Cogmind, Caves of Qud, Brogue.
Yeah, Dungeon Crawl is good. Never beat it, but I had a few characters getting close-ish.
I got so pissed off with them though when they removed my favourite race (Mountain Dwarves - I tend to play traditional Dwarves in most rpg), due to their design philosophy, (Quote from the manual: “Diversity - whenever there are choices to the player, be that choice of species, god, weapon or spell, the various options should be genuinely different.” - and Mountain Dwarves had some functional overlap with some other race (though were far from identical) - but from a roleplaying perspective, they were entirely different for me) that I quit playing, and haven’t touched the game since then, only checking their website occasionally to see if they’ve added them back (and nope, they still haven’t).
TOME is basically the genre leader. At each level up, you get 3 stat points, 1 general talent point, 1 class talent point. When levels are multiples of 5, you get 2 class talent points instead of 1/1. At 10, 20, and 36 you get a Category talent point. What does it all mean?
Essentially a Category is a mini skill tree. 4 skills in it. You sometimes have to invest a certain # of points in the tree overall to get to the “higher level” talents therein. Sometimes the talents are entirely independent of each other. Each class and race starts the game with several class Categories, several generic category, and a racial category (this falls under “general”, but is race specific) “unlocked”. There will be several other class Categories locked. And then there are hidden categories you can unlock/learn in game. A category point spent on a locked Category allows you to invest talent points in it. Alternately, you can put a Category point into an unlocked one and increase what is basically the overall skill multiplier (all skills go from 1 to 5. A “core” Category for a class will have a 1.3 - iirc - multiplier so that at level 5, your effect skill level is in fact 6.5 when using talents in the tree. A Category point would bump this to 1.6, giving you an effective skill level of 8). Though the latter option is often not really a good idea, it sometimes is.
With 50 character levels, there’s a shitload of customization. There are ways to earn additional points in game, though they are not guaranteed even in a winning run. Most of the racial trees have 1 or 2 interesting talents and really radically alter your approach to the game. Take the Skeleton. Skeleton archmages are a popular combo. Skeeltons cannot use infusions (Runes and Infusions are cooldown based abilities you can slot on your character). So they don’t get access to any of the healing ab ilities therein (and some of them are very strong) or the infusions that wipe away certain debuffs. But they get a racial heal, and a cool racial shield. So you can do some crazy shield stacking stuff with the “magic” generic shield Category. Or you could play a Dwarf Archmage, whichb will net you some great saves and another racial that’s pretty good. Or Halfling, and roll with a high spell crit build. Etc.
TOME is basically an entirely different game from the Tolkien days.
Approaching Infinity has good graphics and diversity
So is that ADOM going to be released on Steam anytime soon? Seems like it’s been forever now…
Sadly a price tag that’s even higher than Cogmind, though I agree it’s excellent.
I have had that on my wishlist forever, I think because I just like the look of it. How after 2 years does a game still release Alpha builds? I guess I am old school and miss the days when Beta meant it was kind of a mess and not quite ready and the public didn’t really see Alphas.
After watching a 90 min video on Caves of Qud I bought that immediately. Holy crap what a cool game!
Yeah I’ve had that on my wishlist for a long time too. Many of the reviews say to hold off until more content is in there since you can quickly run out of things to do.
-Todd
Could you link it? I haven’t looked at Caves of Qud yet and would love a video to watch over lunch.
Laughed when I read that RPS quote, which is quoted on the game’s steam page. That’s some movie poster degree cherry-picking from the team - the actual review on RPS is wholly negative.
“Unfortunately, what at first glance appears to be a cutesy top-down RPG with intriguing procedural missions turns out to be a dry, dreary, and most of all, glitchy bore.” - Rock Paper Shotgun
Enjoy! It’s a little slow while they go through the mutations, but they only look at the ones he is thinking of using for his build (not like all of them or anything). There are two guys, one (the player) has hardly touched the game or any roguelike before, and the other guy is also fairly green but he knows a few things and has been playing quite a lot of CoD, so there is some great info to be had while you also get a sense for how the game works and feels.
I’d actually put DCSS ahead of Caves of Qud for graphics - the webtiles version is actually quite nice, a quite a bit more detailed it appears. Brogue is indeed excellent looking for a pure ascii game.
I like that Qud has kind of a unique aesthetic to the tiles. They’re restrained, with a different colour palette to most. Clear, uncluttered and easy on the eye. Most other games’ tiles tend to be high contrast, garishly coloured, and overly busy.
Of course it’s a highly subjective question that ElGuapo asked, so naturally opinions will vary. But I think we can all agree that Cogmind is #1! ;)
Oryx made Brogue a tileset so it’s not pure ascii anymore. It even has animations: Games — Oryx Design Lab
I’m personally still playing the ascii version though, mostly due to habit.
I don’t actually like the tiles version of Brogue. I don’t know if that’s me being a snobby purist somehow or what (I like tiles in DCSS/Dwarf Fortress/etc though). For some reason keeping brogue as pure ascii just seems… better.
Yeah I agree, I can’t pinpoint why either. In fact, taken out of the context of the game, I think the tiles look wonderful. But I find the ascii easier to quickly process for whatever reason.
I just noticed that ADOM is set to laucnh on November 16 on Steam!
Also RPS just recently highlighted a free Broguelike (title reminiscent of Brogue) on their site: Forays Into Norrendrin
[RPS article.](http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/11/11/forays-into-norrendrin-free-roguelike/)
[Game's official site.](http://forays.github.io/)
-ToddYeah, I just saw that. I don’t think I have ever tried this one before and may pick it up depending on the price.
Also, it is going to be a good birthday tomorrow. ADOM and Conquest of Elysium 4 on the same day! I should call in sick or better yet take the rest of the week off :).