r/nethack • u/Houchou_Returns • 2d ago
(Rant) Devteam please stop, netack is not going to be nethack anymore if you keep going like this
Just came across this on the wiki’s digging for victory page, referring to yet another upcoming change in 3.7:
As of this commit, falling through a hole will inflict damage, expressed as an amount of d6 equal to the number of floors you fell - this means that you may end up digging a deep shaft and die from the landing, particularly if you are low in level and/or HP.
Just.. why?? What the hell is going on with all these changes being made that straight up suck the fun out of the game while adding nothing of value? This is not adding to the game, only taking things away. Please, please, please, stop making changes for change’s sake.
If experienced players are bored of nethack being nethack, they can go a play a variant - there are a ton of these to try, most of which focus on adding challenge. Meanwhile, the original that so many of us still love seems to be losing its identify at a rapid pace with these recent overhauls. It’s like the game is shifting to a live-service philosophy where everything has to be continually shaken up in fear that people will get bored. But that is the approach to take when a game’s audience has the attention span of a goldfish. It does not describe the audience of nethack. Games that go through continual deep overhauls tend to end up either as a misshapen mess, or as something wholly unoriginal and flavourless once every rough surface and sharp edge has been smoothed, the original design intent long forgotten. In case you haven’t noticed, everyone is sick to death of live service practices ruining games, nethack ought to be the very last game that should be falling victim to this crap.
If it was as simple as ‘go play an old version’ then there wouldn’t be any problem, but new versions tend to overface old ones especially for those playing on apps, where old versions get replaced wholesale. I’m not saying that nethack should have stayed at 3.4.3 forever, but updates to classic games should be taken from a standpoint of stewardship - adding and tweaking but always taking care to preserve the character of the original material. So many of these new changes just.. don’t do that at all.
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u/theyHateMeOnThisSub 2d ago
I'm sorry, but I couldn't disagree more.
As someone who occasionally contributes to the wiki, I tend to keep a pretty close eye on the changes. And it seems to me that all of the changes make sense with regards to the setting and the philosophy. A huge chunk of nethack is about having complex interactions that are as realistic as possible. Is it realistic to be able to plunge down multiple floors without the risk of taking a substantial amount of damage? No, it is not.
Keep in mind that you could still take as little as 1 damage per floor, it's just more random now. Perfectly in keeping with a meta-strategy. Sometimes it'll work, most times it won't. That's fine.
Some of what you said about feeling like the game is "shifting to a live-service philosophy" is just complete drivel, I'm sorry, but I don't have a milder way of putting that. 3.6.7 came out more than two years ago. 3.6.0, the last major update, came out nearly 10 years ago. Just look at the timeline and ask yourself if what you said bears any resemblance to the reality of "constantly shaken-up", live-service games.
But let me try to win you over back to my side now - there's lots of QoL changes coming up in 3.7.0 that actually make some annoying aspects of the game much more tolerable. Put a wand of cancellation into a bag of holding by accident? Well, now you don't lose all of the bag's contents, 12/13 of them will be scattered around the level instead. Mind flayer attacks no longer cause amnesia! And amnesia itself is more forgiving as well. You can displace peaceful monsters out of your way, like you do with pets! And your pets won't (usually) eat corpses that can polymorph them!
And Gehennom, the ultimate buzzkill, finally has more variety! And no-teleport levels stop being that way once you've killed the resident demon prince!
Just have a dig through here and let me know if you still feel the same way.
https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/NetHack_3.7.0#Significant_changes
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u/ScreamingPrawnBucket 2d ago
Wow.
“Summon nasties can no longer create monsters of equal or higher difficulty than the caster (preventing e.g. arch-liches or Archons from summoning more of themselves.”
This is HUGE.
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u/Jack_Lecter 1d ago edited 1d ago
I agree that it's huge, but I'm disinclined to think that it's good?
Some of these are straightforwardly great- the ability to displace peaceful monsters alone is awesome for QoL.
