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NetHack4 Philosophy

nethack4.org

97 pointssuioir35 comments

Contrast this with the documented philosophy of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which at least partly positions itself as a philosophical antithesis to Nethack: https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/docs/cr...

I love DCSS, and in abstract I think that "meaningful decisions (no no-brainers)" is a great top priority design principle, but in practice I wish they cared more about maintaining the qualia of the game itself.

I understand why they removed food, because it wasn't "fun" or interesting to experienced players. But it was more than just a time pressure mechanic. Cutting up and eating monsters to make your bread rations go further is as thematic as the difference between Zin and Trog

Honestly, it's still potentially fun because of the logistical challenge (your carrying capacity is limited, so staying fed interferes with the ability to carry loot and equipment) and because of unique food effects that may confer mutations and resistances. Eating is very often not a "no-brainer" decision.

On the other hand, I love auto-explore and I don't think I could ever go back to a traditional roguelike that lacks it. "I want to see the entire level in case there are interesting things here" is only "not a no-brainer" if prepared food is very scarce and butchery is implausibly inefficient; walking around without interaction doesn't improve the game experience, etc. (And sure, you can balance the game around not needing to explore entire maps to gain experience, but then you spoil the fun for people who do want to do that.)

Food was almost never interesting in DCSS, except for maybe Centaurs.

Once you reached a certain point you either had a giant stack of rations or a giant stack of honeycombs if you were a Spriggan. Random mutations can happen from other non-food sources, and most items are not worth lugging around so it never really forced you to make decisions. I handled long term item storage by setting a waypoint on a square on a finished floor I used to store items. If you have ++Fire, +Cold, and +RMut then you have all of the resistance you’ll need.

FWIW I’ve won crawl dozens of times, at least once for every race and class. Placed in the top 3 for the 0.10 online tournament, both individually and my team. The two guys who beat me were both child chess prodigies, both won the Morgan Prize and both were multiple time Putnam Fellows; I went to public school and later got a GED. Felt pretty big brained after that tournament lol.

Haven’t played since 0.13

It's a _much_ better game now. You should try again!

DCSS pretty much plays itself and not in a good way. No idea why people find it fun at all, and I'm a hardcore fan of CDDA, Nethack, even Brogue.

Let's see your dcss stats [0] link if it's that easy?

[0] https://dcss-stats.com/

I'm not the person you replied to but I'll give you my link [1]. At one point I had all species, backgrounds, and gods won but they've added a couple since I stopped playing. My win-loss ratio isn't anything to write home about but in my defence, many of my losses are scum losses (early deaths from messing around and not taking it seriously). When I take the game seriously I can win fairly consistently. The main thing stopping me from having a high win rate (besides not playing) is that I get bored and make careless mistakes.

The reason I don't play anymore is because I find the game pretty boring and overly-long. The most fun part of the game is D1-D10 or so, before you enter any branches. That's the point of the game where your options are very limited so you get a lot more situations where your decisions really matter. After that point in the game your character's power curve tends to leave the game in the dust (when you know what you're doing anyway), so those "critical moment" situations become fewer and further between.

You end up doing a ton of "autopilotting" your way through vast numbers of popcorn enemies, though you can still lose when a critical moment pops up and you're not paying attention. This makes losing feel really bad because the game feels like much more of a test of patience than skill to me (and other even higher-level players who have quit or semi-quit).

I'm currently playing in TNNT [2] because I love NetHack. On its face, NetHack seems way worse than DCSS because it commits all of the sins that the DCSS philosophy reacts to. In reality, I find NetHack more enjoyable to play because it has real character/soul/heart. DCSS has had every single one of its rough edges sanded off, leaving it a rather soulless game.

I also really love Shattered Pixel Dungeon [3], a mobile Roguelike that is now available on PCs as well. It has an active and very attentive, engaged, and smart developer [4]. It is highly approachable and has a UI that works extremely well on mobile (its original platform) as well as PC. It is MUCH SHORTER than most of the big PC Roguelikes but it doesn't compromise on gameplay depth. In practice that means the density of critical moments and meaningful decisions to make is far higher than a game like DCSS.

[1] https://dcss-stats.com/players/ChongLi

[2] https://tnnt.org

[3] https://shatteredpixel.com

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMWQIdfCgQg

Totally agree about Shattered Pixel Dungeon's UI. I never thought a roguelike could play so well on mobile. Makes me wonder if it would be possible to give NetHack a similarly intuitive UI.

> overly-long

Worth noting that one of the focuses of the past decade-ish of development has been to make the game significantly shorter. D has lost 7 floors, Lair and Vaults lost 3, Elf, Orc, and Crypt lost 2, the S branches and Slime lost 1, and the first 6 levels of every hell branch have become much smaller. As a result the density of powerful monsters has increased and popcorn has been dramatically reduced compared to earlier versions.

