They launched a new beta last week. Basically it's le heckin' epic climactic "big" battle followed by a random boss fight pretty much out of nowhere, which hopefully they will rework in the actual update. The Lovecraftian horror monsters have been finally added but as of right now they are pretty underwhelming hp bags.
After 15 years in development they might finally finish the main quest. Next year that is.
Anyway this still blows every other tile-based roguelike out of the water.
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sure that will be very interesting for the 4 people still playing this
It has received relatively constant updating for a while now, I don't see what should prevent people from enjoying this game, considering all the slop that people play.
Is a game being tile-based really that off putting to normies?
Roguelike puts off normalgays. troony dev puts off roguelike players.
>Roguelike puts off normalgays
If by normalgays you mean people who only play sport games and mobile shit sure, but people who enjoy videogames not being into roguelikes is not true.
The more action-oriented and user friendly roguelikes like Hades, Crypt of the necrodancer, Slay the spire, The Binding of Isaac, Spelunky, FTL, Risk of Rain, Nuclear Throne and Enter the Gungeon were huge hits. And then there's the case of Noita, which despite being much more of a traditional roguelike in how esoteric it is about your goals and how to progress, still found a lot of popularity.
CoQ devs understand that the traditional ASCII tiles really put off people and normies aren't going to download a tileset. Honestly the default tileset for Qud looks great nowadays, imho graphics really shouldn't be a problem.
Also TTRPGs have been massively growing in popularity lately amongst normies and CoQ is one of the closest experiences to a TTRPG you can find in a videogame.
>troony dev puts off roguelike players.
Devs being homosexuals is another issue. The game is on GOG so it can be pirated really easily.
>Hades, Crypt of the necrodancer, Slay the spire, The Binding of Isaac, Spelunky, FTL, Risk of Rain, Nuclear Throne and Enter the Gungeon
Not roguelikes, those are action games and you know damn well why they are more popular
>nd CoQ is one of the closest experiences to a TTRPG you can find in a videogame.
Eh, not really but that's a good thing, tabletop has no place in vidya, I don't play vidya for that sorta stuff as much as I appreciate the Gamma World juice.
Qud's issue is that it's the same weird blend of roguelike that games like CDDA are about, but unlike those games it also insists on a main quest that goes against what 90% of the game is about so while it is definitely successful for its market it struggles to find a truly bigger audience within it because it doesn't really offer the guided challenge of the Nethack formula but it also doesn't offer the indepth, open ended autism of things like DF's Adventure mode when it comes to sim aspects, at least not without several layers of mods and even there it still lacks a lot of what that and games like CDDA, UnReal World or things like Kenshi offer, for now at least.
As long as the devs refuse to fully capitalize on Qud's strong point, that is open ended adventures that focus on the setting itself, it will never tap into its true potential, modders are doing God's work when it comes to that but they can only do so much, especially when the constant update breaks mods every once in a while on top of invalidating save files.
Seems to me you like the setting rather than the storyline, the storyline is honestly poor and not conductive to the gameplay, it makes no sense to have a linear and overly long main quest in a game such as this.
The setting being as good as it is is what salvages it for me, also for all the good stuff they made they really do need to work more on worldgen and add more variety to common stuff, also add more mutations rather than simply sticking to 1E GW.
> those are action games
There's a lot of variety between those titles.
> it also insists on a main quest that goes against what 90% of the game is about
How so?
I agree that Qud is in a weird spot where it combines premade content with randomly generated stuff. That's partially what I'm referring to when I say that it feels like a TTRPG, with a big important town full of npcs and also quickly put together dungeons with random encounters.
Being purely open ended has its issues too. It requires a dynamic world that's not just endless repetition of the same thing, and it also requires good gameplay. Kenshi is a great example of this.
>Seems to me you like the setting rather than the storyline
Both go hand in hand.
> the storyline is honestly poor and not conductive to the gameplay
The storyline is basically just characters telling you to go to the next dungeon. I don't think it is the next masterpiece in videogame storytelling and deep character arcs but it's definitely not intrusive.
>it makes no sense to have a linear and overly long main quest in a game such as this.
Why not? As you have said lots of classic roguelikes have a set goal to achieve. It has always been expected that you will rarely "win" a run, most of the time you will lose. It's about seeing how far you can go.
