5 ms·

The state of DCSS is interesting because it's like a software Ship of Theseus. It's been actively hacked (and slashed) upon for so long that it is hard to claim

The state of DCSS is interesting because it's like a software Ship of Theseus. It's been actively hacked (and slashed) upon for so long that it is hard to claim that its the same game, even if the git commit history shows a direct lineage otherwise. Or, at least, the aspects of the game that I once so greatly admired (which I wrote about here [1]) are longer present. Only a superficial similarity remains. A very opinionated group of core developers with a minimalist design philosophy has driven the project for years now, and the game now is not the game I knew. [1] https://rhizzone.net/articles/crawl/ https://rhizzone.net/articles/crawl/

gota 5y ago
Can you give a short summary of the changes? I'm not familiar with the current state of the game
- 1_player 5y ago
  The blog has a list of all recent trunk and released changes: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/blog http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/blog As I mentioned in the sibling comment, there's a vocal minority in this game loudly complaining about any change. My suggestion is to decide for yourself, play an older version if you prefer, or any of the dozen forks, all available on most public servers. Off the top of my head, they have recently: * removed the whole hunger/food system: no need to eat, no need to butcher corpses or collect food, magic doesn't make you hungry. * removed cursed items: an issue only in the early game, trivially managed by careful identification of unknown scrolls * removed unremarkable species or monsters * removed trivial spells such as Deflect Missiles or Regeneration
  - not2b 5y ago
    I haven't played rogue/hack/nethack games in a couple of decades, so I'm out of it. But: no need to eat? That was a key part of the game (though the cannibalistic part of that was sometimes weird). Cursed items, on the other hand, were a PITA so I wouldn't miss that part.
    - catern 5y ago
      Food is far more important in nethack than it ever was in DCSS, it was never a key part of the game in DCSS, just an annoying (and sometimes spoilery) minigame.
    - 1_player 5y ago
      About hunger management: it was annoying, it didn't bring any strategical or interesting gameplay, and if you were unlucky with RNG you'd just die. One or more inventory slots had to be used for food. It would heavily penalise newbies or cautious players that were taking the game a little slower than most. Would force you to cast lower level, less fun, spells so that you'd not starve because you cast one too many level 9 spell. That doesn't sound fun to me, and don't miss it for one second.
      - mherdeg 5y ago
        I haven't played in a few years but always felt like crawl's hunger system drove faster games -- where in NetHack I could usually find a way to survive indefinitely and camp out and explore slowly, crawl always felt like the Star Wars garbage compactor pushing me forward. I think I liked it but I'm not sure it helped me master the gameplay (I sometimes felt rushed even when hunger management wasn't obviously an issue).
    - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
      They replaced food clock with a straight-up death clock. There's a counter that constantly ticks down; if it reaches zero, you just die.
      - catern 5y ago
        Just to be clear, the death clock is hidden and is intended to be impossible to trigger if you're not actively cheesing with one of the very few exploits that depend on waiting for a very long time. IIRC to tune the clock, they took the longest non-exploit game on record, and doubled the time that took.
  - MiddleEndian 5y ago
    While I like many of the changes in DCSS, I have stayed on 0.24 because I'm wary of how the game will play without food. I kind of enjoy struggling through the early-ish game without using permafood, and then seeing a pack of orcs and going "Hey they look tasty, maybe I can eat some of them before I starve to death!" That being said I want to play Djinn eventually so I'll upgrade when that time comes.
- ludamad 5y ago
  The changes remove some of the most memorable moments: - Eating questionable meat for random powers - Losing your great items permanently - Not getting poison resistance and putting off the hive for ages - Not being able to carry as much as a weak character - Putting a stash on Hive:2 so monsters can't get your items - Being a mummy summoner and having a full screen of summons (no hunger requirement) - Hill orc priests would wander the map gaining converts A lot of these things became part of the game muscle memory to avoid. They were hilarious and emotional as a new player. They are now obsolete. I have mixed feelings - I always felt enough mitigation existed in the game and I enjoyed learning about it
  - floatboth 5y ago
    Hive was a cute thing but I absolutely do not miss item destruction and weight management lol
    - ludamad 5y ago
      Item destruction I found okay because randarts were immune and it made them feel special. They could have went down the route of mitigation but I respect their clean design ethos Weight management - yes, hard to have too much nostalgia for that one
  - nvarsj 5y ago
    I really miss being able to play a SpEn backstabber. It was the highlight of my DCSS experience. Such a fun, if slightly overpowered, combo. Then they took invisibility out of the enhancer starting book.
    - simias 5y ago
      I started replaying DCSS last week after a hiatus of about two years, SpEn is one of my go-to backgrounds and it's still quite fun IMO. You can worship Dithmenos to get increased stealth. It's not as OP as invisibility but it's still quite fun once you get your stealth to a high level.
1_player 5y ago
The DCSS community has vocal minority that's against any change to the game. Often they forget that old versions are still available for download, playable offline and on most online webtiles servers. I for one appreciate the underlying philosophy of the game and the overarching intent for any change: to remove tedium, grinding, trivial optimal play, remove the requirement of spoiling yourself to beat the game - the latter point making it basically the opposite of a game like Nethack. https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/docs/crawl_manual.rst#n-philosophy-pas-de-faq https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/docs/cr...
- zzo38computer 5y ago
  With a lot of software, it may be the case that you may want some of the changes but not others. (Fortunately, you can fork the project and make your own modifications, but you might not want to do that, for whatever reason, but if you do, then it will be a nonstandard version.)
- eeegnu 5y ago
  > Often they forget that old versions are still available for download, playable offline and on most online webtiles servers. Typically players get upset because they like the majority of the quality of life changes, and new content, but don't like that something was removed that they can't enjoy in that new version. Community knowledge also deteriorates over time; you can ask questions about recent versions, but antiquated versions require meticulous code diving / commit log scanning to figure things out.
  - gwern 5y ago
    Sounds like an instance of 'bitcreep': https://www.gwern.net/Holy-wars#bitcreep https://www.gwern.net/Holy-wars#bitcreep Yes, all the binaries are still there and runnable in a VM, but everything around them can't be run in a VM, and those changes impose negative externalities on those who were happy with the previous way of things.
    - canadianfella 5y ago
bhickey 5y ago
26 years and counting! It's passed through many able hands. My chief lingering complaint with crawl is that the game is too long. Early game is tedious and last I played seriously the midgame tended to drag on. I'd like to see the standard game contracted to twenty-seven levels. Squeeze down Orc, Lair, the Lair branches and so on.
- nvarsj 5y ago
  It is a common complaint among a lot of experienced DCSS players that the game is too long. I have 10 wins under my belt and I stopped playing mostly for this reason. About half way through the game your victory is essentially guaranteed. I disagree about the early game though, this is the most exciting part of DCSS, and the hardest.
- eeegnu 5y ago
  > contracted to twenty-seven levels For anyone unfamiliar, 27 is a number ingrained deeply into the game, with some traces very well hidden. https://www.reddit.com/r/dcss/comments/mvrc1w/did_anyone_of_you_notice_that_lair5_contains_a_qr/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dcss/comments/mvrc1w/did_anyone_of_...
- ludamad 5y ago
  https://github.com/b-crawl/bcrawl https://github.com/b-crawl/bcrawl seems to make the game shorter and be fairly active.
zeofig 5y ago
It's definitely a different game. Personally I love the changes and mostly agree with the devs. Food was for most characters a pointless mechanic once you had a basic level of game knowledge. However there are also some interesting forks which preserve some of the old mechanics.
riffraff 5y ago
I read cursorily through your article and it seems to me the major mechanic (no "this is always better") is still there. What aspects do you feel have changed the nature of the game? I've only played DCSS for a few years and it seems the game now is a bit kinder with newbies but not substancially different.