Yeah I’ve done most of my playing since all those changes. I still find the game way too long!

I played nethack a lot in the 90’s when I was in college. The farthest I got was the plane of air. Despite never beating it I consider it to be one of my favorite games. I’m glad to see design goals are still in the same spirit. Perhaps I should pick it up again now that my patience has leveled up.

Plane of Air is pretty darn far! Those Air Elementals can be brutal.

Still, it's impressive you made it that far, and it's rough you made it so close without actually ascending!

You did much better than me. I always starved to death, or I died of poison trying not to starve to death.

This is a well known indication of a beginner: experienced players apparently never die this way - but I have no idea what they do different or even ideas of what else to try and so I gave up. There was a massive wealth of options (even in the 1990s) and I always wanted to get back into it, but until I come up with a path forward it always feels like I'll never get far so what is the point...

My experience is 30 years old so take this with a grain of salt.

I rushed goblin mines on every character. If I hit a bunch of food in town then the run was on. Store food you can’t carry every few levels. You only need to carry enough food to reach one of your stashes.

You learn good/bad food by watching pet. If your pet wants to eat it then you are good.

I have no idea how people manage vegetarian or foodless runs.

Minor spoilers. (I've ascended but that was a long time ago so some of my NetHack knowledge might be outdated.)

You can mostly trust your pet. But you can't totally trust your pet, because there are some foods that are good for pets but not for @.

One is tripe. I don't get tripe in my pho because NetHack told me it's dog food.

Another is whatever species you are. If you're a human and eat human, or an elf and eat elf, you might get smitten for cannibalism. It's fine for your dog or cat to eat human or elf though.

And there's also the edge case of almost-spoiled food. If your pet eats one of a group of corpses on turn n, and you eat another on turn n+1, it's possible that yours rotted in the meantime. Either because n was the exact limit, or because it was close and yours died a few turns before theirs.

I've only beat the game by playing it in the debugger. I'm not sure if anyone has really beat it honestly.

It absolutely has been done, many times by many people.

There's so many Dumb Ways to Die in the game.

I always played with cheats on just so I could try all the characters and see all their quests and stuff.

Amazing the Ascension speed record is like 49 minutes.

Now now, it's that the game is full of ways to have YASD, Yet Another Stupid Death.

I ascended a couple of times and don't remember ever losing on the planes. But I had read spoilers, and over-prepared on any run where I got as far as the end of the main dungeon.

I have also played for decades. I have beat it multiple times, but never on my PC. The only places I have beat it were on my (Apple) phone and on my (Android) tablet. Something about the UI difference subtly impacts my playstyle.

You may or may not be interested in my "Love Letter to NetHack" talk that I did for Roguelike Celebration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy39L-EaOtk&t=16s

I talk a lot about what makes NetHack unique and influential.

If I read the site properly, did this person usurp the trademark for Nethack for himself? Is this an actual authorized version 4 of Nethack? I just downloaded it the other day and I think it was at 3.6.7

They cover that in the FAQ: http://nethack4.org/faq.html

Basically, NetHack development stalled out, so the developer(s?) behind NetHack 4 decided to fork it. Unlike other forks whose main goal is to put cool stuff in the game without regard for taste or balance, they wanted to stay true to the original.

Not that I agree with the fork name. It's best to not call your fork something that could be confused with the original, were the original devs to ever reach a 4.0 release.

I think 3 and 4 are separate forks, but I could be misremembering.

The author of nethack4 (Alex Smith) subsequently joined the original nethack (nethack 3.x) dev team: https://nethack.org/common/news.html#newmembers

I hope one day the DevTeam releases a NetHack 5 which serves as a successor to both variants.

I spent much of this afternoon playing xNetHack[1] on Hardfought[2]. My first exposure was 30 years ago to a DOS port laboriously downloaded from a dial-up BBS. No web, no documentation, no wiki[3]. And I've loved every minute of it...

[1] https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Xnethack [2] https://www.hardfought.org/ [3] https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page

FWIW, TNNT is in progress now

https://tnnt.org/

Wasn't there some kind of conflict between Nethack4 and Nethack3 people ages ago ?

Taking advantage of this thread to ask: have anyone here tried Cogmind? What did you think of it? I’ve found that traditional roguelike fans always have strong opinions about the course of a games development, and there’s often an older version of the game that’s held in higher regard by the community than the current one.

https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/

(2013)

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NetHack is, in many ways, a dream game. While I enjoy text games, I think that poor graphics really break the immersion for RPGs. I would love to play a NetHack with GREAT graphics - high res final fantasy VI style, for instance.

Nintendo Switch (2) port please

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