| paleface [sys=PC; cat=Roguelike; reg=UC] |
| | | Out of Steam early access today so I plopped down my money and started it up to see if it looks like something I can get along with.
It does.
- Controller support
Works fine with the DualShock. The default (and I'm not sure they're remappable) controls are a little unintuitive; couldn't even figure out how to move my character! Had to quit and restart in Tutorial mode where it explained that to move you uh what was it press the left analog stick in the desired direction, then press R2. To move a square. I think. Whew. Well, I suppose it's something you get used to…
- Eyeballs
You can crank a Contrast slider all the way up to get rid of the game's patented faded pastel look and have a nice black background. You can also toggle off various flashing FX, it says, so hopefully the game won't zap my eyeballs when I finally get to some heavy action.
- Guns
I'm not into shooting guns in games these days but it looks like there are at LEAST a couple melee-focused typical character builds–the first couple were and I haven't looked farther than that yet–so this looks like it should be workable. And I wouldn't mind a crossbow or something, don't know if it has those.
- Non-permadeath
"Classic" mode is permadeath but some modes (one was called "Roleplay" or something I think) say something about saving at checkpoints or checkpointing in towns or something which maybe means being able to restore from a recent spot if you die? Which is what I would prefer because I've discovered from playing Angband that I actually kinda hate permadeath; I want to be able to chill out and fool around and be able to make mistakes, otherwise I get stressed out and that's not why I play games. So anyway I think my wimpiness will be at least somewhat catered to. |
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| | | | (That's a cropped and resized version of the icon it comes with from Steam, which is weirdly small in the taskbar by default. : P) |
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Newly out of Steam early access. DualSense controller. Flashing FX are turned off and contrast is at max.
0:00 - start
0:53 - Options
5:29 - Tutorial
48:50 - Warden Yrame kills Joppa
1:02:21 - character creation (roleplay mode)
1:23:03 - Red Rock
2:08:12 - changing the default controls
Apparently Joppa resident Mehmet can randomly roll "negative reputations with Wardens" and this leads to Warden Yrame going on a killing spree in her own town--which is what happened to me on my first go right out of the Tutorial! https://steamcommunity.com/app/333640/discussions/0/6194224571381644689/
Controls saga short version: changed the following controls
d-pad: move N/E/S/W
left analog up: move NW
left analog down: move SW
right analog up: move NE
right analog down: move SE
Square: activate lookaround (move w/ d-pad)
Triangle: Interact with nearby (or whatever it's called)
L1: Move up (ie up stairs, to up staircase, or from town to countryside)
L2: Move down (ditto but down)
R2: fire missile weapon
Longer:
Can get abilities list with L2 plus Square so don't need to dpad left/right for bottom ability list, so I remapped d-pad to cardinal movement, set left analog cardinals to diagonal movements (rotated 45 degrees ehhh), removed the L1 "melee nearest" mapping, moved the R1 "fire ranged" to R2, which I think was unused--oh right it was being used for generic movement in combination with the left stick, which I hated--which left L1 and R1 available, so I put the "Move Up" and "Move Down" commands--which mean up/down in terms of either stairs or moving up or down a navigation scale, like up from town to the countryside, or down from the countryside to town--on L1 and R1 instead of d-pad up/down. (Move Up / Move Down also serve as shortcuts to offer to auto-navigate you to the nearest stairway up/down!)
Anyway so now I won't need to hold/press R2 constantly in combination with left analog to move around, and can mostly do it with d-pad, and then fumble around with Qberty rotated movement for diagonals with left analog har; that'll be a bit awkward but at least I won't keep aggravating my ol' shoulder by having to mash R2 all the time just to move.
I'd prefer to be able to do diagonals with left/right analog up/down, but for some reason right analog is stuck on some sort of "navigate" menu thing that I don't know what it even does, or why that should interrupt adventuring movement. (I've put this and some other things I came across with the controls into Qud's issue tracker as bugs/suggestions--like, it would be handy if I could just press X on the controller to bring up the interaction menu for the dreadroot plants I was whacking for food, instead of having to press four or more inputs just to bring up that menu to be able to select to attack them; currently, X seems to default to just trying to talk to whatever's next to you, even if it--like the dreadroots--has no capacity for speech.)
