Dungeons of Dredmor - Graphical Roguelike-ish Awesomeness

Games
2150

Patch was released

CORE:
• FIXED: various issues with saving and loading games, including but not limited to your inventory disappearing, your save games breaking, and you losing levels when entering or leaving the pocket dimension.
• FIXED: The Traditional Achievement Fixing Ritual has been performed. (Please join in at home by chanting to the Pterodactyl Wizards until you feel the icy grasp of their claws upon your shoulderblades.)
• FIXED: primary stats not being buffed by skills
• FIXED: game now runs correctly on machines with international localizations.
• FIXED: aggressively regenerate levels when a level has been deleted from a save game.
• FIXED: instructions now included on Magic Box pop-up.
• FIXED: sight radius could not be decreased
• FIXED: flickering up/down buttons in the skills tree
• FIXED: phantom slots on skills grid
• FIXED: crash clicking “next” on tutorial button
• FIXED: at low resolutions, wizard key falls offscreen at 2x mode
• FIXED: magic box could be exploited to steal from shops
• FIXED: Steam overlay not working in -opengl mode
• FIXED: missing expansion2 caused problems with expansion3
• FIXED: spell points could result in negative mana
• FIXED: dagger and polearm bonuses now only apply when wielding a dagger or a polearm
• FIXED: Confiscate Evidence allowed theft
• FIXED: rutabagas would dash repeatedly at you, either killing you instantly or locking the game
• FIXED: named monsters no longer spawn in Mysterious Portals in enormous piles
• FIXED: clicking the Digest button in the pocket dimension no longer freezes the game
• FIXED: item stacking problems
• FIXED: buff stacking problems
• FIXED: skill level is now actively checked when encrusting a weapon
• FIXED: when we add a steam achievement, we also add the local achievement
• FIXED: some local achievements
• FIXED: transmuting monsters could repeatedly set off traps
• FIXED: various other polymorphing monster crashes
• FIXED: Insufficient terrifying and foreboding graffiti on the walls. Added terrifying and foreboding graffiti to the walls in preparation for the Ominous Countdown.
• FIXED: Brittle stacks do not refresh after changing levels.
• FIXED: “Platinum Ring” removed from Lucky Find spawnlist because it doesn’t exist.
• Increased all monster perception values.
• Slightly nerfed first level polearm skill.
• Fixed polearm stance effects that weren’t firing.
• Made high level polearms harder to craft.
• Lucky pick automatically opens locked doors without requiring a lockpick, and no longer requires Lockpick Spamming.
• Radiant Aura, Magic Steel buff stacksize capped at 1.
• tweaked Healing Rain effect.
• tweaked This Root Shall Suffer to cause more suffering.
• Fixed some random spelling and grammar stuff.
• UI: darkened Krong popup dialog background to make icons easier to read
• UI: darkened resistance & damage extension widgets to make icons easier to read
• Master of Arms description updated to reflect chance of triggering “Suit Up”
• removed unnecessary skill category tags
• Tentacular Infestation bolt no longer infests you with tentacles when it hits other people
• Very Sharp Wall of Blades Stance now hits enemies with small amount of piercing/slashing when player is attacked
ROTDG
• Fixed Helm of Threepwood artifact quality
• enhanced the Broadside skill
• added a new sound for Broadside
YHTNTXP
• FIXED: Ravens now make proper sounds. Quothing is involved.
• FIXED: Mage’s Mana Maille buff stacksize capped at 1
• FIXED: All eruptors spawn fewer traps. It was getting ridiculous.
• FIXED: Clockwork Knight: teleport animations removed from movement-based spells
• FIXED: Puissant Veil now hits enemies with magic damage when player is attacked
• FIXED: Multiple, multiple issues with the Arcane Capacitor. Who thought it was a good idea to have a spell with 200 lines of scripts for it anyway?
COTW
• FIXED: decreased monster charge attack damage (see: Deadly Rutabagas of Death)
• FIXED: Insurance Fraud issues when used on a corpse.
• FIXED: Encrustings would fire 100% of the time.
• Communist healing skill may now fire commie debuffs
• Hammer and Sickle can be found in the dungeon
• Hammer is now craftable
• Sandstorm nerfed (Sandstorm damages reduced, mana cost increased, additional player debuff added)
• Asp Empowerment buff changed to fire less commonly
• Damage scaling added to “Alien Weapon” skill
• added special craftable Communist Armour & Helm
• Bailout should now remove fiscal responsibility
• Pyramid Scheme can now trigger correctly
• Reform and Opening now actually pays out
• gave minor passive bonuses to Tourist & Paranormal Investigator
• added missing item definitions for Helm of Ultimate Knowledge and Shrat’s Helm
• added four new high-level daggers
• Added some more Wizardlands so we don’t keep running into that room with the Evil Clones all the time. (Wizardland Geometry may slightly change as a result.)

