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Comment by germanjoey | Hacker News Reader

The state of DCSS is interesting because it's like a software Ship of Theseus. It's been actively hacked (and slashed) upon for so long that it is hard to claim that its the same game, even if the git commit history shows a direct lineage otherwise. Or, at least, the aspects of the game that I once so greatly admired (which I wrote about here [1]) are longer present. Only a superficial similarity remains. A very opinionated group of core developers with a minimalist design philosophy has driven the project for years now, and the game now is not the game I knew.

[1] https://rhizzone.net/articles/crawl/

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The DCSS community has vocal minority that's against any change to the game. Often they forget that old versions are still available for download, playable offline and on most online webtiles servers.

I for one appreciate the underlying philosophy of the game and the overarching intent for any change: to remove tedium, grinding, trivial optimal play, remove the requirement of spoiling yourself to beat the game - the latter point making it basically the opposite of a game like Nethack.

https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/docs/cr...

With a lot of software, it may be the case that you may want some of the changes but not others. (Fortunately, you can fork the project and make your own modifications, but you might not want to do that, for whatever reason, but if you do, then it will be a nonstandard version.)

> Often they forget that old versions are still available for download, playable offline and on most online webtiles servers.

Typically players get upset because they like the majority of the quality of life changes, and new content, but don't like that something was removed that they can't enjoy in that new version. Community knowledge also deteriorates over time; you can ask questions about recent versions, but antiquated versions require meticulous code diving / commit log scanning to figure things out.

Sounds like an instance of 'bitcreep': https://www.gwern.net/Holy-wars#bitcreep Yes, all the binaries are still there and runnable in a VM, but everything around them can't be run in a VM, and those changes impose negative externalities on those who were happy with the previous way of things.

Dwarf Fortress has similar “breakpoints” where major releases that had to drop save file compatibility have separate “version” pages on the wiki to support those who remain on the older version to continue running the fort or mega project they’re working on.

Interesting, that sounds like the philosophy of (modern) ToME, which takes some of those ideas to extremes, to its benefit I find! For example, potions are removed in favor of Inscriptions, that are equipped to limited slots and have cooldown-limited usage, but otherwise stick around forever.

I find ToME has much more unique classes too, doing a lot of interesting things, even if luring monsters into a 1-tile wide corridor is still the safest way most of the time...

That's an unkind characterization. People aren't just complaining to complain - from their perspective their gripes are legitimate. I'd categorize myself as an explorer type of player (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...). So I like to explore how game mechanics interact with each other and new levels. Lately, the devs have removed lots of details and nuances in crawl. That makes the game less interesting for me because there are less things to discover. For example, mummies are kind of pointless now since no race needs to eat. Removing features may be good for achiever type of players though, because it forces them to come up with ways to beat the game without those features.

Now I 100% love the direction of DCSS, but yeah mummies should have been deleted and possibly ghouls as well. But more generally, DCSS is and continues to evolve to be a tactical combat game. Complexity in other areas is continually being stripped out.

That's a great way of putting it. As a tactical combat game it is amazing, but as an exploration game it is lacking (and actually getting worse, imo).

It's fine not to like the game or some of the changes but I don't really get the resentment towards the devs that I read in some of these replies though.

If there's one thing where I believe that "if you don't like it, just fork it" is warranted it's this type of game. It's not like it's production-critical for anyone, so there's no deadline and you can take your time. It's a rather minimalist 2D game, no complex game engine knowledge is required. When I looked into the code a few years ago I found it very readable so it's a nice target for customization.

If you feel like modern DCSS doesn't go in the right direction just fork whatever version you preferred and go from there.

I really like the philosophy as well. But there are probably less than a handful of players that actually managed to beat DCSS unspoilered. It's a really hard game, even knowing the various tricks.

Another possibility would be to add some things as game options, e.g. add game option that you can set at the beginning of the game if foods are enabled/disabled, if certain classes of items or other features (e.g. religion) are enabled/disabled, etc.

26 years and counting! It's passed through many able hands.

My chief lingering complaint with crawl is that the game is too long. Early game is tedious and last I played seriously the midgame tended to drag on. I'd like to see the standard game contracted to twenty-seven levels. Squeeze down Orc, Lair, the Lair branches and so on.

> contracted to twenty-seven levels

For anyone unfamiliar, 27 is a number ingrained deeply into the game, with some traces very well hidden.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dcss/comments/mvrc1w/did_anyone_of_...

https://github.com/b-crawl/bcrawl seems to make the game shorter and be fairly active.

