This is one of the first games which changed so much that I picked it up again and realized it's not the game I liked anymore. It may still be a fine game, but it has little association to Linley Henzell's Crawl left.
These days, as more non-open games go into "updates forever" mode, it's probably going to happen more. I can see it happening real time with Minecraft.
I love that you can play every previous version for free too! I THINK I like the current version the best, but there are some other good versions in the past, like just before food disappeared (I actually thought food was a great mechanic).
Now that I'm getting back into it, I am tempted to stick with the current version for a couple of years so I can really learn it.
I'm giving ToME a go on steam deck now, I like the idea of having more of a narrative and open world. I feel like the dungeon in DCSS is more like a series of individual encounters.
I was pretty shocked at the rate of change in Crawl. I played it for a couple of years and during that time entire major game mechanics changed, like moving from many kinds of food, to only one kind of food, to completely eliminating food and hunger (while adding a completely new form of clock to kill players who didn't keep moving).
Why was the rate of change so huge? And the changes so deep? These roguelikes particularly tend to be stable, almost frozen - at least in terms of mechanics.-
There were a couple of people who were very active in development and were very opinionated about good game design. Then they slowed down a bit, and some other people came in with more ideas, they may not have been quite as radical but by then it was established that upending designs was something DCSS did. (A bit of like the problem the Esperanto offshoots had).
It was at all time driven by very heavy players, and IMO the theme especially suffered from it (by the time you're a heavy player, you have completely abstracted it into a bunch of systems, and it's very hard to see it like a new player would see it).
I started playing (from a thread on HN) ~7 years ago. The changes are both broad and deep - devs are not afraid to rework something three times until happy with the outcome. I missed food/hunger entirely but very few players speak highly of it.
There is no difficulty playing previous versions, changing and compiling your own etc etc. Devs are changing the game to be better (in their own view), more fun, more engaging. They should do that! It is a living piece of art imo
Well, players who speak highly of it probably wouldn't play the modern crawl :)
Old Crawl had a lot of systems around food. You had races that were mostly or entirely vegetarian, which made them significantly harder to play in that respect. Then there were the kobolds, which could eat almost anything, the ghouls which didn't even mind rotten chunks - but they had other problems to balance it a bit. You could opt out of the entire hunger system by playing mummies - those went all the way back to Linley Henzell, and he had the philosophy that if you wanted a bit tedious play style, you could have it (mummies were really hard to play, though!). The Hive was a dungeon side branch with a lot of bees and honeycombs, a big breakpoint on the food clock if you weren't one of the carnivorous/saprovorous races, but nasty if you didn't have poison resistance. I think they removed it entirely in modern crawl? They might as well, without food its whole purpose is gone.
Of course the game works fine without food. ToME has no food, and it's fine. But it says something about how much of the original game they ditched.
Something similar happened to Angband, when I went back to it recently it had been given an overhaul that included making the game shorter. So I went back to v3.4.1.
This is one of the first games which changed so much that I picked it up again and realized it's not the game I liked anymore. It may still be a fine game, but it has little association to Linley Henzell's Crawl left. These days, as more non-open games go into "updates forever" mode, it's probably going to happen more. I can see it happening real time with Minecraft.
I love that you can play every previous version for free too! I THINK I like the current version the best, but there are some other good versions in the past, like just before food disappeared (I actually thought food was a great mechanic).
Now that I'm getting back into it, I am tempted to stick with the current version for a couple of years so I can really learn it.
I'm giving ToME a go on steam deck now, I like the idea of having more of a narrative and open world. I feel like the dungeon in DCSS is more like a series of individual encounters.
I was pretty shocked at the rate of change in Crawl. I played it for a couple of years and during that time entire major game mechanics changed, like moving from many kinds of food, to only one kind of food, to completely eliminating food and hunger (while adding a completely new form of clock to kill players who didn't keep moving).
Why was the rate of change so huge? And the changes so deep? These roguelikes particularly tend to be stable, almost frozen - at least in terms of mechanics.-
There were a couple of people who were very active in development and were very opinionated about good game design. Then they slowed down a bit, and some other people came in with more ideas, they may not have been quite as radical but by then it was established that upending designs was something DCSS did. (A bit of like the problem the Esperanto offshoots had).
It was at all time driven by very heavy players, and IMO the theme especially suffered from it (by the time you're a heavy player, you have completely abstracted it into a bunch of systems, and it's very hard to see it like a new player would see it).
I started playing (from a thread on HN) ~7 years ago. The changes are both broad and deep - devs are not afraid to rework something three times until happy with the outcome. I missed food/hunger entirely but very few players speak highly of it.
There is no difficulty playing previous versions, changing and compiling your own etc etc. Devs are changing the game to be better (in their own view), more fun, more engaging. They should do that! It is a living piece of art imo
Well, players who speak highly of it probably wouldn't play the modern crawl :)
Old Crawl had a lot of systems around food. You had races that were mostly or entirely vegetarian, which made them significantly harder to play in that respect. Then there were the kobolds, which could eat almost anything, the ghouls which didn't even mind rotten chunks - but they had other problems to balance it a bit. You could opt out of the entire hunger system by playing mummies - those went all the way back to Linley Henzell, and he had the philosophy that if you wanted a bit tedious play style, you could have it (mummies were really hard to play, though!). The Hive was a dungeon side branch with a lot of bees and honeycombs, a big breakpoint on the food clock if you weren't one of the carnivorous/saprovorous races, but nasty if you didn't have poison resistance. I think they removed it entirely in modern crawl? They might as well, without food its whole purpose is gone.
Of course the game works fine without food. ToME has no food, and it's fine. But it says something about how much of the original game they ditched.
Something similar happened to Angband, when I went back to it recently it had been given an overhaul that included making the game shorter. So I went back to v3.4.1.
love seeing this kind of work great job!
DCSS has existed for decades...
One can't ever get enough nethack andit feels like a BBS. What's not to like?
Xom titters.