Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1_player | Hacker News Reader

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/cr...

View on HN

That's an unkind characterization. People aren't just complaining to complain - from their perspective their gripes are legitimate. I'd categorize myself as an explorer type of player (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...). So I like to explore how game mechanics interact with each other and new levels. Lately, the devs have removed lots of details and nuances in crawl. That makes the game less interesting for me because there are less things to discover. For example, mummies are kind of pointless now since no race needs to eat. Removing features may be good for achiever type of players though, because it forces them to come up with ways to beat the game without those features.

Now I 100% love the direction of DCSS, but yeah mummies should have been deleted and possibly ghouls as well. But more generally, DCSS is and continues to evolve to be a tactical combat game. Complexity in other areas is continually being stripped out.

That's a great way of putting it. As a tactical combat game it is amazing, but as an exploration game it is lacking (and actually getting worse, imo).

It's fine not to like the game or some of the changes but I don't really get the resentment towards the devs that I read in some of these replies though.

If there's one thing where I believe that "if you don't like it, just fork it" is warranted it's this type of game. It's not like it's production-critical for anyone, so there's no deadline and you can take your time. It's a rather minimalist 2D game, no complex game engine knowledge is required. When I looked into the code a few years ago I found it very readable so it's a nice target for customization.

If you feel like modern DCSS doesn't go in the right direction just fork whatever version you preferred and go from there.

> 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.

Sounds like an instance of '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.

Dwarf Fortress has similar “breakpoints” where major releases that had to drop save file compatibility have separate “version” pages on the wiki to support those who remain on the older version to continue running the fort or mega project they’re working on.

Interesting, that sounds like the philosophy of (modern) ToME, which takes some of those ideas to extremes, to its benefit I find! For example, potions are removed in favor of Inscriptions, that are equipped to limited slots and have cooldown-limited usage, but otherwise stick around forever.

I find ToME has much more unique classes too, doing a lot of interesting things, even if luring monsters into a 1-tile wide corridor is still the safest way most of the time...

Another possibility would be to add some things as game options, e.g. add game option that you can set at the beginning of the game if foods are enabled/disabled, if certain classes of items or other features (e.g. religion) are enabled/disabled, etc.

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.)

I really like the philosophy as well. But there are probably less than a handful of players that actually managed to beat DCSS unspoilered. It's a really hard game, even knowing the various tricks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com