Rank RLs you have played a lot

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(Compilation by Kornel Kisielewicz of the thead on rgrd)

(I included only the posts that provide explanations)

Original post by Herold

Its simple, if you played some RLs a lot - rank them! You can also wrote, why you ranked so (I hope it will help to developers).

My suggestion is this:

  1. ADOM (for challenge, skill system (including horoscopes and talents), incredible replayability, tactic and plot)
  2. Entroband (for nice interface and challenge)
  3. Nethack (which I don't like much - too many non-homogeneous things together)

Timofei Shartov

  1. Crawl - very replayable, characters die fast
  2. ADOM - got me started on RLs in the first place, but the games take too long before the character dies
  3. IVAN - great fun, but some things are too random (wand explosions etc.)
  4. DoomRL - fun, fast, but not very replayable
  5. Rogue - special mention - great fun game, but not much variety

RLs that I played, but didn't like:

  1. Nethack - I don't like the interface and the flavor is totally non-existant with seemingly random classes and items (samurais, valkyries, tourists, kitchen sinks, wtf?)
  2. Angband - don't know which variation I played, but it had huge maps, swarms of identical monsters, ugly tiles. Bleargh...

erisdiscordia

  1. Crawl - beautiful in how much time one spends truly playing and how little doing things that resemble playing, but aren't.
  2. ADOM - my first roguelike addiction, so always a special place in my heart, despite many flaws.
  3. POWDER - still a little rough around the edges, but seems to be well on the way to being a an extremely fun little roguelike
  4. TOME - so much variety, funkiness, and, well, fun that it bamboozled me into playing it intensely for several months despite its being a non-persistent-levels roguelike.
  5. DoomRL - I never really got into it, but it did seem like it could be a lot of fun per minute of play.
  6. Nethack - it feels like it really may be a decent game, but I just can't swallow e.g. the ID mini-game. There also seems to be a lot of ways to do things that resemble playing, but aren't really play.
  7. Angband - I've played it, so it had to go *somewhere* on the list...

Chris Morris

I'm having great difficulty putting an actual ranking together. However, in no particular order within each group:

best

  • Crawl - well-balanced, rewards thoughtful play, excellent religion system, real variety between winners, and while almost all dire situations after the first few levels are survivable, a lot of thought, preparation, and recognising things going wrong before they get to a critical stage is needed to do that.

good

  • Rogue - very well designed and balanced. Simple but not dull gameplay.
  • Letterhunt - see Rogue, and a great implementation of an original idea.
  • ADOM - the first roguelike I played. Lots of variety, interesting quests, and an interesting character advancement mechanism. On the downside, game balance between the early and late game needs tweaking, and it has too many insta-escapes from bad situations.
  • Various other enjoyable 'coffee-break' roguelikes, mainly from 7DRL competitions. See Rogue again.

neutral

  • Nethack - I never really got far enough into this to decide whether I liked it or not. From what I've heard about later bits of the game, I suspect I wouldn't, though.

bad

  • Angband - after clearing a few levels and fighting various differently coloured centipedes I lost the will to continue.
  • My current in-dev game: It needs some fun content. Hopefully I can do that over the weekend and then I'll have some motivation to continue writing it. At the moment, I add a feature, debug it for hours, and then don't get any reward in terms of 'fun game to play'. If (when) I get past that barrier I should be much more motivated to actually do the development work.

lemuel pitkin

  1. Crawl - great mix of tactical and strategic decisions, near-perfect balance, complex play, no extraneous "stuff" (there's just one kind of hydra, but it really changes the game), flexible but highly varied character types, very little tedious/repetitive activity.
  2. Quickband - all of Angband's good qualities with a lot less tedium.
  3. NetHack (pre-1996) - best interactions between game elements of any roguelike (owes as much to old Infocom text adventures as to rogue) and complex, persistent dungeons. Horrible balance, identical characters past the midgame, and test-adventure elements limit replayability.
  4. ChessRogue - the only roguelike I know of that treats the grid as a central game element rather than an inconvenience. It would be great to see some "real" roguelike develop this idea.
  5. Angband - the slot machine of roguelikes. Engrossing but dull.
  6. NetHack (post-1996) - the changes have weakened the good elements (e.g. diluting the quirky flavor with boring D&Disms like class/race rather than role) and made the balance problems even worse.

