Din's Curse... or you wanted a Soldak Thread

Games
1

The Roguelike thread became a Soldak Thread - so I’m officially starting one. I posted this on other places, so let’s post it here.

Alright… I’ll confess… I like RPGs where you can destroy things. In Ultima 6, my friend and I went through and chopped down every wooden door in the game, just because. I used to move gunpowder barrels to blow up stuff… or better yet, move a cannon to REALLY blow up stuff.

I also like action RPGs, like Diablo, and Rogue-likes, but they often fall flat of having some certain “element.” This is why, Depths of Peril, the first game by Soldak, was such a new thing. A diablo-clone that included certain MMORPG-like raiding against AI “houses,” recruiting new people via quests, building up your faction, inter-faction diplomacy. It was all very new and cool. The second game, Kivi’s Underworld, was a little less “cool” but was a fun arcade-like romp.

Enter Din’s Curse. Now this is RPG-lovers porn. Let me show you some of Steve Peeler’s (the developer) blogs.

[INDENT]

I swear our game is plotting against me, I spawn in a gas leak to test out flaming oil, and the world spawns an earthquake and destroys it. This seems to happen fairly often. I cheat to test something and the game responds…

Changelings disguised as imps on a level where you need to find imp tails for a quest is very dangerous. I was actually trying to kill imps and I ran into 2 changelings at the same time.

I destroyed a cursed gate today by setting fire to a bunch of barrels near it with my flaming sword. I couldn’t get to the gate because of the barrels and all of the monsters nearby, so I started a little fire.

A zombie attacked a naga attacking me, the naga turns and kills the zombie, then walks over to use a lifestone, and then it came back to kill me. I was actually surprised that they were fighting in the first place since I was killing everything, so I just sat there and watched. I was even more surprised when the naga walked right by me to go heal and I’m the one that programmed them to do that.

[/INDENT]

Fantastic… how about this:
[INDENT]

Left Din on all night, came back this morning and all the townpeople are zombies, funny thing is they are all standing in their normal spots. What happened is that zombies raided the town and starting killing everyone. As each npc died in town they raised back up as a new undead to help kill off the rest of the living. Once they were done and had nothing left to do they all walked walk to the original spots and stood there like nothing had ever happened.
I’ll just let the skeleton kill him is a bad strategy in Din’s Curse (the victim will just rise back up as the undead). I’ve actually done this multiple times now. It doesn’t help any. Do what they should do in the movies and kill it off before it just raises back up…

While testing today, I ran from some monsters by using a walk through walls cheat; the ghost floated throught the wall and killed me anyway. It’s interesting how many things surprise me, but that is one of my goals for this game.

[/INDENT]

This one particularly makes me salivate…
[INDENT]

have added a good example of how this works lately to the game: the darkness machine. This is a machine that once built causes the entire area to get much darker than usual. This doesn’t sound too bad except it screws with the local crops so food prices go up. Monsters tend to be much more aggressive when it is dark so the town you are trying to save is much more likely to be attacked. Also now that one machine is up and functioning it encourages other monsters to build other machines to wreck havoc on the town (like earthquake or weather machines).

So there are lots of strands that leave the darkness machine quest, but what leads to it? Well a lot of things frankly. Most unique monsters, bosses, and unique monster groups have a chance to secretly build them. Just because you know about a monster already doesn’t always means you know what they are up to. Hurry up and kill them already! You might discover that someone is building a darkness machine in the dungeon and have a chance to disrupt the plans. If you fail, you will have the darkness machine to deal with and whoever built it. Sometimes you only get partial information and find out that someone is building “something” in the dungeon. This could be a darkness machine or it could be something entirely different (although whatever it happens to be is probably dangerous for you). Sometimes your information is really bad and you just find out someone is planning something. This could be anything from a town raid to yep, you guessed it- building a darkness machine. As I implied before, if someone has already built an earthquake or weather machine this might also lead to someone building a darkness machine.

Like I said, the quests are very web like. There are many different things that lead to each quest and many possible other quests it can start.

[/INDENT]Anyway, I’m posting this over here because Steve is just about ready to go into Beta. Like Stardock or Mount & Blade, Steve plans on offering the game for a reduced pre-order price ($19.99, I believe) and you get beta access. As of now, the beta is going to last about 2-6 weeks, depending on sales and what sort of bugs need to be squashed, but he could really use the help. So if you plan on getting this one, you might help out Soldak by jumping in the beta - it’s cheaper in the long run and you get to participate in development.

Last he said, he plans to start Beta sometime in the next few days, unless there is a small delay or something pops up. I’ll update everyone as plans commence, if there is interest.

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BTW, all you DRM haters are going to eat this up - Steven Peeler (the developer) just released info on the liscensing agreement that he is going to include in the Din’s Curse EULA. Behold it’s beauty! This is reposted from his forum HERE.

[INDENT]

I’ve thought about this a lot over the last few days and think allowing 1 copy per family would be a good idea for us, so we are going to try it with Din’s Curse. I’m not sure future games will do it or not (depends on how it works out with Din). Below is the relevant part of the EULA. If anyone sees any problems with it please speak up.

Under this license, you may:

(i) install this Software on as many computers as you personally own and only on computers that all physically reside at the same location. This only applies to a single family within one dwelling (house, apartment, etc), everyone else must purchase one license per computer.

