NetHack 5.0.0 (is still guidecore)
NetHack is the strangest game that I regularly get sucked back into. Recently, the DevTeam released version 5.0.0. The version I’m most familiar with is 3.4.3, which seemed to be the “definitive” version when I started playing as a teenager (c. 2008) and development had already long slowed to a crawl.
I long considered the changes in 3.6.0 and beyond to be a bit disappointing: they mostly served to remove cheesy strategies from 3.4.3 that I found fun. So I lost interest for a while, until the recent release of a major version (the first since the 1980s!) made me check in with the DevTeam’s progress.
Many of the recent changes diversify winning strategies, make the late game more interesting, and remove “interface screw”. For example, the game now prevents you from instantly dying if you accidentally typo your way into a pool of lava. Mind flayers’ attacks no longer cause you to forget maps and items, which encouraged the highly un-fun chore of making backup notes outside of the game.
Goodbye, chordbug the Demigoddess
I won as an orcish Barbarian, playing on nethack.alt.org, a Telnet server that has hosted NetHack since 2001. Apparently, the last game I played on this account, in 2019, was also an orcish Barbarian win. Oops! I should have changed it up.
Some of the most obvious changes in NetHack 5 are interface modernizations. Dungeon branches are colored now, which is lovely. Hell is wrought of fiery rock and iron, and Sokoban is blue, the color of thinking. I messed up a Sokoban level because they are randomly mirrored now, which screws with my muscle memory. I’m not sure what the point of the change is but I think it might have worked on me.
I wonder how the DevTeam reasons about exposing vs. hiding information from the player. For example, NetHack has a weirdly “secret” defensive stat called magic cancellation, not to be confused with magic resistance. Roughly speaking, MC defends against magical “touches” whereas MR wards you from ranged spells. It used to be that the cloak of MR also provided maximal MC, but this is no longer true. (I got level-drained many, many times.) This well-intentioned balance change seems to make it much more important to think about MC… but its existence remains well hidden. I think it would have been good to present MC next to AC in the status bar. Or would that ruin the magic?
Throughout my adventure, I realized the NetHack wiki is a bit of a mess. It was written for 3.4.3, and now contains a bunch of outdated information, with updates for later versions straddled between callout boxes and actual edits to the body text. But really, it has always contained a bunch of ultra-detailed cruft that is not so relevant to most players. (The article about Vlad has an entire section dedicated to taming him, which is something roughly zero percent of players will ever try to do.)
On “guidecore”
I find NetHack hard to recommend to anyone, but it has a special place in my heart. To master NetHack is to memorize reams of dumb little facts and interactions that you can use to your advantage. This ascension marked the first time I ever used the nugget of wisdom that you can dip an amethyst into booze to make fruit juice — because, see, fruit juice was randomly smoky in my game, and drinking a smoky potion has a 1/13 chance of summoning a djinni, which in turn rolls for a 4/5 chance of getting to wish for any item in the game — as long as the potion is blessed, of course. Its baroque complexity makes the original Rogue look like Spider Solitaire.
Winning NetHack without a guide or wiki seems unrealistic. Then again, NetHack inspired Minecraft, which is rather like that too, and it’s the best-selling video game of all time. The harsh unknowability of these games becomes their appeal, inspiring all sorts of walkthroughs and tutorials. I’m reminded of The Tower of Druaga, an arcade RPG that asks the player to master its obtuse secrets: Japanese players exchanged hints in notebooks to beat the game, granting it cult status in the progress.
There ought to be a name for this school of game design. Guidecore, maybe? Tell me about your favorite guidecore games.