I must be some kind of medieval purist because today in the middle of 2023 I still play the original rogue, in its 3.6.3 and 5.4 versions, and I can barely tolerate some of the changes. That's what I don't like about Hack and its "new" incarnation, Nethack. Changes were introduced that change the original spirit. I also played Moria and Adom for years with mixed results. I was never able to play Nethack. I'm going to try, maybe this time I will succeed.
Yeah, as sibling said, they are quite different games actually. Rogue to me feels a lot more minimalist, while nethack is 'everything AND a kitchen sink!'.
May I ask if you've tried other roguelikes over the years?
Caves of Qud is, imo, a particularly exemplary entry into the genre. Its a different approach with a very unique setting and evocative way of story telling. Its just plain...weird.
My favorite thing about Brogue is that I don't have to build a character before starting. You just jump in and grow your character naturally through equipment choices.
Just a security patch, but I like seeing NetHack featured.
Looking forward to 3.7 where they finally address a glaring omission where up until now deities have been weirdly indifferent about people vomiting on altars.
It has a very different philosophy from NetHack tho, in that you generally have clear trade-offs between your choices (e.g. there isn't a "best" armor or weapon, you have limited skill upgrades and need to choose how to spend them etc..), compared to the "keep buffing up until you're god" you get in NetHack.
I know this is somewhat sacrilegious to say but I think for all the reasons you say DCSS is a much better game than nethack. Some years ago I went through a phase of being quite into nethack and ascended a couple of times, but really lost interest because there are too many situations where there is only one correct way to play. There’s also just a lot of arbitrary nonsense that they expected you (not sure whether this has changed) to have read the source code to know with zero discoverability in the game.
Nethack tries to present the experience of exploring a rich and detailed world, full of interesting things to discover. The drawback is that you only get the joy of discovery once. Finding something like the technique to steal from shops is fun the first time, and then tedious every other time. To best enjoy Nethack, I recommend avoiding spoilers as much as possible.
DCSS sacrifices Nethack's sense of wonder for better playability. Simulating a world is secondary to presenting a series of interesting tactical challenges. There's very little discovery involved, because the game openly tells you everything you need to know, and it's up to you to figure out how to apply that information. DCSS goes out of its way to remove tedium, even at the cost of realism.
E.g. Nethack includes food, which serves as a kind of clock, but food availability is random, so it doesn't work very well. DCSS removes food and replaces it with an explicit countdown timer. Nethack allows selling items to shops. This means there's a reason to pick up trash items, which is annoying. DCSS does not allow selling items. Nethack has hidden traps, which can be found by searching. This means you can spend a lot of time searching, or you can tediously track which tiles are safe, noting where you and the monsters walk, which is even more annoying. DCSS makes all traps visible, and replaces hidden traps with "sourceless malevolence", which applies random bad effects as you explore. There are no secret techniques to bypass difficulty in DCSS.
DCSS does not simulate a very believable world, but it's better as a game.
I have been playing both NetHack and DCSS for years and won both multiple times.
I keep going back to NetHack. There’s something I find very endearing about it even though I know what to expect. Perhaps it’s similar to Stardew Valley. A sense of place, of coherence and care, that DCSS lacks. The shopkeepers and the priests. The guards in Minetown. The Oracle. The “monsters” who are neutral to you based on your alignment. All the graffiti and the Discworld books. Even the bloody Sokoban levels which people love to complain about!
In Stardew Valley you’ve literally got to till the soil and plant seeds and water them. You’ve got to break boulders and cut back weeds and cut down trees, and go fishing in the nearby river or lake. You can look at all of that stuff as “tedious”, just as you might for shopping or item identification or altar sacrifice in NetHack.
But I don’t see it that way. These aren’t tedious chores I must do in order to win the game. These are activities I want to do and relish doing. They’re almost meditative, in a way.
Don’t get me wrong. I still like DCSS. But for all of its philosophy around removing tedium, the game still feels way too long. If you’re considering the game purely on challenge grounds, much of the difficulty disappears after the early game. It’s quite interesting from a tactical perspective in the beginning, up until lair or so. After that it’s mostly just a long grind until the end.
So I really can’t agree that DCSS is a better game than NetHack. It’s very different, scratching a different itch. It’s also much more difficult than NetHack, with very tight balance in the early game.
But I would also say that there are a lot of other Roguelikes that try to do what DCSS does (such as Rift Wizard) and some also that take NetHack’s approach (such as Caves of Qud). This is evidence enough to me that both designs have merit and that people are interested in playing both.
So I would conclude that it’s inappropriate to call DCSS a better game than NetHack. It’s a different game, with different goals, not a replacement.
> Nethack allows selling items to shops. This means there's a reason to pick up trash items, which is annoying.
This seems subjective? I mean, sure, it's grindy to pick up cheap helm after cheap helm, but there are other ways of getting money for shops, or getting items from shops without money, or getting by without shops entirely if need be. You can adapt your gameplay to your preferences and/or what the game is giving you.
Similarly with traps: playing without much specific care for them (beyond maybe getting a helm and poison resistance as quickly as possible) basically makes them random bad effects. You can choose to play more carefully or experience them as "sourceless malevolence."
People talk a lot about nethack lacking tradeoffs compared to DCSS and while it's apt enough for the late game where lots of ascension kit gear and other prep have a strong particular shape, I think that's wrong for the early and mid games which offer a wide variety of options and play for reaching intermediate goals.
