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MORE TAXES WHEN posted:Ok when I asked the question I was expecting some normal bad design decisions, like boneheaded class balance or extremely degenerate gameplay loops, not, uh, that. That makes it sound like ADOM is less a game and more a 1v1 with the developer, conducted via the medium of a game. this is precisely what adom is. it is thomas biskup sitting there saying "ha ha ha, you shall never defeat The Ultimate Game" while you farm herbs for 20 years to become a god
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Feb 10, 2021 22:39
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ADOM's ridiculous baroque design is both its strength and its downfall. A lot of the weird poo poo is really memorable and cool in ways that "better," well-designed roguelikes don't measure up to, but it's also really hard to recommend that anyone actually suffer through playing it for a lot of those exact same reasons.
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Feb 10, 2021 22:51
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Basically. In the same way knowing all the rules to writing a good story can help, but you may be prone to writing something obvious and uninteresting. There's craft in it, but you make a lot more interesting and special things by throwing out the rulebook. Even if in the process you rediscover why some of those rules are quite valuable.
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Feb 10, 2021 22:57
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If you grew up with PC games filled with opaque bullshit ADOM and Nethack seem less egregious by comparison. Different genre but some of the bullshit in the King's Quest games is way worse than anything in either of them.
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Feb 10, 2021 23:07
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Nethack was my first roguelike but ADOM was a breath of mechanical clarity and fresh air in comparison to it (which is why it's still the only one of the two I've ever won). I'll forever retain a soft spot for it for that alone even though it's absolutely been surpassed on those fronts in the two decades since.
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Feb 10, 2021 23:16
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Never abandon The Dream that Biskup will somehow wind up in an international collab with the lead(s) on Elona...
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Feb 11, 2021 00:20
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Arzaac posted:The one other thing I remember is that there's a quest to get a certain skill that requires you to kill 20 of whatever monster you killed first. Also, because this is ADOM, there is another, even worse quest (that you need to fulfill if you want to achieve the best ending), which uses the same mechanic, but in reverse: As part of it, you need to collect an item placed on a powerful enemy that will be generated on the dungeon floor level corresponding to the number of kills you have racked up of your first monster type. What's that, your first kill was a goblin, and you didn't know this because the game doesn't warn you about it at all? WELP, not Mr. Biskup's problem - Down you go 500 levels then, and I hope you packed a 10 kilometer toilet roll of corruption removal scrolls! In general, the requirements for all of the Ultra Endings are so extremely arbitrary and unintuitive (A farmer's corpse? A boar's skull? Needing to be chaotic even when aiming for a lawful ending??) that if you had told me back then that they were randomly generated, I would have believed it. I'm actually still somewhat doubtful as to whether 'The Creator' (Get over yourself, you bargain bin David Cage!) even finished his own game for the first ten or fifteen years of its existence, because I remember most of the epilogues being written in broken, barely comprehensible English. I think that was fixed some time after the Kickstarter campaign, but maybe this is just my brain creating a fake memory to protect itself from further harm by the bad computer man.
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Feb 11, 2021 00:20
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TOOT BOOT posted:If you grew up with PC games filled with opaque bullshit ADOM and Nethack seem less egregious by comparison. Different genre but some of the bullshit in the King's Quest games is way worse than anything in either of them. 
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Feb 11, 2021 00:37
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ExiledTinkerer posted:Never abandon The Dream that Biskup will somehow wind up in an international collab with the lead(s) on Elona... Is Elona worth messing around in? The aesthetic seems very different from most roguelikes, which is appealing, but it doesn't seem to have a lot of advocates in this thread.
