NetHack 3.6.2
nethack.org
nethack.org
There is something heartwarming about the attention to detail in some games. NetHack, Dwarf Fortress, ... I wish more games would be made with this mindset. Many modern games seem to overemphasize the "gaming" aspect, and sometimes forget the "playing" with all its joyful intricacies.
Caves of Qud is still in active development, and available on Steam. If you do get it, make sure to go into the menus and enable the experimental UI if you want to see how awesome a Roguelike interface could be if it used graphics.
Also, if you're like me disable Permadeath in the debug menu, the first village you start at is the only non-procedurally-generated village in the game, so if I you don't want to retraverse it over and over, you need savegames.
Here's a Guide: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=48420...
I'm 400 hours in but I still haven't beat the main quest. (But I also suck.)
>The setting is a lot like Gamma World, or if you don't know what that is, post-apocalyptic Dune but with more pulp sci-fi (and chrome).
Or a grittier, LSDier Adventure Time
Oh boy, that's actually a fair description!
Any tips I should know about? I haven't even been able to complete either the watervine or the copper wire quests.
(As IRL) I only got as far as I have because this build is so inherently great: you start with great gear, a sweet desert rifle, you got blocking and sword skills for when the enemy closes in, and I take a focus on tinkering, which is one the most interesting gameplay aspects and quite powerful if you're smart/lucky (find good schematics and can afford them).
Red Rock and the Rust Wells should be a breeze with it. On other classes, they can be nightmarish.
Also, another tip: there's a convenient shortcut to Red Rock somewhere in Joppa. ;3 (I didn't discover this until embarrassingly recently.)
Which?
> Hero poly'd into rope golem form could choke headless or non-breathing monsters
Amazing level of detail!
> And to complete the chain of "the dev team thinks of everything": There's a luck penalty for breaking eggs you laid.
> The number of ways you can solve any specific problem is just ridiculous. I also love that a lot of them are pun based. (i.e., to make a quick escape you could drink a cursed potion of gain level, which will cause you to float up through the ceiling to the previous dungeon level instead of increasing your experience level, or removing cursed levitation boots by floating over a sink - which causes you to sink to the ground).
i.e. how much can be done from clever rules, how much has to be exhaustively enumerated, special cases etc
you should dive into the Nethack source code. It's really well organized but in monster behavior code (mon.c), it's an 'if'-fest :)
I mean it's great for what it is -- an organic codebase that evolved over decades (so there's a lot of performance/memory optimizations that make the code somewhat less clear like a lot of bitwise operations) and targeted a dizzying array of platforms (so there's a million #ifdefs that you have to climb through, many of them nested) and also compilers (so there's a legacy of really short file and function names that decrease clarity as well).
The attention to details is truly inspiring. But as a codebase, it's a mess.
On the other hand, Brogue [0]'s code is very clear and enjoyable to read.
Succubus/incubus seduction might result in loss of levitation which in turn could drop the hero onto a trap that transports him/her elsewhere; seduction was proceeding as if nothing unusual had happened
That's just crazy! Wear ring/boots of levitation over a teleport trap and let the succubus remove them for you. Who does this?! Love it.
If some people reading this thread are interested in trying a roguelike for the first time I strongly suggest not going for Nethack, unless you really enjoy not understanding 90% of what's happening and dying repeatedly on the first few levels. DCSS is definitely a good entry point, I think Angband is also easier on beginners (it can be very difficult to finish it but the early game is more straightforward than NH).
Similarly in DCSS the levels are so large and there's so much space between interesting bits, that you spend a fair amount of your time mindlessly pressing keys to stride through the hallways.
Mind you, DCSS is much better about this than Nethack because there are things like waypoints and fast travel, loot/stash search (with ^F), etc. I'm not contesting that it's better than Nethack in this respect.
But if I may say, Brogue is better about this in that there are very few 'wasted' turns: the food clock is very finely tuned so you really can't waste too much time or you'll die, levels are very compact so there's not as much exploring to do (but there's just as much tactical depth on each level, if not more, because of how the environment works in Brogue).
When you're not auto-o-tabbing, i.e. when you encounter more dangerous monsters, the game rewards tedious habits such as playing very conservatively (hide and seek, kiting, climbing up/resting/climbing down/etc.).
An explanation was that the dev team targets the top players first and doesn't want to allow them to find a way to suddenly cheese through the game, so they lock down on every quirk, feature or strategy that lets them do so. Problem is, the top players are really good and always find another way to cheese, so the devs play a game of cat and mouse to streamline the game further in the name of balance. Meanwhile, newbies struggle and mid-players get bored.
[1]: http://nethack4.org/
Regardless, it's one of my favorite games of all time.
But I don't know what a different implementation would look like.
Before "nethack", there was "hack", but I don't know much about that, except that it was a clone of "rogue", the original "rogue-like". There is some history here: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Hack
But rereading it now, it just seems like someone looked up the word "hack" after the fact, and your explanation makes more sense.
Everything about them is extrememly intuitive. The movement works perfectly and the context bar and quick popup keyboard make playing almost quicker than on pc for me. Plus, there's the whole, nethack in your pocket bonus.
I've tried ports of angband, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead for android and found angband and DCSS to be totally unplayable. CDDA was playable, but kind of clunky and awkward and not very fun in the end.
Highly recommend anyone into roguelikes give the android port of nethack a go.
One thing that's even better than the desktop version is the amount of immersion. You play out this character's life in post-apocalyptic world. You get to make choices for him: what items to collect and leave, what to craft and cook, what to eat and drink to get necessary vitamins & minerals, how to dresses for each season, how to recover from injuries and sticky situations, how to maintain and upgrade a vehicle, how to learn skills necessary to survive... and it's a turn-based simulation. When you are interrupted by RL, you just put the app to background and forget about it for hours or days. Then you start the game again and your character is still where he was, waiting for your choice on what to do next. It's incredible to be able to have something like this in your pocket. A simplistic but still immersive simulation of reality where you can lead a second life.
As a bonus you get to pick up basic knowledge on wide range of topics, from item descriptions and craft recipes - chemistry, medicine, farming, ancient and modern weaponry, car mechanics, survival in the wild...
One word of advice - turn off all enemies when you are starting out, and focus on interacting with the game and its rich world.
Something about the complexity of the controls is part of the charm for me though. Suddenly you remember you can do something you totally forgot about and it changes the way you play the game. Or you reach some kind of understanding about one of the mechanics that just makes it part of your play style.
I've played a lot of different roguelikes, nethack and its variants are some of the few I still get that feeling of discovery from, despite playing it for years, scouring spoilers and even looking at parts of the source for fun.
I think pathos fit the bill better, even if it's a simplified nethack, precisely because a popup keyboard is not a central part of the gameplay experience
I was referring more to roguelikes originally designed for keyboards and adapted to touch ui rather than ones designed around it from the beginning.
Just for a game with the complexity of nethack, that expects a full keyboard full of controls(with modifier keys), originally designed around a bare terminal, they found a particularly efficient and intuitive(for me at least) solution, especially compared to other ports i've played.