gota 5y ago

Can you give a short summary of the changes? I'm not familiar with the current state of the game

1_player 5y ago
The blog has a list of all recent trunk and released changes: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/blog http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/blog As I mentioned in the sibling comment, there's a vocal minority in this game loudly complaining about any change. My suggestion is to decide for yourself, play an older version if you prefer, or any of the dozen forks, all available on most public servers. Off the top of my head, they have recently: * removed the whole hunger/food system: no need to eat, no need to butcher corpses or collect food, magic doesn't make you hungry. * removed cursed items: an issue only in the early game, trivially managed by careful identification of unknown scrolls * removed unremarkable species or monsters * removed trivial spells such as Deflect Missiles or Regeneration
- not2b 5y ago
  I haven't played rogue/hack/nethack games in a couple of decades, so I'm out of it. But: no need to eat? That was a key part of the game (though the cannibalistic part of that was sometimes weird). Cursed items, on the other hand, were a PITA so I wouldn't miss that part.
  - catern 5y ago
    Food is far more important in nethack than it ever was in DCSS, it was never a key part of the game in DCSS, just an annoying (and sometimes spoilery) minigame.
  - 1_player 5y ago
    About hunger management: it was annoying, it didn't bring any strategical or interesting gameplay, and if you were unlucky with RNG you'd just die. One or more inventory slots had to be used for food. It would heavily penalise newbies or cautious players that were taking the game a little slower than most. Would force you to cast lower level, less fun, spells so that you'd not starve because you cast one too many level 9 spell. That doesn't sound fun to me, and don't miss it for one second.
    - mherdeg 5y ago
      I haven't played in a few years but always felt like crawl's hunger system drove faster games -- where in NetHack I could usually find a way to survive indefinitely and camp out and explore slowly, crawl always felt like the Star Wars garbage compactor pushing me forward. I think I liked it but I'm not sure it helped me master the gameplay (I sometimes felt rushed even when hunger management wasn't obviously an issue).
  - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    They replaced food clock with a straight-up death clock. There's a counter that constantly ticks down; if it reaches zero, you just die.
    - catern 5y ago
      Just to be clear, the death clock is hidden and is intended to be impossible to trigger if you're not actively cheesing with one of the very few exploits that depend on waiting for a very long time. IIRC to tune the clock, they took the longest non-exploit game on record, and doubled the time that took.
- MiddleEndian 5y ago
  While I like many of the changes in DCSS, I have stayed on 0.24 because I'm wary of how the game will play without food. I kind of enjoy struggling through the early-ish game without using permafood, and then seeing a pack of orcs and going "Hey they look tasty, maybe I can eat some of them before I starve to death!" That being said I want to play Djinn eventually so I'll upgrade when that time comes.
ludamad 5y ago
The changes remove some of the most memorable moments: - Eating questionable meat for random powers - Losing your great items permanently - Not getting poison resistance and putting off the hive for ages - Not being able to carry as much as a weak character - Putting a stash on Hive:2 so monsters can't get your items - Being a mummy summoner and having a full screen of summons (no hunger requirement) - Hill orc priests would wander the map gaining converts A lot of these things became part of the game muscle memory to avoid. They were hilarious and emotional as a new player. They are now obsolete. I have mixed feelings - I always felt enough mitigation existed in the game and I enjoyed learning about it
- floatboth 5y ago
  Hive was a cute thing but I absolutely do not miss item destruction and weight management lol
  - ludamad 5y ago
    Item destruction I found okay because randarts were immune and it made them feel special. They could have went down the route of mitigation but I respect their clean design ethos Weight management - yes, hard to have too much nostalgia for that one
- nvarsj 5y ago
  I really miss being able to play a SpEn backstabber. It was the highlight of my DCSS experience. Such a fun, if slightly overpowered, combo. Then they took invisibility out of the enhancer starting book.
  - simias 5y ago
    I started replaying DCSS last week after a hiatus of about two years, SpEn is one of my go-to backgrounds and it's still quite fun IMO. You can worship Dithmenos to get increased stealth. It's not as OP as invisibility but it's still quite fun once you get your stealth to a high level.