>It requires a dynamic world that's not just endless repetition of the same thing
That's the fundamental issue with Qud, as I said, it tries to be like DF, CDDA or UnReal World but it's crippled by the fact that the geography is set in stone like in ADOM and that you also have a fully linear main quest.
This means that on one hand the game can't achieve the full extent of its worldgen instruments but it's also too open ended for that linear quest to end up being compelling gameplay wise.
And you can see that the devs know this, which is why you get a free holographic projector if you give the Barathrumites the repaired drone from Golgotha below a certain level...which is completely pointless because only certain character builds can even hope to achieve that and you can also get that in tons of other ways.
This is where Qud suffers from a contradicting core identity where it wants to do things that are complete opposites, and it would suffer so much if the devs were smart and made something like branching main quests, like not having to deal with the barathrumites and, for instance, ask the mechanimists for help, or not give a damn about Resheph and the Tomb of the eaters and just settle down somewhere like the Id Freehold, then there's all the stuff with Chavvah and tons of other entities like Ptoh that is there in the background and could be used to make more main quest branches...but it's just not happening.
That and even at a base mechanical levels there's still contradictions like not being able to get furniture without mods, lots of machinery can't be properly interacted with (at the moment), building is KINDA there but not really and you need Hearthpyre to get a glimpse of how glorious it would be to have proper building, I could go on and on about all of this stuff and it pains me so much that the devs are still so stubbornly unfocused.
But we're still better off than Crawlgays anyway, much better off.
Well but do you think that having a main quest at all is wrong? Or do you think that what's wrong is being in a middle spot in which there's a main quest but it's not all that deep, with several different branches?
>but it's also too open ended for that linear quest to end up being compelling gameplay wise.
What does this mean? I feel like you at first criticize the game for taking you in a predetermined direction, but now you criticize that the game is too open ended?
NetHack also has a long list of things you are supposed to do in order to win the game. On principle this isn't all that different in Qud, except for the fact that Qud tries to have a more detailed storyline than just "go deep, get treasure, leave". But I still think that Qud is much closer to NetHack (and similar roguelikes) than to some of the other examples you mentioned, like CDDA. It's not trying to be a purely open ended experience.
>That and even at a base mechanical levels there's still contradictions like not being able to get furniture without mods, lots of machinery can't be properly interacted with (at the moment), building is KINDA there but not really and you need Hearthpyre to get a glimpse of how glorious it would be to have proper building,
How is that a contradiction? Some games have base building, most don't. I honestly never even thought about that.
>do you think that having a main quest at all is wrong?
It depends on the game, and how the main quest is designed.
Qud's issue isn't really the main quest per se, it's that the main quest is horribly rigid and linear in progression when the game is all about doing whatever you want and play as extremely different characters, which is particularly puzzling when you think how you even have different possible starts.
They have two ways to salvage it as far as I'm concerned, one would be giving branches to the main quest so it's not as rigid, another would be making different main quests, such as ascending and finding out the truth about the eaters, another could be founding a settlement or something, another could be tied to Chavvah, another would be tied to the mechanimists or the Id Freehold and such, basically different main quests depending on the characters you made rather than pidgeonholing everyone into getting their ass into Resheph's coffin, it's such a waste to have the setting being reduced to that.
>What does this mean?
It means that the game is too unfocused, to put it shortly.
>On principle this isn't all that different in Qud
It is, becausei n Nethack you don't have the luxury of scumming the system in 100 different ways, it's a linear dungeon crawl, in Qud you can sequence break shit to hilarious degrees and rightfully trivialize everything on the road to power, from farming Dawngliders with Sunder Mind and eventually farming esper hunters for Ego to becoming a 10 arm, axe wielding blender than chops everything into pieces the moment they get in range.
All of this happens because Qud is fundamentally open ended, Nethack isn't, at best you can backtrack to previous floors.
>How is that a contradiction?
Why put said machinery in the game if you can't make use of it? Why allows us to repair it (pointlessly) but not let us build? Mods like Hearthpyre don't exist without a reason.
>such as ascending and finding out the truth about the eaters
To be fair that's already in the game if you choose to not return to Qud after being entombed.
