Hi, crawlers! Hope everyone’s been enjoying the holiday season as much as we have. Here’s the latest, most festive changes from trunk:
- Characters:
- Whisper ‘Farewell’ when you leave, Legolas: High Elves are no more. (This is, of course, part of the crawl dev team’s newly “straight edge” lifestyle.)
- Ogres’ apts have been adjusted: their Maces and Flails apt has been lowered, and in compensation, their spellcasting skills have been increased to -1 across the board.
- Deep Dwarves’ wand recharge ability has been replaced with a self-healing ability that has a chance of decreasing their max MP whenever it’s used.
- Mummies’ Spellcasting apts are now +2; formerly -1.
- The demonspawn Augmentation effect is 25% less dramatic.
- Items:
- To avoid miskeys, the letter keys can no longer be used to wield or throw useless items unless the * key (‘display all’) has been pressed first. Breadswingers can rest easy, as other selection techniques, e.g. {@w1}, are unchanged.
- Wands of heal wounds, teleportation, and hasting have discharged their last zap. They’re removed. We removed them. Hence: no more zapping.
- Wand and misc acquirement have been merged into one category, ‘evocables’.
- Nemelex wrath reclaims all decks, instead of merely sabotaging them.
- Monsters:
- Hill giants and two-headed ogres have merged into one big two-headed monster. (I’m not sure what happened to the third head.) ‘Hill giants’ will be seen no more, and two-headed ogres take their place, becoming significantly nastier in the process.
- Monsters should no longer, very rarely, appear to be random strange colours in console. This bug was first reported at least three years ago; thanks to johnny0 for finally figuring it out and creating a fix!
- Monster white draconian breath can now be resisted by AC.
- Per popular demand, Sandblast now consumes stones directly from the inventory. As part of the change, it no longer functions without ammo, and large rocks can’t be used at all. (Earth Elementalists get more stones to compensate.)
- Slime:$’s walls no longer collapse entirely when TRJ is slain; instead, only newly-added transparent sections will be destroyed. It seemed a bit too mean to take out the entire thing, even for us.
- In the spirit of helping new players, the autofight_stop default is now 50, up from 30.
- For the first time in nearly two years, acquirement and god gifts can now produce helmets. Oops.
- Followers of the Shining One can now summon golden dragons.
- Trees will appear angry, when appropriate.
- You can no longer rest while on fire.
- You can no longer learn spells that no longer exist.
Happy crawling, and a happy new year in advance! Here’s to many more.
(P.S.: take the survey!)
1. Comment by ojifijod
24/Dec/2016 at 11:47
what’s gonna happen to deep dwarves now that wand of heal wounds isn’t real
2. Comment by ojifijod
24/Dec/2016 at 11:48
wait what will deep dwarves do now that wand of heal wounds is no more?
3. Comment by Alex Henry
24/Dec/2016 at 15:12
Calm down guys!! The only reason they’re taking away High Elves is because they’re putting Mountain Dwarves back in on the next release!!
(not really… xD)
4. Comment by PleasingFungus
24/Dec/2016 at 16:59
@ojifijod: Their wand recharge ability has been replaced with a self-healing ability that has a chance of decreasing their max MP every time they use it. Sorry, forgot to mention it in the post; I’ll edit it now.
5. Comment by Stop Removing Shit
24/Dec/2016 at 20:05
>remove remove remove
Admin Note: comment removed.
6. Comment by Branded Warrior
25/Dec/2016 at 08:13
Mummies getting harder for extended game. Ehh.
7. Comment by lulu
25/Dec/2016 at 08:47
Two-headed ogres should also only wield quarterstaffs or spears….just kidding, i dont mind your changes usually, but ogres and -1 for maces I cannot even begin to understand
8. Comment by kefirnik
25/Dec/2016 at 17:07
It won’t be that much harder for Mus to go extended, just more grinding for exp to train defence to compensate for wand removal.
9. Comment by Cirk
27/Dec/2016 at 10:00
Shite patch. Ogre’s no longer thematically sound. Better with staves than M&F.
Shining one summoning gold dragons? (pearl is more appropriate?)
