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cheetah7071 posted:I feel like kb+m or controller preference tends to boil down to what you grew up playing on. Or what you're more used to, broadly it's a little more complicated than that there are a bunch of genres where there are genuine and significant advantages baked in (FPS, RTS, various simulators) there are others where there's no reason you couldn't adapt the gameplay to either input device but you would need completely different control schemes and most ports are too lazy to bother (twin-stick shooters, character action games) as a general rule if you need two separate streams of analog input, for whatever reason, a controller is better; if you need precision then mouse will always be better but if you need no streams of analog input then the only relevant question is "can you physically reach the buttons"
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Oct 24, 2020 22:40
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The Colonel posted:it makes a difference for some people because the kinds of inputs precision platformers like super meat boy require can be more awkward to execute on a keyboard if you don't train yourself for it You know what? I can agree it makes a difference to some people how inputs are laid out for high precision stuff on keyboard vs controller. If you're more comfortable with a controller, I ain't gonna knock you for it. If you prefer keyboard, that's cool too. But the second part? Lol. cheetah7071 posted:I feel like kb+m or controller preference tends to boil down to what you grew up playing on. Or what you're more used to, broadly Hard agree. I have over a decade of playing on only kb+m at this point, and literally only recently started using a controller again for certain games. And only after a friend actually gifted me a controller to play with. And it's been difficult, there are a lot of times I mix up triggers and buttons and literally have to look at my controller for a moment.
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Oct 24, 2020 22:41
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please note that i was not trying to say that controllers are objectively better in any way but that, for more casual players, it's, easier to grasp enough that games built for it are going to recommend it. saying this as someone who has a much easier time getting acclimated to some types of games with a controller these days
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Oct 24, 2020 22:45
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The Colonel posted:please note that i was not trying to say that controllers are objectively better in any way but that, for more casual players, it's, easier to grasp enough that games built for it are going to recommend it. saying this as someone who has a much easier time getting acclimated to some types of games with a controller these days Fair. I am def so far removed from being a casual player that I really can't wrap my head around that as a concept.
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Oct 24, 2020 22:49
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am i an idiot or does the new gearhead really expect you to only use mouse, its a nightmare... what are they doing?!?!!!!
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Oct 24, 2020 22:51
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these days I play more pc games with a controller than without, it's way comfier and feels better in many cases
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Oct 24, 2020 22:55
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Moving back to the primary topic of the thread, what's the current hotness in traditional, nethack-style roguelikes? I played Crawl for years but fell off around the time gooncrawl updates started slowing down (or stopped?). For a while I kept feeling like the learning curve in every traditional roguelike was so steep that I just didn't want to get over that hump again and just stuck to the one game where I had already learned it reasonably well. But it's been a few years now and I feel like I probably have enough distance to try climbing that mountain another time. Or maybe these days roguelikes that are actually easy to learn exist. Who knows?? Certainly not me.
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Oct 24, 2020 22:59
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cheetah7071 posted:Moving back to the primary topic of the thread, what's the current hotness in traditional, nethack-style roguelikes? I played Crawl for years but fell off around the time gooncrawl updates started slowing down (or stopped?). For a while I kept feeling like the learning curve in every traditional roguelike was so steep that I just didn't want to get over that hump again and just stuck to the one game where I had already learned it reasonably well. But it's been a few years now and I feel like I probably have enough distance to try climbing that mountain another time. Or maybe these days roguelikes that are actually easy to learn exist. Who knows?? Certainly not me. If you want to dip your toes back in I'd say give Golden Krone Hotel a shot. Lovely little roguelike that hits all the traditional notes with a unique twist of its own that also cuts out a lot of unnecessary chaff and fuss. Short enough that once you get over the initial rear end kicking you don't feel like you need to invest tens of hours to days worth of time just to get a win, but said win doesn't feel easy per say.
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Oct 24, 2020 23:02
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cheetah7071 posted:Moving back to the primary topic of the thread, what's the current hotness in traditional, nethack-style roguelikes? I played Crawl for years but fell off around the time gooncrawl updates started slowing down (or stopped?). For a while I kept feeling like the learning curve in every traditional roguelike was so steep that I just didn't want to get over that hump again and just stuck to the one game where I had already learned it reasonably well. But it's been a few years now and I feel like I probably have enough distance to try climbing that mountain another time. Or maybe these days roguelikes that are actually easy to learn exist. Who knows?? Certainly not me. Caves of Qud is arguably more on the Nethack / ADOM side of the family tree than the Angband / Crawl / ToME side. I don't think there's any modern game quite as overtly driven by 90s adventure game logic as Nethack is, though.
