Dungeon Crawl on the other hand is a lot friendlier, in general the mechanics are well explained and you know what to expect and how things work. Contrast for instance the curse mechanic between nethack[1] and DCSS[2]. Nethack is obviously a lot more intricate but good luck figuring out all of that on your own, and good luck finishing the game if you haven't figured out most of that.
NetHack comes from the opposite angle. It's the D&D world your brother's friend spent all summer creating while you were away on vacation. It's best enjoyed on a rainy Saturday afternoon when you've got a clear schedule ahead. Gamers might call it tedious or repetitive, but then so is knitting or dicing vegetables by hand. It's just not meant for people in a hurry.
It's a meditative exercise that also happens to be pretty challenging if you aren't a Munchkin. In that sense it's kind of like correspondence chess for one: sure, nobody's stopping you from cheating (or using other meta-game exploits) but you're really robbing yourself of a lot by doing that. On the other hand, reading books on chess theory (or the NetHack wiki) is just fine.
That stuff is mostly tedious and frustrating though.
> use of potions beyond merely drinking them
That one is fun, sure. But arguably a bit non-obvious.
Ah, now I want to log back on and do a run :) I'm curious to see how the game has evolved since I last played.
Looks like my last win was 5 years ago, wow!
Not that it's your (or anyone's) responsibility to do this, but quick reminder that both Crawl and Nethack are completely Open Source. So if anyone ever wanted to do a downstream fork that was pure Crawl + a few Nethack features... they could.
Just want to maybe stick the idea in someone's head.
Nethack is often brought up as a jewel of Open Source games, but its development style closely followed closed source methodologies. By comparison, most closed source early access games today have more open and transparent dev cycles than Nethack ever did. That's a side topic, but Open Source game design is a really interesting topic all by itself that I wish more people would talk about.
In any case, source dump models are in a lot of ways even better for downstream forking, because you don't have to regularly integrate new patches in. Whenever a new version of Nethack comes out you'd have to merge in the changes from that version, and then reapply whatever patches you made.
The wonderful thing about Open Source is that your patches don't always need to be included proper. :)
Don't bother. Just join the impatients:
http://nethack4.org/media/nethack4.git [email protected]:tsadok/nethack4.git
Some changes from NH4 trickle back into 3.6.
I've been spoiled by Crawl's autoexplore, its richness of gods and god-granted powers, its colors (in text mode, not tiles), and many other new features and innovations. That said, Nethack is still the deeper game in so many ways. Crawl's "don't do it like Nethack" approach has prevented it from taking all sorts of great ideas from Nethack and making Crawl in to a richer game -- things like making more advanced use of pets (like training them to steal from shops), more things to do in shops, use of altars beyond merely converting to a god, use of potions beyond merely drinking them, more uses for item inscriptions, all the ways to combine items, the list goes on and on.
All this makes Crawl seem like the shallower game, though it's still plenty of fun, and I still play it to the exclusion of most any other roguelike for now. There's a lot of room for improvement, though. I just wish they'd take more of the best parts of Nethack and make Crawl even more fun.