quote:
Originally posted by karnot:
<STRONG>
Only by force of habit. I cant see how my example cant stand up.</STRONG>
BS. I'm not even a fan of Nethack, and I think that's a stupid thing to say. Nethack is
huge. There is more content in it than a one-man project like ADOM could ever hope to contain. Just because the lion's share of this content is put in in 'subtle' ways that only show up through multiple playthroughs and under the right circumstances doesn't change the fact that it the vastly, vastly deeper game of the two by any reasonable measure.
And I'm not really such a fan of ADOM either. I played it a little bit, and I do agree that it's fun to play once or twice, maybe play through once for each class... but I don't see how it manages to hold anyone's interest after that. It just railroads the player too much... Every class has a list of preset abilities that they will always get, all the important portions of the world are predefined into a set shape, and the carefully-plotted quest that was so lovingly worked into the game becomes a meaningless distraction after you've played through a few times and know absolutely everything about it. There's a reason why most roguelikes don't go too hard on a hard-and-fast plot, you know. I think, almost, that Biskup was going for the next Diablo when he made the game... in fact, I think he actually describes it as such in one of his promotional pieces. That's fine; Diablo has plenty of fans. But claiming that a game built on that model is objectively better than Nethack is stupid. Different, maybe, but in most of the categories that people like about Nethack, at least, ADOM doesn't even try to compete.
Although I'm actually not, as I said, such a fan of either game... in my mind they both tend to encourage 'twinking', they both have too many things that are always the same between playthroughs, they both lack interesting magic, both force every character to go through the same areas to collect the same ritual-items, both have a similarly annoying and shallowly-implemented conception of religion with cookie-cutter gods, and both share numerous other flaws.
My personal favorite roguelike (outside Dwarf Fortress, which is incomplete and too different to compare anyway) is Dungeon Crawl, which merits particular mention here. Dungeon Crawl isn't overflowing with things. It has, you might say, exactly the right amount of things. It has a hokey feel that exactly matches the gameplay--it never tries to make you feel that getting the Orb of Zot is part of a valient effort to save the world from the rising tide of foof because, let's face it, after (at most) the first playthrough nobody cares anyway. It gives the player near-complete control over how their character develops, allowing them to change direction at any point. It has huge numbers of interesting spells, and divides them up into countless schools so that magic-users can actually be different from each other. It lets the player make choices about which runes they collect on each playthrough, giving them a chance to see new areas and make more decisions about their character. It has an interesting conception of religion that makes prayer more than a get-out-of-jail-free card that occasionally dispurses free items, and which actually establishes real gameplay differences between the gods. It is extremely well-balanced, with no exploitive behaviors or silly tricks that you can get from a FAQ. It feels smooth to me in a way that Nethack and ADOM never did... I can't think of any better way to explain it.
...and, well, I went on for too long. But, anyway, the point is that Crawl did all this while being open-source. Most of the actual work was done by one person, Linley, which is probably the reason why it all feels so smooth; and since he didn't know much coding when he started the source was left in a state that made it very hard for others to expand on, but that didn't hurt him. It's not like having open-source code is going to cause people to force things into the game.
...but, like Toady says, it really comes down to his personal feelings. It might not make as big a difference as all that, anyway; the main branch that everyone cares about would always be his, and with everything so clearly planned-out it's not clear what other people could add to that.
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Topic: DF License query (Read 3868 times)