Removing high elves to step away from tolkien, and because you consider them boring sounds dumb to me. High elves aren’t a tolkien thing are they? I suppose maybe Noldor were seen as high elves or something? And they weren’t boring. One of my most played.
Only good thing out of this patch is the removal of the crutch-wands, and QoL change to sandblast. What a shit show.
10. Comment by Kriby
28/Dec/2016 at 05:31
I don’t quite understand why ogres can’t be good with large clubs anymore. Seems like loss of flavor.
Mummies are my favorite masochistic pass-time, but without any source of haste they might be too much so.
High elves I guess I didn’t really play. I just rarely understand the reasoning behind subtracting race choices.
11. Comment by Vil-hatarn
28/Dec/2016 at 22:55
Pretty disappointed to see this update, high elves have always been one of my favorite race choices…
12. Comment by pratamawirya
29/Dec/2016 at 01:46
“high elves have always been one of my favorite race choices…” well, sucks to be you, then! lol j/k
13. Comment by Shiki Ryōgi
29/Dec/2016 at 04:02
Wondering what “You can no longer learn spells that no longer exist.” entails, was it possible to learn spells from spell books by pressing certain hotkeys for skills that no longer exist in game?
14. Comment by PleasingFungus
29/Dec/2016 at 05:58
@Shiki: some custom ‘random’ spellbooks in vaults contained removed spells (cure poison mainly, iirc), and it was possible to memorize the spells from those books normally. (But not to cast them!) Both of those problems were, hopefully, fixed.
15. Comment by Shiki Ryōgi
30/Dec/2016 at 06:46
Ah, I see, Thanks for the response.
16. Comment by tv1990
30/Dec/2016 at 13:52
hmm, dcss just got a lil harder, but that’s okay, i like a good challenge
17. Comment by pratamawirya
31/Dec/2016 at 00:14
Yeah, a trove asked me for 15 tele scrolls once. If it was pre-patch, it ain’t a thing, lol. OTOH, Ogre’s -1 m&f at least makes Oka more appealing.
HE removal sounds like “another meh patch thingy I don’t care and quite probably will forget about soon”. I kinda feel sorry for dudes who like playing them so much, tho.
18. Comment by gpr
1/Jan/2017 at 08:38
Oh, look. Crawl continues to disintegrate.
Maybe if you guys remove another race or two, and maybe a spell school, things will turn out all right?
19. Comment by Gottschkopf
3/Jan/2017 at 09:55
Wow. Just wow. And not the good kind of wow.
20. Comment by Andy
3/Jan/2017 at 23:04
“Hope everyone’s been enjoying the holiday season as much as we have.”
I was, until reading how you people are removing a bunch of stuff AGAIN… DCSS had so much going for it, but I started playing less and less after the first “let’s remove stuff because BALANCING REASONS” years ago. I lost some of my favorite spells, like tossing potions for cloud-filled explosions and Projecting Noises. Yeah, it’s been so long I can’t even remember the names for some of them. I do remember the dev’s answer to the removal of Project Noise, though: it was “unbalanced” and could be used to sneak through difficult levels like the Tomb. Well maybe I don’t feel like throwing away a character I spent weeks on by charging into enemy ranks? Maybe I like more to stealth than moving and hoping the RNG doesn’t decide everyone should see (and kill) me right now?
THAT was a long time ago, but the problem of cutting stuff at a whim “because balance” or “because it’s old” or “because we have new features we want to force people to use” persists. Remove a monster because there are 3 identical other types I can understand, BUT… why not make it better or more interesting instead of just amputating it? Like the Manticore, for example. And why can’t we leave stuff in because it’s fun? The devs *do* realize that “balance” is not the ultimate goal of playing a game, right? Balance should help CONTRIBUTE to a game’s fun by regulating playability, but nerfing stuff left and right, removing options that (apparently) a lot of people enjoy (like High Elves for people to like ROLE PLAYING), etc., doesn’t really make sense.