(ii) assuming you are following part (i), you may have multiple people playing singleplayer or multiplayer games over a LAN (local network) at the same location at the same time. HOWEVER, YOU MAY ONLY HAVE ONE COMPUTER PLAYING OVER THE INTERNET AT A TIME PER LICENSE. To have multiple computers playing on the internet at the same time, you must buy
one license per computer and install a unique key for each computer (each license purchase gets a unique key).

(iii) copy the Software for back-up or archival purposes.

[/INDENT]Is that good enough to satisfy even the most hardcore of you? Sounds like a EULA from back in the DAY!

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I will be quite honest here when I say that this looks to be one of those games that is much more fun to read about then to actually play. Though I do think everything he talked about sounds awesome. I’ll keep an eye on this one.

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Depths of Peril was a lot of fun, so I’ll definitely be supporting this project. I love the way the game surprises him when he tests it himself. That’s pretty cool.

Please do post when the beta starts.

5

Thats pretty much the definition of software development. Alternating fits of “Oh, cool…that worked?” and “Why the fuck isn’t this working?”.

It would be funnier if his side effects went more like this.

Left Din on all night, came back this morning and all the townpeople are zombies, funny thing is they are all standing in their normal spots. What happened is that zombies raided the town and starting killing everyone. As each npc died in town they raised back up as a new undead to help kill off the rest of the living. Once they were done and had nothing left to do so they drunk dialed all my facebook friends and reformatted my hard drive.

6

I absolutely loved Depths of Peril, so I’m really looking forward to this.

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No. And there’s no polite way to say it: the internet bit is idiotic. But nobody sane is going to buy multiple copies just to play on-line simultaneously, which almost certainly means fewer legit owners will bother playing on-line at all. So ultimately that bit of idiocy probably hurts him far more than it hurts his customers.

I’m fine with the rest, though, and I’m sad to say it doesn’t take more than almost granting users the rights that ought to be the legal minimum, to score a few brownie points with me. I pick Stardock over their competitors every time for the same reason.

8

I wasn’t ever able to get into Depths of Peril, but Din’s Curse sounds pretty interesting, so I grabbed the Kivi’s Underworld demo last night. Very nicely done game, though it’s more of a gauntlet-alike than a diablo clone. It has convinced me to grab this as soon as it’s available. And maybe to pick up the full version of Kivi’s too if I have time to play it…though I wish it was easier for games like this to be on Steam (with cloud support). Anything this lightweight is perfect for popping into at lunch time, but who wants to level two different dudes?

9

What that part is really talking about are games that go through our master server. We can’t just let an infinite number of people play through our server (well and be able to afford it).

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What if you offer people a special on-line code against a valid serial & email addy. Would that work for you?

EDIT: By “a code” I mean whatever number they happen to need.

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EDIT: Nevermind… I read it again with different eyes and see what you’re saying.

If that’s the case then it will be the first aRPG to ever have that effect. Games from this genre are typically a LOT more fun to play than they are to talk about.

Any day now they will be accepting pre-orders and people can immediately participate in beta. I guess we’ll see how fun it is then.

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Eh, I don’t think it’s that crazy to say that you only get to play online multiplayer with one copy at a time, but you can LAN play with all your computers at once if you want.

I will admit, some of the stuff discussed about what goes on in the game gives the impression that it is really complex in a very roguelike way, going down that Dwarf Fortress path that Marcus seems to be alluding to. Hopefully it’s straightforward and action-y enough, though, that that isn’t a problem. Why wait a few days, when we can speculate wildly right now?

13

That’s a perfectly acceptable EULA as far as I see it.

14

Yeah, I’ll be pre-ordering this one.

Anyone know if a Mac version is planned?

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No. And there’s no polite way to say it: the internet bit is idiotic. But nobody sane is going to buy multiple copies just to play on-line simultaneously, which almost certainly means fewer legit owners will bother playing on-line at all. So ultimately that bit of idiocy probably hurts him far more than it hurts his customers.

So are you honestly saying that, if two people in a household (let’s say you and your roomate) want to team up on the online server - you think you should only have to buy one copy? That’s balls. Should you only have to buy one copy of Borderlands, one copy of Diablo II, one copy of World of Warcraft - if you and your buddy want to go online simultaneously? I’m perfectly sane and I would buy two copies, should I want to do this.

I think it is great that Steven accepts that people will only want to buy one copy for inter-household use across a LAN or playing solo at the same time. This is FAR better than the “license to one computer” model.

Anyway, I’m very much looking forward to it and I’m waiting with CC in hand for the “Buy” button to light up.

Ravenight, I HOPE that it is the Dwarf Fortress equivalent to Rogue-likes! It would be great to see some complexity injected into the fast-and-fun gameplay of games like Torchlight.

Bael

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Yeah, because that worked out so well for for Stardock once they had a game people actually wanted to play in multiplayer (Demigod).

I really don’t see what the big deal is, you can do whatever you want with the game in your own home, which is far more permissive than most games are this point and time. If you want to go online, everyone needs a key, which is pretty much how most games now.

So your use of the word idiotic, just seems, well, idiotic.

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Oh, I hope that too - I just hope that it adds depth without killing the fast-and-fun aspect.

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Yes, there will be a Mac version which should be available at the same time as the Windows version.

From what I’ve seen of Dwarf Fortress, I don’t think we are nearly that complex, but we sure have way more going on and more interactivity than Torchlight.

Din is still pretty fast paced.

19

Hey Steve, I was poking around on your site today. How do we preorder? Couldn’t find any info.

20

You can’t yet. You should be able to preorder and grab the beta some time in the next few days.