>It is, becausei n Nethack you don't have the luxury of scumming the system in 100 different ways, it's a linear dungeon crawl, in Qud you can sequence break shit to hilarious degrees and rightfully trivialize everything on the road to power, from farming Dawngliders with Sunder Mind and eventually farming esper hunters for Ego to becoming a 10 arm, axe wielding blender than chops everything into pieces the moment they get in range.
So having the possibility to needlessly grind for hours upon hours to make a quest easier a negative? How does this stop you from having fun? Just play what you want and progress however you feel like. Personally I never felt the need to grind in this game, you can get the necessary xp with the dungeons you visit and the random encounters as you travel.
In any RPG you can farm the early game mooks until you are level 99 if you feel like it. In Qud this is discouraged by enemies giving less and less xp and eventually no xp when you are more powerful than them. You literally can't go past a certain level unless you keep moving forward into new areas.
>Why put said machinery in the game if you can't make use of it?
You can use some of it. In any case, the game isn't centered on you. for example, a town having an anvil for the local blacksmith, without giving me the option to make my own weapons, doesn't feel like an issue to me. It's decoration to make it clear that people in the town do certain work.
If every single item in the world required its own set of mechanics then either the world would be empty or it would need to have hundreds of systems for every little thing. Being able to mine iron and craft an iron sword that's going to become useless after the early game wouldn't add any meaningful gameplay
>To be fair that's already in the game if you choose to not return to Qud after being entombed.
And then the game is over, and that's the only win condition in the game so far.
>So having the possibility to needlessly grind for hours upon hours to make a quest easier a negative?
Yes? Same thing as water being a nonissue, a roguelike shouldn't be so easy to trivialize, especially if it insists on having a linear main quest with a win condition, this is why a lot of people rightfully criticize and dislike Qud, because compared to the normal ascension based games there's zero urgency to anything and it's far too easy to beat, Qud insists on having that sort of thing for some reason and fails miserably at that.
>Personally I never felt the need to grind in this game
Because if all you care is finishing the main quest it's no big deal, but you'll miss out on 90% of the game, if you actually care about exploring the game's world you'll find out that you do need to reach a certain level threshold to do things, especially if you want to play as certain characters.
>In any RPG you can farm the early game mooks until you are level 99 if you feel like it.
No, and this is a dumb statement, Qud doesn't discourage anything either because the EXP yield cap is far too lenient to work, nevermind Sheba and Tszappur being a thing.
>You can use some of it.
The only things you can realistically use are the tumbler in the Id Freehold and the mill in Joppa, everything else is there but still not implemented properly despite being interactable, you can technically create powerlines but have nothing that can actually make use of those without mods.
>the game isn't centered on you
???
Of course it's centered around me, why else would those objects with functions that are still not fully implemented be there in the first place? What kind of argument is that?
That's like the people who said that we weren't supposed to use Metamorphosys and it was unique to Svenlainard (RIP).
>a roguelike shouldn't be so easy to trivialize
>this is why a lot of people rightfully criticize and dislike Qud, because compared to the normal ascension based games there's zero urgency to anything and it's far too easy to beat
By "being easy" you mean that you can get stronger by just playing more and more and carefully fighting enemies and exploring. And then again, your character can always be killed if you are careless.
And if the game is too easy for you, why would you even feel the need to grind? It's just extremely weird to criticize a game because it can be completed if you put a lot of unnecessary time into it, considering that's applicable to all games. I genuinely don't get why would you care about this.
The game doesn't force you to grind dawngliders for 50 hours only to then get one hit killed by a neutronic slime. You can do so if you choose to do it, but why would you?
>Because if all you care is finishing the main quest it's no big deal, but you'll miss out on 90% of the game
????
>if you actually care about exploring the game's world you'll find out that you do need to reach a certain level threshold to do things
Yes, and you can get to that threshold by just playing the game normally. Exploring the game's world is part of the game, it's what you do.
>why else would those objects with functions that are still not fully implemented be there in the first place?
Decoration? Making a village look like a village? Making it so that the world isn't empty?
No, by being easy I mean that it's a roguelike with zero resource managements, no proper timer and most importantly no deliberate progression schedule to properly limit the player and force them to deal with certain dangers.
