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[Mephansteras]

I don't see any reason there can't be paid for roguelikes. Someone is putting a lot of time and effort into making the game, why shouldn't they make money doing so? Granted, I expect a more polished game and some decent support if I have to pay money for it compared to a free game, but that's partly my responsibility as a consumer to shop well and partly the responsibility of the developer if they're going to charge for what they make.


Besides, there are still tons of free roguelikes out there, and those will never go away since the developers are making them for fun rather than to make money. The only existence that is in question is the paid for ones, and that just depends on the market.

[forsaken1111]

Roguelikes should never cost money, and the recent and unfortunate habit of charging for them will be the death of them.

Yes. Everyone should donate their time and creative effort for free so that you may be amused. You're entitled to free entertainment! How dare they sell something they spent a lot of time on!

[Retropunch]

Liked the game when it was free, not anymore now that its costs money for the version that's actually updated (nor do I like the graphics, but that's secondary). Roguelikes should never cost money, and the recent and unfortunate habit of charging for them will be the death of them.

This is ridiculous. As Mephansteras says, any game that's had time and resources put into it should be able to charge if they want to. Roguelikes aren't any different from any other genre, especially as defining a games genre is largely impossible. CoQ has RL elements, but it also has a story - does that still make it a RL? You can buy and sell items - still an RL? We can't just lump games together and say 'these have to be made for free'.

However, I DO understand that there's a level of quality that you expect from a commercial game that you don't get with a stereotypical freeware Roguelike. CoQ is currently moving out of that phase, and so the transition into a paid game makes sense. It is currently Early Access, so it's not 'commercial quality' yet, but I feel that myself and 183 other people can't really be wrong.

[getter77]

This is absolutely a worthwhile project for them to charge a bit of money for, after all these years even well before I started this topic/called it~ all the way back in 2010, at a time when it was just pure HOPE that they'd one day have the opportunity and means to act upon all that rich & delicious potential inherent to it.  Gains have been all over the place and good all over at a good clip---an excellent balance struck as far as how an Early Access project on Steam especially can well be conducted in a vast sea of incredibly terrible ones.

The notion that Roguelikes(Rogue itself was sold for a time among many other classics!) somehow have some magical handicap such that they should always be free is a beyond tired old heap with absolutely no leg to stand on---passion without the resources to actualize them in full is one of the saddest things, as while resources are ostensibly generic, passion in particular is quite unique and ephemeral...down to the very specific individuals involved and their short time on this spinning rock of ours.  That the creative team itself was able to hold it together, all these years, independent of all else as just people being people---is astoundingly rare outright and double that notion specific to gaming out of all niches as it just doesn't tend to happen period.

If it isn't there yet to some general standard, then it is probably just a matter of time and enjoying the ride while seeing it all come together from the sidelines or in the thick of it---lively momentum is one of the most important, yet under appreciated, factors when it comes to these sorts of things working out for the good of all.

[puke]

Well... I hate to be the devil's advocate here, because its just such a jerk thing... but there might be some (albeit unintentional) truth to what he said:

The massive resurgence and commercial success of the roguelike is causing developers to brand any game with any sort of procedural content as a rougelike.  Because people are buying it.  Action platformer?  Roguelike.  4x strategy?  Roguelike.  I haven't seen a FPS "roguelike" yet, but I don't doubt there is one on Steam somewhere.

And this dilution of the market is, by some measures, killing the genre in its more traditional definition.  Certainly, the Berlin Convention has become something of an atavism.

But, in more serious news, I am MORE than happy to pay for my COQ.  Free COQ has nothing on the much more professional and paid-for COQ.  It's just more satisfying all around.  If the only COQ you get is free, you just aren't having the full COQ experience.

[getter77]

I think the genre will weather some long overdue "flattery" just fine considering rpgs, adventures, and so on have managed just fine with their own hybrid dalliances---if anything, the hybrids strengthen the "classics" as they actually do far more, and far more loudly, to raise the core issues into the limelight and thereby the classics outright even if in some oft needless defenses thereof.  Most of the Berlin's darlings had/are/still etc gone stagnant and abandoned---relegated to the reliquary instead of their true forms as living works of finely woven entropy. Had history played out in a more correct fashion, this little phase would've already come and gone well over a decade past---but now beats never by far.  Doubtlessly, some are reckoning it from a crass marketing perspective without knowing the Why behind it all, but ultimately it is the spirit of the thing that is most important---that plucking from the future and across disciplines from the realms of pen & paper to the monitor that was one of the great incomplete advances from mostly the 80's.   The weakest of the lot won't be able to sustain themselves on trendy latching on alone, as per usual, and the rest are certainly in good standing for a place at the grand table---purity isn't the driving force of Roguelikes and, by the very nature same as other fundamentalist notions, can't be....spirit enmeshed with ambition is.

ADOM is a situation unto itself, which I can understand easier by taking a step back and viewing it from beyond more than just financial incentive/passion dynamic---a whole lotta (rough) life has happened to the man and his spiffy team since The Resurrection, but they are still trudging onward to make good on things as best they can given the circumstances.  If finance was the ruling, driving force...especially in the lands of Crowdfunding being what they are...they'd have had a much easier time on themselves to "not" and just fade away.  As such, that means something in my estimation, and the significance is not lost on me versus getting blinded by the mundane business equations.

