We need more people.

[rdermyer]

It is extremely CPU- and graphics-light, though the ASCII does alienate a lot of people. I have found the people who appreciate old-school gaming things (I have a good techno remix of the Bubble Bobble theme) because they don't mind the ASCII and they can appreciate games from an era where the graphics were expected to suck so they had to make the games really fun.

This is exactly the problem I have with a lot of modern games: they put so much into making it look pretty, but there isn't any substance or depth to the game. It seems that any story is just an afterthought and a means of delivering the advanced graphics and whatever.
Somewhat similarly, this is (I think) the idea that Nintendo had with the Wii. Let everybody else try the whole graphics thing, and we'll do something totally different and innovative and engaging. Looks like it worked, too.

[Jungle_Boy]

This is exactly the problem I have with a lot of modern games: they put so much into making it look pretty, but there isn't any substance or depth to the game. It seems that any story is just an afterthought and a means of delivering the advanced graphics and whatever.
Somewhat similarly, this is (I think) the idea that Nintendo had with the Wii. Let everybody else try the whole graphics thing, and we'll do something totally different and innovative and engaging. Looks like it worked, too.

Angband for the Wii!! It's a match made in heaven!!

[Donald Jonker]

This is exactly the problem I have with a lot of modern games: they put so much into making it look pretty, but there isn't any substance or depth to the game. It seems that any story is just an afterthought and a means of delivering the advanced graphics and whatever.

This is a tired and reductive polemic unfortunately all too common in the roguelike community. Who here doesn't have some fond memories of diablo? I have to think that anyone who wasn't at least somewhat impressed by the gameplay, story, and yes, graphics of the half-life series is deluding themselves.

There is often substance, depth and good storytelling in commercial games... more often there is mediocrity, but that's life.

Roguelikes are different not because they put every ounce of effort into gameplay, but because they aren't concerned with reaching a mass market. Sure, you can say that angband has greater depth than diablo 2, but I don't think that's the main factor that puts angband a step higher. Angband works better because it's unabashedly intricate and difficult. As has been mentioned it has no storytelling; if it had better graphics nothing would be changed.

Games should be judged based on their intended effect. It's irksome to see people pat themselves on the back for not playing Halo because it's "focused on graphics and not gameplay." There are plenty of reasons to play commercial games. You play roguelikes because their style appeals to you.

I must reaffirm that roguelikes command loyalty because of their esoteric nature. It's on the level of learning a language or studying a writer.

Commercial games are like reading Stephen King while roguelikes are like reading James Joyce. Neither are to be dismissed in a facile or offhanded manner (at least, not without being challenged ).

[Zikke]

Angband for the Wii!! It's a match made in heaven!!

/swoon



This would be awesome

edit: this the answer to how to hook the younger generation

[buzzkill]

My 2 cents... what Jonker said and...

We don't need more players. If people want to play, that's great. If they don't, that's great. What we do need is more exposure so that people who might be interested in such a game can be made aware of it. There are probably a lot of players sitting out there with their WoW ultra-powerful, died 1000 times, living in a castle on a hill, ruling over armies of minions... whatever.... just bored to tears.

I find that any games ceases to be entertaining when it is either too easy, or too hard. Too easy, forget about it... but for a certain portion of the population, brought up on games that have no real penalty for death, a game such as Angband would seem mind-bogglingly hard, incomprehensible, unfair (how I hate that word). Combine that with a almost total lack of graphics, and the odds of attracting new players seems even more dismal. Yet despite these attributes, new players continue to stumble upon, and come to terms with the beast that is Angband.

More players... certainly a good thing... probably not necessary for our survival... and isn't that really what Angband is all about.

All we really need for wide spread success is a variant with save points and difficulty settings.

[pav]

Sounds you really advocate You-Only-Live-Once-Warcraft

[buzzkill]

Sounds you really advocate You-Only-Live-Once-Warcraft

Well... not exactly... not at all... but that would be a step in the right direction .

[Zikke]

Wait you mean you don't re-roll every time you get ganked in Stranglethorn?



(ok WoW talk is done)

[Djabanete]

The trick is to hook players while they are young by lacing the game shamelessly with addictive properties and then handing out free samples.

You're actually half-right. My dad showed me Moria when I was 7 and because of that RL's have never seemed strange to me. For me, strange games are those with a huge emphasis on graphics and lighting and particle engines, to the extent that it makes the gameplay less transparent. My favorite games are those that have simple, easy-to-parse graphics _and_ excellent gameplay(Angband, yes; StarCraft, yes; Dwarf Fortress, no (because of the impossible graphics, and yes I did give it a shot); Warcraft 3 or worse, no).