Again, in Nethack, Crawl, Zorbus or what have you, if you can't get past a floor it's GGs and back to the drawing board, in Qud there's no such thing, which is why most of the people like me who're reaching 500 hours don't even bother with Joppa anymore since it serves no real function, you could effectively shave off lots of stuff like the grit gate, the rustwells, Joppa's underground reservoir etc. and nobody would notice because there's no incentive for any character to do any of that given you can progress much faster by sequence breaking and doing other stuff, most of which is simply done by exploring the world.
Which mind you, it's not necessarily a bad thing per se, but it is bad in Qud's context because the game forces you to deal with a boring and unnecessarily linear main quest that goes against that open ended spirit and doesn't really work at any level, either you embrace the cheese and open ended world like CDDA does or you don't, standing in this awkward middle ground doesn't do the game any favor.
>The game doesn't force you to grind dawngliders for 50 hours
You can get to level 20 by farming gliders and selling the books you find around in barely even an hour, oozes aren't going to do shit to you by then, they're not going to do shit to you anyway because you can just sprint and they'll never catch up to you
>You can get to that threshold by just playing the game normally.
So there's a certified way to play Qud normally now? I didn't beat the game because I didn't do randomly generated quest for a pittance of EXP.?
>Decoration?
Decorations with functions that are in the game's code but still not fully implemented?
Honestly you're grasping at straws too hard, there's better hills for you to do die on?
Oh so you are complaining that you can cheese the game too quickly. So why were you complaining that you needed to reach a certain level threshold to explore the world, if reaching said threshold is not an issue?
>Which mind you, it's not necessarily a bad thing per se, but it is bad in Qud's context because the game forces you to deal with a boring and unnecessarily linear main quest
The game doesn't force you to do it in any way.
>So there's a certified way to play Qud normally now?
Dude do whatever you want. All I said is that you don't *need* to grind in order to progress. But if you'd rather kill dawngliders to progress more quickly that's good too. But at that point cheesing the game is a decision you make, it's not forced upon you, and thus I don't understand the point of criticizing the game because it can be cheesed.
>I didn't beat the game because I didn't do randomly generated quest for a pittance of EXP.?
Why are you getting so defensive?
>you could effectively shave off lots of stuff like the grit gate, the rustwells, Joppa's underground reservoir etc. and nobody would notice because there's no incentive for any character to do any of that
Honestly, do you even enjoy this game?
What is it that you actually want to do in Qud?
You're not even trying to follow the conversation here, you think I'm attacking Qud because it's easy to cheese when all I'm saying is how the main quest being structured like it belongs in a linear dungeon crawl makes no sense because it cannot enforce itself and also goes against the rest of the game's design.
The main quest doesn't work and ends up being obnoxious precisely because Qud doesn't force you to play through it in any particular way, which is something I will keep praising until the end of time, the only one who's being needlessly defensive of faults even the devs themselves are aware of is you.
>All I said is that you don't *need* to grind in order to progress
Feel free to post yourself finish Eyn Roj at level 1 then, if you can even get there there in the first place.
>inb4 but only this barely finished main quest matters when it comes to progression!
Golem built at level 1
>how the main quest being structured like it belongs in a linear dungeon crawl makes no sense because it cannot enforce itself and also goes against the rest of the game's design.
Why does it need to "enforce itself"?
And what is this "game's design" that this supposedly goes against?
You speak as if being able to improve your character in order to progress through the game more easily wasn't a staple of RPGs.
>Why does it need to "enforce itself"?
Because Qud is a sim roguelike in the first place and it's really the only one of its kind to have a main quest designed like an ascension game for some reason, while refusing to understand that such a thing is meaningless outside of heavily controlled environments, which Qud is antithetical of, and frankly it's largely out of place, they could have spent those resources and dev times on much more interesting things.
But you're going off wildly unrelated tangents for some reason and still missing the point of it all.
Vanilla Sword and Board is exceedingly strong especially after the latest patch introduced some new skillsets, vibrokhopeshes alone always made a strong case for swordsmen, whether it's sword and board or dualwielding, psionics aren't really necessary if you're mutant, but you'll want your augs as a truekin since living off your salves can be annoying.
Caves of Qud is a role-playing game. You go through the main quest to follow along the story as you play the game. This is like complaining about Morrowind having questline because you can just cheese to become overpowered and go straight to kill Vivec and then Dagoth.