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Oct 24, 2020 23:03
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caves of qud owns and a free option is infra arcana
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Oct 24, 2020 23:03
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play dungeonmans
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Oct 24, 2020 23:07
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Caves of Qud is arguably more on the Nethack / ADOM side of the family tree than the Angband / Crawl / ToME side. As I said, Crawl is the only traditional roguelike I've done more than dip my toes in, what are the primary differences in those two family trees?
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Oct 24, 2020 23:08
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cheetah7071 posted:Moving back to the primary topic of the thread, what's the current hotness in traditional, nethack-style roguelikes? I played Crawl for years but fell off around the time gooncrawl updates started slowing down (or stopped?). For a while I kept feeling like the learning curve in every traditional roguelike was so steep that I just didn't want to get over that hump again and just stuck to the one game where I had already learned it reasonably well. But it's been a few years now and I feel like I probably have enough distance to try climbing that mountain another time. Or maybe these days roguelikes that are actually easy to learn exist. Who knows?? Certainly not me.
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Oct 24, 2020 23:09
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cheetah7071 posted:As I said, Crawl is the only traditional roguelike I've done more than dip my toes in, what are the primary differences in those two family trees? Angband and its relatives are a lot more like Diablo clones: you mow down countless enemies and get incrementally better loot, rinse and repeat. Their gameplay is a lot more unified around core systems, usually tactical combat, with a ton of depth to them but not a lot of variety in terms of your actual goals. Nethack represents the other extreme end of this: it's basically a shitload of one-off solutions to one-off problems. Combat is much more simplistic and more about having exactly the correct counter to whatever enemy you're facing. It mixes in more puzzle gameplay, more game-defining secrets or "spoilers" that you either know or you don't rather than complex systems where your ability to execute the solution is what counts. Caves of Qud isn't anywhere near as puzzle/adventure game-styled as Nethack is, and even the comparison itself is more of a continuum than a sharp binary. But it's maybe a notch or two in that direction from center, if you arranged all these games in a line. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Oct 24, 2020 |
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Oct 24, 2020 23:23
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The Nethack/DCSS dichotomy I think is where than old Forge roleplaying games argument about simulationism vs gamism kinda makes sense. Nethack and things more like it, like Qud, really want you to feel like you're in a weird world of rules that, while baffling, are internally consistent - or at least map to a kind of logic you can puzzle out. (IMO Qud is a little bit better at this than Nethack, because Nethack is kind of fantasy kitchen sink pastiche whereas Qud has a much more authored setting.) in Qud you can randomly find something early that gives you a ton of early game power. or you can luck into something far beyond your currentability to fight and get owned. DCSS and DoomRL are about having a series of specifically interesting game encounters. They're fantasy themed into a loose world but you're not going to accidentally fall in love with a farmer's daughter in DoomRL, which is a realistic thing that could happen to you in Qud. Your character's power scaling is going to move in a specific direction in DCSS and DoomRL. In the middle you have TOME4 which wants to have an internally consistent world but is also centered around a kind of loot oriented progression.
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Oct 24, 2020 23:31
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Qud sounds cool, I think I will try it, then.
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Oct 24, 2020 23:33
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cheetah7071 posted:Qud sounds cool, I think I will try it, then. feel free to check out the thread on it - lots of good new player advice there: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3739217
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Oct 25, 2020 00:10
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cheetah7071 posted:Moving back to the primary topic of the thread, what's the current hotness in traditional, nethack-style roguelikes? I played Crawl for years but fell off around the time gooncrawl updates started slowing down (or stopped?). For a while I kept feeling like the learning curve in every traditional roguelike was so steep that I just didn't want to get over that hump again and just stuck to the one game where I had already learned it reasonably well. But it's been a few years now and I feel like I probably have enough distance to try climbing that mountain another time. Or maybe these days roguelikes that are actually easy to learn exist. Who knows?? Certainly not me. Cogmind is still churning out I-can't-believe-its-not-post-release updates, so it's a modern traditional RL that's been actively developed. It has lovely with gfx/sfx which is rare! It follows normal RL stuff except for it's twist of making item destruction a central theme. Best to play unspoiled as there's a lot of lore where the joy is in the discovering. Caves of Qud is a very popular topic nowadays (deservedly!), it's more 90's-jank-being-updated-to-2020-gui stuff. Qud has towns and overworld the like (so it's distinct from Crawl in that gold/xp is not on a tight budget), and it's main quest is technically unfinished, but there's so much content in it that it's still a good buy if it's your cup of tea. Both of these are paid products; I do not know of any great RLs still being developed that are free. edit: beaten, badly. Serephina fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Oct 25, 2020 |
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Oct 25, 2020 00:33
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angband is, as far as i know, the only one of the traditional big roguelikes that is 1. still being developed 2. still free 3. not asymptotically approaching the Platonic Ideal of Gameplay, which is a classless raceless perfectly spherical @ running down an unbranching corridor
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Oct 25, 2020 01:09
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ToME is free except for the DLC, and the base game still receives updates. also I guess Nethack 3.7 is being developed and in open beta after however many years of radio silence 
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Oct 25, 2020 01:12
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Qud is also interesting imo in making the kind of wooly 90's jank design feel expressive and intended in a way that your imagination as a kid would have filled in, except this time the game is doing (more of) the lifting.
