Angband, yes. But plenty of classic roguelikes (Rogue itself, DCSS, Brogue, Shiren the Wanderer) keep the lengths of successful runs in the 5-10 hour range.
I mean, those are mostly modern rethinks of the genre, not classic roguelikes, for all that DCSS and Brogue still operate (or potentially operate) in ASCII mode. But yeah I suppose Rogue itself counts.
Shiren came out in 1995, and the first version of Dungeon Crawl was 1997. I think once a game is old enough to drink, you can’t really call it “modern”.
I haven’t played Moria much, but my understanding is that it was a much more manageable size than its descendant, Angband, which took Moria’s end-game Balrog and made it just an early step on the road down to Morgoth.
And my understanding is that NetHack is also fairly reasonable in terms of length:
(Full disclosure: I’m now on the NetHack devteam, although I wasn’t when the events below occurred.) The last time I checked the statistics, the median length of time spent in a winning game of NetHack is about 10 and a half hours. Of course, that doesn’t include all the games that were lost before finally getting the winning game. How many of those there are depends a lot on the skill of the player. On the linked site, people seem to be inconsistent about whether they’re counting that time or not. For the record, my own fastest ascension is 5:48:18, which was part of the “first ascension” contest at /dev/null/nethack 2014 (scroll to the bottom of the page). Interestingly, the fastest ascension of that tournament was the last ascension, a 1:38:38 by Adeon. (The world record counting all verified games is a little over 1 hour.)
Larn was specifically designed around completion in a single sitting. Can’t say for sure about Telengard, Sword of Fargoal, Omega, etc. etc., but I haven’t heard people groaning about their length the way they do with Angband and its descendants.
Anyway, this is a tangent. I’ll grant that there are some classic roguelikes that go overboard on game length, most of which I’m not a big fan of for the same reason as @TurinTur’s. But plenty kept runs to a more reasonable length.
My main reason of why I want a shorter experience is because I want to try all the classes not just two or three, so that’s several runs to play already.
Yeah, these days I differently prefer my roguelikes lean and mean. I would even say 2-5 hours is good. Being able to start and finish a roguelike in a single session is my jam.
As much as I love TOME, it is a tad bit long in the tooth. The original end point (killing the Undead Master wizard guy in his tower) seemed about the right length. Although probably a bit too easy now considering the second half of the game and last bosses are so much harder.
LOL it is funny to me that classes are called jobs when it is a JRPG or something? I originally thought this was just a weird Final Fantasy naming convention but I guess not anymore!
Btw, a small thing, but by default the game looks like this, all very retro… (you need to click on the image to really see it)
However, you can zoom out a bit and disable the fake overscan lines, and play like this
Which imo it looks better.
Finally
Only two characters… because the second character died 5 or 6 times or so, it was in adventure mode. I’m no good at roguelikes because decades of other games (without permadeath, and with quick save…) have made me search of efficiency, even if that means playing more risky.
Still, I would say I learned a lot on how to play the game in this run, I think the next one should go smoother.
Switch version will be out on Jan 31st.
Well, at this point I played well enough to judge the issues of the game. Because every game have them :)
-Pace. The game is imo too long. We are talking of 20 hours for the first run, a bit less on the following ones. The game is 24 floors + 12-15 of side dungeons + whatever number of floors you do in dream items, and some of them can be up to 5 floors. In total around 50 floors to do.
That’s fine for a game you are going to play one or two times, but for a game that is supposed to be very replayable (random dungeons, random items, random champions & rumors, a dozen of classes), it had been better idea a shorter length to use better that replayability.
-Difficulty balance. The game difficulty isn’t as well adjusted as I would like. Part of it it’s the variable length, part of it the randomness.
For the first part, it can make the game too easy for the middle 25% of it. The game won’t scale the floors content to the player, as because the game designer didn’t know how much side content the player is going to do nor at what point he is going to do it, in the end it’s easy to out-level the main story content of the game if you explore every side dungeon, do semi frequent rumors, and are basically a completionist player. There are some mechanics to be sure they player won’t outlevel a lot the game, he gains less and less xp in the content that it’s too easy for him, but even then, you can outlevel several floors in the middle of the game by two or three levels, enough to make them boring. It seems the game trust on the caps (hard player level cap at 15, and a cap for job skills as you can only have 16 active and 4 passive ones) to make the endgame not trivial whatever the player does, and it mostly works, but the issue still persists, in the previous floors before the ‘endgame’ (the last four or five floors).
The second part is the opposite, instead of the game being too easy, sometimes it’s too hard. It’s more rare, but from time to time the pure randomness of a roguelike can bit you in the ass. That’s ok-ish in a roguelite where a run is 70 minutes, but less ok when the run is 20 hours. The issue is the champions and their randomness, sometimes a floor have zero champions, sometimes they have three. Sometimes they are separate, sometimes two fo them can be close enough as they move around randomly, so once combat starts, you may have to fight two fo them. Their level also varies a bit (-1 to+1?) of what it should be, sometimes they are ‘very hard’ and sometimes they can be ‘impossible’, all this means sometimes you will fight two harder than usual champions.
And finally add their champion abilities are random, and some are better and more deadly than others. And they have up to four of them, so you may have a champion with several of the ‘mean’ ones. So all these random factors can produce up encounter that are much more harder than the rest of the game.
-The game had a good amount of variation in key aspects, like biomes, player classes, enemies, iteminization… still, at the end of the day, it’s a hack & slash. It gets repetitive. This is more wish listing, but I think what is missing maybe it’s a bit more environmental effects and interaction. The game has a few ground tiles with effects (mud, lava, water), it wouldn’t hurt to have a few more types. And traps, thing like triggerable fire traps or spinning blades or a rolling boulder, something that other RL have done but are totally missing here. I think they can be fun, if you can use them at your advantage, against the enemies, too.
