What's the best dungeon crawler?
What's the best dungeon crawler?
Ultima Underworld
eye divine cybermancy
wixardry Xth and 2
Generation Xth trilogy
Playing through arcana in the evenings before bed.
Breddy gud
Windows screensaver maze.
Sapes vs Thals
doom rpg 2
streamable.com
What makes a good crawler? What really makes you enjoy them? I was just bored with the site going down so I finally messed around with godot and vibe coding and think with a big effort I could make a shit etrian-like.
Cirnozardry.
I will warn you it's an extremely niche genre, but good dungeons
Barony
underrated and overrated at the same time
The exploration and combat need to be fun: To make it fun, dungeon has to be dangerous, big but not annoying, risky but rewarding. The combat has to be satisfying and meaty. Good graphics are a plus. You also need good character progression
I enjoy secrets and reactivity but that's not always present.
KING'S FIELD 4
Demise: Ascension
IRL Brazil
truly the FFXIII of dungeon crawlers
For me it's combat too, I think trying to come up with party synergies is a good start. I enjoyed Potato Flowers recently and there's a lot of that there even with three man parties.
1: good density of happenings on individual floors (chests, events, etc)
2: clear and brutal division between the challenge level of each zone/floor as opposed to gentle difficulty curves
3: somewhat reliable ways to escape from or avoid encounters
4: floors with clear theming and purpose - find something that works for each floor and run with it instead of shitting all over a graph paper sheet
5: fewer strong floors are better than many shitty floors - Etrian Odyssey suffers from this quantity over quality issue quite badly at times due to its insistence on its strata/floor counts when it might have benefited from more focused design
I liked World of Xeen
Wizardry Variants Daphne is pretty damn good. The mobile version is confy af.
This. Making the dungeon dangerous I think is especially important, otherwise it feels too safe and not fun. You should want that feeling of 'should I keep going or turn back?' often. Once you clear a floor or return to it later, then thats fine to not feel as threatened. I think there should always be a point where you are thinking 'what is beyond this'. Also changing the scenery, music, enemies, and even adding gimmicks for a few floors helps so it doesn't feel samey.
The Etrian Odyssey games do that well. Everything is dangerous on that floor and you have to consider the risks of pressing forward or turning back before its too late.
Just touhou things.
Escape is never handled well, it's either rngshit, consumables which are too rare or too common or skill based escapes which are just too powerful even with health costs. Dunno how you'd handle it. Some of etrians floors are a drag I agree, 5 per stratum in the older games wasnt good. I think quests baked into the floors rather than having a beginning and end outside of the dungeon would help, like extended events.
Just rip off strange journey. The best dungeon crawling game.
What makes a good crawler?
dungeons need to have a good design while being labyrinthine and the progression needs to feel meaningful. if the dungeon is too complex spaghetti vomit it sucks. it also sucks if it's too simple so good luck trying to find the perfect balance. and I by progression I mean the act of backtracking to town and then going back into the dungeon. there should be like landmarks to pass by when moving back and forward to remind the player of the progress they've made.
Enchant Farm-style escape - guaranteed escape as long as you pay an MP penalty that scales with your level difference vs the enemy's. Makes it easy to ignore pointless battles you don't have a reason to fight while giving a limited but reliable option when faced with actual threats. The task then is to make MP restorative items/opportunities precious rather than doling them out willy nilly.
this, and by a longshot
If it counts for anything, I really enjoyed UFO 50's Valbrace for the Punch-Out like combat, I thought that was cool as fuck. And I was drawing out my own map to make sure I didn't lose track of shit like the walls that show you the inputs to use important magic spells. The only downside was that the enemy variety wasn't the best, I think if it had three or four more enemies in each major area (0-2, 3-4, 5-6), it wouldn't have felt as stale by the end.
youtube.com
Imagine what else could be done with a dungeon crawler building off this. You could have enemies that engage you and the combat is more like a shooter, able to stun enemies by shooting them in the right spot at the right moment or even canceling or repelling projectiles, the tougher enemies could lead to some back and forth moments. Sure, not a traditional dungeon-crawler, but it could be fun.
Interesting idea. On the MP front, one idea I liked from the persona dungeon games (not that there was much to like imo) was having that "minimum" MP from your persona if I'm remembering right since you were never truly out and you could probably use this to make encounters slightly harder or checkpoints further away from each other. Not that they did that in the game. MP restoring itself is always a tough one because it's usually too easy to stock up and skills are either must haves or useless.
just make escape 100% success rate but random battles are activated by roaming enemies in the dungeon, and fleeing battle doesnt despawn them. and do that busin wizardry alternative thing where if enemy touches you from behind you start the battle with reversed rows and enemy ambush.
Legend of Grimrock
vibe-coding
shit, ai made this?
there's like 4 people in the entire world who have played this game, excluding the person who made it
Like, I already know one of you is elephantparade
I like 4 a lot but maybe more for atmosphere and music and stuff, the first 3 are great too and have some fun unique charm of their own.
tfw really want to play more dos games but I'm a turbo sperg anal about displays and don't have a crt monitor, and no dos emulator has decent shader options or any way to counter my 16:9 display obviously not translating 4:3 perfectly
A large portion of it, all the shit graphics are mine for now. I have to write python at work though so I'm able to do a lot of changes myself and point the AI in the right direction for fixes.
People say Wizardry 7 but I haven't played it yet. From the ones that I did, I'd say Dungeon Travelers 2-2 but I'm an otaku so I'm biased.
Fucking this, nothing better than exploring a dungeon and going back to your base with loot before sleeping soundly.
7 people, chud
Gonna be 8 when I play it (soon)
Lands of Lore 1, nothing comes close or ever will.
Diablo 1 until you figure out how to break it
Grimwah
Ehehe...
these and pic related once it's out of (((early access)))
oh yeah also arx fatalis
Anime fighting game tier writing and story.
I should go back to Labyrinth no Kanata someday. I remember it being fun.
Is this one of those "can't pirate this shit cause it's too niche" things, Revenge of the Tavern Keeper is nowhere to be found.
Filtered.
The dev's planning to release it on GOG and Steam eventually, not sure when though. It's up on e-junkie for now.
decklinsdomain.e-junkie.com
Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land, Kowloon Youma Gakuenki, Wizardry 8, EO III, IV and V, SMT SJ/SJ Redux, SMT II, VTMB.
All of them are dead btw. Wizardry is a gacha and SMT is open world trash.
The "dungeons" in smtv
Genuinely embarrassing.
i never mentioned smtv
Anon, you may have undiagnosed dyslexia or autism.
You guys realise he posted something after the linebreak right?
Love replaying shadow tower. And shadow tower abyss is my quick and guilty dungeon crawling pleasure.
Etrian 3
Wizardry Bussin
Wizardry Bussin
Kowloon Youma Gakuenki
Based for actually knowing about it.
Smt is open world
V is not open world you retard. All the areas are designed to be cleared in a strictly linear way outside of ueno which is the open one, and even then you are still guided by levels.
Wizardry Bussin
Is Wizardry Bussin actually Bussin?
thunderscape
smtv is not open world because it has some...........le corridors
bro better say cap right now
SMT V is not open. You cannot tackle the objectives in any order. The daats are almost explicit lines (aside from Ueno). They have these big areas, but they are just sections with hazards to traverse and with specific ways to be cleared for you to progress.
legend of grimrock 1
ok, that's fair enough, i never mentioned smtv though.
Climbing a big tower with the bros to retrieve a macguffin and save the kingdom. You don't need anything else.
2spooky4u?
fippy bippy