but it's more of a traditional roguelike. I have never really played it extensively but it's pretty fun. It's not longer actively developed because it eventually turned into Tome 4.0, and from what I gather the final version has some balance issues, but whatever. I wish TOME4 was a given a different name and someone kept developing 2.x because they are much different games overall. I see now that the website is even gone, which was pretty extensive. It's kind of sad that it's been abandoned like that.

It suffers from the same problem I think TOME4 has, though, where you have to slog through the same crap and quests over and over if you die. Roguelikes don't necessarily work well when designed like a full-fledged RPG rather than a straight-forward, very random dungeon crawl.

Speaking of Angband, it's probably about time I actually finished one of the games.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

It's not about right or wrong way to play, it's just that non-permadeath is more popular so it's labeled as the difficulty setting most people are likely to play.

In any case, if it was developed assuming you are playing without permadeath, wouldn't that make the game harder ? There's no reason to pull any punches if you assume the player has extra lives.

 

[PorkaMorka]

If the game is developed for adventurer mode instead of roguelike mode, the developers may be willing to tolerate a higher risk for "cheap" or "unfair deaths", as long as they're relatively rare. In adventurer mode you can just shrug off a couple of cheap deaths, not so in roguelike mode.

A practical example of this would be random uniques in TOME. In certain zones, random uniques are generated. Their skills are generated from the pool of player talents, they usually get 1-2 classes to pick skills from. By itself, this could create some issues as a talent that is balanced for the player may not be balanced when used against him. However, the actual situation is much worse as these uniques are allowed to dramatically exceed the 5 point cap on player talents and their abilities will continue to scale up and up, potentially creating some very dangerous bosses when they get 10+ points in certain talents.

This situation probably wouldn't have been allowed to go unchecked if the game was developed with roguelike difficulty in mind. As is, people playing on roguelike mode should really avoid these random uniques whenever possible, which makes the game a bit more boring (only fighting non random bosses) and punishes the unspoiled (going to Last Hope Graveyard when the game gives you the quest = really bad idea).

 

[empi]

Could never really get into the new TOME, and i'm also wary of a roguelike that has a non perma death mode. There's already enough bullshit insta-kill stuff (especially in nethack, ADOMl), without encouraging the devs to add more because "Oh they can probably reload anyway". God how i'd love to design a RL
After trying out dozens of different roguelikes, i'm beggining to doubt i'll ever learn another one, well, until ADOM II becomes more of a fully fledged game