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Feb 11, 2021 00:58
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A Strange Aeon posted:Is Elona worth messing around in? The aesthetic seems very different from most roguelikes, which is appealing, but it doesn't seem to have a lot of advocates in this thread. messing around with, yes. past a certain point the game just gets wildly grindy though and i can't imagine ever bothering with going for a win, especially since last time i checked (admittedly years ago) huge swathes of the main plot weren't translated
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Feb 11, 2021 01:03
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Pladdicus posted:Bridgebuilding, a skill some start with and others might get from an absolutely off the cuff solution to one of two optional quest paths has literally no cool applicable use in the entire game. Actually, there is a use for Bridgebuilding! ... you use it to cross rivers. Which is important for the Tomb of the Eternal King, which is surrounded by water. What's that? You can swim and can just leave your equipment that is messed up by water behind? Haha, the lake is filled with CHAOS PIRHANAS that instantly kill you! Sure, you can use ice magic to freeze the lake, but if you're carrying too much you fall in anyways. Tuxedo Catfish posted:messing around with, yes. past a certain point the game just gets wildly grindy though and i can't imagine ever bothering with going for a win, especially since last time i checked (admittedly years ago) huge swathes of the main plot weren't translated A friend of mine looked into this, and apparently it's not really a big deal if the main plot isn't translated. It's literally all "Why is this boss here in this specific place". The PC is literally irrelevant to the plot, and is just a stupid murderhobo who busts into places and kills important people for no reason.
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Feb 11, 2021 02:03
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Elona's ElonaPlus incarnation is adventuring along, even if under extreme situations, as per the dedicated thread. Lots of overhauls, lots of madness---The Good and Inscrutable Stuff. IVAN's new lease on life of late is another fine counterpart to ADOM's intrigue and Unfortunate Bits hopefully to not repeat in Ultimate ADOM. There's only so very few mega-projects afoot, so it is good to see life within and across the spectrum.
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Feb 11, 2021 02:10
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:i don't know about top three but DoomRL is the best. you could teach a class on game design with DoomRL as a textbook dont forget that they "fixed" monster talent generation which means monsters are more likely to have tier 3 and 4 talents. which is so loving annoying and is a big reason why there's more variance now. if you run into a randboss with disruption shield in a T1 (not terribly unlikely) you'll have a thing that if you DO manage to pierce its massive shield, it will do gently caress You, Die unavoidable (trained reactions doesn't help lol) AoE damage. Just run away? As people mentioned, the AI got changed and they wallhack. i lost a character recently to an archmage boss just constantly teleporting directly ontop of me through walls. the AI isn't as skynet awful as 1.6 release but it's really annoying. monsters constantly pre-buff when resting so everything is Greater Weapon Focusing and poo poo all the time. using track to avoid bad fights isn't new but it's more annoying now because there's more talents to have to skim through! augh! darkgod just sorta disappeared so we haven't had a patch in 2 months or something and i don't know if anyone knows when to expect the next one. oh and my other complaint about 1.7 is that they ruined a perfectly fine addon class. the Fallen Paladin was an addon that was totally fine, but when they put it in officially they made it a Class Evolution for sun paladin. it's an active nerf to take it because you're missing out on a prodigy point doing so, and all the abilities you were using up to this point for 42 levels (if you get it at 25 you eat poo poo to dreadfel) get completely replaced! also it requires a stat that sun paladin doesn't use... fallen paladin also doesn't use it, of course, but you need it. mostly just annoying on insane because you can satisfying requirements with gear but c'mon
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Feb 11, 2021 02:30
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King of Bleh posted:ADOM's ridiculous baroque design is both its strength and its downfall. A lot of the weird poo poo is really memorable and cool in ways that "better," well-designed roguelikes don't measure up to, but it's also really hard to recommend that anyone actually suffer through playing it for a lot of those exact same reasons. yeah. ADOM is old as hell and has things that'll turn a lot of folks off, but if you're the kind of person that enjoys Routing, I say give adom a try. that was like the entire fun of the game for me after a point. Figuring out just how exactly to go through the game most efficiently while hitting the weird requirements for random poo poo. the downside is i'm not a crazy person like grond so after 14 wins (one more than black august as i am cooler) and basically having The Route figured out it stopped being as neat so I stopped playing. but uhhh that was hundreds of hours of playing, so hey. most games don't get anywhere near that much. plus it's way less dumb bullshit to memorize than nethack, so if you want oldschool RL cred you can play ADOM instead and trick people who don't realize that it's an easy game now after all the updates ACtually!! MORE TAXES WHEN posted:With regards ADOM and bad design decisions, does anybody have any specific examples? I played it some a while ago and got very far, and it seemed like a fine game, if janky. The big thing I remember being awful about it was having to roll stats, but that's more an annoyance than a fundamental bad design. two of my favorite ones are developer intent just going wrong due to poor implementation. In ADOM you almost never use anything but one-handers and shields, but there's one class that is best with a huge two-handed sword throwing caution to the wind. now, biskup probably meant for this to be barbarians since they have class f eatures for doing really big single hits, but it's actually... monks. the guys who can't even go true berserk. they don't lose their DV for two-handing, so they're the only class that can really justify running around with a massive sword. and it's waaaay better than using your lovely fists. Also their insta-kill quivering palm works with weapons equipped i'm pretty sure. the other fun one is what Mist Elves are good at. mist elves are ancient prettyboys with god awful toughness and hp (they'll have double digits when everyone has 200 i think) who can't wear things made of iron without it hurting their pure, elvish skin. in return they get massive boosts to magic poo poo and regenerate PP quickly and as a small consolation melee (NOT elemental stuff. like fireball traps). with all this caster focus, it's obvious that their best classes are... fighter, weaponsmith and so on. you see, they can't wear iron. they can wear mitrhil. Because the game doesn't start them with gear that kills t hem their melee classes start with armor that's waaaay better than you should have at level 1. PV is flat damage reduction and with the half damage from melee (99% of monsters in adom are melee only) you almost cannot die in combat as a mist elf weaponmaster at the start up to midgame. unless you step on a fireball trap. but traps kill their wizards even more cuz they'll have worse toughness!
