Ascii Dreams poll

[Nick]

I'm surprised Antoine didn't mention it but I've been airing my views about Angband's "ghetto-ization" on Roguelike Radio the last few episodes.

So this post finally gave me the impetus to listen to some of RR, and I found the Quickband episode interesting.

The tl;dr is that IMO Angband was great during the nineties, but there's been a complete lack of cross pollination between Angband (and variants) and other roguelikes, which have moved on considerably from where more=better.

The point was made during RR that one of the defining features of Angband versus other roguelikes is its epic scale. IMHO this gives it a sense of gravitas that the others fail to have (that's on top of the fact that the aim in some of the more popular other roguelikes is to fetch a necklace named 'Rodney' spelt backwards).

The recent devteams supposed focus on 'improving the UI' actually hasn't - see Tome 4 and Brogue for examples of good to great roguelike UI.

In the interests of balance, I downloaded these two to compare UI. Now I am aware that this is a matter of taste, but I felt that Brogue was a bit busy - I like the clean, uncluttered feel of Angband. No offence to DarkGod, but Tome 4 made me want to put my eyes out.

The current focus on balancing and creating more interesting item affixes is just mimicing the path Diablo took, which is another game from the 90s.

I don't believe this was a conscious attempt to mimic Diablo. Given that, I think it is better to see how the new affix system works in Angband (well, v4 for now) and judge based on that rather than on perceived parallels.

There was a window of opportunity in the early 2000s to merge back a whole lot of great ideas from Angband variants (4GAI, monster mana, actually interesting monsters, the TK user interface) into Angband, in order to improve the game, but I think that window has since passed. Playing Quickband recently just reminded me how colourless and hard to get into a game Angband really is in many ways.

If something was worth doing in the early 2000s, it could surely be done now. The difficulty with UI work in particular is getting people interested in doing it, and keeping it up to date.

As for the last comment, I suspect it is actually a reflection on how long it is since you've played Angband...

I'm not sure what to do to fix Angband these days. Whatever magic it had is being done much better elsewhere.

In case you haven't realised yet, I disagree. The magic of Angband and variants is in the seriousness and the scale and the glorious enormity of it all. It's not a game that you pick up and play for a bit before moving on to the next shiny object; it's a game for devotees. It doesn't suit everyone - it's not even close to suiting everyone - but the people it does suit tend to fall deeply and lastingly in love with it.

I only started playing Angband about 8 years ago, but I realised very quickly that I had been looking for it for a long time without realising. And I don't think I am the only one, and I think it needs to be maintained in its current spirit for those who, after wandering lost in the wilds of the internet, come upon Angband and find that they are home.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

The magic of Angband and variants is in the seriousness and the scale and the glorious enormity of it all.

Now we're getting somewhere! Great post.

If I had to pick two games that do this epic seriousness best, I would choose Moria and Oangband.

[getter77]

I see nothing wrong with the concept of an infinite dungeon so long as it is paired with not being the same infinite dungeon. A better goal/mindset has to be attainable than "well, it is deadly as per normal design come lvl 50 (or whatever the last boss habitates), just have the monster spawning increase on down until they kill the player"

For something nigh-infinite to work, it has to lean more towards improvisation than..er.... an ideal sort of Descension Kit in this case---as the very nature of populating a list skews towards you pretty much rounding it out rather early on beyond complexity for the sake of complexity like having you hunt for 100 Immunities or some such padding. Special levels, rules, thinking about time and space and settings---you'd pretty much want to have the player getting a feel for the general style the gravitate for on a given character while generally keeping them guessing.

The score attack notion could also work pretty well as far as means to ferret out things in the context, so long as it goes balls out 80's/ 90's Arcade-level of pomp about it---probably be a bit much to chase after the bullet hell's Billion/Trillion+ range though.

[Malak Darkhunter]

The thing that attracted me the most about moria and angband is the infinite dungeons, and also NWN game has copied that from angband and moria and produced their own game called Infinite Dungeons, There was also a very good game desighner called primogenitor who made games for NWN fans and he was working on a game called NWN Angband, the concept: randomly generated dungeons. So in reality this has been a big "seller" of angband for a long time.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

The magic of Angband and variants is in the seriousness and the scale and the glorious enormity of it all.

Angband is an epic and serious game about a lone hero fighting the army of darkness.

Maybe from this statement we can derive something about how the game mechanics of our Dream Angband should look like.

I'm imagining quite crunchy and simulationist combat mechanics, like in Rolemaster, MERP, AD&D, and RuneQuest. There should definitely be interesting tactics and puzzle-like elements in combat, but most importantly it should always feel "real", and puzzles should never break the simulation, the illusion of being there.