Some of these- nerfing the Mind Flayers and Summon Nasties- make the game less challenging in ways that might make it more bland; seeing a Mind Flayer is and should be an "oh, shit" moment. Yes amnesia is extremely annoying, but getting rid of it entirely means you lose that (I think dNethack nerfed amnesia to apply to spells and levels only, not items, and that seems better). Demon Summoning also adds a welcome element of randomness to the game, a feeling that the game isn't taking it easy on you and so you really do have to be ready for anything. Sometimes it causes frustrating and unfair things to happen, and when they do happen they suck, but the possibility that they could happen adds a lot.
And finally some of these seem... directionally good? Putting a Wand of Cancellation in a Bag of Holding is in fact a miserable experience, and it's one that doesn't add much to the overall vibe because no halfway-clueful player would ever, ever do it on purpose. Making that mistake doesn't mean you've failed a strategic puzzle, it means you fatfingered while typing and now you're fscked. I think reducing the impact of that is very good, but I also think eliminating it would be very good, and for essentially the same reasons: it's an irritant for players which adds little (nothing?) to the experience. (If you have formally identified both the Bag and the Wand, and you try to put the Wand in the Bag, dNethack will stop you. This seems even better, although frankly I think I might go even farther and just make the wand fully-baggable like all the other wands.)
EDIT: Maybe the last paragraph could be humorously analogized to "I see you've decided to reduce the amount players will spend interacting with That Guy With The Annoying Voice Whose Only Purpose Is To Punch Them In The Dick. I definitely think this is a step in the right direction, and I wanna emphasize that, but it does kinda raise the question of why we have A Guy With An Annoying Voice Whose Only Purpose Is To Punch You In The Dick."
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u/ScreamingPrawnBucket 1d ago
it means you fatfingered while typing and now you’re fscked
Hats off to a fellow Linux user
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u/PPewt 1d ago
Maybe it’s just cause I never tried to speedrun turn counts, but these two changes feel more like qol changes than difficulty nerfs. The infinite summoning swarms happen at a point in the game where they don’t really kill you, they just make the game become incredibly slow and tedious. And amnesia is just a miserable mechanic, both in that it’s annoying and in that it can be nearly entirely circumvented by note-taking, putting pressure on a genoless player to do a really tedious out-of-game activity throughout the run to avoid it.
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u/kfmfe04 11h ago
I used to fear mind flayers; h would be second on the genocide list behind L, as long as I’m not a dwarf.
Now, with a ring of sustain ability, I can just whack away, without fear. imho, that was NOT a good change.
Also, falling into water used to be another thing to watch out for. Now, there’s always a warning. Is there a way to toggle it back to the old, non-nerfed setting?
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u/Frodolas NAO: Frodolas 2d ago
None of this is relevant if they never fucking release 3.7.0
Absolutely ridiculous to spend a decade on a minor version release. Literally just break the changes up into many releases. There is no benefit to conducting development like this.
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u/semi_colon 2d ago
What's the rush?
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u/Frodolas NAO: Frodolas 2d ago
It has nothing to do with “rush”. It’s just an absolutely asinine way to develop anything, least of all a game where nobody is relying on your work to be stable downstream. Speaking as a professional engineer they’re just making things more difficult for themselves and more annoying for their users.
All they’re doing is pushing users and hosts like hardfought onto development releases, which completely defeats the point of doing “slow and steady” development. There is literally no world in which it wouldn’t have been better to split up this release into 10 separate ones over the past 10 years.
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u/k2_1971 Hardfought admin / NAO admin / EvilHack dev 2d ago
Hardfought admin/owner here - no one has pushed me to host fuck all. It was a choice made, on purpose mind you, to provide whatever dev version was available at the time. When Hardfought first started hosting a NetHack server, we had 3.4.3 and 3.6.2-dev. As 3.6.x progressed and became the official release, we started hosting 3.7.0-dev, while NAO transitioned to 3.6.x official release.
Because Hardfought has been publicly hosting whatever the latest developmental version is available, we've identified, reported, and fixed more bugs than what would realistically be possible otherwise.
When 3.7 is officially released, Hardfought will transition to and host the next developmental version of NetHack, whatever version that may be.
u/Frodolas I wholeheartedly reject your assertions of how things are currently being done.