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Feb 11, 2021 02:46
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if someone wants the experience of beating a game that actively doesn't want you to do it i would just direct them to IVAN
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Feb 11, 2021 02:48
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Johnny Joestar posted:if someone wants the experience of beating a game that actively doesn't want you to do it i would just direct them to IVAN i always assumed that ADOM was the setup to IVAN's punchline
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Feb 11, 2021 03:15
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MORE TAXES WHEN posted:Ok when I asked the question I was expecting some normal bad design decisions, like boneheaded class balance or extremely degenerate gameplay loops, not, uh, that. That makes it sound like ADOM is less a game and more a 1v1 with the developer, conducted via the medium of a game. I'm remembering this vaguely from playing the game like 15 years ago, and it may or may not have changed since then, but one of the very endgame encounters after hours and hours of play is a Cat Lord who becomes more powerful based on how many cats you've killed in the game, including enemies like tigers or whatever big cat ADOM has that are naturally aggressive. If you've killed too many he becomes absolutely godlike and unbeatable, and if you've killed none at all he becomes friendly and gives you an extremely OP ring. It's kind of funny, in that old Sierra adventure game instant-death way where letting an alien kiss you in the first zone in Roger Wilco would make a chestburster pop out of your body and kill you hours later in the last zone of the game. But its not, like, good
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Feb 11, 2021 05:32
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goferchan posted:I'm remembering this vaguely from playing the game like 15 years ago, and it may or may not have changed since then, but one of the very endgame encounters after hours and hours of play is a Cat Lord who becomes more powerful based on how many cats you've killed in the game, including enemies like tigers or whatever big cat ADOM has that are naturally aggressive. If you've killed too many he becomes absolutely godlike and unbeatable, and if you've killed none at all he becomes friendly and gives you an extremely OP ring. ADOM does at least... kind of warn you? The first cat you kill, it's enraged soul plunges into the depths of the earth. Until you actual reach the Cat Lord you won't be able to put two and two together though, so it'll catch you once. Also he's got innate invisibility so it's possible to meet him in godlike form and have him kill you before you even know he's there. I love ADOM dearly but a lot of that love is from having put the requisite hundreds of hours into it back when I had fewer game options. Also from just accepting I was going to need liberal amounts of spoilers. If I tried to start from scratch now I doubt I'd get into it. Another ADOM trap: the game gives you a quest to go either through an Animated Forest or a side path which you are warned is dangerous. One look at the forest and the absolute tedium it's going to involve and you may well assume the danger is the better bet... the side route looks normal enough, and usually the mobs that start on the floor are only a little stronger than you should encounter. But once you start looking around, you'll realize the truth. It spawns end game monsters, from around floor 45 of the main dungeon (out of 50, with the last few being special floors), but occurs around floor 13 Mithross fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Feb 11, 2021 |
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Feb 11, 2021 05:55
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the worst thing about the cat lord is that his existence poisons the brains of new players who will kill a cat, then quit their character and start again because they think it matters at all when they've never even made it to the ToEF ever. please, people, just keep playing. if you've reached the cat lord you've already won and dont need his ring. just murder cats. if you want to care about it, at least make it there once first.
