New version, and it seems a new name, dropping the “Dungeon Crawl” part: Stone Soup 0.6.0: Heizölrückstoßabdämpfung. This isn’t the first name change-- “Linley’s” was cut off some time ago.
(It’s a roguelike. That’s a sort of RPG, I guess.)
Some of the reaction here and there has been negative, but I’ve killed off a dozen or so characters now in 0.6.0 and there’s some good changes. I’m not going to go into detail because this game might have zero interest for readers here, but I’d like to.
Never heard of this one. How does it compare to Angband?
I loved Linley’s (well, still do) and so I’ll give this a check-out.
I haven’t played Angband in years, so my comparison is based off hearsay and a quick reading of a newbie’s guide.
Angband has heaps of variants, Stone Soup has few. However, updates to SS come out fairly frequently and are pretty different from what’s come before. I gather that Angband has so many variants (Zangband, Steamband, etc.) because the code is well written. The original Linley’s Dungeon Crawl, not so much.
Angband has shops that buy your junk and sell useful things that are guaranteed to be available. SS has shops, but they’re scattered randomly through the dungeon (in some admittedly silly places, like a desolate swamp filled with hostile monsters) and there’s no telling what will be available. It used to be not too uncommon for winners to make note that they had nothing to spend their gold on, but bazaar levels came in a few versions ago, which give you more chances to find something worth buying if you’re quick/lucky. Shopkeepers not buying from players means you spend less time backtracking on shop runs. I wish other action RPGs adopted that non-feature.
Angband seems to have a lot of sources of instant death. The guide I read mentioned said that around depth X be sure to have source of resistance Y or you’ll be killed by Z. SS is certainly eager to kill your character, but getting killed in one blow is rare. That said, there are lots of enemies against which you’ll want, say, poison or fire resistance.
Angband apparently has (maybe a lot of) spoilers, SS has relatively few. It has fewer than ADOM (which I’ve actually played enough to know what I’m talking about) and NetHack (which I haven’t).
If I remember right, Angband has non-persistent levels, SS has persistent ones. This basically means that you can’t go up and down stairs to generate new levels. Monsters respawn slowly in SS as well, so usually there’s not much point in revisiting a level other than to travel back to a shop or a cache of items.
And that exhausts my knowledge of Angband.
In a bit of follow up, I ran across an online poll (who knows if it’s accurate) that has Crawl as twice as likely to be played than Angband (Sept 09) among RL players. I suspected Crawl, sorry, Stone Soup, had taken off (as these things go) but interesting to see. The tiny sample is probably overkill for the RL-playing population.
I prefer Stone Soup than most other roguelikes I have found. You could actually get quite deep without lots of luck. There are neat features like switching weapons, auto-quarrel and skill systems.