I guess I am getting old. I didn’t starting playing games like DCSS because it is “simple” and “easy to get into”. I like having a zillion different options, and removing stuff gets under my skin. I get tired of having new stuff that looks cool, stuff that I want to try out, only to have it die forever on an apparent whim. The changes listed in this dev post don’t affect me much, I usually play a Mummy and don’t use wands much. But too many other times I get to read about decisions that DO impact me and the way I play the game. Some decisions were correct, but others I still miss, years later.
Something is off when “improving” the game makes it harder to love.
Oh well, break is over. Back to work.
21. Comment by removed
4/Jan/2017 at 00:14
Really disappointed by the constant removal of content.
22. Comment by Morphy
4/Jan/2017 at 22:45
Agreed with hating all of the removal. The biggest reason I played DCSS a ton was the huge option selection in races. Why remove things, just because they’re not quite unique enough/played enough/your style enough? I never got to play as an Ent, and I wish I could have. Other races, like Djinn, were plenty fun, to me. It’s just frustrating/disappointing to see devs’ work thrown in the trash for no good reason.
23. Comment by Gottschkopf
5/Jan/2017 at 15:37
So, how are we supposed to play EE now? You are forced to use all your stones on trash, and if you run out of stones before getting Stone arrow to a reliable successrate (and a big enough Manapool)? Too bad, Ctrl+Q it is.
24. Comment by pratamawirya
6/Jan/2017 at 02:07
Yeah, sometimes you get unlucky with stones, lol. I’m not sure it’s a bad thing, tho; it’s kinda fun and different from other book starts.
25. Comment by Devin Buck
6/Jan/2017 at 22:00
I personally like the removals. I usually look at things like hill giants and go “why is that even in the game?”
26. Comment by Andy
9/Jan/2017 at 19:59
Devin, you do make a good point. We don’t need a bunch of copy-n-paste classes/enemies/items/etc. That certainly *is* bad for a game, because it is boring. However, I would rather have “two similar but slightly different” things than “one thing twice”, because in this extreme case a little flavor is better than none. The main complaint I (and I think many others) have is this: we would rather the devs put effort into redesigning things to be more interesting, or more distinct, or more complementary, or whatever that would contribute more to gameplay. Our complaint is that they INSTEAD seem to go “Well, it’s broken/unbalanced/uninteresting/[fill in the blank] so let’s just throw it out. We don’t feel like fixing it, so bye!”
Now, I don’t want to criticize the devs too much. I have been modding and programming for 20 years, and sometimes you really can’t fix something. Or maybe for a better feature to be implemented, something else has to go. But removal should serve a good, defensible purpose. What did removing High Elves accomplish, other than annoying people? What is this “straight edge” lifestyle? As I wrote, I usually play as a Mummy, so removing High Elf as a playable race doesn’t really affect me. But it seems endemic to this mindset on the devs that they are in charge, so they can do whatever the heck they want to. The devs ARE in charge, to an extent (though people can make their own changes to the source code and make their own DCSS); what the devs forget is that they are *custodians* of DCSS. When I make a new gun for a game, it is for me and me alone. The DCSS devs are making a game, but it is NOT for themselves only: it is for all of us, their players! And our opinions matter for the following reason:
At it’s core, gameplay is about the players’ preference. A good game give the player what they want. It doesn’t have to have EVERYTHING, just what attracts the player. People play some game genres and not others, but role-playing games are about playing roles and making choices. You can’t make choices if you don’t have choices, and you can’t play a role if it doesn’t exist. The irritating thing is that a lot of choices (items, spells, characters), options (playstyles), roles (overall preferred character builds), and flavor (maybe I just want to look like an elf today?) exist[ed] in DCSS that is simply being removed.
Cutting stuff left and right shows the devs really don’t seem to care much about the game, since they don’t put the effort into fixing it. Ignoring the feelings that I and others have about the [seemingly] capricious cutting of content is just that: the devs ignoring us. The core, however, is this: you keep cutting pieces off a game, then you will eventually have no game anyone wants to play. I like new stuff, and balancing can be very beneficial, but I have seen very little ADDED content that would necessitate so much REMOVAL.