lochok

  1. ADOM - my first, and current RL addiction. I'll probably never win but the game, its backstory and its engulf me and my imagination. I like most of its combat system and its sense of morals
  2. [[DoomRL] - the most fun I have ever had playing a roguelike... I'm not much of a player and will probably never finish it but its great fun. MIDI and SOUND and BLOOD SPLATTER = GOOOOOD!
  3. Letter Hunt - YA Untraditional RL - I play it in small bursts, play for half an hour and shelf for a while. Its a great minigame (no offense meant by the term).

Neither nethack nor the bands ever got it for me - I tried zangband for a bit and it had my attention for a little while, but ADOM came straight back out...

SZDev

  1. DoomRL - simple, fun, aggressive, addicting, rocket launcher, BFG
  2. DeadCold - cool mood
  3. ADOM - first roguelike I played, classes and abilities are nice, spells are cool, very stable
  4. Moria - yes, I played it more than angband and I like it more, and my computer screen was screwed so I could only play monochrome games by tilting the plug so only blue was seen.
  5. GearHead - nice concept, mecha fighting is cool.

Ancient

Liked

  • Dungeon Crawl - fast play, constant tension and lost of beautiful spells. I am almost addicted to it
  • Xenocide - for cool concept of DNA merging and total freedom developing your character
  • ADOM - lots of classes each with its own different special abilities. Everything is cute except the plot which subtracts from replayability IMO
  • DoomRL - FEEL MY WRATH! That's the one I pick when berserking in real world. Just gimme double shotgun
  • ZapM - just like NetHack with shorter learning curve. A bit too easy though
  • ChessRogue - almost won it, interesting game where luck plays minimal role

Not liked

  • NetHack - many tricks and lots of humor, but I find it too hard to learn and wtf's are all around
  • Angband - simply I don't like it. Often waitng for right item to show up bores me horribly
  • DeadCold - not enough activities other than killing

Risto Saarelma

  1. Nethack - I didn't like Nethack that much for a while and always died in the beginning of the game. Now I've begun to get to the mid-game and I'm beginning to see why it's so addictive. The game mechanics are very polished and balanced. The interface is a bit crufty though. Seriously, what's the idea with separate equip/unequip commands for armor and jewelry?
  2. ADOM - It has a nice world concept and more involved plot than Nethack. The world is quite immersive and strikes a nice balance between randomly generated and fixed content. But it also has some bugs, balance issues and game mechanic issues. Some interface cruft, a separate command for cleaning your ears is a bit much. And it doesn't support hjkl movement keys out of the box.
  3. Crawl - Intriguing, but I'm still stuck in the "certain death at early game" phase. The religion system and some races are innovative. I'd need to get better at Crawl to appraise it further. Nethack seems to have a relatively relaxed mid-game where the player can kit up his character and try all sorts of things, I'm under the impression that Crawl keeps a tighter pressure on the character throughout the game.
  4. Zangband - occasionally other variants. I don't really get Angband. The vanilla version seems very bland but at least the variants have enough weird starting options to be initially interesting. Of course adding several layers of features makes a horrible mess out of the game design. But what all Angbands end up being is a large number of huge, confusing and boring dungeon levels with rags and broken sticks in them. Still, I've played Zangband enough to add it here. The scripted quests and the overworld make it a lot more interesting.
  5. Omega I tried to play this a long time ago, but it was pretty confusing. With a better interface and a bit less of the "good RPG = lots of ways to mess up the player" -attitude from the 80's, this might have developed into something quite interesting.

Unfortunately none of the more modern roguelikes have really hooked me yet. Powder and GearHead are nice, but I haven't gotten very far in either.