If you think Qud's questline is boring and the characters are uninteresting that's one thing, but to complain about a questline existing makes no sense.
>main quest designed like an ascension game for some reason, while refusing to understand that such a thing is meaningless outside of heavily controlled environments
If you think that the only thing that gives meaning to a questline is the bragging rights of getting to the end screen then yeah, I can see why you'd dislike Qud's questline.
Qud is a roguelike, not a simple roleplaying game, or a shitty action game parading around as an RPG like Bethesda's shovelware.
If you fail to understand something as simple as this I really don't know what to tell you, if the only thing you got from my posts is that I think there should be no main quest at all it's clear you have some sort of reading comprehension problem, either that or you actually didn't read through any of what I typed.
>If you think that the only thing that gives meaning to a questline is the bragging rights
I don't give a damn about bragging rights, I do give a damn about game design being coherent and functional, and Qud's main quest is anything but, it's nothing but a huge waste of potential, they were so incredibly close to achieve actual greatness and they squandered all this time on a pointless forced questline that doesn't even make sense in a game such as this.
>Feel free to post yourself finish Eyn Roj at level 1 then, if you can even get there there in the first place.
>there was no response to this
lmao
Anyone can pick up neutron flux at level 1 to make a golem, not sure what your point is other than showing a character made with the sole purpose of running away from anything.
Actually nevermind, a reverse search just showed you picked it up from fricking Reddit and the guy did have to play like a b***h and run away from everything, on top of not mentioning how the guy farmed polygels and schrodinger pages for god knows how long, let alone not mentioning whether he did go to Eyn Roj at all, which means he clearly just polygel'd a couple of neutron flux vials
>moving the goalpost
The entire main quest can be completed at level 1, period. Seethe about it.
>Original post was about Eyn Roj
>BUT MUH MAIN QUEST THO
If you want to cope about how some redditor spent hours of his life grinding polygels and schrodinger pages to make this shit kinda work it's all on you, just don't change the subject.
>Not roguelikes
have a nice day you pedantic homosexual
>Hades, Slay the spire, The Binding of Isaac, Spelunky, FTL, Risk of Rain, Nuclear Throne and Enter the Gungeon
>roguelikes
Anon...it's you.
You were the normalgay all along.
I never said I personally enjoy or even have played all of those games.
Spelunky and FTL are good though.
Just pirate it.
>Just pirate it.
I just genuinely don't want to have some furry communist's brainchild to pollute my mind even a little bit. I came here to say that, just to point out no amount of shilling can unring the bells they've rung along the path developing this game. It sounded cool, and I've heard good things. But I will never play it, not for full price, not on sale, not for free. Pro tip: keep your dipshit mouth shut. Also stop being a furry communist. It's just seriously embarrassing at this point, it should be a year-long phase an autistic 16 year old does out of adolescent rebellion. At absolute most. And even then you should be rightly shunned.
Get your autism checked, anon.
american moment
seethe harder. it will surely make me look the fool.
If it was only about looking, anon, that would be the least of your issues.
please go on, still not playing your commie furry moron game. oh, and cope seethe dial 8 you know all that jazz.
I've also been playing since the latest patch dropped, though honestly I still prefer just wandering around doing my thing and tending to my villages/secret hideout through Hearthpyre.
The Golem stuff is really cool though, shame it takes so long to get to that point and you still have to suffer through Pax Klanq, I swear it's much more fun to find a way to get to 0lam than doing most of the main quest, this will always be Qud's weak point.
>The Golem stuff is really cool though, shame it takes so long to get to that point and you still have to suffer through Pax Klanq, I swear it's much more fun to find a way to get to 0lam than doing most of the main quest, this will always be Qud's weak point.
idk, I actually really like Qud's storyline and the overall worldbuilding it has. Finding out more and more about the world and the eaters is really cool to me. The true purpose of the tomb of the eaters shocked me when I first got what it was all about. Maybe it's just that the science-fantasy post-apocalyptic cyberpunk aesthetic really appeals to me.
The questline can also be done really fast as you become more accustomed with the game. I have seen people do the entire thing from start up to the end of the beta in like 8 hours.
The main quest is finally getting to the more abstract and otherworldly aspects that we first saw at the moon stair.
I JUST downloaded this shit, I have to download it again??