1_player 5y ago

The DCSS community has vocal minority that's against any change to the game. Often they forget that old versions are still available for download, playable offline and on most online webtiles servers. I for one appreciate the underlying philosophy of the game and the overarching intent for any change: to remove tedium, grinding, trivial optimal play, remove the requirement of spoiling yourself to beat the game - the latter point making it basically the opposite of a game like Nethack. https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/docs/crawl_manual.rst#n-philosophy-pas-de-faq https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/docs/cr...

zzo38computer 5y ago
With a lot of software, it may be the case that you may want some of the changes but not others. (Fortunately, you can fork the project and make your own modifications, but you might not want to do that, for whatever reason, but if you do, then it will be a nonstandard version.)
eeegnu 5y ago
> Often they forget that old versions are still available for download, playable offline and on most online webtiles servers. Typically players get upset because they like the majority of the quality of life changes, and new content, but don't like that something was removed that they can't enjoy in that new version. Community knowledge also deteriorates over time; you can ask questions about recent versions, but antiquated versions require meticulous code diving / commit log scanning to figure things out.
- gwern 5y ago
  Sounds like an instance of 'bitcreep': https://www.gwern.net/Holy-wars#bitcreep https://www.gwern.net/Holy-wars#bitcreep Yes, all the binaries are still there and runnable in a VM, but everything around them can't be run in a VM, and those changes impose negative externalities on those who were happy with the previous way of things.
  - canadianfella 5y ago

bhickey 5y ago

26 years and counting! It's passed through many able hands. My chief lingering complaint with crawl is that the game is too long. Early game is tedious and last I played seriously the midgame tended to drag on. I'd like to see the standard game contracted to twenty-seven levels. Squeeze down Orc, Lair, the Lair branches and so on.

nvarsj 5y ago
It is a common complaint among a lot of experienced DCSS players that the game is too long. I have 10 wins under my belt and I stopped playing mostly for this reason. About half way through the game your victory is essentially guaranteed. I disagree about the early game though, this is the most exciting part of DCSS, and the hardest.
eeegnu 5y ago
> contracted to twenty-seven levels For anyone unfamiliar, 27 is a number ingrained deeply into the game, with some traces very well hidden. https://www.reddit.com/r/dcss/comments/mvrc1w/did_anyone_of_you_notice_that_lair5_contains_a_qr/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dcss/comments/mvrc1w/did_anyone_of_...
ludamad 5y ago
https://github.com/b-crawl/bcrawl https://github.com/b-crawl/bcrawl seems to make the game shorter and be fairly active.

zeofig 5y ago

It's definitely a different game. Personally I love the changes and mostly agree with the devs. Food was for most characters a pointless mechanic once you had a basic level of game knowledge. However there are also some interesting forks which preserve some of the old mechanics.

riffraff 5y ago

I read cursorily through your article and it seems to me the major mechanic (no "this is always better") is still there. What aspects do you feel have changed the nature of the game? I've only played DCSS for a few years and it seems the game now is a bit kinder with newbies but not substancially different.