Caves of Qud (ROGUELIKE)

[xuerebx]

2 weeks in, 50 hours of gameplay - playing as a mutant is really fun, especially when you have multiple arms! Best result was with a dual-wielding pistol build, went down to Bethesda Susa and got frozen by an enemy and bitten to death. Fun times. Now I'm using a melee character and got to the same place, but being more cautious.

Anyone knows if you can wield like, 4 pistols with 4 arms and get twice the benefit of akimbo? Just something which came to mind.

 

[Emmanuel2]

2 weeks in, 50 hours of gameplay - playing as a mutant is really fun, especially when you have multiple arms! Best result was with a dual-wielding pistol build, went down to Bethesda Susa and got frozen by an enemy and bitten to death. Fun times. Now I'm using a melee character and got to the same place, but being more cautious.

Anyone knows if you can wield like, 4 pistols with 4 arms and get twice the benefit of akimbo? Just something which came to mind.

Only with a True Kin with the Gun Rack cybernetics.

You can even go further and get the Giant Hands cybernetics as well to wield 4 rifles.

 

[xuerebx]

Haven't played True Kin too much, but that will be my next character for sure!

 

[Dadd]

Too bad the game looks like a vegan's diarrhea. Live and drink.

 

[Cryomancer]

they could be playable or to have some kind of questline to join the Templars because doing that was basically supporting fascism or whatever.

That is a silly reason. Mutants are the true master race of CoQ. They can drain lifeforce from enemies, can enslave people with their mind, create forcefields, shape the reality itself while "truekins" can't do any shit without its cybernetics. Anyway, I can be utterly evil in some roguelikes, In ADOM, I can play as a troll chaos knight and be utterly chaotic and commit Dwarf genocide, steal everything from Merchants guild and kill everyone on sight, what is the problem? Someone can believe that templars are evil and yet want to play as one.

That said, I was in doubt if I should buy this game. Was looking interesting but this notion "everyone who disagrees with me is a nazi" from the game devs make me reconsider my idea.

---------------------------------------

So I will only make one question. I was reading some posts in this thread and wonder. How is the ESPER gameplay in this game?

 

[buffalo bill]

they could be playable or to have some kind of questline to join the Templars because doing that was basically supporting fascism or whatever.

That is a silly reason. Mutants are the true master race of CoQ. They can drain lifeforce from enemies, can enslave people with their mind, create forcefields, shape the reality itself while "truekins" can't do any shit without its cybernetics. Anyway, I can be utterly evil in some roguelikes, In ADOM, I can play as a troll chaos knight and be utterly chaotic and commit Dwarf genocide, steal everything from Merchants guild and kill everyone on sight, what is the problem? Someone can believe that templars are evil and yet want to play as one.

That said, I was in doubt if I should buy this game. Was looking interesting but this notion "everyone who disagrees with me is a nazi" from the game devs make me reconsider my idea.

---------------------------------------

So I will only make one question. I was reading some posts in this thread and wonder. How is the ESPER gameplay in this game?

it's pretty good

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

That said, I was in doubt if I should buy this game. Was looking interesting but this notion "everyone who disagrees with me is a nazi" from the game devs make me reconsider my idea.

Yeah, this is basically my stance on it.

So I will only make one question. I was reading some posts in this thread and wonder. How is the ESPER gameplay in this game?

Sseth did a video on it and reviewed that part too. It's one of the things that got me interested, though I suspect it's less fun playing than listening to his description of it.

 

[Cryomancer]

IS this game ""modernized""? Because I loved so much ADOM but honestly get bored after few minutes playing ADOM cuz I never found managing cooldowns and the relative modern gearing good. So I wanna know. Will be I spending my time managing cooldowns and trying to farm bigger numbers in gear instead of getting immersed in a fictional world?

 

[notpl]

IS this game ""modernized""? Because I loved so much ADOM but honestly get bored after few minutes playing ADOM cuz I never found managing cooldowns and the relative modern gearing good. So I wanna know. Will be I spending my time managing cooldowns and trying to farm bigger numbers in gear instead of getting immersed in a fictional world?

The one thing this game does probably better than any other roguelike (if we even want to call it that) is immersion. Gearing is very unlike any other game - you can't really grade a vial of antimatter that destroys the map - including you - if you accidentally break it alongside a +2 short sword.