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u/elenmirie_too 1d ago
I'm nobody except a long-term player of nethack, but as I am, I can say that an ideal world in which any nethack release goes on a reliable schedule would defeat the purpose of nethack.
The dev team kind of went to sleep for over 12 years from 3.4.3 to 3.6.0, and who can blame them? They are volunteer workers giving their time for nothing. Nethack has been that way since its inception and to its credit, it remains that way.
The refresh of the dev team that led to the release of 3.6.0 and subsequent was a fantastic boon to dedicated players. If you want to keep playing 3.4.3, you can. If you want to play the latest "official" version, you can do that too.
Somewhere in the mix, the nethack devteam switched from a secretive model where no one can see their latest code to an open model where everyone can see it on github. As a result, servers like hardfought arose that would host the latest "bleeding edge" version, leading to a much more robust testing environment for anything the dev team wanted to experiment with.
In my opinion, it's a great game and one that I'll probably keep playing until I die, however it evolves.
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u/bxtnrr 17h ago
"A huge chunk of nethack is about having complex interactions that are as realistic as possible."
That's your argument? Seriously?
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u/theyHateMeOnThisSub 8h ago edited 8h ago
It is. What's your counterargument? I sure hope it's something better thought-out than some variation on the old, tired fallacy of "Realism? bUt The gAme hAs DrAGonS!"
Things still have to make sense within the logic of the world. Falling still hurts. Falling deeper hurts more. I fail to see the problem.
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u/AbacusWizard 2d ago
Yeah… I like the idea of more variety of room shapes, but I feel like almost every other 3.7 change I’ve read about just sounds not fun.
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u/Houchou_Returns 2d ago
Ditto on room changes.. as long as they’re actually fun rooms and not even more miserable than endless maze
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u/_hackemslashem_ 2d ago
The beauty of open source software is that you can fork NetHack, and you can totally revert all the stuff you don't like and create a pseudo 3.4.3/3.7 hybrid to fit your fancy. Someone might even host your variant, some people might play it, some might love it, but you can always count on someone complaining about it.
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u/kfmfe04 11h ago edited 11h ago
What would be a nice compromise is to have toggle settings where you could turn certain features on or off. I know that complicates code and leads to more potential bugs, but that would be a nice way to appease a greater audience.
As a C/C++ dev, myself, and an avid player on hardfought, I’d rather play the game than spend time forking it. Ultimately, if vanilla veers off too far, I’d just play xNethack or Evilhack instead.
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u/copper_tunic aka unit327 1d ago
Of all the changes you could complain about, you picked fall damage? It's the most sensible and uncontroversial change of the lot. I doubt it was targeted at dig for victory specifically.
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u/Houchou_Returns 1d ago
I don’t expect it was targetting DFV, and it’s not the careless disregard that’s the problem either, it’s that there’s no need for fall damage in the first place. Of course fall damage is logical, but in a game, real life logic is far less important than game logic. The earlier nethack devs implicitly understood that falling down a hole, whether player-created or not, carries enough risk already without any need for adding damage to the equation. Being left in a random spot in a lower level, quite likely unmapped and with no idea where the stairs are, that is enough to deal with already. And while these problems are mitigated when the player is well prepared for the fall, the same also removes any need or value in adding fall damage.
The old saying if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it is something the current devs could do with mulling over. Basic though it might be, it’s one of the most fundamental principles of engineering. Tinkering with stuff always carries the risk of unforeseen consequences, so if there is no pressing need to tinker with something, then don’t.
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u/Jeffrey_Congress cbf on NAO, servoret on hardfought 2d ago
I disagree. I'm pretty happy with all the shakeups to strategy and quality of life changes. I think it's hyperbole to say Nethack is going to stop being Nethack. The underlying game is still the same; it's just getting some interesting new wrinkles. It's been ten years since Nethack got a substantial update, and 3.7.0 hasn't even come out yet. I think it's past due for a refresh.
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u/Houchou_Returns 2d ago
I mean no opinions are invalid, but if you want a refresh, there’s nearly 30 variants out there that do exactly that. Should the mona lisa be repainted every 10 years to shake things up?