[puke]

I also agree that the recent trend towards commercialization (and, as puke pointed out, labelling anything with procedurally generated elements as 'Roguelike') may be harmful for the genre as a whole in the long-run, but we'll have to wait and see I suppose.

I actually think its a passing fad.  Likely the mass market audience will get tired of it, and people will stop calling everything  roguelike. 

But there will always be madmen making games like this, and I hope they get paid enough to continue the projects they love.

[ThtblovesDF]

The more big companys fuck up and do cash grabs, the better I feel about each dime I throw at indy devs, where your cash still makes a difference.
Anyway, you are clearly allowed to dislike the cash aspects, but you can hardly demand they all be free. Freeware is free.

[Retropunch]

I definitely agree that a lot of indie devs have started to cash in on old creations and put in the bare minimum to sort of make it viable for sale. This was one of my fears with CoQ when I saw it was going paid - I worried they'd just do a token amount of work, grab a bit of cash and then just leave it.

I'm STILL slightly worried by that - the idea of early access is that you pay for something and you get a finished game at the end. CoQ is so big/complicated that I'm worried that they won't 'finish' it sufficiently on the amount that they earn from it (although it does seem to be doing well!). If that happened we'd be left with a better - but not finished - product. Obviously where you draw the line is a big one, and I'm sure they have their own ideas, but I can see the reluctance of some people to buy in when it might not get finished.

Still, for the amount I paid I feel a very decent amount of work has been done on it - it's more just the principle of 'early access should equal a finished game' that I'm worried about.

[unormal]

We've been working on it for more than 10 years, I dunno why we'd stop now. People already get more than 200 hours of gameplay out of it, so I feel like being 'finished' just just saying 'we give up that's all we're adding, peace bros'. There's already as much gameplay as people get out of Skyrim or other big open-world games, so it amuses me that people not only demand 4x more but also that they get it for free.

At any point we could just cut scope and write a plot that ends, and call it done and throw it in the ocean. However, instead, we're sort of mindfully trying to stick (at least thematically) to a lot of the really absurd scope we came up with as teenagers/early 20s brainless dudes and trying to do it justice.

Considering the scope, it's totally possible that we just both die of old age before it's done; but sometimes that happens with absurdly huge creative works.

[Retropunch]

We've been working on it for more than 10 years, I dunno why we'd stop now. People already get more than 200 hours of gameplay out of it, so I feel like being 'finished' just just saying 'we give up that's all we're adding, peace bros'. There's already as much gameplay as people get out of Skyrim or other big open-world games, so it amuses me that people not only demand 4x more but also that they get it for free.

At any point we could just cut scope and write a plot that ends, and call it done and throw it in the ocean. However, instead, we're sort of mindfully trying to stick (at least thematically) to a lot of the really absurd scope we came up with as teenagers/early 20s brainless dudes and trying to do it justice.

Considering the scope, it's totally possible that we just both die of old age before it's done; but sometimes that happens with absurdly huge creative works.

You can't believe how great that is to hear!!! I've played CoQ over many years and it's been a staple in my life that I've kept going back to - I'm so relieved that you'll keep working on it!

To clarify though, when I talk about finished game, I don't mean it in terms of that there's nothing more to add, I just mean when it gets to the point where it's sort of 'here's a very coherent game and everything works' - each patch gets nearer to that, and I can't wait to see what you add next!

[bahihs]

I'm on the fence on buying the beta version. How much has been added? Are tinkerers actually useful now (they were my favorite class, but they suck)?

Have new locations been added, random or otherwise? I remember several areas in the free version were disappointingly incomplete (There was an area at the end of the salt desert if iirc that is empty). New quests? Items?

I really want to buy this (I probably will one way or the other) just want to know if there is now a significant enough difference between this and the free version that would actually make the purchase worth it or if I should wait a bit.

Also is there an option for ascii graphics or is it just graphical?

[puke]

you can turn the tiles off.

new features are released just about every friday.  Mostly optimizations, some fixes, some new skills, some changed skills, a few new items.  Look at unormal's post history to see whats up.

The Artifex and other tinker types are a little bit better, turrets are a bit more worthwhile now. 

It's hard to beat a mutant with Psychometry though, as the mutie can analyze an item and get the blueprints instantly and non-destructively, while the Tinker or True Man must disassemble many of them in an effort to learn a blueprint.

I think I saw a post somewhere from unormal suggesting that the desert location you are talking about is next on the list to get an overhaul.  I believe the main quest currently stops in the same spot, but even getting that far is a tough trick.

[bahihs]

you can turn the tiles off.

new features are released just about every friday.  Mostly optimizations, some fixes, some new skills, some changed skills, a few new items.  Look at unormal's post history to see whats up.

The Artifex and other tinker types are a little bit better, turrets are a bit more worthwhile now. 

It's hard to beat a mutant with Psychometry though, as the mutie can analyze an item and get the blueprints instantly and non-destructively, while the Tinker or True Man must disassemble many of them in an effort to learn a blueprint.

I think I saw a post somewhere from unormal suggesting that the desert location you are talking about is next on the list to get an overhaul.  I believe the main quest currently stops in the same spot, but even getting that far is a tough trick.

Thanks, I think I'll wait until a few more features kick in

[puke]

Haha,

New game, walked to RedRock overland instead of using map travel.

When I got there, the surface was covered in webs and spiders were fighting off a swarm of Girshlings.  Good news, I completed the first part of the quest to discover the critters INSTANTLY.

Bad news, Superdead.