An open source roguelike adventure through dungeons
crawl.develz.org
crawl.develz.org
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.
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
Old Crawl had a lot of systems around food. You had races that were mostly or entirely vegetarian, which made them significantly harder to play in that respect. Then there were the kobolds, which could eat almost anything, the ghouls which didn't even mind rotten chunks - but they had other problems to balance it a bit. You could opt out of the entire hunger system by playing mummies - those went all the way back to Linley Henzell, and he had the philosophy that if you wanted a bit tedious play style, you could have it (mummies were really hard to play, though!). The Hive was a dungeon side branch with a lot of bees and honeycombs, a big breakpoint on the food clock if you weren't one of the carnivorous/saprovorous races, but nasty if you didn't have poison resistance. I think they removed it entirely in modern crawl? They might as well, without food its whole purpose is gone.
Of course the game works fine without food. ToME has no food, and it's fine. But it says something about how much of the original game they ditched.
Mummies are still miserable to play, only now they have no upsides at all... xD
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).