Impermanent fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Oct 25, 2020 |
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Oct 25, 2020 01:52
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beyond anything else, qud's ability to capture the alien feel of being from the yellowed pages of some old sci-fi/fantasy novel from the 70's that you just randomly found one day at the library is something that's hard to find elsewhere
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Oct 25, 2020 02:04
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Jazerus posted:not asymptotically approaching the Platonic Ideal of Gameplay, which is a classless raceless perfectly spherical @ running down an unbranching corridor Golly gee I wonder what game this is a criticism for?? Fuckin' says a lot doesn't it, not needing to name it.
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Oct 25, 2020 02:04
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Serephina posted:Golly gee I wonder what game this is a criticism for?? Fuckin' says a lot doesn't it, not needing to name it. Yeah, that's definitely because it's true and not because it gets brought up for no reason 57 times a page
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Oct 25, 2020 02:06
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is that just crawl or is that a problem multiple roguelikes have slipped into
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Oct 25, 2020 02:07
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Serephina posted:Golly gee I wonder what game this is a criticism for?? Fuckin' says a lot doesn't it, not needing to name it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7AWoMDp4-U
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Oct 25, 2020 02:08
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Minorkos posted:It's technically possible that the world generation being scripted in Unity's own scripting language, which is admittedly quite slow, could cause it to be a lot slower than it would be in a custom engine. But I don't know how the world generation is really done to say anything for sure. Either way, the game being made in Unity is probably helping it way more than it is hurting it, just in terms of getting stuff up and running without issues. lol this doesn't make any sense. Unity doesn't have a scripting language. It just has c# which is roughly equivalent to c++ if you decide to use it like c++ (unmanaged, unsafe, etc). No one's proc gen code is so amazingly efficient they need to bleed every inch of performance out of it. Usually its a sprawling mess of code that is slow due to structure and nothing to do with language.
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Oct 25, 2020 03:28
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cheetah7071 posted:is that just crawl or is that a problem multiple roguelikes have slipped into
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Oct 25, 2020 03:47
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Saying C# is slow is like saying Java is slow: it's a dumb meme that might have been kinda true* over 20 years ago but sure as gently caress isn't true now. If something's slow it's because it's either doing a lot of work or it's badly-written, the language doesn't enter into it. As a relevant example, Caves of Qud uses a level generation system called wave function collapse that is sufficiently pricey that Unormal has contemplated setting up a server specifically for generating levels for people playing on their smartphones. In this case it's not that the code is badly-written (since CoQ uses a highly optimized library for this specific job); it's just that chewing through all the potential permutations and deciding whether a given chunk of level is valid is a computationally demanding task, regardless of what language you write it in. * in the sense that you paid a performance cost for using the language's virtual machine and that cost was not entirely negligible. These days it's barely noticeable, both because computers are generally faster and because compilers are a hell of a lot smarter.
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Oct 25, 2020 03:49
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Java also got a reputation for being slow because it was the go to language for new programmers fresh out of terrible CS programs/learn to program in 21 days books. I guess Unity is now getting the same treatment for essentially the same reason.
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Oct 25, 2020 05:31
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There are legit performance differences between languages but for the most part video games shouldn't be doing anything intensive enough to matter besides graphics, which you'll usually use a highly-optimized library for anyways
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Oct 25, 2020 05:38
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Caves of Qud is arguably more on the Nethack / ADOM side of the family tree than the Angband / Crawl / ToME side. Along that same vein Cogmind seems to be on the Angband / Crawl / ToME branch. I really love seeing the next generation of roguelikes unfold and become behemoths in their own right 
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Oct 25, 2020 05:48
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I like Brogue 
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Oct 25, 2020 06:06
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I was all jazzed to talk up Night of the Full Moon finally getting an ending and an optional, "half as hard as Dream Quest" mode. But the Nightmare mode is locked behind all of the lesser difficulty runs, for each class. And the difficulty only really kicks in after an event in the first act. But it is getting closer!