 

[Cryomancer]

Bought the game but honestly din't liked. Every shit that you do has 30+ turns cooldowns, and mutations are quite reliable. For comparision, I bought Rogue empire, a fantasy medieval roguelike, my character has a "arcane tread" in adition to his mana bar, each spell tears it apart and lightning orb damages it so much that I can only cast it 3x. Cooldowns aren't in every single ability and you learn spells by reading books, there are a chance to fail and if fail, something really bad can happen, one time, a powerful boss spawned, another time, I took ridiculous amount of damage and was set in fire.

The unique mutation in CoQ which has some cool drawbacks that I saw was disintegrate. Since I din't played much, IDK if is the case but seems like everything is available for a lv 1 nobody which is also not good.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/333640/view/3672173806421961189

Meet Kitfox Games! They are co-publishing Caves of Qud 1.0 with us!
Live and drink, friends
Hey friends!

We want to introduce you to a couple of our friends at Kitfox Games, community manager Alexandra and director Tanya. Kitfox is here to help us ring in a new era of Caves of Qud development. Today, we'd like to all announce together that the game will fully launch out of Early Access next year, 2024! Kitfox will be helping us do that, and hopefully as many people as possible will enjoy the fruits of those efforts. We made a new trailer to announce the upcoming launch and publishing partnership, so please do watch it and send it to those of your friends who weirdly haven't bought the game yet for some reason:

If you like the new visual effects you see in the trailer, you can check 'em out in game now, on the beta branch! (right-click on Caves of Qud in Steam, select Properties, click the Betas tab, and switch to the 'beta' branch)

Feature Fridays will continue, as well as everything else we normally do, but we'll also be popping up regularly with news and updates surrounding other ways to chat and hype and enjoy the game together. For example, you're welcome to join the Qud channel on the Kitfox Discord server, or come meet some Kitfoxes at the Gamescom booth this year, where we'll be showing Qud to mystified Germans alongside Dwarf Fortress.

Kitfox will probably livestream the game on their Twitch channel in the coming days or weeks, so keep an eye out there too, if you want to hang with some fellow mutants or even give them a few pointers on how best to enjoy our journey under the salt sun.

You can sign up for our email newsletter for updates directly to your inbox!

Excitedly,
Brian (AlphaBeard), Jason (ptychomancer), Alexandra & Tanya
MORE ABOUT THIS GAME

 

[Theodora]

I was having an impression this would never release before the end of the world.

I know of at least one person that'd screech about the story not being finished every time it was mentioned. Good to see it finally being released after nearly two decades of work. (No, it hasn't been available in EA all that time.)

Making a trailer for a traditional roguelikes is hard, but I felt this was particularly weak. The narration seems off, not ... alien enough(?) orr something for the oddity than is Qud. But it also just doesn't really show the game off properly. Hopefully they manage to put together something stronger when they're making more than an "announcement" trailer.

 

[notpl]

I was having an impression this would never release before the end of the world.

I know of at least one person that'd screech about the story not being finished every time it was mentioned. Good to see it finally being released after nearly two decades of work. (No, it hasn't been available in EA all that time.)

Making a trailer for a traditional roguelikes is hard, but I felt this was particularly weak. The narration seems off, not ... alien enough(?) orr something for the oddity than is Qud. But it also just doesn't really show the game off properly. Hopefully they manage to put together something stronger when they're making more than an "announcement" trailer.

The old trailer they've used for years with narration by what I assume is just some friend or member of the dev team is 10,000x better.

 

[Alex]

Bought the game but honestly din't liked. Every shit that you do has 30+ turns cooldowns, and mutations are quite reliable. For comparision, I bought Rogue empire, a fantasy medieval roguelike, my character has a "arcane tread" in adition to his mana bar, each spell tears it apart and lightning orb damages it so much that I can only cast it 3x. Cooldowns aren't in every single ability and you learn spells by reading books, there are a chance to fail and if fail, something really bad can happen, one time, a powerful boss spawned, another time, I took ridiculous amount of damage and was set in fire.

The unique mutation in CoQ which has some cool drawbacks that I saw was disintegrate. Since I din't played much, IDK if is the case but seems like everything is available for a lv 1 nobody which is also not good.

I will try to address some of your complaints while trying to explain what I find good about Caves of Qud's system.

On cooldowns, psionic powers all rely on them. You don't have a mana bar in this game, but rather each ability can only be used every so often. I am usually against cooldowns myself because of two reasons: first they don't usually make sense and second (though related to the first) because they usually indicate thatthe developers is more worried with balance than with making abilities that actually do what they are supposed to do. On the first issue; I will agree that you could have done something more interesting to represent what psionics are; but since this is something that doesn't really exist it is not so bad as using it to mundane abilities. It is also interesting to note that cooldowns here are even given some depth by being affected by wisdom and by some elements like mass mind. On the second issue, CoQ takes a lot of care to make powers reflect what they should do, even if they end up unbalanced. The game can be heavily exploited and doing so is part of the fun (I think the Sseth Tzeentach video showed this to good effect).