Some ideas about what might make me like a game:

  • Thought-out game mechanics. Don't just design from realism or mindlessly copy existing games. If you give me numbers to track, make them something that has a significant impact in the game. Don't have a charisma stat unless the game really makes use of the charisma and don't put the stat on the status panel unless it's really important that I can tell the stat at a glance at any moment (Nethack and ADOM fail at this). Use a sensible degree of detail in the stats. When playing ADOM, I really don't care whether I have 48 % ventriloquism skill or 63 % ventriloquism skill. I'd be quite happy if ventriloquism would be just a skill that you either have or you don't have, no ranks whatsoever. Even somewhat more useful skills can probably do with something like 10 ranks.
  • Some hand-made flavor. Random dungeons are never the same, but most of the time they're pretty boring. Zangband's overworld is generated, so it ends up being mostly random mush. ADOM has a fixed overworld, so you learn its geography just like you learn Nethack's recurring dungeon features. Some repeating elements give your game identity.
  • Have interesting choices. Maybe character types with a genuinely different gameplay feel, maybe different routes through the game world, in which different obstacles are faced, maybe different tactical options for various situations. Choices are interesting if they are genuinely different and there isn't a single choice that is clearly better than all the others.
  • Either support hjklyubn movement keys or only have movement in the 4 cardinal directions. I've configured my numpad to navigate in my window manager, so it's not useful for games. Other people use laptops with no numpad. This seems to be rare in new roguelikes.
  • Have a Linux version. Or release the source so that people can build their own.
  • Random nastiness needs a balance. If death is literally lurking around every corner, the game will wear me down. If things are too easy, it might be boring. Of course short games can be more intense than long ones.
  • It's nice if I can learn new things about the game without dying or ruining my game every time. Of course some learning by death is a part of the roguelike charm, but the player should be able to blame himself afterwards. Deadly surprises late in the game are particularly unfortunate. The player should be able to encounter many deadly mechanics early in the game, when losing the game isn't such a big deal.
  • Making me obsess over the ultimate character build is a great way to get me hooked to a game. For this obsession to come about, there needs to be some mutually exclusive decisions in character development, not just grinding until I have the ultimate spellcaster tank. And I need to have good control over character development, it's better to have a point allocation or a class level system than skills that develop when used. Baldur's Gate 2 has quite a warped and nonsensical character development system, but it really makes you obsess over figuring out some obscenely powerful build. And of course to really pull this off, make sure there isn't a real ultimate character build, just a lot of mediocre ones, some good ones and a few evilly powerful ones that require some deviousness to achieve, not just putting all the character points in speed.
  • Simple game mechanics with lots of uses are good. Using the same mechanic in different contexts might be interesting. For example, suppose living things have stats like skill, power and health. Maybe equipment has the same stats. The equipment's stats are just added to the character's stats when used, but if hit with an Animate Object spell, the equipment can turn into a creature with the same stats. I think this is more interesting complexity than a huge bundle of ad hoc mechanics.
  • It's good to have some idea about what the final goal is and have a sense that I might actually accomplish it. Having subgoals on the way helps this. I'm a lot less likely to get overwhelmed if my initial task is to go see whether a shrine on dungeon level 5 has been desecrated than if it is to travel to dungeon level 200 and slay the Greater Avatar of Ultimate Chaos, even though the former might be the first quest in a chain which eventually leads down level 200.

Flubsicle

  1. ADOM - The first RL I played, and possibly the best-developed of them all. There is an enourmous amount of things while still maintaining a perfectly balanced flavor. The large amount of commands is also a good thing--I love how everything that can be done is actually doable through one or two keystrokes without going overboard on things that can be done (like kitchen sinks in nethack). The randomly generated dungeons with fixed levels and lack of random monster quests (only 1 is normal to do; if you screw up some stuff you can do up to 3) are also great; they ensure that I will never have the same game twice, but that I won't be lost in the randomness either. The latest version is almost bug-free, with the only prominent bugs being that the skill-boosting talents crash the game (they can only be taken at the start of a game, so you won't crash a level 48 character over this), and two randomly generated artifacts can't be generated (out of over 30 that each have a tiny chance to be generated in the course of a game)
  2. Rogue - It is an extremely sturdy roguelike, and is pretty fun, although lack of flavor and features hurts it.
  3. Angband - I don't like hacking through layer and layer of randomly generated dungeon; I like continuity to my life. After killing droves of monsters that are identical in all but name, it is pretty hard to be interested. With some guaranteed levels and more unique monsters rather than clones, this game would be a lot funner.
  4. Nethack - Ugh, I hate this game. It is utterly and completely like an American car--just a bunch of parts shoved together to make a whole thing, which isn't very good because none of the parts are made for good compatibility with one another. Seriously, I don't want to be fighting the horsemen of the apocolypse, killing a bunch of demon lords, and seeing a colony of gnomes that don't care about any of this in the same game. The sheer amount of incongruous features (like the famed kitchen sink) and classes (archeologist? tourist? valkerie? all in one game?) pisses me off. The monster variety is also fairly lackluster. I got overwhelmed by random items though that I couldn't concentrate on any storyline--all I wanted to know was what my towel could do.