No? Beta versions tend to be pretty broken and are published mainly for people to help the devs find bugs. You can ignore it.
The game has more than enough content to play for dozens of hours before even thinking about updating.
Don't regret pirating it.
that said, when are we getting a mod that allows the player to join the templars, the troonydev seethe would be glorious.
You're never getting any of that because there's no factions to join the first place.
You can already become friends with the Templars and LARP as them in the base game anyway, no mods needed, which you'd know if you actually played the game.
Devs have also said that the main quest will have different endings, though I have no idea how they plan to implement that. I don't know if it will be just making a choice between A, B or C right at the end, of if maybe it will take into account stuff like faction reputation and sidequests completed.
I have to see what they come up, but I thought that just having the usual mid-way win and end-game better win (like in Spelunky) was good enough.
Ultimately, the gameplay loop is rather simple
>get a quest, go out
>explore new area
>fight monsters
>acquire loot
>level up
>become stronger
>achieve the quest
>return to a town to sell stuff, buy stuff, eat the local meal, get a new quest
>go out again
You do that inbetween advancing the steps of the main quest. The "goal" is becoming strong enough to go further down the main quest.
Isn't that essentially every RPG ever?
Yes.
>anons writing essays on game design about how some dogshit rogueoid is le bad because they heard on 4cheddit that some chuds got banned for poopooing in their shitty discord
Honestly the devs are actual morons but surprisingly that doesn't seep into the game.
The character that people who haven't played the game obsess with due to Sseth's video, Q girl, is genuinely not obnoxious. If anything she's one of the more friendly character you can find, specially so amongst the outright autistic homosexuals that most barathrumites are.
There is an actual troony character in the game but it is completely irrelevant part of a kino sidequest.
>blows every other tile-based roguelike out of the water
I like TOME4 more.
All roguelikes are tile-based btw.
Playable templats? :v]
The idea that you need a certain level to get past a given area is false btw. Players have beaten the end game with a level 1 character before (using mods to disable xp).
more like Caves of Chud
too complex. games need to be simpler to be enjoyable
open world roguelikes kinda get boring after a while
They're a fun diversion but most of them don't really work because they're either too simple like Dungeonsman or deliberately irritating and full of moronic metashit like ADOM that is pure gotcha! filth.
Honestly Qud is one of the few of its kind that manages to strike a good balance overall.
How do I get into this game? Never played a roguelike btw
Just play it. It's not really complex. The biggest filter for people who don't play roguelikes is getting accustomed to playing the game with the numpad.
>Honestly Qud is one of the few of its kind that manages to strike a good balance overall.
This.
> I don't know if I can handle another autism simulator.
Qud isn't like that.
>How viable is just playing a generic swordsman?
Very much so, though all characters benefit from having ranged combat options, even if you are focused on melee.
> I don't really want to use augments or psionics
There are two main "races", true kin and mutant.
True kin have access to mechanical implants while mutants have access to, well, mutations, both physical (think extra limbs) or psionic.
Both are just a normal part of the upgrades you will be getting to your character. Overall, if you want a more simple and grounded experience true kin is the better option. You depend much more on your equipment than on having fancy abilities.
I've been really interested in playing this game but I feel like after burning out on Dwarf Fortress all those years ago I don't know if I can handle another autism simulator.
How viable is just playing a generic swordsman? I don't really want to use augments or psionics but it seems like very let's play and video online they always go for those since they seem super strong.
Isn't this made by a literal communist furry? Was interested in playing until I found out about that and the chimpout online because that youtuber asked about them letting you join the bad guy faction. I usually separate the art from the artist, but I just really don't want to give money to these people or even play their game anymore.
If you aren't a queer leftist the devs really, really do not want you on the game's discord. It has more rules and moderation than Smash Brawl Club.
The dev is an SA goon. Or was.
He went off the deep end when Sproggiwood failed to secure the normalgay dollar.
SA?
Where troons come from.
>Gatekeeping is only good when the people I like do it
I remember when this place used to mock Tumblr for having a shitfit over every little thing and being overly politic, and look at how things are now, contrarian Tumblr prety much.
Impressive how a game can't be mentioned without someone getting butthurt.
You're literally more annoying then the furry leftists at this point. I just want to play a fun game. Shut up.