[Atarlost]

I once played one of those heavily lauded new FPSs on someone's X-Box. It was terrible. I couldn't see a bleeding thing.

Then there are the games that require HTL and a particle engine for no good reason. Like Civ4. It's nice and pretty, but it's seriously excessive. It's also, for all that the game engine is fully moddable, more difficult fo do custom content than 2d Civ2. It may even verge on impossible.

[Malak Darkhunter]

That's the great thing about roguelikes, angband, moria. You can see what's going around around you, it's very comfortable. Most graphic games gives you a very limited camera control, it's very frustrating just to see what's going on. Take Fate for example I play it every now and then, but the top down perspective is very limited and dosen't quite feel like a roguelike to me.

[ChodTheWacko]

Angband is the greatest game for playing on long flights.

It takes forever, and it doesn't use much CPU or hard disk so your battery lasts forever. Regardless how long your flights are, you can just bang away at it.
Great stuff.

I showed my coworkers and they now call it the 'crazy text game', I don't think they will ever get over me panicking because I got surprise attacked by a capital L.

Angband is definitely a immediate love it/hate it thing.

- Frank

[Hematite]

Thoughts from a relative noob

Hi, I happened to be passing and coincidentally I'm going through my first big roguelike binge. Perhaps I can relate some of my experiences as a veteran gamer but roguelike noob.

First thing, the learning curve in roguelikes is ludicrously steep. Don't think I'm saying the game should be dumbed down, if roguelikes weren't complex there wouldn't be any reason to play them. But even with more than a decade of experience with other computer RPGs I'm having trouble adapting to the play style - there is a gaping chasm between the skillsets used in even Diablo or Baldur's Gate and angband. The variants I've played (and I assume the ones I haven't) are very unforgiving of mistakes - not so much with the permadeath, but with the dying and not knowing what you should have done differently. I would dearly like to play a tutorial variant of angband which would be horribly boring for veterans, but could present new gameplay concepts in a more digestable form.

To start with I'm going to have to write a short novel about my roguelike experiences so far to give context (sorry), then I will talk about some of the specific problems I've run into and how I think they might be solved. In case the forum software complains about length, and to keep things organised for people who don't really care about my autobiography, I'll put my suggestions in a following comment.

Way back in the 80's when I was young and roguelike graphics were state of the art, I played some extremely limited game on a friend's computer which involved exploring a haunted castle and escaping with loot. It didn't have randomly generated maps, and it seemed pretty cool. But when I realised that the silver cross wasn't just loot - it was to help you pass the vampire in another room, I realised it was totally awesome. So I was primed from a young age to think that roguelikes were cool.

When I set up my first linux system in the mid 90's a friend told me I should try nethack. What a bastard he was. Nethack is the least accessible game I've ever played; having no grounding in roguelikes I died all the freaking time. Even with wizard mode turned on I quickly came to a point where the game became unplayable because I would get killed two or three times every turn and I couldn't figure out how to get decent equipment and keep myself fed. Of course in those days debian was only slightly more accessible than nethack was, and since I had the major problem that I couldn't get my modem working (and hence couldn't look up any online help) I quickly went back to windows and left nethack behind too. I really want to like nethack, but even now I don't think I could play it without spending a couple of days reading forums and completely spoiling myself so I could actually survive for a while.

A couple of years ago I got into ZAngband; I forget why. It was great fun, not nearly as pathologically cruel as nethack and I played rather a lot of it but always with the option to cheat death because, frankly, I died often and unexpectedly. I eventually moved away from the computer I had ZAngband on and didn't start again on a new one.

I've also done some time with Dwarf Fortress, of which I am in awe. Not strictly a roguelike of course but it does share the complexity and spartan graphics of roguelikes. It's very complex and it's quite possible to suddenly have your fortress utterly destroyed by failure to deal with an invasion or some magma that you didn't treat with due respect, but I didn't run into the same kind of failure to properly engage with the game that I've had with roguelikes.

Most recently I've been playing Steamband, which is awesome. I mostly picked it up because of the HG Wells and Jules Verne themes but my interest has lasted beyond killing martian walkers while wearing Dorothy's Ruby Red Slippers [0, +0]. I still die fairly frequently, but now I can see it coming when my options start running out and I'm usually killed by uniques or something else which is out of scale with the level I'm on. I've also toyed around with a couple of other *bands including vanilla angband, but I haven't played them enough to make much comment.

So I've got half a dozen roguelikes on my system at the moment, and I'm enjoying fiddling with them and comparing. More specific comments will follow.

