An open source roguelike adventure through dungeons

vintermann•1 day ago

This is one of the first games which changed so much that I picked it up again and realized it's not the game I liked anymore. It may still be a fine game, but it has little association to Linley Henzell's Crawl left. These days, as more non-open games go into "updates forever" mode, it's probably going to happen more. I can see it happening real time with Minecraft.

iamthemonster•1 day ago

I love that you can play every previous version for free too! I THINK I like the current version the best, but there are some other good versions in the past, like just before food disappeared (I actually thought food was a great mechanic).

Now that I'm getting back into it, I am tempted to stick with the current version for a couple of years so I can really learn it.

I'm giving ToME a go on steam deck now, I like the idea of having more of a narrative and open world. I feel like the dungeon in DCSS is more like a series of individual encounters.

schoen•1 day ago

I was pretty shocked at the rate of change in Crawl. I played it for a couple of years and during that time entire major game mechanics changed, like moving from many kinds of food, to only one kind of food, to completely eliminating food and hunger (while adding a completely new form of clock to kill players who didn't keep moving).

Bluestein•about 24 hours ago

Why was the rate of change so huge? And the changes so deep? These roguelikes particularly tend to be stable, almost frozen - at least in terms of mechanics.-

vintermann•about 21 hours ago

There were a couple of people who were very active in development and were very opinionated about good game design. Then they slowed down a bit, and some other people came in with more ideas, they may not have been quite as radical but by then it was established that upending designs was something DCSS did. (A bit of like the problem the Esperanto offshoots had).

It was at all time driven by very heavy players, and IMO the theme especially suffered from it (by the time you're a heavy player, you have completely abstracted it into a bunch of systems, and it's very hard to see it like a new player would see it).

Ntrails•about 23 hours ago

I started playing (from a thread on HN) ~7 years ago. The changes are both broad and deep - devs are not afraid to rework something three times until happy with the outcome. I missed food/hunger entirely but very few players speak highly of it.

There is no difficulty playing previous versions, changing and compiling your own etc etc. Devs are changing the game to be better (in their own view), more fun, more engaging. They should do that! It is a living piece of art imo

card_zero•about 24 hours ago

Something similar happened to Angband, when I went back to it recently it had been given an overhaul that included making the game shorter. So I went back to v3.4.1.

Founderarcstone•1 day ago

love seeing this kind of work great job!

Bluestein•1 day ago

One can't ever get enough nethack andit feels like a BBS. What's not to like?

subeadia•1 day ago

DCSS has existed for decades...

Lord_Zero•about 6 hours ago

No mobile support?

jdw64•about 24 hours ago

Xom titters.

An open source roguelike adventure through dungeons

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