Friday, 3rd February 2012, 16:31 by eeviac
Honestly, I think many 'average' pc gamers would play Crawl - and love it - if it was playable through a 'normal' medium like Steam. I believe roguelikes have historically languished in obscurity only because they are awkward, obtuse, and archaic. Much of their perceived difficulty comes from this; NetHack really isn't hard once you've memorized its thousand unintuitive quirks. Crawl has improved, and continues to improve, so much on this.
I can think of many recent and successful commercial games heavily inspired by roguelikes: desktop dungeons, dungeons of dredmor, the binding of isaac, 100 rogues, dwarf fortress, diablo, torchlight. Terraria and Minecraft are absolutely massive, and both take several nods from the genre, including a permadeath mode. 'Difficult' games are still around, too: one example would be PS3's Demons Souls/Dark Souls, where its deadly monsters and harsh punishments for getting killed are a major selling point. These games are played by 'normal' people. Why wouldn't they like Crawl?
Of course, with Crawl being free and open source, it may not matter to the devteam whether crawl has 500 active players or 50,000. Licensing problems (free game on commercial platform) could arise, and major network coding could be required. It certainly wouldn't help to have the forums flooded with terrible game suggestions, and I can only imagine the storm of whining that could come with major game changes a la removing MD. It's all just a pipe dream.
Last edited by
eeviac on Friday, 3rd February 2012, 16:35, edited 1 time in total.