On your comment about disintegration being available for a level 1; to be quite honest I don't hate much of a problem with that. The game won't be broken because of that because you still can easily kill yourself by being unable to react to an enemy, by being blasted with some explosion, by falling into a trap, etc. Furthermore, disintegration itself is rather dangerous because you may destroy useful items and you could open yourself to monster attacks. But, more important and generically, psionic powers (and physical mutations too) have levels. Disintegrate doesn't destroy stuff automatically; rather it does damage depending on the level of the power. This damage is equal to (level)d10+(level*2) to most creatures, but to inorganic things (including walls) it causes (level)d100+20 damage. This is a lot, of course, but not necessarily guarantees destruction. What sets disintegration aside is not that it automatically destroys anything, but rather that its damage can't be resisted and that it always penetrates exactly once.

About levels, note that the level of a power can't go over 1 + (character level / 2; round down). You can add levels to the powers you have with mutation points, but psionic powers get a bonus to their level equal to your ego modifier (limited by the limit mentioned before, but possibly going above 10 which is the maximum level you can get with mutation points alone). Because they have such synergy, there is a good incentive to play as an esper, but again many of the physical mutations are actually really interesting and could help with survivability where a mental one couldn't.

Another aspect that you should keep in mind about psionics is that even a powerful psionic usually can't just blast stuff every round. Most abilities have powerful and interesting applications such as pyrokinesis increasing temperatures besides causing burning damage and allowing you, for instance, to create lava out of walls. The point is that you usually rely not just on your abilities, but also other systems. It is not too hard, for instance, to get at least competent with fire-arms. Some of the psionic abilities may also be more useful to deal with the prolonged dangers than punctual powers. Two of my favourites were light manipulation (gives you a light source and allows you to attack enemies with a laser ability which has low damage but high penetration capacity) and beguiling (which allows you to take a permanent ally. Look for a particularly strong enemy and get him to serve you. The effect is permanent and you can give your servant equipment. They can also level up, although I think you need dominate to actually assign skill and mutation points).

Finally I will note that while the psionic powers in this game don't have a chance of failing, there is a danger associated with them called "glimmer". Basically, the more levels you have in psionics, the more likely it is for psionic assassins to show up.

Anyway, since you've already bought the game, I think you should try sticking with it a bit more since there is a lot of interesting stuff in it.

 

[Cryomancer]

, I think you should try sticking with it a bit more since there is a lot of interesting stuff in it.

Already asked a refund and bought Rogue empire with the same money and honestly am liking Rogue Empire way more interesting and has a more interesting character building and progression. Look to Mindcraft in adom, at lv 1, he can barely cast one or two small CC and ran out of power. At lv 50, can AoE massive damage, destroy walls and buildings with his mind, can regenerate his body, teleport and so on. I like this type of progression.

 

[bandersnatch]

Both the devs and the publisher are wokity-woke woke and dat ain't no joke.

Stopped giving my monies to people that wanted me dead in the last few years. Pandemic brought out their true colors.

 

[Theodora]

people that wanted me dead

???

Pls tell what demographic you're in that they've claimed to want to genocide.

 

[bandersnatch]

people that wanted me dead

???

Pls tell what demographic you're in that they've claimed to want to genocide.

Don't play dumb woketard. The straight white people demographic. Or what they now slur as a cis abnormality that should be eradicated.

 

[buffalo bill]

, I think you should try sticking with it a bit more since there is a lot of interesting stuff in it.

Look to Mindcraft in adom, at lv 1, he can barely cast one or two small CC and ran out of power. At lv 50, can AoE massive damage, destroy walls and buildings with his mind, can regenerate his body, teleport and so on. I like this type of progression.

this game has this type of progression, to the point of sme builds being way too op at the late game

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/333640/view/3753244942585644948

Creatures of the 7th Plague - NEW BETA!
Our next feature arc has arrived
Our next feature arc, Creatures of the 7th Plague, is now in beta! Big picture, this arc includes the next quest in the main questline, significant updates to the UI and input, lots of new visual and sound effects, lots of performance improvements, and many gameplay changes.

