Caltrops - NetHack - oh god this game is brutal

Forum Overview :: NetHack

by Bananadine 11/27/2007, 9:30pm PST

You're right, it's better than NetHack as far as I (who have only gotten partway through NetHack) can tell. Where NetHack is broad, ADOM is deep and broad. It's goddamned huge and you still can't die without starting over, unless you start cheating with your save-game files and then there's no point. It's like a severely old-fashioned, strangely complex, 100-hour console RPG in which you cannot make a single bad mistake. It's like single-player Everquest--it sucks you in and holds you there and you don't even get to talk to strangers along the way. This game is so hard it hurts and I think I am going to have to relegate it to "airplane only" status in order to preserve my sanity. Even though it's good! That is insofar as a game can be good and still have these things said about it... I just now threw up my hands after losing my twentieth character to some stupid freak encounter, and searched Google for "adom hard" to see if I was crazy or something to be unable to complete more than the tiniest quests in this game, and one of the things I found was a Something Awful thread in which dudes talk about how they have played the game for the past five years (not continuously but still) and only won once, and how ADOM is like an abusive spouse that you just can't stop coming back to, gah I must give this up.

Mischief Maker wrote:

A tourist class? Grid bugs from Tron?? Quantum Physicists??? In a tolkienesque RPG? MY MONOCLE!!!

This still doesn't make much sense to me, I mean if you can accept the ridiculous ideas behind these RPG's in the first place, like how the shopkeeper in a tiny farming village is five times as strong as all the monsters you'll meet in your first hour of play combined, then I don't know what it matters that some teleporting letter q has "quantum physicist" in its name slot instead of "dark fairy" or "extradimensional demon" or whatever. Much greater is the problem that in order to see the end of one of these goddamned games you basically have to marry it.