damn, that was a tear
I love this clubhouse
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dragon quest games are good because they are full of cute monsters and animals to look at
roguelikes are bad because they typically donāt really have anything to look at in them
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As the guy who has played MK11 more or less daily since release and spends all his time tapping X so AI Noob Saibot can clear towers to earn currency so I can reseal all the chests in the Krypt and open them up all over again in hopes of getting a color variant of a dagger or something Iāve already got.
Thatās not really the best way to play that game.
Also it turns out Iām awful at it when towers require you to actually play.
the only allure more powerful than The Grind is Dressing Up All My Ninja Boys
Roguelikes are dear to my heart, Iāve never beaten any of them or felt the need to, the suboptimal weird choices and finicky bits are the whole reason theyāre good, and you guys writing these huge nerdy-ass essays about how playing 10000 hours of games made you too smart to enjoy them are driving me fucking nuts. But I canāt ignore any of you. Normally I like your posts
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I play the subset of roguelikes that abstract all that into pure ASCII. 
Most of the older rogue-likes are stuffed with cruft, such that trying to learn them on your own without having a spoiler handy is adding years to a successful win and running into many gotchas. There was a person on Usenet that took 4 years to win a Nethack game just like that. These were games that were intended to be played on mainframes and discussing them fanatically with other players.
Angband as played by experienced players was not intended to be a grindfest, slowly accumulating resources as safe as possible before proceeding to the next floor, of which there are 100. The intent was to determine how deep one could dive without certain resistances due to threats that could now spawn and skipping past the boring stuff in-between. Still has the wide problem space that necessitates knowing combinations but again, came from that era of intended shared community knowledge.
Sil instead condenses what Angband was as a Tolkien inspired roguelike into a much more tightly woven set of mechanics, 20 levels deep and an aim to allow players to gain experience without having to kill everything. This would mean learning the game from scratch is absolutely possible within a typical timeframe. It is much shorter than the other two I touched on and thereās an anti-grind mechanism in place that pushes you closer to the confrontation with Morgoth the longer you stay hovering outside of that depth.
Play Dungeonmans if you want to avoid traps and mastery and length. Similarly Tangledeep.
Play Towerclimb. MORE people play Towerclimb!
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See I got this all sorted out, I just donāt play any games with roguelike elements and hence I donāt have to worry about any of this stuff.
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what Iām really trying to express is that Iām too stupid to enjoy roguelikes and I donāt get a kick out of failing 10000 times because I didnāt read the developerās mind. The RLs I do enjoy are the ones where I can be an idiot and still get by
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The point is that neither of us are stupid because we enjoy different things about roguelikes. We can be stupid for other reasons.
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Races in DCSS are essentially difficulty settings (theyāre labeled āSimpleā, āIntermediateā, and āAdvancedā in the menu); most good players donāt play MiBe over and over because theyāre fairly easy once you understand the game and there are more interesting and more challenging races to play once youāve mastered the basics. (Also I donāt think theyāre nearly as trivial as you make them out to be; I just queried my games and Iāve only won 50% of them online, and Iāve certainly killed many more offline when I was learning the game.)
The tournament Iām in currently forces each player to play a randomly selected race & background combination each week. You only get one shot each week (well technically two if you die before XL 5). You get points for completing certain milestones, worshiping certain gods, and each week has unique challenges that get you additional bonus points. I think itās a fun way to play DCSS that forces you to learn a bunch of different strategies and playstyles, and play in a careful and conservative manner since you only have one try.
I do think Brogue is much better in terms of mechanical transparency and simplicity, but DCSS does try to surface a lot of information in the game and has been getting simpler over the years (a main complaint from older players that have fallen off is that the devs remove and simplify too much). The design goals explicitly call for skill based gameplay, meaningful decisions, avoidance of grinding, and playability without need for spoilers. You can certainly argue that they donāt achieve all those goals perfectly, but itās closer than a lot of other games I play. I donāt think any of the devs would say itās a perfect game, but theyāve fixed a lot of the low hanging fruit and most of whatās left are hard problems without obvious solutions.
