NetHack: Still One of the Greatest Games Ever Written

M-Saunders writes: While everyone obsesses about frame rates and polygon counts, there's one game that hasn't changed visually for decades. NetHack may look incredibly primitive today, but it's still arguably the best game of all time, with an unmatched level of depth, creativity and replayability. Linux Voice looks at this fascinating dungeon romp, explaining what makes it great, how to get started with it, and how to discover some of its secrets.

Comments

Re:Don't foget

[fahrbot-bot]

Rogue, Moria and the likes. I personally played Rogue and Moria.

Don't forget the original Hack on which Nethack is based - (basically) the same game, but on ASCII terminals (yes, I'm that old).

I played both Rogue and Hack on the VAX-785 running BSD back in college. Rogue was more forgiving, like if you ran out of food (faint, continue, repeat...), where Hack was hell-bent on killing you for the slightest mistake. You were boned if you died in Hack, restarted and ran into your former dog - who hadn't been fed in a while. Lesson: Teach your pet to hunt non-humans or be prepared to end him.

Nethack needs an upgrade

[wierd_w]

No, I dont mean graphics wise, or anything like that.

Nethack needs full multi-user, and an overhaul on the generated story (what there is of it), so that the core process can be daemonized, and users attaching to the system can play against each other.

The plot of NetHack is to get the silly amulet and take it to YOUR god's altar on the last level, before anyone else can. Given the obscene amount times people die, it could reasonably take weeks for this to happen. (Seriously-- Gehenna without any genocide scrolls? LOL! As IF!)

I would like to see a fully MUD revamp version of NetHack, that connects users either through port listener, with a remote client app. The "remote client" can be run locally on the system using ssh, or it can attach to an exported listen port. Either way, players attach to the server deamon, which does the real nitty gritty.

The spontaneous level creation is a fun part of Nethack, and I would like to keep that-- just have the game world get reset with new random dungeons after somebody manages to put the amulet of yendor on an altar at the end.

Why would this be more awesome than nethack already is?

1) Players can choose weather or not to cooperate to get through certain areas before having to go all "highlander" on each other at the end.

2) Nethack's dungeons were deformable at-will using certain spells/items. Even without regenerating the world each and every time, the gameworld would change in unpredictable ways with multiple human players attacking it and changing it.

Nethack uses so little resources on modern systems that it is not even funny at all. Seriously, I can run it on an openwrt enabled router over ssh. For real. A daemonized instance of it would hardly make anything modern even twitch, even with many users stuck on it.

Re:Nethack needs an upgrade

[wierd_w]

I know, but not nethack.

These days, too many multi-player games focus on "events", and have various things nerfed for casual players.

Nethack is not for casual gamers. It chews them up and spits them out again until they become system exploiting, backstabbing bastards. That's the only real way to win that game.

As such, any vandalism, griefing, or other "It makes my mangina hurt!" type things that would happen in a fully daemonized version of nethack would ONLY server to ENHANCE the game.

Not sure how saving and loading would work. Whoever has the amulet of yendor would be virtually untouchable while in the nether of being offline, and having multiple true amulets of yendor would be game breaking. This means somebody could actually be a real dick and obtain the real amulet, save, then quit playing, forcing the server admin to reset the game to make it completable again.

Perhaps making players vulnerable while offline? (say, "asleep"?) Making hidden passages to crawl into for protection when you have to stop playing would solve that issue, and add incentive to get back asap before somebody finds you and gives you a finger of death.

The stupid wizard that shows up when you get the amulet would need to be prevented from teleporting to a sleeping player and stealing the amulet though.

Re:Nethack needs an upgrade

[Rei]

You could go to a semi-realtime version if there aren't too many players, where you can issue any string of commands (including multi-turn commands like walk-to) and they execute sequentially until any player doesn't have an action queued up, some "demands a player's attention" event has occurred, or a player decides to interrupt their commands. You could give other players the option to force the current turn to end if any player hasn't taken an action and a minimum amount of time has passed.