The first six minutes of the expansion
It shows how Shara plays differently, in how she obtains stats, skills, in how she uses pets and how fountains affect her.
New Update
I remark the Mod support because I’ve made a few. I will publish them soon enough (tomorrow?)
Sorry for the ‘spam’, but let me write a bit about the mod I’ve made.
First, this is it, Turin Condensed Campaign
You can read inside the intention of the mod, how it works, etc.
Basically, I tried to do a shorter, more condensed experience to play a single job, still maintaining the variety of types of floors, improving the pace and the balance of the game. In addition, it’s a bit harder than the main campaign.
If anyone can give me feedback about it, I would be happy.
That said, now it comes the boring part.
Let me talk about the sunk costs fallacy. Because I started the mod basing it in a sample dungeon mod from the devs, with the intention of making a dungeon run for myself. I saw the xml structure of the mod, and it seemed super easy to do, just copy and paste some sections, modify some values, edit some id numbers, test it works, and baaam done in a pair of hours !
Well, you know how it’s any software development. Unexpected problems appeared one after another, I underestimated the amount of time needed to balance it (and I wanted something better and better as I developed it, to), and in the end I needed not 2 hours, but six days to do this. If I had known from the start the amount of work I guess I wouldn’t have made it, but here it comes the sunk costs fallacy. As I already had invested 7 or 8 hours of my time when I started thinking ‘mmm maybe I should forget this shit’, if I dropped it to cut my losses, that 7 or 8 hours would have been a waste if I didn’t finish it and release it, so I continued and continued, until the time investment was more like 10x of my initial thought, lol.
Because the entire dungeon counts as a side dungeon, at some parts I had to even invent some workarounds to deal with how the game passes days, or how you obtain orbs, I talked with the dev for some stuff (that new possibilities for modding in the last update? that was me 
), and playtested to check the balance.
In any case in the end I’m happy with the result, the mod more or less fixes most of my issues with total length, pace and uneven difficulty, while tweaking things to a ‘experienced’ player level, without going overboard.
Because the mod is a totally experience linear without alternative branches or sidequests (with the exception of the dream dungeons, that also are limited), you can control the difficulty progression better than the base game does, and as the experience is notably shorter than the base game, you win:
-less gold
-less xp (you don’t reach the cap, in fact)
-less jp
-less health charges (and no fireplaces between floors)
-notably less orbs
-most rumors aren’t in this mod dungeon, so that’s also another source of resources nullified
Adjusting the economy and progression balance in a more ‘tight’ way. Money is a bit more important, in the base game once you were high enough it was no concern. You have enough jp to buy a full job and a weapon mastery, but not enough to take a second full job. You have enough health charges and food to finish the dungeon, but not enough to end it with 40 extra unused flasks. And more importantly, there shouldn’t be floors where you are mopping the enemies with autoattacks without even looking what they are.
Firstly, you’re writing anything but spam.
Secondly, thank you for all your impressions. I was checking the thread today because of the Switch release (and the prospect of a closer to roguelike roguelike was a great appeal), and while I’d be okay, I think, with most of them, the long games issue you describe is a really huge issue for me. I’ll stay clear from the game — until my tastes change, some day!
Agreed with @Left_Empty I’ve gotten a lot out of your impressions since you started playing, apologies for not acknowledging them earlier!
Yeah thank you for this thread. I saw this on the Switch store earlier and couldn’t figure out if I should write it off as shovelware or not. Guess it’s going on the wishlist!
Every bit as good as it is on the PC! It’s the sort of game that you would show to someone and then tell them it was originally a PC game and they’d be all, like, “No way.”
But I certainly agree with some of @TurinTur’s criticisms, especially about pacing. I only ever play a couple of floors at a time, which lends itself to casual Switchery, but he’s right that it’s far too drawn out for a rogue-like that should push you into trying different characters and builds.
-Tom
I’ve made* three new mods!
*: I actually made them two weeks ago but I was waiting until the dev fixed some stuff, there was a silly bug with the modding system. In reality I stopped playing, I’m waiting for the expansion.
Hard Mode
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1650084633
As it says in the tin can, this mod increases the difficulty of the game. All very straightforward, just a combination of slight increases and decreases of damage, xp rate, gold rate, etc.
More Monsters
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1650110964
There is an alternative way to change the game than just tweaking stat numbers, and some will say this is more fun. For people who want more action, but don’t want the rest of difficulty increase from the Hard Mode.
Just put more enemies on the game, instead of making them tougher or making you the player weaker! The mod only increases the numbers slightly, but I didn’t want to go overboard with it because I noticed that from the times I die in this game, a fair number of them is when I attracted too many enemies and they surround me and deprive the player space to move around.
Interestingly, the mod should balance itself, as having more enemies means also a bit more of xp/jp/gold to win.
Many More Weak Monsters
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1650110519
Following the previous logic of ‘more monsters to fight is fun!’, we can think that even more monsters will be even more fun! And thus, this mod is born. This time their numbers are increased by a bigger amount, however to make things not too crazy (it’s supposed to be an alternative way of playing, not a hardcore mode) their damage is lowered by 30%. Even then, if you do the math, the result should be a net increase in difficulty. Remember too they have abilities that don’t do damage but may pull you, debuff you, etc, none of that is nerfed, nor their HP.
My collection of mods
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1650117784