It is possible that eventually DCSS will hit a slump, nothing will happen for a while, then we will start getting all sorts of forks like what happened to Angband. Who knows? But I would rather play DCSS, *if* I can enjoy what is there for me to play.
27. Comment by PleasingFungus
9/Jan/2017 at 20:06
@Andy: The comments section of a blog post isn’t the right place to have a lengthy discussion, so I’ll just clarify one small point. The ‘straight edge’ line was a joke. If you don’t get it, don’t worry, since it was a pretty dumb joke to begin with!
28. Comment by Andy
9/Jan/2017 at 20:13
Ah, ok. Sorry, I am an engineer by trade and used to writing big papers explaining everything… in tiring detail! :)
One last thing I do want to make clear: I am GRATEFUL to the devs, including you (PleasingFungus). I am sure some of you opt more for cutting stuff and focusing on core mechanics, and others are more for fixing and enhancing what exists. That DCSS is still going shows that it has had devs who have made mostly sound decisions… I and others just don’t think cutting stuff is one of them. There have definitely been things throughout the years that should have been removed (and were), but what purpose do things like removing High Elves serve? Oh, and that’s not rhetorical: really, why are you all cutting stuff?
29. Comment by PleasingFungus
9/Jan/2017 at 20:21
We try to explain our reasoning in the commits; you can see the high elf removal commit here. Most development discussion occurs on the IRC, ##crawl-dev on freenode; you can search the logs for more discussion, though the search UI isn’t ideal. If you want to talk about this in more detail, I’d be happy to discuss it on IRC.
30. Comment by Andy
9/Jan/2017 at 20:31
Thanks for the reply, commit link, and your work, PleasingFungus! The commit is an almost textbook example of “it’s boring/similar to other stuff, so we dropped it”, but I did notice the part on trying to get away from Tolkien-esque things. The removal is not a satisfying result, since I do think there is room for improvement rather than elimination, but I suppose it’s somewhat reasonable in the “get away from Tolkien” argument. He didn’t invent elves, though… ;)
Oh, and I finally got your joke in the post, too!
31. Comment by Kyle
10/Jan/2017 at 03:55
Yep terrible.
Depth, content and variety is what makes players hooked on a game. Crawl has lost a huge bulk of these since these last few years of *updates* due to that stupid over-dumbified game design concept being pushed by the devs.
You’ve lost me as a player as well, sad to say.
32. Comment by Billy Bob
11/Jan/2017 at 01:01
I’ve been playing DCSS for years and this update is very disappointing. I hope there are VERY GOOD REASONS for such changes. Let me get this straight:
- remove high elves,
- remove wands of healing, teleportation and hasting,
- Ogres flavor fail,
- remove hill giants, :c
- made The Shining One even more useful, despite the fact that it’s already one of the most used Gods.
I do appreciate the voluntary work behind DCSS, but this is no the kind of design process that it’s going to make the game more fun. I’ve started to notice more and more questionable updates.
33. Comment by pratamawirya
11/Jan/2017 at 01:54
I don’t know about any flavor fail, but the new ogres is my most played race right now. The -1 m&f kinda sucks (but you can always take Oka to mitigate it), but -1 spell schools are so good.
34. Comment by warren
13/Jan/2017 at 06:40
Taking out the wands is going to have a huge impact on the 15 rune ability of melee classes. It has very little impact on a 3 rune run for anyone, and a 15 rune caster can avoid most spiky damage. But without a wand of heal wounds, a 15 rune melee run goes from medium risk to very high failure. Thus, the reason this change is not good is that it impacts different classes in a very unequal manner.
35. Comment by sika
14/Jan/2017 at 17:51
I am so happy we are removing high elves for thematic reasons, now eating slices of pizza totally fits in! :P
36. Comment by Styro
17/Jan/2017 at 22:05
Very disappointed to see high elves taken out. They are my favorite race. I don’t understand what the devs have against Tolkien. Doesn’t seem like a very good reason to remove something so many people enjoy. I like many of the new changes, but I really struggle with the removal of races that have been there for a long time. The game becomes less fun for me. Roleplaying a frog does not have the same appeal to me as roleplaying a dwarf or elf.