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Oct 25, 2020 06:35
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cheetah7071 posted:Moving back to the primary topic of the thread, what's the current hotness in traditional, nethack-style roguelikes? I played Crawl for years but fell off around the time gooncrawl updates started slowing down (or stopped?). For a while I kept feeling like the learning curve in every traditional roguelike was so steep that I just didn't want to get over that hump again and just stuck to the one game where I had already learned it reasonably well. But it's been a few years now and I feel like I probably have enough distance to try climbing that mountain another time. Or maybe these days roguelikes that are actually easy to learn exist. Who knows?? Certainly not me. I mentioned some currently "hot" traditional roguelikes here, maybe one or more may spark your interest but I wouldn't call them Nethack-style specifically, but maybe you're still interested: here. If you've been away for years then are of course still popular roguelikes that have had significant updates, this list just tries to highlight ones that have become popular in traditional circles within the past few years and might not be as well known. Something about Qud that perhaps Unormal could confirm or not, is if the near-unheard of 90s gem that is Alphaman was at all an influence on Qud?   I played it a lot as a kid, probably one of my first roguelikes. Post-apoc, mutations, humourous or bizarre game elements, psychic powers, overworld. Such a gem although I have no idea how it holds up today.
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Oct 25, 2020 10:12
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habituallyred posted:I was all jazzed to talk up Night of the Full Moon finally getting an ending and an optional, "half as hard as Dream Quest" mode. But the Nightmare mode is locked behind all of the lesser difficulty runs, for each class. And the difficulty only really kicks in after an event in the first act. But it is getting closer! You mean you weren't already clearing Hard VII with all eight classes? I've been leveling up the Mechanic. Assembly is looking like the strongest strategy; Mechanical Rabbit combined with Assembly Station gets absurd fairly quickly, especially when you have Rocket Booster and a couple of other attacks and actions that play all attacks in your top 3-5 cards. I'm still unlocking synergies though. There's a lot of stuff that lets you stack Frailty sky high and it may be possible to build a deck that exiles the enemy's entire deck and board.
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Oct 25, 2020 12:52
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I like Angband because of the loot pinata system, which is also something I cherish about Qud. I just want to get new toys and fiddle with them.
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Oct 25, 2020 17:01
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I'd like to give Angband another shot and see if I can get a win eventually, are there any particularly good/easy characters for 4.2.1? Or if there are recommended birth options I should change to help out? Looking at my 4.2.0 scores from a year ago, I only really made it to DL 45ish. From what I remember I was pretty bad at picking my fights and that was about where it would start really biting me. My highest score by far is with a Dwarf Paladin, but maybe something else would be better.
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Oct 25, 2020 18:31
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I think the default birth options are the best in v4. No selling of items but increased gold find is great because it greatly streamlines and speeds up playtime, and that's on by default now. I don't think the races really have that much of an impact unless you try to pair them up in bad combinations, i.e. trying to play a Half-Troll Mage. But you might want to consider going with a race that has good stats like a Dunadan or High Elf, which necessitates a slower pace of play due to the XP mod, but helps with early game survivability if you're willing to grind more. I think Priest is a decent, uncomplicated 'survivor' class as Detect Evil and healing spells can save your bacon throughout the entire run if you don't want to go standard sword and board. Magic users like Mage and Necromancer are a bit more advanced and squishy. Really, the key to ascending in Angband is making sure you hit gear milestones as you dive. Because getting out of dodge is generally cheap, the danger in this game comes from being caught off guard by a resistance. Speed also becomes important. The classic spoilers have something like this: 1000': Free Action, See Invisible 1250': Basic four Resistances 1900': Maxxed Stats, Confusion Resistance, Blindness Resistance 2000': Poison Resistance 2500': Hold Life 2700': Chaos Resistance, Nether Resistance 3000': Permanent and Temporary Speed of +20 or greater 4000': Permanent + Temporary Speed of +30 or greater 4950': As much as you can get. Sustains, Speed, every resistance And you should definitely not take this lightly; paralysis or even blindless can cut a run short even in what seemed like a safe floor, not to mention getting blasted by an elemental breath you hadn't covered.
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Oct 25, 2020 19:09
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In fact, if you sort the Angband ladder by date, you can see a lot of Paladins and Priests matched with non-squishy races like Dwarves and Half-Trolls. http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-browse.php?v=Angband&s=1
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Oct 25, 2020 19:12
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