2151

Fixing stability problems is a Good Thing[tm].

I stooped playing because I had a lot of crash, and I can’t access my own pocket dimension (and in the game).

2152

Arghh. So I just killed myself with Rocket Jump from the Clockwork line of skills and have to start all over. How exactly is rocket jump supposed to work?

2153

Any advice for a pure rogue build in the early game? (Also, mage?)

Pure warrior seems pretty straightforward to get going, but it’s not really all that exciting.

2154

I’m trying to figure out if the tome I have with two icons is actually better than the shield with about 8. And if not, why is it 5x the price to sell??

BTW, icons on an item which you can’t mouse over are pretty useless for evaluating it.

2155

Rocket jump is basically the thing people do in Quake where they shoot a rocket at their feet in order to propel themselves higher. Expect to take 20-30 damage when you use it, but it does area-effect damage to monsters at the takeoff and landing sites. I’m using it because it turns out to be my only jumping skill, but yeah, it’s a tradeoff.

All of the icons are present on your character sheet/paperdoll. After a while you get used to them and will start to recognize types of icons, but yeah, there’s a learning curve. That reminds me, I was talking game design with someone other day, and basically the thing with Dredmor is that it just dumps everything on the player right away. There are what, a couple hundred possible items in the game, and you could run into any one of them. And that’s to say nothing of the crafting system.

Tomes are offensive weapons. Shields are, well, shields. I’ve discovered the joys of unarmed combat, which lets me equip dual tomes or dual shields.

I’m currently taking Tanky McTank through the dungeon on Permadeath/Going Rogue using two shields and the best armor I can craft/find. My block rate is hovering around 90% right now, pending more metals to smith the high-level stuff. Or I was, until I got trapped in a poison cloud while clearing a monster zoo; a 90% block rate doesn’t help with that.

2156

The icons drive me batty. There’s dozens of them, many of which are very similar to others but which may have dramatically different effects, and they’re tiny tiny tiny at 1080p. But then, that’s just one symptom of the many ways in which Dredmor obscures vital information without continual reference to the wiki. It’s not just hidden interactions and such, though there’s certainly plenty of that - skill trees don’t tell you that they affect your starting equipment or about some of the hidden passive effects that they can apply, there’s no indication that certain rogue skills can allow you to actually pick up and reposition traps, etc. But also it’s rarely clear what the actual game mechanical effects of investing skill points in a given tree will be. The Knightly Leap skill lets you teleport in an L-shape like a chess knight. Cool. But it doesn’t say so, and if you try to use it targetting a square that’s not legal because you don’t understand the movement pattern it enforces, you’ll waste your turn and nothing will happen. The game doesn’t even tell you that you picked an illegal target.

And it makes me sad because there’s actually a lot of cool stuff going on here, even more so as the game is expanded.

2157

It’s rather unforgiving, like Rogue or Nethack. You have to spend a lot of time reading the wiki and forums to really figure out what’s going on.