Honestly, though, I'm not sure how much advantage multiplayer would bring to the game vs. the disadvantages. Maybe you could have fun with it, though, having one person be the player and one person being the "god of the random number generator" trying to hinder the player's progress ;) The player could be given certain advantages to assist them over standard play (say, free stat boosts and some starting wands / blank scrolls / marker / potions of holy water / etc), while the other person could be given some limited leeway to skew random monster creation, room creation, etc - not full control, just enough to be annoying, as if they have a slowly regenerating "mana" and can spend it on influencing random events, with the most evil influences being the most expensive ;)

"Oh, gee, there was a *polymorph trap* in that hallway? How'd THAT get there?"
"Hey, you're blind now? Wouldn this just be a TERRIBLE time for a SWARM OF KILLER BEES to show up?"
"Wow, YET ANOTHER unidentified ring turns out to be cursed! What are the odds?!"
"You know, I'd recommend actually hitting that troll before he kills you rather than MISSING eight times in a row!"

You could say that they're playing the Wizard of Yendor or something ;)

Re:Nethack needs an upgrade

[nzhavok]

I've actually been writing a multiplayer roguelike so I may take a stab at some of these.

if you had to wait for others to finish their turn or if the turns had a time limit, it would take much longer than couple of weeks for anyone to finish.

I don't think there's any way to have a turn-based multiplayer dungeon game with a significant amount of people in it. At some point someone lags and the game dies. If you decide to have a cut off point (like 5 seconds per turn) then it just becomes a really slow real-time game. People hate it and stopped playing almost immediately during play testing.

this is what many people forget. the interface as it is, is suited for a single player game. like instead of pressing a button and typing in a number to wait for 100 turns would you rather wait half an hour? all the game mechanics would need changing.

Pretty much on the money here, I've had to re-evaluate almost every mechanic, especially the sleep/paralysis ones. The good news is that if you play in a team you are suddenly a lot more resilient to these effects, your team becomes your shield.

thing is, nethack is TURN BASED. changing it to a realtime game doesn't quite work out simply and in the end it is something totally else.

I agree that it would be near impossible to port all the NetHack mechanics verbatim. You could probably make something for a small team of four people or so, who are friends and talking on teamspeak or something, but not a game with hundreds or thousands of players.

and in a little while all the levels would be digged up. of course, you could make them bigger than the screen but that would be totally changing the game mechanic again.

I did playtesting with destructable dungeons, it's a nightmare. You just can't let people dig holes in the floors, walls. Perhaps the only way it would work is if it literally took hours to dig one square. I experimented with allowing you to dig a path with a pick, and letting the dungeon heal itself over time, it works OK but doesn't really add much to the game.

If you want to check out what I came up with check out Squadhack. It's in an early alpha at the moment and many things don't work but due to the graphics it will be familiar to many NetHack players.

Re:One of the few games with incredible imaginatio

[gl4ss]

there's some forks with more classes to play etc.

but at the heart nethack is a memorization and risk minimization game.

all the insta deaths you need to prepare to counter(reflection is a must) and then just making the character strong enough to deal with the enemies - and there's a certain degree of luck involved in if you can prepare to some insta deaths before they become likely to happen.

but since nethack is already a complete game with beginning and an end goal(ascension), don't know what's there to update, I don't remember any bugs either really. the endgame is kind of ridiculous and the character needs to be kind of ridiculous(ac -27 and what have you) to face it but that's the game...

Re:Don't foget

[ShieldW0lf]

Nethack is fiendishly addictive.

I liked the protection racket strategy. That, or playing an elvish ranger and using the rename trick to get stormbringer, if I was feeling too lazy for the protection racket and wanted a faster game.

I never did beat the game. Eventually, I made it to the final room and got killed by the four horsemen, just about went out of my mind with frustration, looked at the sun shining outside, thought about how much the obsession was taking me away from my girlfriend, and gave up the game for good.

