Re:Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
by bjourne on Sunday May 09, 2021 @01:50AM
(#27093570)
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.
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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.
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.