If you'd like to help us test it, right-click on Caves of Qud in Steam, select Properties, click the Betas tab, and switch to the 'beta' branch. Check out this thread if you want to post your feedback and get access to fast-forward wishes to help test the new quest. Note: previous saves won't be compatible with this beta.

Live and drink, friends. Patch notes below.

NEW MAIN QUEST AND THE GIRSH NEPHILIM
Added the next leg of the main quest. Talk to Barathrum after completing the Golem.
Added the Girsh Nephilim, 7th plague of the Gyre. Lairs to come.


UI AND INPUT
Several of these changes were merged in from the "input" beta.

Merged all input managers down to one, meaning you no longer have to change settings for gamepad to work.
Added a new keybind screen and made key binding more flexible, with many more commands now bindable.
Made keyboard, gamepad, and Steam Deck input much more robust across the board.
We added a new Abilities screen ('a').
Added icons for every ability.
Added in-depth, dynamic descriptions for many abilities (the rest to come).
You can reorder abilities on the Abilities screen and they will also reorder in your hotbar.

We made several enhancements to the ability hotbar.
Your abilities are now automatically hotkeyed. You can change the hotkeys from the Abilities screen.
Added hotkeys for scrolling through your hotbars (default ctrl+1 - ctrl+5).
New ability icons also appear on the hotbar.
Added the new ability icons to the old UI sidebar. They also now respect the order of abilities on your ability screen.

We added many new visual effects.
Added new visual effects for several abilities: flaming ray, flame breath, teleportation, slammed, digging, and temporal fugue.
Added new visual effects for several types of deaths: decapitation, transmuted, consumed, lased to death, and immolated.
Added new visual effects for several missile weapons: all lead slug weapons, all arrows, laser rifle, chain laser, laser pistol, point defense laser, spitting seed plant, light rondure, flamer thrower, null ray pistol, and rocket launchers.
Added new visual effects for several other creatures and items: aloe pyra, flaming vents, HE grenades, neutron flux, and hookah.
Added new visual effects for throwing.
Replaced the combat slash animation with a new one that has three grades of intensity for 1, 2-3 and 4+ penetrations.
Added a new animation for bludgeoning damage.
Added a new block animation.

Added a new, highly visible autoexplore danger indicator.
Added new tiles for some flashing status indicators: swimming, wading, covered in spores, flying, and sprinting.
Holding down movement keys to move quickly is now safeguarded by the autoexplore danger indicator.
Added gamepad button glyphs for Xbox and PlayStation controllers wherever the UI indicates a button bind.
Right-stick up and down now defaults to page up and down in menus.
Added default force-attack diagonal bindings: Ctrl+Shift+arrow keys.
Added a bunch of new keybinds.
Page Up and Page Down can now be used to navigate popups and the look menu.
Changed the default bind for the Factions page to ctrl+f.
Removed "laptop defaults" keybind options. The new defaults should be usable without numpad.


GAMEPLAY
Added new creatures: grand newfather, temple mecha mk I, and temple mecha mk II (legendary).
Added new items: grappling gun and longreach grappling gun.
We revamped the First Aid skill tree.
Renamed the skill tree to Physic and reduced the initial purchase cost to 50sp.
Staunch Wounds now simply improves your bandaging rolls, both in and out of combat.
You can now use Staunch Wounds on your companions.
Removed the Heal and Set Limb skills.
Added a new skill: Nostrums. 100sp. INT 21.
You can treat bleeding, poison, illness, and disease onset at a campfire.
Treatments can be applied to companions.
Some treatments require a medicinal ingredient.

Added a new skill: Amputate limb. 50sp. INT 23.
You can voluntarily amputate your own limbs.
You can amputate your companions' limbs, if they are infected or equipped with unremoveable equipment.

Added a new skill: Apothecary. 100sp. INT 25.
Healing tonics you apply last an extra round.


We revamped the Dual Wield skill tree and made changes to how offhand attack changes are displayed. (Experimental: subject to change)
Renamed the skill tree Multiweapon Fighting and the skills Multiweapon Proficiency, Multiweapon Expertise, and Multiweapon Mastery.
The bonuses to offhand attacks granted by Multiweapon Fighting skills now apply to all offhand limbs, except mutation-based weapons like Horns and Stinger. This now includes chimera limbs, as before, but also limbs granted by Multiple Arms and Helping Hands.
Reduced the offhand bonuses from the three skills from (effective) +20/40/60% to +20/35/50%.
Reduced the skill point cost. Each skill is now 150sp, down from 300sp.
Natural offhand limbs and weapons wielded in offhand limbs now display their offhand attack chance in their descriptions.
When you swap your primary limb, your old primary inherits the offhand chance of the new primary you swapped to. This was always the case but is now easier to track due to the offhand chance getting displayed in the limb/weapon description.