Oangband combat feels just right to me. It's possible that the combat system that is being developed for V4 is an even better fit. It's funny how the dev team members talk so much about "realism" of the combat system. Realism is not at all fashionable in either roguelikes or in tabletob RPGs at the moment. These guys are old-school grognards.

What I want from my own variant is something completely different: I want to make a fast-playing tactical toy with only a touch of epic in it, something much like Brogue I guess. But for Vanilla Angband, I think semi-crunchy simulationism is the way to go.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

The thing that attracted me the most about moria and angband is the infinite dungeons, and also NWN game has copied that from angband and moria and produced their own game called Infinite Dungeons, There was also a very good game desighner called primogenitor who made games for NWN fans and he was working on a game called NWN Angband, the concept: randomly generated dungeons. So in reality this has been a big "seller" of angband for a long time.

Every roguelike player loves randomly-generated dungeons.

But many people criticize Angband for the fact that you can spend an eternity collecting experience and items on easy dungeon levels, and the game puts no pressure on you. That's what I meant with infinite dungeons.

[Malak Darkhunter]

Every roguelike player loves randomly-generated dungeons.

But many people criticize Angband for the fact that you can spend an eternity collecting experience and items on easy dungeon levels, and the game puts no pressure on you. That's what I meant with infinite dungeons.

That kind of seems like a matter of choice for the player, you can always keep going down after you clear a level, if you want to or select the birth option-no stairs back the way you came, or their is an option to play in ironman mode, the game could be difficult if you select the right options, if you want to play that way. for me I like having the option to hang out on easy levels before proceding forward, It is sometimes kind of necessary as the RNG dosen't always give you what you need, and it is a very good choice not to go farther until you have basic resists, Free Action, covered.

[Nomad]

The big selling points of Angband for me are that there are no fixed dungeon branches to be cleared game after game, and the fact that randomised egos and the option of randarts allow (near) infinite possible combinations of equipment, instead of the "find universally agreed best item for this slot, enchant to fixed maximum of plusses" approach that leads to assembling a very fixed endgame kit.

I've won Nethack and played a bit of Crawl, and both eventually suffer from the fact that certain steps are very repetitive - in Crawl, if you're not a good player (like me) you're clearing the same early branches again and again, in Nethack you're looking for the exact same kit and completing the same required steps every game... It diminishes the replay value a lot when you're playing many games one after the other, particularly at the two extremes of the curve where you're either dying early every time or winning nearly every time and you end up doing the same stuff over and over.

It's a joke, and an out of date one at that, but to me, "Buy lantern, kill Morgoth" is kind of the essence of Angband's appeal. There's no rigid sequence of 'must collect these specific items and do this stuff in this order' steps along the way. You just get down to 99 and then 100 with whatever's the best kit you've managed to pick up on your way down, and the only part that you have to repeat is killing the last two uniques.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

That kind of seems like a matter of choice for the player, you can always keep going down after you clear a level, if you want to or select the birth option-no stairs back the way you came, or their is an option to play in ironman mode, the game could be difficult if you select the right options, if you want to play that way. for me I like having the option to hang out on easy levels before proceding forward, It is sometimes kind of necessary as the RNG dosen't always give you what you need, and it is a very good choice not to go farther until you have basic resists, Free Action, covered.

Well I've made my own semi-ironman variant FayAngband that addresses this problem for me.

When I'm playing Vanilla, there's always a tiny voice in my head that says: "This is not a game that I can play with my full ability." It bothers me that if I played this game optimally, it would get boring. I want the game to kick me in the head.

But I've accepted the fact that many Angbanders actually prefer setting their own difficulty level, and this is actually one of the reasons why they are playing Angband and not some other roguelike. So I'm not complaining really, it's just that tastes differ.

A better scoring system (as discussed earlier in this thread) would help a bit.

[Malak Darkhunter]

Well I've made my own semi-ironman variant FayAngband that addresses this problem for me.

A better scoring system (as discussed earlier in this thread) would help a bit.

I agree with that completly something that rewards the daring player, and it should reflect that on the ladder as well.

[buzzkill]

Now I am aware that this is a matter of taste, but I felt that Brogue was a bit busy - I like the clean, uncluttered feel of Angband.

I don't know how you call Brogue "busy", unless it just the vibrant shimmering colors.

It's certainly more compact than Angband, it's a tighter dungeon but not much more or less interesting. It has a few more terrain types, a few more than Angband's two. But, way less monsters, less levels, less commands, less to do to get started, less to remember, no speed, no stats, no 100's of armours and weapons and items, no ego, no artifacts, no uniques, and less is more in this case.