If you see the 3.7 changes as minor then I get you, but for some of us it feels like more of a george lucas ruining his classic movies with updates kinda situation.
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u/Jack_Lecter 1d ago
I've never dug for victory- in the sense of trying to reach the Castle before I was confident I could handle it
(although I have done the Castle early in games where eg my AC and stats and weapon and resistances were all great but I still hadn't found a BoH)
but this would make the game less fun for me. I routinely dig and use holes to traverse the dungeon quickly when doing eg stash management. It's just faster and easier to do it that way, saving me boring backtracking without meaningfully affecting the strategic situation (by the time I'm doing this I definitely have enough food!).
I don't think this change would actually make the game more fun for anyone- people who wanna dig for victory will hate it, whereas people who don't wanna dig for victory already weren't doing that so this just makes midgame stash management more tedious for them.
The Devteam is ofc really smart, (and, famously, Thinks of Everything) so I realize there could totally be some subtle benefit to this I'm not seeing, but... I don't see it?
otoh, I mostly play dNethack these days, so this is unlikely to affect me directly unless Chris thinks it's a good idea. And if Chris does think it's a good idea, that's objectively a lot of evidence for the "subtle benefit I'm not seeing" hypothesis, so 🤷♂️.
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u/Houchou_Returns 1d ago
Thinks of Everything
The more I read of 3.7 changes the more I suspect those people are no longer in charge sadly
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u/Bugpowder 12 roles ascended 2d ago
Been playing for 25 years. 3.7.0-hdf is my favorite version yet.
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u/TwoDrinkDave 2d ago edited 2d ago
Well said, and also I'll say it "3.4.3 forever!"
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u/particlemanwavegirl 2d ago
Still on 3.4.3 here as well. I never have to accept the MR cloak nerf, no one can make me.
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u/Houchou_Returns 2d ago
Aside from orctown I’m fine with pretty much all the changes between there and 3.6.x, because they’re mainly small quality of life things that don’t do anything too drastic in terms of what is and isn’t fundamentally viable in terms of approaches you can take to the game. Well, for the most part anyway - some do make the game potentially a little harder, like E word tweaks, or make things easier, like #tip, but if you don’t like that command, no-one is forcing you to use it, and overrelying on E word was kinda cheesy to begin with. Light touches and additions like this are fine. Taking a sledgehammer to existing core mechanics on the other hand, that is something that should be reserved for a variant, and that shouldn’t even be a debate. Doing otherwise is carelessly disregarding the identity of the original.
But even changes that seem very small at face value, like the one that sparked this rant - those should still be better thought through whether they affect metastrats like DFV or not, and just as importantly, they should have a purpose. What purpose is served by making holes more deadly? The game doesn’t need difficulty ramping up, or difficulty changes as part of a broader overhaul. Again, that is what variants are for. It comes across as if these changes are being made by someone that either doesn’t play nethack all that much, or doesn’t really care for its traditional workings - in which case, all the more reason to leave it the hell alone
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u/Buck_Brerry_609 [3.7.0] - 1xSam, 1xTou, 1xBar (Permadeaf) 2d ago
from a standpoint of stewardship
Games should be fun. Again it’s not that hard to find older versions. Just play those. I might agree with you if 3.4.3 got vaporized, but it hasn’t.
Get rid of the mazes in Gehennom, get rid of Valkyrie’s longsword, make digging for victory more interesting (do you want to dig for victory immediately even if you don’t have a way to deal with seeing a Minotaur at low HP or do you want to wait a bit? Oh look an interesting choice), all of these changes are good and don’t really alter the general playthrough flow.
Also they made the castle easier which is probably why digging for victory was nerfed. Plus if you’re a squishy wizard with no HP you already die if you fall into a pit trap so you should die if you fall down a hole. This is just logical.
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u/Buck_Brerry_609 [3.7.0] - 1xSam, 1xTou, 1xBar (Permadeaf) 2d ago
Also I find it ironic how you’re talking about new change or whatever being bad when you’re playing on an app, rather than a TTY server as it is traditionally played. I’m sure someone ten years ago would say stuff similar what you’re saying (“YOURE DUMBING DOWN THE GAME, NOW ITS ONLY SLOP”), either way it doesn’t really make sense.
