I liked the bit I played of this and have been looking forward to getting back to it with the Steam version as a catalyst. Now I’m just waiting for Indie Royale to post the keys (they say they will as soon as they have them).
Excellent tips. I have seen a few dungeons report “you sense you will get killed if you stay here” or something to that effect upon entering. Seems it’s always good advice to listen to those warnings. Proceeding and then getting one-shotted into perma-death by a hidden enemy was instructive.
Overall I’m learning to be much more prepared to sneak, snipe, kite, or just generally run away, even when using a warrior class. The teleport rune is a good one.
From my reading, it seems it does unlock a class. The Stone Warden can only be used if you donate, or presumably buy the Steam version.
What I’m not clear about is whether or not the Steam version needs to login to get the goodies. Do you have to remain logged in to maintain the extras?
Also, what about the Items vault?
For each 2€ of donations you gain one slot in the online Items Vault. This allows a character to send items to the vault and an other one to grab it from there. This feature can be accessed through the Fortress ingame.
Do Steam versions get a slot? Or more? If you’re offline, can you use the vault?
I feel like the dev needs to explain this stuff a little better.
I only know how it worked pre-steam, which was that if you weren’t logged in you couldn’t access the donation features.
That probably includes the Item Vault, which I always forget about. Purists probably want to avoid it (since it allows twinking). It was buggy way back in 1.0, but it’s possible patches have fixed it.
I’m assuming one of the reasons to log in is that you get an online profile to facilitate shaming or bragging rights. That’s public, right? Can you guys see all my characters, my achievements, and so forth?
Actually, it looks like the achievements, which are broken on Steam, are broken on the official profiles as well. I’ve definitely earned more than just the arena achievement. You’d think if one of your selling points was 1225 achievements, you’d get them to work right.
-Tom
Har har. I played a couple of hours last night and my profile barely shows up. I read that the dev is having some issues with server load since the Steam version went live.
Jesus, Tom! 17 hours already!?
Well, that just means it’s been running for 17 hours. Many of those hours were probably spent with the game idling while I did something else. A better measure of my time spent is that awesome roster of characters, some of whom attained dizzying heights of power as grand as level eight. Behold my greatest accomplishment in all the Tales of May’Eyal, Rustle Crow the Dwarf Berserker, who made it to the 10th wave in the arena.
-TomSo any actual losses between this and the old version? I thought the content was merely converted, not removed.
The biggest reason to login is to persist your unlocks. So if you play on a different machine or uninstall and come back to it some day, you still have all those races and classes unlocked.
You mean, besides all of the Tolkien stuff, and the old character building mechanics?
Isn’t that what Steam should be for?
The game had this mechanic years before it was on Steam.
So the graphics have gotten some touch ups here and there since 1.0. Spell effects and such. Also, I’m reading that various “story dungeons” can get “alternate layouts”, which in this case means “an entirely different theme” (e.g. Daikara is “cold” themed. But it can now apparently be “hot” themed).
Yeah, I’m asking if beside the “flavor” there was more content or much different gameplay. I’ve read that the new TOME is usually something between 15-20 hours for a complete playthrough?
I’ve run 2.3.5 and it has that nice Angband look and style where you can set up and configure multiple windows, and I like so much better classic ASCII in these games.
Running with modern tiles diminishes a lot of the fun for me.
I would have expected that all the talk in this thread about the radically different character building mechanics - which are a first for the genre - largely answered that point. There are other differences, significant differences though none as big as that thing, which is gigantic and impacts every level of gameplay. The games have the following in common: Dwarves, Dragons, Trolls, Orcs, Giants. Tome “hobbitses” and “elves” by other names.
There is nothing else about them that is remotely the same, assuming we’re not talking about hopelessly broad things like “they have unique monsters” or “there are classes that use magic”.
No, I’m asking about everything else. I’m not asking about mechanics, but about content.
Is the size of wilderness or number of different dungeons and floors more or less on the same scale or it’s a smaller scenario overall?
You can turn the tilesets off, if staring at letters and symbols somehow adds to the experience for you.
At least, there’s an option to do that. I have not tested it.
HRose, there’s an absurd amount of content here and it’s predicated on two things: randomized maps and the distinctness of the race/class combos. Your online profile has a grid for characters who have beat the campaign. There are 10 races and 27 classes. There are separate grids for all four difficulty levels. So if it takes 15-20 hours for a complete playthrough, multiply that by four grids with 270 possible character combos*. There is also an arena mode for fast character advancement on a separate leaderboard and a third option I haven’t unlocked yet. This game is nothing if not vast, generous, and varied.
-Tom
- I’m not sure if every race can be every class, so the grid might not be entirely wide open.
Also there are user mods.
For a free game you get a lot of stuff. Paying a little cash you get a little more and the satisfaction of helping the developer. Judging the game as it is he deserves a bit of cash.
I’m not saying the game is small. I’m just curious about the specific aspect of world-size compared to the old Middle-Earth version. It’s just a personal curiosity.
I’m kind of interested just because of the achievements. I was surprised how fast the hours melted away playing DoomRL, trying to complete challenges and boost my meta-stats. But that was a coffeebreak game. Not sure I have hundreds of hours to sink into a roguelike right now…