AH okay I've um let's see I just needed to free up right analog up and right analog down for the diagonals--I set those to Touchpad (which doesn't work) and Triangle--triangle wasn't actually doing anything useful in the menus.
So I've got my Angband-style d-pad / up/down analogs for 8 way movement! : ) Also, I've set Square to toggle Look--which I can then move with the d-pad--and Triangle to Interact, instead of having to hit L2 plus X, which is annoying. : PP
Much more stoked about doing a second Qud session now. ^ _^
OH so you use the "Make camp" ability by selecting it, then pressing a direction in which to place the fire next to your character--then you can just press X while standing next to it to get the "Whip up a meal" option (you get fancier stuff if you have a cooking skill) and there's your food problem taken care off. So no need to be rooting around in terror with all those dreadroots and things. Hm I could have used the tutorial explaining that to me because somehow when I tried "Make camp" it didn't seem to work--I was probably stuck on the direction selection part and backed out or something instead of pressing a direction, I dunno; but also "Make camp" doesn't necessarily communicate that you're going to be fed for free. (Ah yeah, I guess I did skip making the actual campfire--probably not supposed to be able to do that, I've reported it as a bug.)
The game's made-up vocabulary is hard to understand. = P |
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| | | The "Debug" section at the bottom of the Options screen has some interesting settings that aren't actually debugging options. The top three have to do with getting around permadeath by disabling deletion of saves on death, enabling save/load (not sure exactly how this will work), and giving a prompt on death (I read a comment on the Steam forum I think saying this restores you with full health or something).
Those sound like more of what I wanted rather than the option to make a manual checkpoint (are these save points? not really clear) in towns when using "Roleplay" mode--which appears to be somewhat misleadingly named as, as far as I can tell from googling, the only difference between Roleplay and Classic modes is that Roleplay has the checkpoint option.
Another non-debug option in the Debug section is an option to disable preloading all sounds, which I think was enabled--ie, preloading all sounds is disabled--by default; when I unchecked it and restarted the game, it took much longer to start up, and Task Manager reported it occupying 1.7+ GB of RAM at the starting menu, instead of 500 MB or so. Might avoid the slight hiccup when moving between floors of a dungeon? Didn't get that far with it, think I'll just leave the preloading disabled. |
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| | | Qud is not open source but does have an issue tracker here: https://bitbucket.org/bbucklew/cavesofqud-public-issue-tracker/issues . A pinned 2020 post in the Steam forum linking to the tracker says it allows anonymous reporting but that doesn't appear to be the case now, as the "Create issue" button doesn't appear until you create a free "Atlassian" account (which then sort of sticks you in generic bitbucket/Atlassian menus or something and you have to go track down the URL back to the Qud issue tracker manually, and I think log in anew there : P).
I had one of the game's two main devs respond within 12 hours to bugs and suggestions I entered late on the first day of the game leaving early access--mostly just assigning them to some milestone or other, like "Future," so that was nice.
A lot of people have just defaulted to reporting bugs haphazardly in the pinned post linking to the tracker, and the dev does respond there regularly.
For a declared 17 years of development the game does have a surprising amount of fairly easy-to-stumble-into bugs.
And I'd finally got myself out of the Angband bug vortex by making myself a version of that game based on a fixed past build... ; ) |
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Playing recently out of Steam early access classic-style roguelike game Caves of Qud using a DualSense controller. Flashing FX are turned off and contrast is at max.
0:36 - debug options to avoid permadeath (I think)
7:50 - Silver 10th Ekaruk (wilderness ruins)
24:30 - bow
29:51 - rust wells
35:33 - saved from rustacean by ubernostrum injector
40:05 - Mind's Compass "Make Camp" UI bug
50:58 - thirsty
More kinda boring newbie missions and monsters, hard-to-read dungeon graphics, and now foraging for water. Whee? Continuing to have the feeling that I'm just more of an Angband person--don't like messing with ability shopping, water hunting, quests, trades with everyone, wilderness areas, mysteriously written "lore," etc; think I have more fun just being in a dungeon bopping old dnd monsters on the head. ; D
My reconfigured controller controls have worked out so far, so that's good, anyway. And hey I found a bow! So that's something. |
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