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Feb 11, 2021 06:08
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if you ever kill a cat you should immediately fall on your sword as a matter of principle, the material benefits of sparing them is completely secondary 
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Feb 11, 2021 06:12
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Mithross posted:I love ADOM dearly but a lot of that love is from having put the requisite hundreds of hours into it back when I had fewer game options. Also from just accepting I was going to need liberal amounts of spoilers. If I tried to start from scratch now I doubt I'd get into it. This is basically me and Nethack. I would say that in my personal opinion Nethack is the 'best' old-school roguelike, but as a kid I looked up and memorized a lot of spoilers, and I've muscle-memoried the game's fairly obtuse command system / UI. The game has a lot of obtuse, weird references (try eating a trident and see if you get the joke, etc.) and the 'meta-progression' of figuring out which things will just absolutely obliterate you, be it enemies or weird interactions with items, or whatever, takes a long time. I can play the game now and find it fun, but I honestly don't think it'd be a good or fun gaming experience for someone with fresh eyes sitting down with it today. Unless they specifically enjoy the kind of process learning old roguelikes is like, but as far as I understand it, newer games have stream-lined the process a lot, and it's not like you're exactly missing much not experiencing the joy of digging through 20 levels of Gehennom mazes, or ADOM end-game nonsense.
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Feb 11, 2021 11:09
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I've always seen ADOM as basically the DOTA of roguelikes in that it's a weird kludged-together mess of things that fly in the face of accepted game design and is popular in spite of, or maybe even because of, its 'mistakes'. And also in that it's something I only ever could have enjoyed as someone with way more time on their hands than I have now. Happy memories of finally closing the gate after savescumming my way there in my student garret.
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Feb 11, 2021 11:56
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:if you ever kill a cat you should immediately fall on your sword as a matter of principle, the material benefits of sparing them is completely secondary Don't worry - if you kill a cat after getting the RotMC the game will do it for you, because the ring will explode if you're wearing it. There's also a new quest line that shows up if you don't kill any dwarves apart from DCKs. You can access the most important part of it even if you do kill a dwarf, but if you don't you can trade Rolf's axe and shield for even more powerful versions and get access to a post-game dungeon.
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Feb 11, 2021 12:16
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So apparently Trials of Fire is 50% off. Which is pretty crazy since they're so close to the 1.0 release. Several people in this thread (myself included) like it a lot, but apparently some others didn't like the art style, so YMMV.
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Feb 11, 2021 20:10
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It's boring as hell that the optimal way to play ADOM is an axe and a shield, and then you get Rolf's Axe and Shield and main it for a majority of the game unless you get a lucky artifact drop and oh BOY, did they dilute the pool with a lot of loving useless artifacts, on top of the score of poorly designed ones already making GBS threads up the pool He can't even design corruption stuff to be a tempting thing to use, all corrupting artifacts and powers and way too weak to justify the insane corruption rate they carry, so why would you ever bother with them even as a Chaos Knight
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Feb 11, 2021 20:23
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The thing that consistently draws me to ADOM despite its hostility is its scope. You always start out as a nobody seeking honor and glory and you can (potentially) and the game as a demi god after murdering the literal divine source of all evil. Hell even the 'worst' ending is still quite the goal.
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Feb 11, 2021 20:34
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Black August posted:It's boring as hell that the optimal way to play ADOM is an axe and a shield, and then you get Rolf's Axe and Shield and main it for a majority of the game unless you get a lucky artifact drop and oh BOY, did they dilute the pool with a lot of loving useless artifacts, on top of the score of poorly designed ones already making GBS threads up the pool yeah but they also added some OP poo poo like the wall and silence of the dead and potion belt (advanced gamer artifact) so its impossible to say if it's good or bad. 100% on the corruption thing though they're all just objectively awful and some of 'em suck just to hold onto! the most useful one is moon sickle for dipping into water to make chaos potions, which you then dip chaos potions into for Fun.