It is a common complaint among a lot of experienced DCSS players that the game is too long. I have 10 wins under my belt and I stopped playing mostly for this reason. About half way through the game your victory is essentially guaranteed.

I disagree about the early game though, this is the most exciting part of DCSS, and the hardest.

I read cursorily through your article and it seems to me the major mechanic (no "this is always better") is still there.

What aspects do you feel have changed the nature of the game?

I've only played DCSS for a few years and it seems the game now is a bit kinder with newbies but not substancially different.

It's definitely a different game. Personally I love the changes and mostly agree with the devs. Food was for most characters a pointless mechanic once you had a basic level of game knowledge. However there are also some interesting forks which preserve some of the old mechanics.

Can you give a short summary of the changes? I'm not familiar with the current state of the game

The blog has a list of all recent trunk and released changes: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/blog

As I mentioned in the sibling comment, there's a vocal minority in this game loudly complaining about any change. My suggestion is to decide for yourself, play an older version if you prefer, or any of the dozen forks, all available on most public servers.

Off the top of my head, they have recently:

* removed the whole hunger/food system: no need to eat, no need to butcher corpses or collect food, magic doesn't make you hungry.

* removed cursed items: an issue only in the early game, trivially managed by careful identification of unknown scrolls

* removed unremarkable species or monsters

* removed trivial spells such as Deflect Missiles or Regeneration

I haven't played rogue/hack/nethack games in a couple of decades, so I'm out of it. But: no need to eat? That was a key part of the game (though the cannibalistic part of that was sometimes weird). Cursed items, on the other hand, were a PITA so I wouldn't miss that part.

Food is far more important in nethack than it ever was in DCSS, it was never a key part of the game in DCSS, just an annoying (and sometimes spoilery) minigame.

About hunger management: it was annoying, it didn't bring any strategical or interesting gameplay, and if you were unlucky with RNG you'd just die. One or more inventory slots had to be used for food. It would heavily penalise newbies or cautious players that were taking the game a little slower than most. Would force you to cast lower level, less fun, spells so that you'd not starve because you cast one too many level 9 spell.

That doesn't sound fun to me, and don't miss it for one second.

I haven't played in a few years but always felt like crawl's hunger system drove faster games -- where in NetHack I could usually find a way to survive indefinitely and camp out and explore slowly, crawl always felt like the Star Wars garbage compactor pushing me forward.

I think I liked it but I'm not sure it helped me master the gameplay (I sometimes felt rushed even when hunger management wasn't obviously an issue).

They replaced food clock with a straight-up death clock. There's a counter that constantly ticks down; if it reaches zero, you just die.

Just to be clear, the death clock is hidden and is intended to be impossible to trigger if you're not actively cheesing with one of the very few exploits that depend on waiting for a very long time. IIRC to tune the clock, they took the longest non-exploit game on record, and doubled the time that took.

While I like many of the changes in DCSS, I have stayed on 0.24 because I'm wary of how the game will play without food. I kind of enjoy struggling through the early-ish game without using permafood, and then seeing a pack of orcs and going "Hey they look tasty, maybe I can eat some of them before I starve to death!"

That being said I want to play Djinn eventually so I'll upgrade when that time comes.

The changes remove some of the most memorable moments:

- Eating questionable meat for random powers

- Losing your great items permanently

- Not getting poison resistance and putting off the hive for ages

- Not being able to carry as much as a weak character

- Putting a stash on Hive:2 so monsters can't get your items

- Being a mummy summoner and having a full screen of summons (no hunger requirement)

- Hill orc priests would wander the map gaining converts

A lot of these things became part of the game muscle memory to avoid. They were hilarious and emotional as a new player. They are now obsolete. I have mixed feelings - I always felt enough mitigation existed in the game and I enjoyed learning about it

Hive was a cute thing but I absolutely do not miss item destruction and weight management lol

Item destruction I found okay because randarts were immune and it made them feel special. They could have went down the route of mitigation but I respect their clean design ethos

Weight management - yes, hard to have too much nostalgia for that one

I really miss being able to play a SpEn backstabber. It was the highlight of my DCSS experience. Such a fun, if slightly overpowered, combo. Then they took invisibility out of the enhancer starting book.

It's still viable even without invisibility. Petrify, Ensorcelled Hibernation, Uskayaw and Dithmenos are still there.

My last win was an Spriggan Venom Mage that could backstab poison resistant enemies with a +11 artefact dagger.

I started replaying DCSS last week after a hiatus of about two years, SpEn is one of my go-to backgrounds and it's still quite fun IMO. You can worship Dithmenos to get increased stealth. It's not as OP as invisibility but it's still quite fun once you get your stealth to a high level.

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