Roguelike Caves of Qud (ROGUELIKE)

[notpl]

i'm not so on the same boat with all this praise. i feel its open world clashes *hard* with the tiny amount of skills, which are almost all combat related. after a couple days i felt attracted back to good old zangband.

There's fairly involved crafting, cookling, pathfinding skills and diplomacy. What do you feel is missing?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

"involved" like "scare monster" and "charm monster"? or like "build stuff 1", "build stuff 2" and "build stuff 3"?

 

[Zothique]

Sorry, I don't think CoQ is good enough to justify all of the asslicking it's getting from the media lately. It might be a competent roguelike (get in line, there's tons of them) but otherwise it's fairly linear and not as expansive as it was made out to be at one point.

Those heckin tranny devs, tho! Saving the industry one pixel at a time!

 

[Sinilevä]

I will not eat the bugs.
I will not live in the pod.
I will not play caves of pedophilia.

 

[cpmartins]

I will not eat the bugs.
I will not live in the pod.
I will not play caves of pedophilia.

 

[buffalo bill]

Sorry, I don't think CoQ is good enough to justify all of the asslicking it's getting from the media lately. It might be a competent roguelike (get in line, there's tons of them) but otherwise it's fairly linear and not as expansive as it was made out to be at one point.

Those heckin tranny devs, tho! Saving the industry one pixel at a time!

the game is very good, and unique

if you hate the devs too much to play the game, fine, do whatever you want ofc, but saying "there are plenty of other games like this" is bullshit

 

[jungl]

There is too much "skyrim killing wolves gameplay" easy difficulty for kids which is not what makes a good roguelike.

 

[Lacrymas]

Not me dying two times in a row in Red Rock. Is it just me or has the game become more goofy over the years? I don't remember the cartoon-like anthro coyotes.

 

[buffalo bill]

Not me dying two times in a row in Red Rock. Is it just me or has the game become more goofy over the years? I don't remember the cartoon-like anthro coyotes.

snapjaws were always in the game

 

[Gandalf]

Not me dying two times in a row in Red Rock. Is it just me or has the game become more goofy over the years? I don't remember the cartoon-like anthro coyotes.

snapjaws were always in the game

Maybe he played an early ASCII version?

 

[Lacrymas]

Nah, I think I played it last 5 years ago. I guess I just don't remember the coyotes.

 

[notpl]

"involved" like "scare monster" and "charm monster"? or like "build stuff 1", "build stuff 2" and "build stuff 3"?

I mean, yeah? You can build nearly any piece of equipment in the game, modify it in dozens of further ways, there are several different ways to then POWER those devices, and you can apply them to the world as turrets or bombs if you don't feel like using them yourself. What roguelike has more involved speech skills than allowing you to barter, debuff, frighten, or recruit? What game, period, even has as many types of grenade as Qud, let alone all the other gadgets you can make?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

call it then "grenade simulator" and be done with it. me cojoni, most amount of different grenades, total masterpiece 5/7.

 

[Mortmal]

Sorry, I don't think CoQ is good enough to justify all of the asslicking it's getting from the media lately. It might be a competent roguelike (get in line, there's tons of them) but otherwise it's fairly linear and not as expansive as it was made out to be at one point.

Those heckin tranny devs, tho! Saving the industry one pixel at a time!

It's good, but so are hundreds of roguelikes that don’t get coverage due to a lack of network and friends in the right circles. Also, the design isn’t the most fun I’ve ever seen. The Rainbow Woods, in particular, were really frustrating, and I ended up having to use the debug console to finish the quest because the NPC wasn’t spawning in their hut. I’ve never had to use the debug console in any other roguelike.

As for the factions, what’s the point if it forces you to side with the LGBTQ+ bears.

 

[Turn_BASED]

After beating it again, Qud has two big problems for me.

1. It's too long and too linear, even with the randomly generated stuff, for a roguelike. Every playthrough feels roughly the same as a result. That makes dying extremely painful, and, due to the nature of some creatures, it can be difficult to learn from your mistakes as you won't see those creatures again for a long time. Bethesda Susa has a few of these (like those ice beast things that freeze you and then chomp you for 25 ticks of damage). The troll bosses on the way down aren't nearly as bad by comparison.

Roleplaying mode (respawns at checkpoints) feels much better since it saves you from skipping the redundant content (red rock, rust wells, six day stilt, salt desert xp farming, golgotha, etc.) you've already done a million times.

2. Every build ends up being roughly the same. Want to build a mutant axe murderer with multiple limbs? Awesome. Dismembering enemies is cool. After you get your melee skills up, though, you might as well learn tinkering and throw a few extra points in guns. Want to play as an esper and blow up people's heads? Want to shoot fire/ice rays? Want to focus on gas generation?

Those are all cool and different ways to play the game. But by mid game you will want to also use guns and tinkering because they're easy to get and very strong. Melee combat is especially hazardous as not letting enemies touch you in the late game is a major positive due to all the fucked up effects they will nail you with in melee range.

You could also just make a gun/tinker build right from the start and just never pick up melee/esper stuff. Even the terrifying punch truekin (punchkin) will prefer to eventually shoot stuff down because it's safer.

Where's the specialization? This kind of stuff ruins the power fantasy for me. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup suffers from this too, where the best characters will want to eventually dabble in several areas as opposed to adhering to an archetype.

After all these years, ToME is still the best at delivering that experience. Zorbus is the only other recent roguelike I've played that scratches that similar itch while also being great in a more offbeat way.

Qud is fun but once the honeymoon phase wears off, all of its best parts - the exploration, experimentation, worldbuilding - aren't able to counterbalance your character becoming Goku with an assault rifle, running the same dungeons with fucked up, hard to navigate subterranean tiles, regardless of the class you originally picked. Yes, you can limit yourself to not using those skills, but you'd also be gimping yourself.

 

[notpl]

Definitely agreed about point 1, but I don't really know about #2. Melee is, if anything, stronger overall than ranged - some things are more dangerous up close, some are more dangerous from afar, but melee definitely dishes out more damage. The game's bosses are functionally immune to ranged attacks altogether, though by that point you have so many ways of killing anything that it doesn't really matter. Espers never really lose the ability to kill things with their powers, either, it's just a matter of building one correctly and being ready to deal with the incredibly tedious waves of extradimensional esper hunters.

The real "split" is between true kin, chimerae, and espers more so than equipment-based playstyles though. Cybernetics are hard to get going because they're fully RNG-dependent, but if you find the ones you want they provide effects that cannot be replicated any other way, like being able to equip seven ranged weapons at once or throw two grenades at a time. Espers can dominate and pacify the game's superbosses, something that - while not impossible - would be extremely difficult and tedious for anyone else.

 

[buffalo bill]

Yeah, I agree with point 1 more or less, but disagree with 2. Various kinds of melee are totally viable endgame if your build is right, and so is e.g. flame hands mutant (especially combined with sparser pistol/rifle), corrosive gas mutant, esper, etc. Tbh I rarely go the guns route anymore.

 

[xuerebx]

Fair points I'd say. I'm playing roleplay mode for the first time and the game does seem to favour this mode (more experimentation and risky takes) - although I play more diligently in classic mode.

 

[buffalo bill]

OK, I think I got the best ending finally.

This required finding and killing all seven of the Girsh Nephilim, including the "secret" seventh one (Starformed Ehalcodon) which shows up at Reclamation if you've killed all the others (or befriend them? but I didn't do that). The Starformed Ehalcodon has tons of hitpoints, high AV and DV, 150 quickness, flight, an umbral attack, irisdual beams, regeneration 10, and a special version of temporal fugue that spawns many copies of itself that all shoot irisdual beams. It also spawns creatures that reflect irisdual beams, so with all the temporal fugue clones and the spawns, the map is completely covered in irisdual beams.

I built my character around this fight, since I was playing with permadeath and wanted to get the best ending "for real" (I knew it was coming from the wiki tbh). My character had double muscled maxed with two rapid advancements to try to guarantee stun lock, maxed heightened quickness and photosynthetic skin (with two rapid advancements in photosynthetic skin), precognition, 80 AV from precog neutron flux (but I think AV is irrelevant in this fight), multiple arms, two headed, level six wings. I chugged the slog juice and then ate the crystal delight for strength and then as many face, hands, and arm slots as possible. Had (I think) five sets of overloaded precision nanon fingers equipped to max crits. All hands had sharp masterwork vibro daggers, all faces had girshling fangs. Full multiple wield skill tree. Kesil face ofc. Two Nephilim chords, including the one that gives extra arms. Crystalline halo to reset precog.

The idea was to get above 150 quickness so that it would never doube turn me (I had quickness 201), and hit it with as many AV-bypassing attacks as possible so that daze/stun would proc every turn. I fought on the edge of the map, and when it created temporal fugue clones, I left the map and waited for them to disappear. Worked OK, and I barely took any damage. My character was probably overkill for the fight. Also, I had precognition going all the time in case I fucked up somehow (man, it would have sucked to do all that over again).

Then, I got the full dialogue from Barathrum the Old as we ascended the Spindle by first reading Crime and Punishment (I am not sure this affected the ending though). Finally, went to the chamber with hologram projectors, where you can turn them on to talk with Reshep. Instead, I killed the cherubim who were guarding the big tomb thingie (I can't remember what it was called in-game), and opened it after getting a warning that doing so would irrevocably alter Reshep. Then descended back down to Earth in the Golem from where we entered the space station.

 

[Gahbreeil]

I wish this game had Rimworld's graphics and setting.

the game is very good

EDIT: To be more productive, explain to me the rage about the Caves of Qud. I watched an introduction on YouTube, I've seen the Steam stuff, what makes this game playable? Is it catering to people with old PC's? What makes it stand out other than "everything is happening"?

 

[Sweeper]

Sorry, I don't think CoQ is good enough to justify all of the asslicking it's getting from the media lately. It might be a competent roguelike (get in line, there's tons of them) but otherwise it's fairly linear and not as expansive as it was made out to be at one point.

Those heckin tranny devs, tho! Saving the industry one pixel at a time!

the game is very good, and unique

if you hate the devs too much to play the game, fine, do whatever you want ofc, but saying "there are plenty of other games like this" is bullshit

>Yeah the devs might be pedophiles
>But the game is good and unique so it doesn't matter
>Consume more goy
No, I don't believe I will.

 

[buffalo bill]

I wish this game had Rimworld's graphics and setting.

the game is very good

EDIT: To be more productive, explain to me the rage about the Caves of Qud. I watched an introduction on YouTube, I've seen the Steam stuff, what makes this game playable? Is it catering to people with old PC's? What makes it stand out other than "everything is happening"?

Here is my review https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=12491

Btw I really hate how Rimworld looks, and strongly prefer minimal graphics as close to ASCII as possible (as in most traditional roguelikes), so I am glad that there are games like this graphically. But this is not important to core gameplay ofc. For instance, I like Jupiter Hell even though I hate how it looks.

 

[Lacrymas]

The devs aren't all offending pedophiles, they are communist trans furries. Which explains the anthro coyotes now that I think about it. Only one of them has been charged with diddling his (step-?)daughter!

 

[Seethe]

The devs aren't all offending pedophiles, they are communist trans furries. Which explains the anthro coyotes now that I think about it. Only one of them has been charged with diddling his (step-?)daughter!

You said at least 3 times that they're coyotes. They're hyenas, which is why they "laugh" when you talk to them.

 

[lightbane]

Soo, is there an ending where the human race is preserved, these furries are exterminated, or something like that?