Angband and the roguelike community

[Nick]

Inspired by this year's Ascii Dreams Roguelike of the Year poll, and by a possible upcoming Angband episode on Roguelike Radio, I started thinking about Angband's relationship with the wider roguelike community.

Using the following data:

• I used to read rec.games.roguelike.development
• I read Ascii Dreams
• I've listened to several episodes of Roguelike Radio
• This site where you can play "classic roguelikes" in your browser which I found via
• The roguelikes thread on reddit

my conclusion is that it's a pretty dysfunctional relationship. What do other people think?

[Derakon]

Angband has a terrible reputation among the greater roguelike community, from what little I've seen. People regularly dump on it just as a matter of course, like "Of course Angband is bad, why would you think otherwise?" It's like being a Mac user in a Windows-dominated world.

I don't really get the hate, but it doesn't surprise me that it results in a "dysfunctional" relationship, as you put it.

[LostTemplar]

Yes angband is special, a different kind of game, it is more developer's game, then player's game. Other major roguelikes are supposed to be played by people, who don't know the details, angband is probably the only one that keep interest with full knowledge. And Angband is a horrible thing for a beginner.

[mrrstark]

Angband is about the only RL that allows (encourages?) grinding, since it lacks any clock and you can always get another level generated for you.

There are other complaints, but I think this is the biggest, and I think this is the one that leads to the hate. It's very 'loose'. Almost all other RLs pride themselves on a 'tight' design, in terms of turn counts, food clocks, interacting systems, etc. But Angband lets you always escape, and try again for more gear, consumables, stuff.

I think people see this as a weakness to mock. They think a good RL should kill you quickly for not being good enough, rather than letting you grind on with terrible play. And they think Angband's style in that respect is closer to non-RL games, and it bugs them.

As they stated in the Roguelike Radio about Angband & variants, one possible explanation for so many variants, is that there's so many problems to fix, and each variant fixes that maintainer's pet peeves.


Personally, I actually Angband because of the lack of a clock, because of the loose play. It's relaxing. If I want to play something with really tight systems, I've got lots of options. If I want to kick back and play something lighter (ha) and not feel pressure to optimize absolutely everything I do, then I can unwind with a Band.

I think the haters may not realize that... there's no right answer.

[LostTemplar]

Almost all other RLs pride themselves on a 'tight' design

Yes, but this only works at start. After a given roguelike, e.g. ADOM or Crawl is won by a given player couple times, design stop being 'tight', since it is only tight for a beginner, and the game becomes boring. Angband's focus is to make a gameplay process interesting by itself, regardless of whatever it is hard or not to win, there are allways hard tasks to attempt in Andband game. It is somewhat like Dwarf Fortress, where is no difficulty set by the game itself, however there are many things to try, and enjoy success or be frustrated by failure.

[bio_hazard]

Judging from another forum (SomethingAwful), I'd agree with most of what's been said so far in this thread. SA usually has a "general roguelike" thread that is pretty active. Sil and Brogue have gotten a lot of love there, but Angband tends to get dumped on. The complaints are usually about a clunky UI, too long, needs grinding, dumb monsters (not thematic enough), boring dungeon layouts and lack of terrain, lack of "interaction" a la Nethack or ADOM. Note that many people who complain about it probably haven't played for many versions. I think also it's fun to enjoy the shiny new game of the moment, and Angband can seem stale by that measure since the basic premise of the game hasn't changed in forever.

That said, there's now a Let's Play thread for Angband 3.5 and a few of variants (Steamband, Sil and ToME 2), which has gotten several people to check out Vanilla (they either had never played or hadn't played for a decade), and the feedback has been pretty positive.

I don't think Angband is going to be for everyone. However, it still draws new people into the community, so there will always be interest in it.

[mrrstark]

I think also it's fun to enjoy the shiny new game of the moment, and Angband can seem stale by that measure since the basic premise of the game hasn't changed in forever.

That's definitely true. Consider how
- Crawl recently added new classes, races, change...
- Tome4 had a steam release, has a lot of new classes, and addons to keep innovation coming
- Adom has added new classes and races
- Cataclysm had a kickstarter to fast track some specific new feature development

And then consider the recent threads about what post 3.5V might look like, not the content, but the tone with people freaking out about relatively tweaks to the edges of Angband's systems.

