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It has a very different philosophy from NetHack tho, in that you generally have clear trade-offs between your choices (e.g. there isn't a "best" armor or weapon, you have limited skill upgrades and need to choose how to spend them etc..), compared to the "keep buffing up until you're god" you get in NetHack.
Both are a lot of fun and frustration.
DCSS sacrifices Nethack's sense of wonder for better playability. Simulating a world is secondary to presenting a series of interesting tactical challenges. There's very little discovery involved, because the game openly tells you everything you need to know, and it's up to you to figure out how to apply that information. DCSS goes out of its way to remove tedium, even at the cost of realism.
E.g. Nethack includes food, which serves as a kind of clock, but food availability is random, so it doesn't work very well. DCSS removes food and replaces it with an explicit countdown timer. Nethack allows selling items to shops. This means there's a reason to pick up trash items, which is annoying. DCSS does not allow selling items. Nethack has hidden traps, which can be found by searching. This means you can spend a lot of time searching, or you can tediously track which tiles are safe, noting where you and the monsters walk, which is even more annoying. DCSS makes all traps visible, and replaces hidden traps with "sourceless malevolence", which applies random bad effects as you explore. There are no secret techniques to bypass difficulty in DCSS.
DCSS does not simulate a very believable world, but it's better as a game.
I keep going back to NetHack. There’s something I find very endearing about it even though I know what to expect. Perhaps it’s similar to Stardew Valley. A sense of place, of coherence and care, that DCSS lacks. The shopkeepers and the priests. The guards in Minetown. The Oracle. The “monsters” who are neutral to you based on your alignment. All the graffiti and the Discworld books. Even the bloody Sokoban levels which people love to complain about!
In Stardew Valley you’ve literally got to till the soil and plant seeds and water them. You’ve got to break boulders and cut back weeds and cut down trees, and go fishing in the nearby river or lake. You can look at all of that stuff as “tedious”, just as you might for shopping or item identification or altar sacrifice in NetHack.
But I don’t see it that way. These aren’t tedious chores I must do in order to win the game. These are activities I want to do and relish doing. They’re almost meditative, in a way.
Don’t get me wrong. I still like DCSS. But for all of its philosophy around removing tedium, the game still feels way too long. If you’re considering the game purely on challenge grounds, much of the difficulty disappears after the early game. It’s quite interesting from a tactical perspective in the beginning, up until lair or so. After that it’s mostly just a long grind until the end.
So I really can’t agree that DCSS is a better game than NetHack. It’s very different, scratching a different itch. It’s also much more difficult than NetHack, with very tight balance in the early game.
But I would also say that there are a lot of other Roguelikes that try to do what DCSS does (such as Rift Wizard) and some also that take NetHack’s approach (such as Caves of Qud). This is evidence enough to me that both designs have merit and that people are interested in playing both.
So I would conclude that it’s inappropriate to call DCSS a better game than NetHack. It’s a different game, with different goals, not a replacement.
This seems subjective? I mean, sure, it's grindy to pick up cheap helm after cheap helm, but there are other ways of getting money for shops, or getting items from shops without money, or getting by without shops entirely if need be. You can adapt your gameplay to your preferences and/or what the game is giving you.
Similarly with traps: playing without much specific care for them (beyond maybe getting a helm and poison resistance as quickly as possible) basically makes them random bad effects. You can choose to play more carefully or experience them as "sourceless malevolence."
People talk a lot about nethack lacking tradeoffs compared to DCSS and while it's apt enough for the late game where lots of ascension kit gear and other prep have a strong particular shape, I think that's wrong for the early and mid games which offer a wide variety of options and play for reaching intermediate goals.
I would say.. maybe? IMO it's just fun in a different way.