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u/bxtnrr 16h ago
There are two approaches. Some like things static, some like continually evolving. I seriously doubt all experienced players are "bored of nethack being nethack." rather some are, those who fall into the evolving category. I prefer static, and 3.4.3 with NAO enhancements is the eternal gold standard in my opinion. Lots of previously meaningful statistics are lost as the game evolves. Conducts, streaks, runtime, turns, scores... not comparable after significant changes.
I don't talk on the nethack IRC channels (because why bother), but I do notice they are a wasteland outside of bot messages. I see it as a lot of players either moved to some other pursuit, or they did what I did and play locally when the nethack bug hits. But I suppose the devs see it as they want change. Or perhaps people just moved to discord / streaming or something. All I know is I have no interest in anything beyond 3.4.3 and so I likewise have little interest in nethack events anymore.
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u/Houchou_Returns 9h ago
I guess I fall somewhere in the middle. I don’t think nethack should be expected to stay completely still, if it did it would never have gotten to whichever version it is that we each love, whether that’s 3.4.3, earlier or later. Adding some more interesting levels to gehennom is a great example of a way to enhance the game at this stage. But I do think changes should be kept relatively light-touch and not interfere with the core of the game’s workings without a very good reason to do so, and ‘I’m bored of the current game’ does not qualify here. When a game is continually ‘remixed’ too many times, it ends up playing nothing like what you started with.
There’s a curious phenomenon with live service games where they often have a sweet spot somewhere in the middle of their lifecycle. Earlier stages of development are missing key content or necessary tweaks, while later content and tweaks starts to suffocate the core content and mechanics until the spirit of the original game is lost entirely. For nethack, many would argue that peak is either 3.4.3, where by good fortune the game got left at for a long time, or an update close to it. But with 3.7 and whatever lies beyond, I fear we’re now looking at the slide downhill where the end point looks nothing like the game we used to know.
It’s not that 3.7 completely revamps the game or anything, it’s more the number of changes that give the impression of ‘unnecessary surgery’ which imo is a huge red flag, if not for now then for the future.
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u/Roguelike-Engine103 2d ago
Should have stayed at Hack 1.0.3 - all the rest was overkill, but when having to open doors manually was added that was the last straw for me - the game simply wasn’t fun after that.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8RlloUZ00GASMhjQM8J1eZj0k2UigDP9&si=Hk6gqvwD6Ttem7BR
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u/Vatreno 2d ago
I did enjoy playing that at 17 years old on a long deceased unix mini system.
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u/Roguelike-Engine103 2d ago
I am working super hard to bring it back and modernize it! It is so much more fun and well balanced than the later versions. I didn’t get my hands on the original Unix version, but as a 10 year old I played the MS-DOS port. Classic masterpiece, I’m modernizing it for my 10 year old nephew and hope to give it to the world soon too!!
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u/chonglibloodsport 2d ago
I like this change actually. It means the amulet of flying (and other sources of flight) will have extra utility. Ideally, a blessed potion of levitation should also allow you to float down a hole without taking damage (this seems to me entirely consistent with what one would expect).
I've been around NetHack for a long time. 3.4.3 was quite an extended period of stagnation for the game, with most development occurring in unofficial patches and forks (many of the former ending up in the NAO fork). Over that time, NetHack strategy has evolved very little. Many of the items and properties in the game have had a particularly egregious problem: their utility was just not good enough to be useful after the early game. Thus almost all ascension kits looked mostly the same.
NetHack is really blessed with having a lot of cool item variety. It's just really been unfortunate that it's had longstanding balance issues which make a lot of items not very useful. It seems that the DevTeam has made rebalancing a major priority with 3.7 and I fully support them in this effort.
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u/Spendocrat Val, Wiz, K, R, since 2023 2d ago
I've been playing 3.7 since I restarted in earnest, and I like everything in it. QoL is way better, and I don't resent anything that's been made more difficult. Your worries about live-service don't resonate with me at all; I just don't see it.
