Wednesday, 30th March 2011, 13:25 by Whart
I got into roguelikes via ADOM. I'd played at least two other ones, but only a bit. ADOM was the first one I really got into. Never won it, though. Shame that Biskup didn't pass it into open source, IMO. It looks like he's updated it? It's too much of a grind, though, it really rewards tedious things like planting herbs. And I came to dislike the early quests. Still, I enjoyed it on and off for a couple years.
I've tried a few of the other RLs, like IVAN, Incursion, and Slash 'Em, but never got into them. Did play a lot of Dwarf Fortress before the Z axis came in, but only fortress mode. I like Desktop Dungeons quite well but can't get those last few Crypt and Factory wins and haven't come close to winning the elvish mini-campaign. Played several commercial hack n slash CRPGs, like Diablo I & II, Sacred, and, more recently, Torchlight, which often seem pretty similar to RLs to me.
There's a lot of things to be said for traditional RLs, though. Low system requirements mean I can play on any old computer. A lack of eye candy means the game loads quickly and can progress surprisingly quickly without a lot of cut scenes and story time where words slowly scroll by as some crap voice actor tries to channel Orson Welles. You can get pretty far in a spare hour with a RL. Or maybe just kill off three hapless new characters.
All that's true of pretty much all RLs, so why Crawl? Part of the genius of Crawl is what's left out. Shops restocking? Nope. How about buying loot from me? Also no. Games like Diablo and Torchlight in particular got to be more about shopping and gambling than battling, but I can remember making plenty of tedious trips to the shop in ADOM. And it turns out that what's left out stems from a design philosophy that's specifically against rewarding grinding. I'm really bad about grinding. I'll do it until I'm sick of it and end up quitting or starting a new character. Crawl is quite straightforward, no overland map with lame encounters, no side quests (well, I guess there are with the troves but I never completed one), no damn herb gardens.
That's all well and good, but I doubt if I'd keep returning to Crawl if it didn't keep evolving. I haven't actually won since Stone Soup came along, although I did manage-- if I recall correctly-- to get killed in Zot a couple times with MDFis of Okawaru, back when they were the easy build. Not sure why I don't win now, but it's probably mostly that the old game was easier and that I don't have as much time for games these days. But I keep coming back and some of that behaviour is due to wanting to see the changes.
It seems like development is picking up pace, too. I really like the new interface changes in 0.8, little things like getting a message telling you what scroll you just read and how you don't have to press the letter now for a repeated spell. I particularly like that the developers are open to some suggestions-- this did not seem to always be the case in the past. I also like how they got rid initial game randomness that encouraged restarting, for example to a get the fire spellbook for a wizard or a higher intelligence for a transmuter. Sort of funny to think that a genre that thrives on randomness can be improved by taking some out.
I don't really have a conclusion paragraph, so I'll ask you this: what's chunky and poisonous? Naga vomit.