There's been lots of innovation in variants, maybe more should be aggressively pulled into V?
Maybe significant new features should be publicised?
Or what about an effort to promote addons instead of variants to try and consolidate support around V+addons instead of a loose collection of different games

[brownbear]

Angband will always be fresh to me, since I usually play for a few weeks to a month then something IRL usually tears me away for a week or two, and then I forget about it for months/years.

I don't know all the artifacts, (play randarts most of the time anyway) play different versions depending on the machine I'm on, and am not aware of the difference between versions. It's like a different game everytime I play

Ignorance is bliss!

[debo]

Hi, what I've seen of the "roguelike community" so far is that everyone shits on everything all the time but once you get to know people, each individual is pretty nice and funny and just likes bashing things they probably genuinely enjoy or things they just haven't had a chance to amply try yet. I mean, roguelikes are a pretty extreme form of entertainment and will naturally attract extreme people.

Also angband is terrible and I don't even know why I come here. (See?)

[bio_hazard]

Hi, what I've seen of the "roguelike community" so far is that everyone shits on everything all the time but once you get to know people, each individual is pretty nice and funny and just likes bashing things they probably genuinely enjoy or things they just haven't had a chance to amply try yet. I mean, roguelikes are a pretty extreme form of entertainment and will naturally attract extreme people.

Also angband is terrible and I don't even know why I come here. (See?)

This may be true, but I think this is dismissing the image problems we've been talking about. I also think roguelikes are broadening their reach with some of the more recent offerings.

I think mrrstark may be on to something. There may be some things worth bringing into V from variants, but I also think 'marketing' V as a *system* that more directly includes variants could be an interesting idea (if at all feasible). When people learn about the "big 3" or whatever breakdown of the old heavy hitters, they are introduced to the proliferation of variants with Angband, but without necessarily any useful entry into that world.

This could take the form of:
1) bundling some variants with the vanilla download (would be great if they were all somehow modules under the same executable, but this is iikely asking too much).
2) having some sort of useful summary of working variants better than what's on ook. "You'd like this if you want more of X, or less of Y, or you want to play this character/strategy"

[Patashu]

I like the idea of bundling variants with vanilla, but it is one that needs to be approached carefully - you do not want new players to suffer from 'decision paralysis' from too many variants offered simultaneously with no prior knowledge of their workings/pros.

[Carnivean]

I see Angband as a bit like Quake (Damn I'm old now...). Great technology show piece, but it's the mods that keep the interest. It's not that straightforward, as winning Angband is still a massive challenge.

If you start stitching the community of variants back into the fold, by making the game code "mod"-able, then I think that you could hold the Vanilla game relatively static. Improve the technology, the UI, and then let the "mods" build the complexity.

You might even be able to create a mini-dungeon game to get people into it. Go down 20 levels and have Smaug as the End Boss. The Hobbit vs the LOTR. Might need to Nerf Smaug a bit for that.

Win that and "unlock" the variants. Their variations could be options within the Vanilla code, ready to be utilised when you choose to start a variant game.

[Timo Pietilä]

I see Angband as a bit like Quake (Damn I'm old now...).

I have sometimes made comment about "recent" change in the game only to find out that that was made 10+ years ago... .

Couple of years more and I comment recent change that was made before current players were even born.

[debo]

This may be true, but I think this is dismissing the image problems we've been talking about. I also think roguelikes are broadening their reach with some of the more recent offerings.

Maybe. I'm not sure this is actually true, tbh, certain games are absorbing roguelike mechanics or principles for sure, but I'd be curious to see how much the total audience of, say "permadeath games" is actually growing.

I think mrrstark may be on to something. There may be some things worth bringing into V from variants, but I also think 'marketing' V as a *system* that more directly includes variants could be an interesting idea (if at all feasible).

I think bundles are a neat idea, but the thing is that I see many people outside of the Angband community looking over here and saying things like "man I am so sick of Tolkien, that is so overdone".

It's a cross-association with tiresome boring old things. Maybe it would be cool to bundle in variants that are drastically different, but then you run into the problem that most of those are either broken to hell or archaic (steamband) or still sort of unfinished / in major flux (halls of mist)

I think Halls, Sil, one of FA or NPP (as the "trad V representative"), and Steamband would make an awesome bundle. That's still 50% tolkien, though

[nppangband]

I think mrrstark may be on to something. There may be some things worth bringing into V from variants

NPPAngband already does this.

(And now I am stealing Nick's catchphrases as well).