[Hematite]

Thoughts from a noob: classes and abilities

So when I start playing a new RPG of some variety I usually start off with a warrior - lots of armour, lots of bashiness, how could it go wrong? With most games playing the pure warrior achetype is a recipe for easiness and boringness in the early stages of the game. You hit things, they die. The enemies are usually scaled so that even some priest or other weakling can just bash away for a few levels without having to use any class skills, so for a class whose raison d'etre is bashing it's a piece of cake. This works to a certain extent in the roguelikes I've played, but only for a VERY short time. I brought some false assumptions from other games which crippled my play style for a long time in ZAngband.

- if you meet something, you should be able to kill it using tactics appropriate to your class.
- if you progress through the game at a normal rate you should constantly find level-appropriate equipment.
- magic items are for magicy classes

And of course I was thinking "Warrior, class skills: bash, be bashed". I'm sure you all know that just hacking away at things doesn't work for very long, but I tried it like a trooper. I thought that when I kept dieing it was because I was too low a level, or hadn't farmed good enough equipment. Very frustrating.

Now of course I realise that magic items are for warrior types to get elemental attacks or magic effects, sometimes you find great equipment and sometimes you really don't, and sometimes you need to find other ways of dealing with a threat than just killing it. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure that out.

Furthermore, as I progress through these games (still haven't finished any) I keep coming across new and game-changing abilities. Again, this is a great thing and one of the best features of roguelikes, but it took me a long time to realise that when I get a new power I should be taking full advantage of it and changing my play style so that when I have item detection I come to a level, detect it, loot it and move on rather than playing the same explore-and-slay style I've been using. When I first discovered teleport scrolls in nethack I thought they were a 'bad' item like siren scrolls (that's steamband terminology, I'm thinking of the ones that wake up monsters) - suddenly you've traded the nice safe corner where you decided to test out some unidentified scrolls for a random, likely lethal part of the map. Now I buy a pile of them before I leave town the first time, but for a long time I ignored them as junk and assumed that when I died it was because I just needed more healing potions or better gear.

I don't think it was until I played steamband that I got over my 'warriors don't use wands' mentality; steamband uses custom classes and races, and it made me stop and think about which items my character should be using regardless of whether it was appropriate for the fantasy stereotype. Does a British Gentleman use a .20 Guage Shotgun? He does if his shooting skill is ok. That's all there is to it.

My current thinking is that the community (as a group, not the individuals who already know this stuff) would benefit from a noob-band which walked fairly slowly through the addition of new abilities and when you might use them.

- Have the first dungeon level be ONLY boring melee monsters who run monotonously toward you, and are killed by your sword, bow or magic missiles depending on your class. Money drops for loot.
- On level two, have fast melee enemies and phase door (short teleport) scrolls so it's incredibly obvious that THESE new toys are so you can evade THESE new monsters.
- Have a couple of levels to beat in the rules about elements and resistance, reproducing monsters, fighting groups, tunnelling, blindness and confusion, how light and dark effect potions vs scrolls.

Then you can have some interesting levels - maybe deliberately give the player a powerful but class-inappropriate item. Warrior types get an advanced magic item which either has limited charges or a high failure rate, wizard types get a neat weapon which they still kinda suck at using. Make it clear that you're scrounging around to make the most of what you find, not waiting for the next [class gear] drop. Have a set piece where there's a lumbering unique enemy you have no chance of killing, but you can avoid or delay it to farm loot off the level.

Of course I don't demand that anyone goes out and makes such a game, but probably everyone here has been playing roguelikes long enough that even a new angband variant is mostly a process of learning which items a class needs to pick up to round out their skill set. It blew my mind when I got a spell of teleport other and discovered that instead of fighting my way through tough monsters I could just dispose of them and grab the loot. In what other type of computer games is that even an option? Being new to the genre is really rough and I don't think there's an easy starting point right now (nethack would be the opposite of that).

[Dragonboneman]

One or two people here have advocated save-scumming as a "learning aid" for new players. I say thee NAY!
I would never encourage a new player to savescum as the beauty of Angband is the permadeath. Not only does it cause you to think about each death and turn it into a learning experience, but the game is just so much more exciting when you feel something is at stake (namely the time invested in your current character). And then there's the thrill you get when something goes right, like the first time you find Ringil or when you finally get your revenge against that unique who killed your best character in a previous game.
In over 25 years of gaming, I can't remember anything which gave me quite the same sense of accomplishment as seeing the magic words "You have slain Morgoth, Lord of Darkness" for the first time. I wouldn't have danced around like a loony if I'd cheated my way to that win.
Permadeath turns the game into an emotional rollercoaster and is the chief reason why I've played Angband longer than any other game. To attract new players, we need to use it as a selling point, not something to be worked around.