You mentioned the āoā key, which I think is a good example of a hard problem. If a character is doing particularly well some parts of the game could be boring, so the āoā key is an attempt to automate exploration to reduce the number of trivial decisions the player has to make. Ideally the āoā key reduces the time between interesting situations, so that the player has to make meaningful choices more frequently.
Certainly there could be other solutions to this problem: they could make floors smaller to reduce the tedium, but then that affects the playerās ability to run away or avoid threats. Theyād also need to increase the experience every monster gives, re-balance how many enemies spawn per floor, potentially resize all the handmade vaults, maybe change spell ranges, how far sound travels (you wouldnāt want to wake every monster onthe whole floor since itās smaller) and itās not entirely clear that a better game would come out the other end. A lot of mechanics that currently result in interesting situations would have to change and be re-balanced to support that.
Maybe itās a shitty stop-gap solution, but I donāt think itās designed to be compulsive. I think the same game without the āoā key is certainly a worse game because youāre spending more time in the boring parts.
As for randomization: I think itās largely to force the player into new situations they havenāt been in before. Good players can win many games in a row, so I donāt really think it can be a gambling compulsion at a high level. You could argue worse players might get some gambling thrill out of it, but since ultimately player skill has a much larger effect on winning than getting good gear, their time would be better spent trying to learn the game, rather than mindlessly mashing and trying to get lucky.
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God damn it why am I writing long posts about roguelikes you should all play Outer Wilds! Itās wonderful to explore and youāre constantly making new discoveries and seeing new things and itās got compelling mysteries!
My buddy and I played for like 5 hours tonight and were so enthralled we forgot to eat dinner.
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love you sb
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the true roguelike is me on this train hitting the button on this pokeball plus forever
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only roguelikes/lites Iāve ever been able to get into are Risk of Rain and the various Chunsoft-likes. I havenāt really analysed why
Iāve been baffled about Toys for Bobās trajectory for years and it never falls into a predictable pattern
For 10 years before Skylanders they were making stuff like Tony Hawkās Downhill Jam??
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I agree Nethack is bad in exactly this way. One of my first experiences at Nethack was praying at a shrine on the first floor which killed me.
I kind of perceived it as a Nethack-specific problem but I suppose there is a world of similar roguelikes Iām not aware of.
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i played okami last nite for the first time in awhile
everything is as gorgeous and charming as i remember
canāt wait to beat it thoroughly again
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i wish okami was a good game
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Is this only on Xbone right now?
Itās on PC too in the Epic Store. And thereās a $10 discount to everything in the Epic Store until June 13th.
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Thatās not even the worst of it. There is a chance through no fault of your own to fall into a pit. That pit might be lined with spikes for extra damage. Those spikes have a chance to be poisoned and without resistance, could be instantly fatal.
ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery) is also rife with this, where originally monster types would increase in strength the more you killed them. This is all fine and dandy fighting normal enemies as the numbers were in expected ranges, so future fights would still be eclipsed by your own characterās growth. However, there are ones like werejackals that could summon weaker enemies in the tens and hundreds if you werenāt careful, leading to cases of encountering āsuperā jackals as a wilderness encounter later on that would tear you apart. This has been toned down for current releases now that it had kickstarted further development.
Another fun āgotchaā is killing a cat type, any cat at all. The first gives an indicator that this might have been a bad idea (message that its spirit yowls and disappears into the ground) but subsequent kills do not. What happens much, much further into the game is that thereās an invisible and powerful Cat Lord on a separate, guaranteed floor that must be traversed. He has a greater and greater chance of being hostile after the first cat death, with subsequent deaths further increasing its strength.
And letās not forget the background corruption of certain deeper levels that youāre not aware of until you suddenly pop a Corruption message! Which also increases and without warning after a relatively long period of time. There is an in-game reason for this happening but it fails to let you know about it.
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