Nice to see it getting some love though.

Re:Don't foget

[Darinbob]

Rogue-like also needs the randomness. Randomly generated levels, random monsters, random loot. Plus it has to be easy to restart because your character will die often (they're a lot like solitaire or minesweeper that way). And not much thinking, as your goal isn't to minimax your build.

Re:Don't foget

[Architect_sasyr]

I go through that "giving it up" phase at least four times a year. Once I even managed to go four months between games. Mostly I just get terrified of my email address. ssh + screen is really a good thing.

Re:Don't foget

[Vintermann]

And not much thinking, as your goal isn't to minimax your build.

What roguelikes are you playing? The entire appeal of roguelikes, as I see it (and that includes pseudo-roguelikes which have random worlds and permadeath but aren't turn based) is that you have to actually optimize, actually get better in order to progress: learn which things are good, which ones are situational, which ones are mostly bad. And it's not enough to get the good things, you have to get a picture of the risk/reward ratios too, so that you take less risk when you're on a path to winning, and more when you aren't. Such considerations are largely absent in non-roguelike RPGs.

Re:Don't foget

[Vintermann]

These days, you can pretty much skip nethack... Rogue and Hack were the originals. Nethack was a modest extension of Hack, which had a brief injection of popular culture tropes before being abandoned by its dev team in about 2003. For the progression of the roguelike genre (conservative or extended) , it hasn't directly mattered in a long time. The only modern game I can think of that draws directly on Nethack lore is Spelunky.

More important roguelikes for today's games: Dwarf Fortress, Linley's Dungeon Crawl/DCSS

Re:Don't foget

[Warma]

Very much this. For this reason, FTL is a roguelike in almost every meaningful sense of the word, even though the presentation and subject matter are nothing of the like.

Re:Don't foget

[defnoz]

Amazed ADoM (adom.de) hasn't been mentioned yet. I've been playing it for about 15 years on and off (and actually won for the first time this year!). It lacks the stupid stuff you can only learn from spoilers that Nethack has, and it's got a more consistent universe - no stupid Sokoban, no flash cameras and credit cards...

DCSS seems pretty nice too, not played much

Re:Don't foget

[Rei]

Yep. It's a bane to magic, and bags of holding are magical. There's a saying with nethack: "The Dev Team Thinks of Everything" Half of the source code is probably taken up by easter eggs. Check out a random assortment of them here. Some of my favorites are how a Quantum Mechanic can drop a box containing Schrodinger's Cat which - unlike all other objects in the game - doesn't have its life / death state determined until you open the box; and tricking gods into killing creatures for you by ticking them off into trying to kill when you're engulfed by a monster (which gives you the experience ;) ). There's even some things in the source code that players never see, like a commentary about why angry gods don't notice certain details, relating it to how some nuns would shower clothed so that God wouldn't see them naked - as if God is a peeping tom with X-ray vision that can penetrate convent walls but not a bathrobe.

Re:One of the few games with incredible imaginatio

[Anonymous Coward]

You can polymorph into a cockatrice, make yourself female (if male), lay cockatrice eggs, put them into a sack and have projectiles that automatically stone monsters.
Polymorph yourself into a Winged Gargoyle, you can wear armor and don't have to worry about stoning with the eggs. You are also flying, so you can get over the pesky water parts of the lower levels and the elemental plane of air.

You can polypile to make a bunch of rings of +1 damage / +1 accuracy, then poly yourself into a Xorn, eat the rings and gain intrinsic accuracy and intrinsic damage bonus. Most people use this to increase scores by having 1-hit-kills on the horsemen at the endgame.

The game has insane levels of depth.

Oh Yeah And

[Greyfox]

World of Warcraft needs a tourist class. Give him a camera, a Hawaiian flowery shirt and a million hit points per level, and the only way he can level up is to wander around taking pictures of things. How does any self-respecting RPG not have a tourist class?