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C(6.3) C Erirbag [Half-Ogre Cultist] L:39 DL:Collector's Cave 2 A+ R+ Sp w:The Long Sword of Karakal (2d5) (+9, +12) (+2)
C(TN/Do) W H- D-- c-- f PV s- d+ P++ M?
C S++ I+ So B- ac- GHB- SQ RQ V+ F:TomeNET Game Progression -
Ok so I've listened to a lot of roguelike radio episodes (it's one of the things I listen to on long runs)
I also browse reddit.com/r/roguelikes very frequently
I've been playing a decent amount of crawl and tome4 lately.
Most criticisms of Angband are criticisms of Angband circa 3.0.6 or earlier. This happens on roguelike radio a lot (the most recent episode on Nethack criticized potions of death for example). Most of these can be ignored. The two criticisms that are also brought up is that the play is clunky, and that the game is grindy.
Many people assume the game is forced grindy, but this is obviously not true. It simply allows for it. This is actually what made me choose angband initially, because it's more forgiving at the beginning. You can spend a lot of time in the early levels learning how the game works without dying. Of course it's easy to fall into the grinding trap, but I'd rather eliminate it with options (like forced descent) rather than making the game perma-levels or something.
The other critique, which is much more relevant, is that the game is clunky. The subwindows are clunky. The keyboard commands are clunky. The main window display is clunky. The tiles are often buggy. etc. etc. If we had someone who was willing to make the angband display look something like the dcss-tiles version, that would be fantastic. I want to do this, but it would take me years, since I have absolutely no skill in the area. The crawl-tiles game presentation is about 50 times better than angband. The gameplay is probably equivalent.
There's another critique which is probably worth considering. Many people say that after they've played a roguelike with auto-explore, they just can't go back to one without it. While I think auto-explore is a crutch to manage bad level design (like Tome4's trollmire, or DCSS's swamps) it's worth realizing that this has become another hill we're asking new players to climb over.
In the past, as recently as 6 years ago even, Angband had a privileged place. Crawl development was stalled. Tome4 hadn't yet started and Tome2 was considered a variant of Angband. When you looked up roguelike you got Nethack and Angband. There were a constant stream of players who found the game just by looking at "free games" on google. Now when you look up roguelike, there are a lot more options that come up, so the competition is fiercer, and we no longer have the privileged status (which we probably didn't deserve that much anyway).Comment
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I don't want to turn this into a crawl vs angband shitfest, but I don't think they have equivalent gameplay at all. The thing I like about crawl is that there are about eleventy billion possible interactions between stuff in the game. Monsters wielding equipment, various abilities, various characters levels etc. It feels like there are a lot of orthogonal options that interact in a huge variety of ways, and it's these continual surprises that I enjoy (and curse at when they kill me).
Angband is pretty one-dimensional in comparison, and that is actually why I like angband. It's a game I can go back to anytime and play for a couple hours without having to remember a zillion things, and finding that next new artefact or blasting that next new unique is an addictive enough mechanic that it has some longevity for me. If the monster list was mega cleaned up so that a huge percentage of them weren't just fodder, I'd say that would get it a bit closer to crawl.Glaurung, Father of the Dragons says, 'You cannot avoid the ballyhack.'Comment
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Oh, I wasn't clear. I don't disagree with this. I meant the gameplay of either game is equally enjoyable to me, while different.
Where I think crawl fails in presentation is the lack of transparency. I shouldn't have to look on the wiki to figure out what magic resistance actually protects against, or what my current attack speed with my sword is, and how high I should be training it. This is the one presentation point where Angband is ahead. Everywhere else, Angband is behind crawl or equal in dumb ways. (Angband has 4 different commands for activations: zap, use, activate, Activate; Crawl has 3 different wear commands and 3 different take off commands)
Crawl kind of fits in the middle of between angband and tome here IMO. Angband has a huge amounts of monsters, but every monster of a given type is exactly the same. Tome has a (relatively) low number of monsters, but monsters can have all ranges of abilities. So you can have spellcasting molds or berserker skeleton mages. Crawl doesn't quite have as much individual variability as Tome, but there is a difference between an orc with a dagger and an orc with a long sword of electrocution. So it indeed is an option to clean up the monster list but allow for variations in the individual monsters.If the monster list was mega cleaned up so that a huge percentage of them weren't just fodder, I'd say that would get it a bit closer to crawl.Comment
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I agree violently with everything you just said here
I made a similar comment about the opacity of crawl on the first silstreamer video, and people were not impressed!
Glaurung, Father of the Dragons says, 'You cannot avoid the ballyhack.'Comment
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I don't disagree with this, but I would give Crawl points for their tutorial mode that teaches while you play.Comment
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There's also a really good tutorial video / replay out there from some guy named dog, I learned a lot from it.Glaurung, Father of the Dragons says, 'You cannot avoid the ballyhack.'Comment
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The tutorial mode is useful for learning commands. But learning commands is not really where I get hung up on games. I'm pretty good at getting keys down these days. The tutorial mentions nothing about weapon speed. It mentions nothing about how resistances work. It doesn't cover extremely important issues like getting cast into the abyss. It doesn't cover long term strategy. Some would say that these are the things you should learn while you play, but most of them you can't learn except by using the wiki/spoilers.
A tutorial for V is probably another thing we should do. But I'd like it to cover a lot of the things that generally required looking in spoilers.Comment
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Crawl's hints mode is a bit closer to this than the regular tutorial. The tutorial has fixed maps and just teaches basics. Hints mode is a regular game with one of a few preset characters, and messages that pop up frequently (when seeing a new type of item, gaining skills, being hit by status effects, and so on). Probably something along those lines is a good approach for teaching the parts of the game (be it Crawl or Angband) that might be considered more spoilery.