Antonie

  1. Larn - I played a great deal of Larn in the 90s. I'm surprised no one else mentioned it. I thought it was an excellent game at the time, and still do. It has the advantage of being small - you can play a game in an evening - and has a certain flavor. It has the Lance of Death, and you can be called a 'mighty evil master' at the end! What more could you want?
  2. ADOM - Only large game I've managed to complete. Unquestionably fun. Then again I was playing an earlier version. I don't know if I'd enjoy current versions. They seem more feature heavy.
  3. Angband - The grinding essence of roguelikeness.
  4. NppAngband - Similar enough to, yet superior enough than, Vanilla Angband, that IMO there is no reason to play Vanilla any more.
  5. Quickband - Like Angband except I can actually win it. I've given up on ever winning V or NPP. I don't have the patience.
  6. Hack - Not Nethack! Another one from the 90s.
  7. DoomRL - Double shotgun gibbing goodness
  8. LetterHunt - Neat concept, kept me entertained for a while.
  9. DROD - Ditto. But could have been so much better.
  10. Diablo 2 - Hovers on the edge of roguelikeness in my opinion.
  11. Moria - Another one from the 90s.

Alan Monroe

Larn - My favorite for many reasons. It's much shorter/easier than all other Roguelikes. It doesn't have hunger or decaying lightsource (most annoying features ever). I liked the Amiga version's tile set. No player classes - I can be a fighter and wizard simultaneously. someone else already mentioned the cool titles you earn when leveling up. I find its map style more natural than Nethack's (basic, boring) 9 rooms. I like its shopping interface. You know what most items are just by the messages they display upon using them, rather than fiddling around with identifying them or waiting for your pet to pick them up. I found the three letter spell codes fun to learn too.

jude hungerford

  1. Crawl - by far my favourite roguelike, and the one I play most. It does have a problem with frequent (sometimes unavoidable) death in the very early game.
  2. Rogue - inspiring to see how much fun can be had from such a simple concept. The same can be said of many of the smaller roguelikes.
  3. Nethack - I like (some of) its sense of humour. I haven't ever gotten very far into it, having (only?) played a thousand or so games. But I play it as a fun diversion.
  4. ADOM - Very good in many ways, but in the end I just don't have fun playing it. Too much death for too little reward.
  5. Moria - I played it for years before I knew the word "roguelike". It was better than any other game I had. It's still better than Angband in many ways.
  6. Angband - Played this one for a year or three after I discovered that there were more games like Moria. It's odd to see how much work has gone into this game and its variants, and how boring I find the result. Compelling when I was fourteen, though. Once I discovered Crawl, I never really went back to the non-persistent-level roguelikes, except to briefly try ToME, and discover that it was even bigger than Angband, and just as boring.

There are others which I am sure are worthy of note, but the above are the ones I have played enough to comment confidently on.

Giorgos

  1. Rogue - my first RL (CPC version!), quite addictive, simple gameplay, no special plot but who cares :-D
  2. ADOM - playing it for 9 years, very replayable, some minor annoyances (e.g. corruption), many things to do, tactics and ways to deal with situations
  3. Crawl - the perfect arcade RL, battle, battle, battle
  4. Nethack - so crazy it is interesting, needs seriours spoiler help though, still play it occasionaly
  5. GearHead - one of the best games I've played, consistent, interesting quests, unique world
  6. CastlevaniaRL - as a fan of the Castlevania universe, it is quite interesting with some nice ideas (2.5D areas, day/night, etc)

kalikiana

  1. ADOM - This is the first RL I ever played. My girlfriend recommended it to me once and it's at the same time the hardest, most coplex and most interesting with more features than I could explore on my own.
  2. CastlevaniaRL - A very unique game in my opinion with several uncommon aspects. Much more of a quick game, but not comparable and certainly not less fun.
  3. DungeonBash - Exactly the kind of game where you don't have to worry about doing too much wrong. The game for a quick session. I'm looking forward to the planned version with more complex elements.