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Feb 11, 2021 20:35
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Black August posted:It's boring as hell that the optimal way to play ADOM is an axe and a shield, and then you get Rolf's Axe and Shield and main it for a majority of the game unless you get a lucky artifact drop and oh BOY, did they dilute the pool with a lot of loving useless artifacts, on top of the score of poorly designed ones already making GBS threads up the pool Hi august i haven’t seen you posting in ages but adom chat starts and you pop right up 😀
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Feb 11, 2021 22:01
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Captain Foo posted:Hi august i haven’t seen you posting in ages but adom chat starts and you pop right up 😀 hey Foo, congrats on the star  I don't play it anymore but it's still the only roguelike I ever played and beat so I have a deep resentment on not ever being able to mod it I'm sublimating it through running a pretend roguelike instead
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Feb 12, 2021 02:29
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Kobold Sex Tape posted:yeah but they also added some OP poo poo like the wall and silence of the dead and potion belt (advanced gamer artifact) so its impossible to say if it's good or bad. 100% on the corruption thing though they're all just objectively awful and some of 'em suck just to hold onto! the most useful one is moon sickle for dipping into water to make chaos potions, which you then dip chaos potions into for Fun. to zero surprise, the only chaos artifacts that don't get immediately fed are the ones that have no corruption-on-carry property, or passive benefits like the orbs
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Feb 12, 2021 02:31
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Took me like 6 hours but I beat Synthetik. It is a bad game. It is like Nuclear Throne except the art, levels, music, UI, gamepad support, and game design are all bad instead of good, and it is buggy as hell. It at least had the decency to crash after I had already looped, so it didn't record my win but I don't feel the need to ever touch it again.
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Feb 12, 2021 05:45
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Zero VGS posted:Took me like 6 hours but I beat Synthetik. It is a bad game. It is like Nuclear Throne except the art, levels, music, UI, gamepad support, and game design are all bad instead of good, and it is buggy as hell. It at least had the decency to crash after I had already looped, so it didn't record my win but I don't feel the need to ever touch it again. respectfully disagree
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Feb 12, 2021 05:59
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Nuke Throne is excellent, but so is Synthetik. It does have some bugs, though, and it's very much a keyboard and mouse game.
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Feb 12, 2021 06:35
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Nuclear Throne is way too hectic for me, I like Synthetik better.
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Feb 12, 2021 06:37
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once you loop they basically become the same game
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Feb 12, 2021 06:57
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Wamdoodle posted:respectfully disagree Disrespectfully disagree. With OP, not with you. Love Nuclear Throne though and still think it's best in its class -- I just don't think it's the closest comparison you can draw to Synthetik. Both games have similar paces to encounters and a focus on positioning as opposed to dodging, but Synthetik is REALLY systems heavy with a ton of stat numbers, weapon variants, alternate ammo types, temporary buffs, etc etc to explore and exploit. Nuclear Throne is the character you choose, a few perks you pick up, and the weapons you carry VS the entire game, and it's just about perfect because of it. I love Synthetik because it keeps that really rapid and brutal pace but also gives you the opportunity for a ton of number crunching and optimization in between fights, and the contrast of slowly agonizing over those decisions VS split-second combat makes for a really unique flow.
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Feb 12, 2021 07:21
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Nuclear Throne is notable because it was in development for years and had 99 updates but still manages to feel unfinished. There are some fun mods out there though. Not understanding the dislike for Synthetik’s art and gameplay, game is flawed but it looks distinctive and the moment to moment action is its strongest point.
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Feb 12, 2021 08:00
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bees x1000 posted:Nuclear Throne is notable because it was in development for years and had 99 updates but still manages to feel unfinished. There are some fun mods out there though.
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Feb 12, 2021 08:09
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synthetik is yet another game that makes me sick of twinsticks constantly doing tilted perspective. make it actually topdown so that there's not weird knock on effects with how accessible enemy weakpoints are based on whether you're approaching them from the south or not. also, take the lesson from NT and letterbox the game so that you don't have way more vision approaching enemies horizontally rather than vertically, and then lower enemy vision a bit so they can't shoot you from outside your vision. and then cut down on the metaprogression.
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Feb 12, 2021 08:23
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bees x1000 posted:Not understanding the dislike for Synthetik’s art and gameplay, game is flawed but it looks distinctive and the moment to moment action is its strongest point. I am pretty sure their "art" is some kind of 3D sprite asset flip from a 90's Mac shareware game, and not in a good way. There's no actual art directon to speak of and the levels are just completely square tiles. It's a severe case of "coder art". I get that it's only like one or two people but at least the developer's website says they're looking to hire artists.
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Feb 12, 2021 08:30
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