Not disagreeing that it'd be a good thing to have of course, but personally Angband's lack of tutorial hadn't even crossed my mind until this thread, and my opinions on it are certainly mostly based on permitting (not requiring) grinding and all the problems that this guarantees (although despite this I'm still playing a lot of vanilla at the moment, and finding it hugely more enjoyable than I did Nethack).Comment
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I like Tome4 for the class variety, but, Tome4 gameplay can be boring generally, IMO, for these reasons:
- Autoexplore
- Meaningless monster variation desensitizes
- Entirely cooldown based play
Autoexplore:
Turns the game almost linear. Hit autoexplore, arrive in random room, clear, repeat. Autoexplore in many ways removes your connection with the tactical map since once you hit autoexplore, you're not in control of how you get where you end up. But manual control in an autoexplore game is often a huge tedious pain because the map isn't made with manual control in mind. Compare this to something like Sil where the game forces you to have an escape route in mind, even all the way back to the stairs.
Meaningless monster variation:
So many minor variations of monster abilities often means that I get desensitized, and end up treating all the stuff as just another thing to blast. Then I'm quite surprised when something blasts back way harder than expected... should I have to 'l'ook at every single monster when 99% of them die in one turn? I prefer the clarity of monster's type communicates their power/danger.
Entirely cooldown based play:
Means that every time you come out of autoexplore, you cast the same spells in the same order, for hours on end. No consumables means you always start with the same set of tools at the beginning of every encounter.Last edited by mrrstark; December 20, 2013, 21:06.Comment
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Sounds like the problem here is that the cooldowns are too short and/or there's no penalty (beyond boredom) to sitting around waiting for the cooldowns to expire.
In other words, it should be possible to make a cooldown-based game that doesn't have the problem you described; it's the implementation that's at issue, not the mechanic.Comment
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This forum never ceases to amaze me - I started this thread 24 hours ago, and tada! - instant analysis.
I guess my take is roughly this - neither the Angband community nor the wider roguelike community really needs the other all that much.
The roguelike community has moved on from the days when it was mostly centred around a few major roguelikes. My (fairly ignorant) impression is that there tends to be a focus on celebrating the new, but also a willingness to build up new majors (like Brogue and Sil); this makes for a pretty healthy community, on the whole. I guess most people who have been around the roguelike scene for any length of time have come across Angband, but it's probably not all that relevant to them. Angband, conversely, takes occasional ideas and inspiration from elsewhere, but on the whole sets its own course.
As to the future, I think a (nearly) 25-year-old game that still has old, and attracts new, players clearly has something going for it. The main thing it has to do is to continue to be Angband; that way the tiny weirdo slice of the population who are attracted to it have something to do for the rest of their lives
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.Comment
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I, for one, am proud to be a tiny weirdo.As to the future, I think a (nearly) 25-year-old game that still has old, and attracts new, players clearly has something going for it. The main thing it has to do is to continue to be Angband; that way the tiny weirdo slice of the population who are attracted to it have something to do for the rest of their livesComment
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@what nick said:
While it's probably true that we don't "need" the greater roguelike community, and they don't need us. I don't see any reason for isolation either. I think many people are perfectly willing to suggest people play a game that they think that person would like, as opposed to their personal favorite. And it'd be nice if people knew enough about Angband to suggest it where appropriate.
That being said, I definitely agree with the "taking stuff where appropriate but setting our own course." We definitely do not want to fall into the trap where we move towards a certain game's playstyle so much that we're just an inferior version of it. On that note, keeping infinite regenerable levels looks to be a niche that all the other games are perfectly willing to cede to us.
On other things that came up in the thread that aren't directly related to the topic.
@sil layout and stairs:
Yes, sil is the best at managing escape routes of the games I've played. (brogue might be ok, i don't know it all that well) However, the reason in my mind is pretty simple. There's no teleport for either players or monsters. Teleport really changes the game and makes a lot of clever tactical maneuvering strategies moot. DCSS is reasonably good at this, partly because of the ability to pull people up stairs. But DCSS has teleport, autoexplore, and some open level designs that prohibit tactical maneuvering. Because of this tactical choice, Sil actually manages to get by with a very simple looking dungeon generation algorithm. I do think they could handle a little more variety here, but that might just be my personal bias.
@autoexplore:
The danger of autoexplore is it means if the player wants it, then exploring the level isn't interesting or dangerous enough. It's hard for me to describe exploring angband levels as interesting, with mapping and monster detection playing such a promising role. I do think that making stuff more interesting here is the better choice. Angband has another good reason to avoid the autoexplore route. The games that have autoexplore assume that you're going to clear every level. Angband encourages you *not* to clear every level. It encourages you to run away when things get too hot.
@tome's monster types:
tome has huge spam problems of all sorts. This is just one aspect of it. There's too many things going on that to read all the messages is impossible. So you don't. It could really do well by trimming stuff, but that's not Darkgod's style. It is nice in Angband that you know that the green g is a monster to avoid. You don't have to do a bunch of clicking and examining to figure out if something is dangerous or not.
@tome and cooldowns:
I think tome does a reasonably good job with this. But I think the decision to use or save a consumable is great gameplay, and by removing consumables, tome loses out on a lot of tactics. I don't see angband ever going away from a consumable based gameComment
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