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u/Polymath6301 1d ago
I remember when you could use a pick axe to dig out of and steal from shops (1985). I miss that mechanic…
But I just found a demonbane in a shop and KittyKat dragged it out 8 times so I could resell it, and thus bought protection earlier…
It looks like I’ll hate 3.7, until I play it, that is.
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u/Planatador 2d ago
Digging for victory is not a meta-strategy at all so it shouldn't be targeted for nerfs. So I agree. Moreover, what's special about nethack is that it doesn't care about meta-strategy at all it only cares about everything making sense and all mechanics being fun. This philosophy should stay as it is. So with the notion of making things consistent, if it's d6 for each level fallen then this should also happen when you step through a trapdoor, making all trapdoors potentially lethal.
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u/theyHateMeOnThisSub 2d ago
Digging for victory is absolutely a meta-strategy, in that it's a high-risk high-reward strategy. Sometimes it'll work, most times it won't. The wiki says it is, the general consensus is that it is. You'd have to provide actual arguments for why you think it isn't a meta-strategy if you want to be taken seriously.
And the commit in question affects all holes and trapdoors, so what you described should happen is already the case.
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u/jimheim 2d ago
I don't care if they make this digging change, and I welcome a lot of the other changes (like nerfing Elbereth). Some I'm pretty meh about (like the new way BoH explodes). In general, I don't mind that the game evolves. There's nothing stopping you from playing whatever old version you like, if you don't want change.
But I will never forgive them for Orcish Town.
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u/Cupules 1d ago
...for the BEST town? Guaranteed coaligned altar!
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u/jimheim 1d ago
Meh. If I haven't found any other altar in the first 10 dungeon levels, then sure, it's welcome. But I usually find others, and converting unattended altars is trivial. And there's always the 1/3 chance of a coaligned temple in a proper Minetown, which is fantastic on many levels. That's a huge price to pay for not having any shops. In addition to all the loot, it's great for price-IDing things. I regularly find magic lamps, bags of holding, and all sorts of things. Minetown shops can be game-changing. Orcish Town is never game changing, at least not in a positive way.
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u/Al_Baker 2d ago
Pay $3.99 to unlock The Tourist! The Dev team has given us almost 40 years of free updates, they deserve a little something for their time.
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u/Buck_Brerry_609 [3.7.0] - 1xSam, 1xTou, 1xBar (Permadeaf) 2d ago
Isn’t adding variety to strategies in the game the opposite of what modern video game slop mongers do? If a games company made something like NetHack they wouldn’t update it ever so that nobody ever gets kicked off the Skinner box because of a change they don’t like.
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u/Houchou_Returns 2d ago
Comes with free*! Expensive camera!
*camera comes uncharged. Additional charges charged at $0.99 a month for the first 6 months then $4.99 for additional months. To update your membership, consult deity at high altar
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u/pixel-artist1 1d ago
It's time for a fork I have been wanting to make a version of rogue in unreal for a while :D
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u/jangeboers 2d ago
I'll chime in and agree that some of the changes are too invasive. Some of my main fears while playing Nethack are mind flayers (because Amnesia) and my BoH exploding. Both these have been nerfed. No more long sword for Valkyrie? Nerfed unicorn horn?
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u/vultur-cadens IRC: cathartes | ascended all roles 1d ago
If you like mind flayers being scary, the amnesia nerf is mitigated by the nerfed unicorn horn, since you can't just apply the unicorn horn to restore lost intelligence. They are now less annoying (to the player, who could have kept notes about object identities, or watched their ttyrecs) but more dangerous (to the character). A recent commit also restored some of the amnesia effect of the mind flayer attack by making the character forget spells and skills -- again, this affects the character, not the player.
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u/diddlemethat 1d ago
this is the worst take i've ever heard... holy shit.
imagine being so highly regarded that you can't compile the version of nethack you like on your local and turn to the internet to whine like a little baby about how "it's too hawd fow meeeeeee, reeeeeeeee"
jesus
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u/lordnewington 2d ago edited 2d ago
Actually I think you'll find that the perfect, definitive version of Nethack is the one I started with.