What’s the general consensus from long time veterans around the overall difficulty of the game? Both for core and extended?
It’s hard for me to tell since I’ve been playing on and off for many years, but have only recently got a couple of wins.
I think it would be fair to say, that the game has gotten harder over the years. In the sense that your tactical mistakes are punished more severely (AoO), there are more enemies with abilities that challenge the way you approach combat (harpoon shots, blink allies encircling, smite nukes), there are less experience overall (less trivial do-nothing enemies) and less available “cheesy” tactics (like summons and clouds doing damage out of LoS, Sticks to Snakes, limited enemy ammo, pillar dancing).
I also think it would be fair to say, that the game has gotten fairer towards the player over the years. There are more info available in-game, UI is way more clear, spoilery, tedious, noob-trap-ish and overly random/swingy stuff gets regularly removed/changed. Also a lot of the stuff that is weak/irrelevant gets replaced with stuff that is quite potent (god/spell/items redesigns).
Judging this stuff is really freaking hard though, cause players on average has also gotten much better, there are more things that are considered common-place good practice now, that were not quite as figured out way back when (or at least were not as widely preached). Also tactical turn-based games have been in a somewhat of a golden age for a while now, and all that ambient knowledge helps win rates a bunch as well, IMO.
edit: oh yeah, it’s all about core 3-rune game, I don’t play extended. New Hells are generally considered way harder than the old ones.
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I feel the same way as PaperRat.
I go through phases. I’ll play for a year or two, stop, come back in a year or three, etc. Each time I come back, I’ve been compelled to get better at the Triumvirate of Good Crawlin’: (1) threat assessment, (2) positioning, & (3) use those d#mn consumables you idiot!
Years ago, I could get wins by using stupid tricks (my favorite was conj flame + summon door, remember that baby?). But because I could cheese, I didn’t try as hard/feel the need to learn the core skills. That doesn’t fly now because the worst cheese is gone.
Now, to win, I have to become a better player. I need to figure out just what the heck I am fighting, that it is okay to not kill everything I see the moment I see it, that terrain can be my friend if I move right, and that seemingly “impossible” situations can in fact be overcome through the proper use of consumables.
Overall, I think DCSS is still moving in the right direction.
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I’ve been playing since Linley’s and I think the game has gotten easier… but that is probably me just getting better.
But a lot of unfair ways to die just don’t happen anymore. I once got down to elf, maybe my first time ever, and walked into deep water and died.
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I’ve been running the same MiFi^Oka since 0.14. Overall the game has gotten easier to win, but it has gotten harder to mindlessly tab and use cheesy no-brainer tactics.
Anecdotally, 0.16 was prime tabber and I had at least one win where I basically just held down the tab button. Things got a lot harder for a long time but 0.30 and 0.31 were pretty tabbable, but not nearly as mindlessly tabbable as 0.16. 0.32 and 0.33 aren’t very tabbable, but they’re still pretty easily winnable for melee brutes… you just can’t smash your face into every situation and expect to win.
From a caster standpoint, I didn’t play many until 0.28+. It’s not nearly as dumb as the old 0.14 (was it 0.12?) Tornado days or Absolute Zero lolz, but since the introduction of Plasma Beam and the other L6-L8 spells casters have been having a pretty smooth go of it. The alchemy/shifting change was a big QoL improvement and the multischool Alchemy points go farther than Poison/Transmutation did before.
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I got absolute zero as my last Dj spell when they were being developed (before AZ was removed that release) and it was so BORING. The whole screen just vaporized with the span of a couple turns.
I’ve been playing since 1998 or so. I think the game has gotten easier, because I don’t think people actually streaked victories in Linley’s Dungeon Crawl. Even though there were things like the haste spell and control teleport…
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I have been playing since 2009, although my first win was in 2014 (and my last one in 2022, because I keep going for extended in splatting).
I think over time the early / mid game has definitely gotten easier, but the late /extended game has gotten harder because of how many rules-breaking monsters there are. I remember when Abyss was basically trivial (and full of tasty loot), before wretched stars were a thing, for example.
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The online winrate rose nearly twice from 0.13 to 0.33 (0.6%->1.1%) according to dcss-stats.com so I would say game got easier.
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The online winrate rose nearly twice from 0.13 to 0.33 (0.6%->1.1%) according to dcss-stats.com so I would say game got easier.
Having just recently played 0.13 again, the idea that 0.13 is harder than 0.33 is just outright nonsense.
So, so much of the game is just filled with uselessly weak chaff enemies getting spawned way later than they have any reason to. Late dungeon(27 floors by the way) is orders of magnitude less dangerous than depths is. Vaults is mostly a pushover, most lair branches are total pushovers, so many nasty monsters in the current edition just don’t exist(like caustic shrikes, walking tomes, dread liches, wyrmholes) or are missing dangerous spells/abilities(like guardian serpents having teleport other instead of blink allies encircling).
Instead of all that nasty stuff, you get stuff like… boring beetle. Spiny worm. Sheep. And then mechanics like item destruction, permanent corrosion, and hunger. None of which are dangerous at all if you play around them, but all of which(besides hunger which is already mostly vestigial even back at that version) are consistently annoying.
The only possible part of the game you could actually make a case for being harder is like, the first couple of dungeon floors, and only in the context of getting unlucky OoD spawns. If you’re not getting D:1 halberd gnolls or something like that, that part of the game isn’t harder either and overall the game is considerably easier, albeit crunchier and cruftier. My earlier games today when I was struck with the impulse to 0.13 were first a D:3 death to an orc priest I wasn’t respecting, and then right after that once I was locking in for early dungeon, a win where like 60% of the game felt trivial.
The winrate nearly doubling is not because the game has gotten easier, it’s because the people still playing the game have gotten much better at it.
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.26 was a MASSIVE jump in difficulty for the game and basically reduced the game down to one playstyle.
Shout, kite, isolate.
Over and over and over.
The winrate has measurably gone up every new release. There used to be an easy way to check this but I’ve forgotten how. My personal winrate is closer to 5% and higher than it has ever been with 33.1. By the winrate metric alone, the game has become easier.
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Winrate has multiple inputs. It isn’t a good measure of the games difficulty. Winrates could be going up because the community is stronger for instance. Better players teaching beginners. It could be that the less skilled players are dropping out. It could be that all the learning materials are better than they were (I started playing when it was linleys and played without community whatsoever and it was HARD to learn). It could be that the people playing the most are getting better.
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Global online winrates go up and down fwiw. Not up every time!