Corremn

Order of first played (50 games or more):

  • Moria - The first roguelike experience, great game to start with, very repetitive though as are all *band games. Only finished it once after i realised the slower you decend the easier it is to win. 3/5
  • *band - Not that better than Moria and I rarely play them. Although NPP and Quickband are exeptions. 3/5
  • Alphaman - First and only post-apoc RL game i've played. Some interesting ideas. 1.5/5
  • ADOM - Probably the most user friendly RL, I had no real problem getting in to this one after playing years of Moria. Only challenging when you get to Mid level. 4.5/5
  • Nethack - Never got into it, and never will. Mostly because adom and crawl are so much better. 2/5
  • Crawl - I would of played this a lot more if it was around earlier. This is a great game, varied play style is great. I have never got passed level 12 though. I love the skill and magic system. Dont have much time to play it now. 4/5
  • DoomRL - Played about a month of this. Great game, perfect challenge, just the right level of difficulty. Not many unexpected deaths as in most RLs. (many of expected deaths though) 3/5
  • My Game - I spend most of my time playing this so I dont have much time for RLs anymore. I will have a beta release in a week. unrated

sterjs

I've played Crawl, Nethack, Slash'EM and ADOM(to a lesser extent) extensively. Ranking them in order:

  1. Crawl - By far the best Roguelike out there. Variety, challenging and fast paced. The thing I love most is that it nearly eliminates scumming. There are avenues for scummers--Nemelex, Mummies and Pandemonium, though all of these have "complications" even for the most skilled scummers, but for the most part descent is driven by the need for food and the low monster respawn rates. Did I mention that food is at the heart of what makes the game work? It powers spellcasting, invocations, HP/MP regeneration and various special abilities. That's why the Amulet of the Gourmand is such a coveted item--it lets you eat when you're not Hungry/Starving and it lets you eat rotten meat with no ill effects. There are lots of other reasons to love this game, but I'll stop here. If you're having trouble succeeding at it, Google "a the human fighter" and "b the deep elf conjurer". Both are chronicles of two successful crawl characters and go into the different strategy and tactics integral to success. I don't think you should sit around casting magic dart a wall with all skills but Spellcasting turned off like he recommends in "b" though... it's unnecessary tedium IMO.
  2. Nethack/Slash'EM - Pretty decent as roguelikes go. The early game is challenging, but nothing on the level of Crawl(I read that Marvin ascended ~12 times in a row in Nethack... 2 in a row would take a lot of luck even for an expert in Crawl. I'd like to see how he fares at Crawl, actually!). Nethack has a high barrier to entry for new players--you have to learn an overwhelming amount of wacky, nonsensical information to succeed. The real problems with Nethack, though, are character homogeneity, an easy and tedious end game and rewards for scumming(Alchemy, Altar Saccing, Foocubi, Reverse Genocide Wraiths, Stealing from Shops...).
  3. ADOM - The fixed early game really frustrated me, so I can't give this game a fair review. It's one thing to die over and over on D: 1 like in Crawl, but it's quite another to die over and over again right after finishing the same boring quests.

I've dabbled in Angband variants... the most promising looks to be quickband as the other versions are just too repetitive for my tastes.


sterjs

  1. Crawl - In my opinion best RL. It's hard. It's cruel. I love it. There are lot dangerous situations but they can be (sometimes) solved. Problem is that istead YASD from another you have

Yet Another Unavoidable Death wasp without poison res, /paralyzed by eye and killed by nearbly ogre

  1. Nethack Slashem - It's designed with spoilers in mind.
  2. ADOM - Is too repetive. Quests are great first time but when you play it 1000 time its quite boring. Another issue is that without scumming its insane hard and with it's insane easy. Only early game is challenging,midgame turns insane easy or impossible(Play spellcaster swich to coward and you are invicible.)
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