Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup’s former lead designer, David Ploog, was recently a guest on the Roguelike Radio podcast, speaking with Ido Yehieli, Keith Burgun and Jeff Lait. The episode covers some interesting topics and is well worth a listen – check it out here!
Saturday, February 18th, 2012 01:50
1. Comment by RjY
18/Feb/2012 at 04:14
“Former” lead designer? I seem to have missed that announcement…
2. Comment by Napkin
18/Feb/2012 at 04:43
We’re still haggling to lure him back :-) But he seems quite determined..
3. Comment by Gimli
18/Feb/2012 at 17:39
If we get the mountain dwarves back in return, all is well.
4. Comment by PigVomit
24/Feb/2012 at 15:35
@Napkin: Try harder! :P
@Gimli: didn’t you get the memo?
it was not just dpeg that wanted your short butt kicked out of the dungeon, but support from the dev team and a horde of players.
5. Comment by tigen
8/Mar/2012 at 03:57
Between minotaurs, orcs, and dwarves, I’d rather have axed the minotaurs. I don’t see them as being a “race”, just a one-off mythological figure. And dwarves have a bigger player history in the game, with the dwarven arms and such, and orcs being generally evil.
I could understand why some might prefer exorcising Tolkien. But the orc is still straight up Tolkien (even more than dwarves IMO).
At the end of the day it’s mostly just a flavor choice. But Street Fighter II had both Ken and Ryu, and I think most people liked that. Crawl had elves, dwarves, hobbits, and orcs for a long time, vanilla as they might be. They give people a familiar starting point.
(In the end I don’t actually care too much.)
6. Comment by Reuben
17/Mar/2012 at 20:13
A longtime on-off player of DCSS (about 5 or 6 years), I’ve seen this game get better and better with every release. In hindsight, it seems to me that’s because the designers weren’t afraid to make big changes to gameplay that removed things people liked in favor of improving mechanics long-term. I think pretty much everyone would agree that the direction DCSS has been going has always been good (in general, though people may disagree with individual changes like how I’m not a fan of the new Chei resistances removal in 0.10).
No matter how anyone feels about the MD removal, I think it’s really sad that such a small change (relatively speaking! the skill pool change had much larger gameplay implications) has created so much division in the community and that most of it was directed at dpeg.
I’m sad to hear about dpeg’s decision to step down and hope that in the future the community will learn to treat the people that develop DCSS on their free time (!!!) with more courtesy and respect.