2158

The wiki contains a useful list: http://www.dredmorwiki.com/wiki/Stats

2159

I’ll grant you Nethack, which is full of obscure undocumented interactions such that I’ve never managed to get into it. But there are plenty of other roguelikes that, while having a steep difficulty curve and plenty of mechanical depth, manage to actually tell you what you need to know in a clear, up front, and concise way. DoomRL, for example. Or (bloated though it may be), ToME.

Things that I’ve needed to know in DoomRL but didn’t:
Locked doors can be shot open.
The exact details of what alternate fire modes do. (Fairly self-explanatory, though.)
Applying certain combinations of mods can produce special enhancements.
The nature and layout of the special levels.

I think that’s about it, and the latter two are absolutely the sort of thing that’s appropriate to make people learn through experimentation and experience. But the details of things like the statistics and capabilities of my equipment and inventory items, my character statistics, the game effect of skill point investment… all that is laid out for you without fuss. ToME makes the mechanics clear too, although the exact interaction of the stats has to be explained in a tutorial. The things it reserves are things like how to earn achievements and unlocks, and it uses the latter to ease players into the game before confronting them with the most complex playstyles.

2160

After finally finishing the game, god almighty I just don’t have the patience to play it anymore. There is just far too much tedious inventory management and wading through crowds of enemies.

2161

I kinda think the developers kept everything relatively vague just so people are left guessing. I could be wrong, but that’s how I see it. So you learn how things work over time but there’s still a big cloud of ??? over what’s going on. It’s a very tongue-in-cheek game in every single facet whereas others are more serious.

That being said, for my current build “Mr. Crafty” who has no weapons and all crafting-type skills - is there a penalty for wielding weapons you have no specialty for? Or duel-wielding without the skill? Or using a shield and a book without magic skills or shield capability?

Alan Au - is there a way to guarantee which direction you’re going to go when using rocket jump? Can it get you two spaces away so you clear a water zone?

2162

So exactly what good is Haematic Phalactary?

I cast it, and get a bunch of negative icons without seeing any benefits…

2163

There used to be an untrained weapon use penalty but I think I remember reading it’s been taken out. Also no penalty for untrained use of shield or book. There is definitely a penalty for dual-wielding without the skill, though.

And there’s definitely something to be said for having gameplay nuances discovered through play. I don’t think basic mechanics should be handled that way, however, especially when it comes to things like trying to figure out what skills do for you from the skill selection screen at the start of a new game. Also, it’s traditional in many roguelikes to have randomized unidentified consumables and only partially identified gear, with identifying happening through spells, consumables, or usage. Dungeons of Dredmor obviously decided not to go with this mechanic, which has some gameplay value (though I am okay with getting rid of it), so it seems odd to deliberately introduce obscurity in a way that just sends players off to a wiki to make sense of the game. If indeed that is what’s been done.

Incidentally, as long as we’re getting a screen with all the enemies we’ve killed, why not inject Angband-style monster information into it? (Where the more you kill, the more of the monster’s stats and capabilities are known to you.)

2164

According to the wiki, it makes a potion in your inventory that heals health and mana both. (And this is exactly the sort of obscurity I’m complaining about, incidentally.)

2165

I think that would clash with the “style” the game sports. The current description:

Pour your blood and soul into a secret hidden thing that you can tap when the need is greatest - or whenever you fancy a nip of forbidden sanguine juices.

The same happens with every object, every description of skill, etc. All of them are written “with style”, and in some of them it makes it a bit confusing, in others it’s more clear what they do.

2166

This one is better than the wiki IMO: http://j-factor.com/dredmorpedia/.

No obscurity there, you’ll get the skinny on pretty much everything.

2167

My point is that I should not have to refer to an external reference to understand basic game mechanics like “what does my skill do?”

2168

4 hours to go on the Ominous Countdown!

2169

Info has been released, started a thread here: