I was never any good at Nethack. I think I just get impatient. I could regularly get a bit past Medusa but anything past that definitely involved save scumming. I was always a little jealous of the folks who could ascend regularly. But not jealous enough to, like, do anything about it.
Nethack's always been amazing for the feeling of "the devs thought of everything." I wonder how well that feeling holds up today.
It's a fantastic game if you have a bit of imagination. The possibilities are endless and it's so rewarding to ascend finally.
> Nethack is incredibly difficult, and near impossible to win without some knowledge. Whilst it could be argued that one could attain this knowledge through trial and error, it would take many many playthroughs to make any headway, even if you played in the invincible “Wizard” mode. Whilst I would recommend the use of spoilers if you wish to make progress in the game and discover what it has to offer, I wouldn’t suggest reading up on absolutely everything to give yourself an advantage. My general rule of thumb was to look something up when I came across it. I still found the game incredibly challenging, as I was placed in situations that I couldn’t predict or prepare for, and I still had that thrill of discovery and amazement.
https://marzzbar.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/awesome-game-exper...
That is good advice. Nethack “spoilers” are more like being let in on an “in-joke” than being told the solution to a puzzle or the ending of an M. Night Shyamalan movie.
You're crazy. All that does is prevent you from playing the game.
Ehhh. I guess "enjoyable" from a masochism perspective? Nethack has a lot of very specific mechanics and hazards that aren't explained to you.
If you're just looking to explore, then by all means dive in. But if you're trying to finish the game (or even just, make something resembling meaningful progress towards doing so), you realistically probably never will without either reading guides or putting in thousands of hours wandering and dying.
To put it in perspective - many people have played the game with guides for years without ever beating it.
https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack/blob/NetHack-5.0/doc/fixe...
I revisited the game a few years ago & was happy to realize I had, in the meantime, grown the necessary patience. Ascending felt great.
Oh noooooooooo... yeah that's fair.
Lots of overdue gameplay changes here, really. I was something of an expert player 20 years ago, my best ascenscion being Atheist/Genoless/Wishless with no pet to boot. It seems a lot has changed. I see fixes on this list for things that bothered me then. :)
Dungeon crawling as a tourist with a camera, rubbing a lamp and it’s a magic lamp that gives you a wish, kicking a fountain and bringing out a succubus who steals your equipment and teleports away, finding a scroll of genocide and accidentally genociding yourself because you forgot you were polymorphed, robbing shopkeepers blind with your pet dog, scratching a magic word in the ground at your it feet with your sword because you’re outnumbered to scare the enemies away, looting past dead bodies with legendary gear only to find one of the unidentified amulets was a cursed amulet of strangulation and now it’s welded to you and cant be taken off. You die. Play again?
The last time I played, it was with a build that had visual tiles instead of ascii which were kinda retro fun. Hope to see a similar build on 5.0 one day.
Also some pretty major gameplay and balance changes, some of which are pretty controversial. But overall, I think that it's a big improvement, and although I don't necessarily agree with all the changes it certainly makes the mid and late game a lot more interesting and varied (not to mention dangerous) than it was in 3.6.7.
(I probably play to finish ever 5 years or so)
It occurs to me that procedurally generated dungeons would be amazing with LLMs. Imagine every level with the sophistication of nethack's "special" levels. I hope someone out there is working on it!
Anyone know why the skip over 4.x, or have any insight into how much play has changed as well as infrastructure?
Then, nothing ever took advantage of it, and the lua was eventually stripped out.