We added a new Single Weapon Fighting skill tree. (Experimental: subject to change)
Single Weapon Fighting. 150sp. AGI 17. You no longer make offhand attacks in exchange for mastery with a single weapon (toggleable).
Opportune Attacks (free with skill) - Whenever you score a critical hit with a melee weapon, the cooldowns of up to two random weapon or shield skills are immediately refreshed.
Expert Strikes. 200sp. AGI 19. Your attacks always penetrate one extra time.
Weapon Mastery. 150sp. AGI 23. Whenever you make a melee attack, immediately make a second attack for free.

We made improvements to how mutation variants are chosen and displayed.
Added new tiles and descriptions for each mutation variant. E.g., horns, horn, spiral horn, antlers, and casque now each have their own tiles and descriptions.
Added new tiles and descriptions for Flaming Ray's ghostly flames and Freezing Ray's icy vapor.
When you choose a variant during character generation, the appropriate tile and description are now displayed.
When you randomly choose mutations during character generation, you can now get mutation variants.
When you gain a mutation after character generation, you can now pick a variant.

Increased Gun Rack's license point cost from 4 to 6.
Intravenous ports now stack by adding to the tonic's duration its original duration, before any modifiers, for each implant.
Objects that occlude vision, like trees, and stationary pieces of furniture now have a chance to be hit if a missile passes through their space.


MISCELLANEOUS
Added MANY new sound effects.
Changed the penetration SFX to match the 1, 2-3 and 4+ tiers.
Replace "Then Things to Do When You Start the Game" with a "Quickstart" guide that has up-to-date info and dynamic keybinds.
There is now case specific death messaging for dying from reflected damage.
Removed the unfinished dungeon Trembling Dunes, to return at a later date.
Simplified the campfire sounds.
Greatly improved save & load performance for both the game and previously visited zones.
Greatly improved performance when new game objects were created.
Improved general rendering performance.
Improved performance when sounds would play during your turn.
Improved performance when custom effects play during your turn, particularly offscreen.
Improved performance when a creature takes damage and attempts to alert nearby allies.
Reduced memory usage & fragmentation for long play sessions, particularly when saving or loading the game often.
Reduced save file size.


BUGFIXES
Rejoinder no longer counterattacks while toggled off.
Fixed a bug that caused Light Manipulation to cast ambient light even when out of charges.
Fixed a bug that caused some popup selections to cancel autoexplore immediately after.
Fixed an issue that caused a spurious option popup when selecting a category in the trade menu.
Fixed some grammar issues in Disintegration's messaging.
Fixed a bug that caused several dynamic quests to stop working if you swapped bodies.
Fixed a bug that prevented "find a relic"" dynamic quests from immediately completing the find step if you already had the relic when you got the quest.
[*]Fixed a bug that caused the first step for site-finding dynamic quests to not complete if you found the site before you got the quest.


DEBUG & MODDING
Improved the map editor UI.
The workshop uploader now provides a native file picker for images.
The workshop uploader now allows you to close the upload status screen after an error.
The workshop uploader now allows you to elide hidden files from your uploads.
The map editor now provides a native file picker for maps.
Fixed a bug in the map editor that caused dragging the map to be scaled improperly.
The mod manager now displays disabled mods as grey instead of red.
GameSystems.FireEvent now supports all events fired on the player
There is a new GameSystems class which provides public static helpers for raising an event on all game systems.
Added string, int, float, list, and dictionary properties to Quest XML.
ReflectDamage is now an IActivePart.
Systems now support PlayerEquipped, PlayerActivating, and PlayerObjectAddedToInventory.

 

[Dadd]

Is it still gay?

 

[Serus]

Not sue about the game, played it a long time ago. But the developers still are. So many of those indie devs are, at least in the CRPG and RL (sub-)genres. Why, do we have to live in such fucked up era? I'm starting to understand the, supposedly-Chinese-but-not-really, curse: May you live in interesting times.

Enough with that crap. The update itself looks substantial. Several additional mechanics and content and UI changes. What happened? Didn't they work very slowly in the last couple of years?

 

[buffalo bill]

looks good

 

[Lacrymas]

Wake me up when the main quest is finally finished.

 

[Theodora]

Wake me up when the main quest is finally finished.

I believe that was already confirmed as approaching, given they announced 1.0.