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I think what's not obvious to people casually familiar with Nethack is that success is hugely bound to memorizing spoilers (the NH community term for any non-ob
by fenomas 11y ago
I think what's not obvious to people casually familiar with Nethack is that success is hugely bound to memorizing spoilers (the NH community term for any non-obvious peculiarity of the game).
In the early game that means knowing what the various meaningless messages mean ("You have a strange feeling for a moment, then it passes"), knowing how to identify items from context (cost, weight, results of innocuous actions) and so on. In the late game it means knowing all the harmful stuff coming up and what counteracts it, knowing all the statuses and interactions (Gold Detection while confused, etc).
That kind of stuff is what wound up driving me from the game - anything past the early stages just felt like bookkeeping.
- stickfigure 11y agoFor me, reading the source code was part of what made the game fun. It was a sort of metagame, learning how to cast "real-world" spells by studying the arcane tomes that held the secrets of the universe. It by no means made me invincible (my death/ascension ratio was still topheavy) or even cut out the mystery; it just moved some of the action and exploration from the game screen to a text editor. Two games in one. Every 5-10 years I end up losing a couple days to NetHack. I'm overdue.
- NoGravitas 11y agoI've been a NetHack player since about 1990, and have ascended every class at least once, and I agree with you about the tediousness. One roguelike I'm really enjoying these days is Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It's very much like Nethack in many ways, but the developers have made it a conscious priority to remove all of the tedious elements or the need for spoilers. They have been mostly successful with this, IMO.