Maybe it's just that 99% Angband's complexity is buried in the details, and 90% of Brogue's is right there on the screen for you to see.

[Derakon]

Just to back up a bit about Mikko's post about realism and the ideal Angband: at least when I talk about realism, I'm trying to guide intuitive gameplay, not include lots of simulationist details. It makes intuitive sense that STR affects how hard you hit things while DEX affects how accurate you are. That kind of thing. To the extent that Angband is unintuitive, we'd better have a good gameplay reason for it. Stuff like abstracting out hitpoints instead of dealing damage to individual limbs and organs Dwarf Fortress-style is a good gameplay reason.

What I'd like to see Angband do more of in the future is encourage the player to take risks. There's little incentive right now to stick it out if things start getting even a little hairy, since you can always find the stuff you need elsewhere and you're not risking anything permanently by leaving. Preserve mode is an example, though perhaps a heavy-handed one.

My personal roguelike design document which I have lurking in the back of my head has the risk and the reward of the dungeon scale up based on how long you spend in the dungeon, not how deep you are; you're an intruder, so as the residents propagate the alarm more dangerous monsters with better gear start showing up to try to eject you. Once you flee back to the surface (or wherever) the alarm dies down again. In the interests of helping players choose their own difficulty level, whistles could be sold to increase your alert level.

However, I don't know that such an approach would necessarily work well with Angband, where a big part of the feel is delving deep into the earth, having most of a mile of solid rock above you by the time you get down to the bottom. Alarms work best with "infiltrating a facility" type of designs, not so much "exploring a massive semi-natural cave system" designs.

[LostTemplar]

The magic of Angband and variants is in the seriousness and the scale and the glorious enormity of it all. It's not a game that you pick up and play for a bit before moving on to the next shiny object; it's a game for devotees. It doesn't suit everyone - it's not even close to suiting everyone - but the people it does suit tend to fall deeply and lastingly in love with it.

I agree with this, Angband (at least old vanilla and many variants) is not a good game for many, but great game for a few. It have some fetures, never found in other modern games.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Just to back up a bit about Mikko's post about realism and the ideal Angband: at least when I talk about realism, I'm trying to guide intuitive gameplay, not include lots of simulationist details. It makes intuitive sense that STR affects how hard you hit things while DEX affects how accurate you are. That kind of thing. To the extent that Angband is unintuitive, we'd better have a good gameplay reason for it. Stuff like abstracting out hitpoints instead of dealing damage to individual limbs and organs Dwarf Fortress-style is a good gameplay reason.

I want simulationism that is at the same time streamlined, easy to understand, and intuitive. And it has to play very fast. Fortunately, what you're creating seems exactly what the doctor ordered.

A system like O-combat is perfect: elegant, functional, but not the simplest possible, with some nice simulationist crunch in it.

I love the elegancy of Ey-combat but it is too bare-bones and abstracted for Angband. It feels a like a system from a tactical console RPG. The fact that weapons get higher and higher damage dice and more and more exotic sounding names as you go deeper in the dungeons is PURE FUN but it isn't realistic.

And the old Vanilla combat system is simply bad. It's crunchy in all the wrong places, and doesn't feel anything like real combat.

I'd love to see some more magical realism added, too. The elemental system is in the core of Angband, and therefore we should spend some worldbuilding effort on it. Are we calling our spells effects from the Elemental Planes? What is this Nexus thing exactly? Maybe we could browse Rolemaster books for inspiration. It could just be some notes in the help files, or maybe the scientific explanation for the elements could have some real effects in the game.

Oh yes, and a game with clerics and paladins simply has to have gods, somehow, at least in the help files if nowhere else. Their flavour sucks. (I have a nice simple deity mechanic with semi-randomly created gods in the next Fay. It *might* work with the deities of Middle-Earth, too.)

What I'd like to see Angband do more of in the future is encourage the player to take risks. There's little incentive right now to stick it out if things start getting even a little hairy, since you can always find the stuff you need elsewhere and you're not risking anything permanently by leaving. Preserve mode is an example, though perhaps a heavy-handed one.

This is the biggest issue for me, as you've probably noticed.

The Fay stair system is working very well, but unfortunately it needs smaller levels, so maybe it isn't suitable for Vanilla.

[LostTemplar]

you're not risking anything permanently by leaving.

This is also true for most other roguelikes which have permanent levels. You can allways return later. What I dont like the most in e.g. Dungeon Crawl, is how limited items are, and how they are independent on depth, so e.g. the only copy of some cool book or the only ring of "type you need" may be located at dlvl 1. This basically means, that obviosly the best way to play is to clean out levels.