DCSS feels like it's been taken over by people who've played the game too many times, steadily working to refocus the gameplay to cater to minimizing the tedium of having completed the game many times.
Hmm. The way I've heard it expressed is they want every decision the player makes to matter. In other words, the ideal to work towards is that there is never a "no-brainer" choice to make, you always have to think about every action. To me, that always seemed like a great design goal, but I never thought about it from the new player perspective. Maybe the act of learning that a choice is a no-brainer is itself a valuable process for a newer player? That's interesting to chew on.
it's not even just from the new player perspective. I've played DCSS reasonably casually on and off for like a decade and the more recent years' changes have been a bit too much for me, in terms of stripping everything down. I completely agree with the comment before yours. I liked the food "minigame", it was fun to play KoBe and chop corpses into chunks to eat, before they go bad.
it's not that it's a bad game now, or anything like that, but it does feel like some edges may have been sanded down that should have been left intact.
The web UI is excellent, but not flawless... for example, Ctrl-Q is the key to quit the game (so you can start over with a new character). But... that's already taken by the browser.
Your browser assumes that the server is reachable on port 80 if you are browsing a http site or port 443 if you are using https.
The server mentioned above runs on port 8080. So the Browser needs this information which is then added to the url
It means they are running the server on port 8080, which is actually a popular choice if port 80 is already in use or if you don't want to access a "privileged port" in Unix.
I would have thought 8443 was a more common choice for HTTPS on a unprivileged port rather than 8080, which is frequently used for unprivileged HTTP. But it matters little, its only cosmetics anyway.
I'll add Angband to the list. A hack-and-slash roguelike. 1 town, 100 dungeon levels, kill Morgoth and win the game. Diablo 1 was heavily inspired by this game (and Moria).
Artifacts, ego types, and most normal objects have to pass a depth check before being generated. But nothing in the game has a depth below 100, so there would be no difference between 100 and 200 from that perspective.
It might be easier to find weapons with higher +to_hit and +to_dam values, or armor with higher +ac, but that would be unlikely to matter much, because you'd be using artifacts anyway.
I don't know if rings of speed take dungeon depth into account. Most other types of bonuses in the game are capped. (e.g. a Ring of Constitution +6 is as good as Rings of Constitution get.)
Angband is great, and was great to find after having played Moria on and off for a few years. The game that really caught me was one of its variants — Zangband. Not because of the Zelazny connections, but because of the sheer size of the gameworld and everything that could be found in it. It hasn't, however, apparently been updated since the mid-aughts.
Unfortunately some of these aren't very good in some cases, for eg you can't click on the map in the X11 version under GNOME XWayland and the Qt interface just doesn't start on Debian.
I'm quite fond of Pixel Dungeon. It's quite simplistic compared to NetHack but it's good fun (if you like dying early and often) and looks nice. And, bonus, it's GPL3-licensed and hasn't seen an update since 2015, so not only are there a bunch of really creative forks out there, but they're also open source.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is my favourite fork. The game is actively developed and has done a ton of cool things to change up the formula. Really great game to play on a phone!
The iOS app just got updated and I think it has new tiles. What we really need imho is a mobile interface like the one that Beamdog designed for the Switch version of Baldur's Gate. That way it could be played on systems like the Steamdeck.
By your logic, every CLI program is a GUI program. That may be technically not wrong, but it doesn't really mean it's true, according to what people usually mean when they talk about GUIs.
> NetHack is a single player dungeon exploration game that runs on a wide variety of computer systems, with a variety of graphical and text interfaces all using the same game engine. Unlike many other Dungeons & Dragons-inspired games, the emphasis in NetHack is on discovering the detail of the dungeon and not simply killing everything in sight - in fact, killing everything in sight is a good way to die quickly. Each game presents a different landscape - the random number generator provides an essentially unlimited number of variations of the dungeon and its denizens to be discovered by the player in one of a number of characters: you can pick your race, your role, and your gender.
Pick up stuff and run away, not necessarily in that order.
Go shopping. Or have your pet go "shopping" for you.
Have your pet kill things. This removes threats and gets you loot and through maybe half a dozen levels, helping you gear up without leveling up (and yes, eventually you want to level up, but you want to do it very slowly if at all while gearing up, because the faster you level up, the more likely it is the game will generate tough monsters you're probably not ready for, like soldier ants or crowds of orcs with poison arrows).
Try to find your way downstairs while avoiding monsters too dangerous to fight and collect more powerful items. Standard NetHack strategy is that you should try to collect an "Ascension kit" of items and know when to use the tools in it.
Seriously, if the security of nethack is critical to your security, then you probably do something very wrong. There is no reason to not sandbox the hell out of it.
You don't have to spin up a VM per user to sandbox on Linux. You could use firejail. But traditional UNIX user sandboxing could also go a long way.
I'm just saying that I would never trust nethack to not execute arbitrary code and I would have other security measures in place if my threat model required it. It's written in C. I don't expect most contributors to be security focuesed. The primary use is a user running it on their own machine, which is a completely different threat model.
All I see in every thread is this meta complaint about seeing this genre of comments too often. I find that pretty annoying.
And yet, I don’t want to say my subjective experience is objective truth. Maybe I notice and remember the comments that annoy me? You see how that works?
The only way to even approach objective truth is to communicate your subjective experience and have others tell you whether their subjective experience corresponds to yours or not.
