Nethack: 10 years after the last version.

[reaver]

Today marks 10 years since Nethack 3.4.3, the last official version, was released.

I wasn't around when it was actively developed, but it was the first rougelike I played before finding Crawl. I played Vulture's eye with full spoiler access, although I never master concepts like price-ID or exploited Elbereth heavily enough. My farthest game got around the 17th dungeon level or so, desperately fleeing threats above. I thought about trying Sporkhack after reading this awesome Let's Play, but I couldn't find a graphical port for it.

(PS, does anybody know if the same Kobold Lord who used to post here made that Let's Play? The one there mentioned how awesome Crawl was near the end, and ours has described Let's Plays as though he has made one before.)

I have mixed feelings about Nethack being a dead project. (It has forks, including Grunthack by our very own Grunt, but the community has withered and died rather than choosing a new fork to support). On one hand, Crawl is obviously the better game, but Nethack still has things like wacky humor and the complex web of interacting subsystems that isn't possible without spoilers. It's hard to say what more crazy things might have happened if it stayed alive. Mayve it would have even seen the light and tried to reign in the spoilers.

[Klown]

Seems like some have wanted to take over development but an overly-conservative community shunned away new devs?

[nicolae]

Probably one of the first things that attracted me to Crawl in the first place is the transparent development cycle where you could see what updates were being considered and added, instead of occasionally getting a little bit of information from a dev once a year like some hermit wandering down a mountain to preach a kernel of wisdom.

[Mankeli]

...well, ADOM did come back (we'll see how much improvement will truly happen but there is definitely stuff going on) so maybe Nethack will too .

[dpeg]

Nethack seems to be dead in the water, but some people still keep talking about it in radio shows. This one features the people behind the Sporkhack and UnNethack forks -- attempts to keep the game alive but I think they're facing an uphill battle given the vanilla devteam's pedigree and status, and the playership's outlook.

[TeshiAlair]

So when do we get to pillage the remaining good ideas from Nethack without cries of thievery?

[dpeg]

Are there good ideas in Nethack left? (half joke)

We borrowed their ammunition mulchin model at some point. From scratch, I wouldn't know what to steal fromNethack at all. Maybe the in-game options editor Apart from that, two cool assets are the starting pet and spatial shops. But beyond that?

[TeshiAlair]

The two big things are flavor and more complex item/monster/spell interaction, both of which Crawl has been drastically improving and both of which are handled horribly in NH. Flavor is being handled primarily in vaults and uniques, but I think there is more room there with more thematic portals and even making the branches feel better (I hate playing Shoals, but flavor wise it is hands down the best Lair branch).

Item interaction is a taboo topic in DC, simply because Nethack did it in such a spoiler-requiring way, but I think the recent push for more niche items will open up some design space here. I find the few "combos" in DC so satisfying- Petrify-> shatter, Mephetic cloud -> ignite poison. Sure, they aren't always the best option, but they are fun as hell, and are intuitive rather than spoiler driven. I'd love to see more oddball stuff like this.

EDIT- I know I was talking about item interaction then just talked about spells. I'm saying that the spell combos in crawl work- some item combos I feel could work as well.

[Sprucery]

I've played a lot of Nethack in the past and absolutely loved the game. But I can't think much of anything worth borrowing. Riding? It's definitely cool to ride a dragon. Swallowing as a monster attack (Juiblex, elementals,...)?

EDIT: Also purple worms and long worms.

[HenryFlower]

I ascended NH with all characters, & and with wishless, pacifist, atheist & non-weapon wielding conduct ascensions. Worked on a genocide ascension but got bored. It got so that you had to ascend wielding only a trunk to be truly badass. Every character in NH ends up looking the same at the end: maxed STR, INT, DEX, etc., reflection & MR, fully enchanted dragon armor, spells & weapon skills, etc.

Have won Crawl exactly once (and cleared Z:5 four times but got splatted in Extended).

I have a spot of love for NH but most of the "depth" is just grind: memorizing what happens when you dip X into Y, how and when to tin, how and when to use a blindfold, the combinatorics of scroll meaning when blessed, cursed or neutral with and w/out being confused etc.

The depth of Crawl is the depth of tactical and and strategic decisions that need to be made to win. It's the depth of the strategic tradeoffs necessary to tank vs glass canon vs. stab vs. etc.

(If there's a weakness of Crawl post Depths and Vault runelock, it's that at the limit of experience in Extended, everyone is a hybrid with high AC and EV and similar resistances).

[Sprucery]

I also ascended all characters and then some. Not many with special conducts, though (except I never engraved Elbereth or wished for quest artifacts). I also read every spoiler I could find, which is basically a requirement for getting anywhere in Nethack (unless you have unlimited time and patience).

I really like how Crawl tries to make spoilers irrelevant. One reason to consult them disappeared with the display of uniques' spell lists. One of the things that still require reading spoilers is using some of the decks, IMHO. Some evokables are a bit fuzzy in their descriptions, but you can usually just try them out and not risk your life.

[Siegurt]

Did you know you can see all the possible cards in a deck from ?/

[rebthor]

In honor of the 10th anniversary, I started playing NH again. In truth I've never ascended since I generally get bored around the quest and being bored in NH (and crawl) leads to YASD often enough.

One thing I will say is that the interface is just horrific after going back to it from Crawl. Even compared to "contemporary" games like Zangband, it's bad. I know that in crawl I know most of the monsters on sight but if I don't, I can just glance to the right and see the monster list or hit ctrl-x and see all the monsters in LOS if the list is long. In NH, I have to go ; on everything I want to see.

And seriously, maybe there's some edge case that I'm not seeing but why would I ever want to . wait when I could "s" search? And that's not even counting all the #commands and m-commands.

[duvessa]

If you are encumbered then pressing . will wait at your unencumbered speed whereas it still takes your encumbered speed to search. You're only ever encumbered when you're hauling things to an altar so this is not particularly useful knowledge.

[Sprucery]

Did you know you can see all the possible cards in a deck from ?/

Sure. What I meant was that spoilers are necessary for finding out the concept of power level and it's effect on certain cards. For example, a certain card is mostly useless at power level 0, at power level 1 it can kill you and at power level 2 it is very useful.

[I want to believe]

Maybe i'll try my hand at a borris-wizard of yendor style vault.

[Sprucery]

That would be cool. I guess there should be a high level spellbook in there. And Boris should have an amulet with no useful properties

[duvessa]

This was one of the first vaults minmay submitted:

  Code:

NAME:   min_nethack
TAGS:   mini_float
DEPTH:  D:10-16
WEIGHT: 2
MONS:   water moccasin, blue devil
ITEM:   long sword
MAP
xxxxx
xd2.x
x1U1x
x111x
xx+xx
ENDMAP

It didn't get in.