dibs

Tales of Maj'Eyal

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Tales of Maj’Eyal (ToME) is a free, open source roguelike RPG, featuring tactical turn-based combat and advanced character building.  Play as one of many unique races and classes in the lore-filled world of Eyal, exploring random dungeons, facing challenging battles, and developing characters with your own tailored mix of abilities and powers.  With a modern graphical and customisable interface, intuitive mouse control, streamlined mechanics and deep, challenging combat, Tales of Maj’Eyal offers engaging roguelike gameplay for the 21st century.

 

Yada, yada. What it is is awesome! More structured than a lot of the RPG heavy roguelikes, and a tileset! Also, interface is predictably terrible. All in all, i'm loving it. Also, very difficuly. The classes seem nicely differentiated (I always get overwhealmed by open ended class systems).

 

Anyone playing it?

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I've fooled around with it a few times and it's a good game, especially considering it's basically been a hobby project for so long. I think it's probably the best available "traditional" roguelike. They also recently got a commercial version greenlit on Steam that has the normal expected features like achievements, cloud syncing, etc. Worth picking up if you want to support the project.

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Tis the Steam version I have. There is some sort of online integration going on, but i haven't explored them yet.

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I got the Steam version in an indie bundle and...

 

How long is the game? It seems like you have to complete quests to unlock new classes, so I'm really hoping the game isn't too long. Also, I somehow managed to reach the boss of an area only to die quickly, I restarted the game with the same character and didn't find any boss and the end of the dungeon. :|

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I don't have any idea how long a run is typically. I've been having a lot of fun with the base classes and the 2 i unlocked. It's a roguelike though, so to say "how long is a game" is more "how long can i survive".

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The unlockable system doesn't have much to do with game length since they mostly are about making specific choices or killing specific bosess, most of which happen before level 20.

As dibs said, it's a roguelike so game length scales mostly with your decision making speed and routine. I've been playing for a couple of years very intermittently and only recently gotten the bug again, and I'd say I can get to the East in about 4 hours of playtime.

I usually play on adventurer mode because I think the lives system is a wonderful way to make the game's occasional completely unfair minibosses more bearable. In this way it hits an almost perfect balance for me between the high-stakes gameplay of roguelikes in general and at least some respect for my time in that it lets me recover from several fuckups per characters.

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I miraculously survived two dungeons... on easy (it's still crazy though), only to be given four more dungeons to complete. Six dungeons in a roguelike is kinda ridiculous, aren't they usually just one dungeon?

 

I'm hoping six dungeons is the max, although I'm not sure I'll live long enough to find out. Those minibosses are tougher than normal bosses or something? In the middle of one dungeon, I met a special skeleton that took a few lives from me. 

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ToMe is one of a rare family of roguelikes pioneered by ADoM that has an overworld with many shallow dungeons rather than a single deep one.

I prefer these, but some prefer the Crawl/Spelunky approach of branchess off a single deep dungeon.

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Something like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is technically one dungeon, but it goes down and down and down. Inside the dungeon there is also vaults and sub levels (like the orc mines). MJ just moves to an overworld approach. I also like it better, it lets me pick and choose the order I do the dungeons in. For instance, I'm pretty good at the trollmire and the woods now. I can gauge pretty well if i can take the big 2nd boss in the trollmire or leave him till later. I can ignore anywhere there may be rogues for now, as they are the biggest weakness I have, in my already impressively weak game plan.

 

Roguelikes probably aren't the place to go if you want to be a tourist. I've never been past level 10 in DCSS, never finished any of the side dungeons in it, i've never been past level 14 in Brogue, i can barely handle the attic in Rogue Legacy, and i've seen the icecaves maybe 3 times in Spelunky - none of lack of progress matters to me much, i'm there for the journey and to see what hilarious horrible things will happen to be next. In MJ, i can finish three of the starter dungeons, the extra trollmire boss and the orc tower - I am now getting brave enough to try the maze or the worm tunnel. Playing on normal adventurer that is. 

 

Edit: Speaking of which, any tips for dealing with rogues. I tend to favour the bulwark and cursed, and i generally get eaten by them.

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I assume you're putting points into the accuracy generic talent already? The main issue with rogues tends to be missing them a couple of turns in a row.

Cursed definitely can have trouble with them (one solution is to go shields early on until you get your offensive stats off the ground), but they should be pretty easy on bulwark given all their defensive tools plus the fact that dex is one of their main stats anyway.

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And my bulwark is powering on. Completed the worm tunnels and unlocked a new class. Died once I Daiktana(?) so I fled as it seemed a bit nasty. I found a belt that makes me undead so I can do the underwater parts easily. that said, I've lost all my lives but one so I'm getting very nervous. It will be a while before I'm brave enough to go full balls to the wall permadeath.

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ToME isn't really designed or balanced around roguelike (ie. one life) mode. I wouldn't recommend it unless you get bored.

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I bought the Steam version of this and played it but I, oddly, got bored because I'm playing on Normal-Roguelike and finished two dungeons without even coming close to death on my first dude. I just have so many abilities and equipment that it feels more like Diablo than Nethack or Dungeon Crawl and kind of a breeze.

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It gets more difficult pretty fast and you'll soon enough be cursing getting blown up in two rounds if you continue on. Make sure you always have some escape options.

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I bought the Steam version of this and played it but I, oddly, got bored because I'm playing on Normal-Roguelike and finished two dungeons without even coming close to death on my first dude. I just have so many abilities and equipment that it feels more like Diablo than Nethack or Dungeon Crawl and kind of a breeze.

 

ya I had a similar experience. You breeze though screens full of mobs, then one of the cannon fodder enemies kills you in 2 hits because it randomly rolled some insane combo of abilities. It always felt a bit underhanded, like the game was designed to be played impatiently but pulls the rug out when some dice rolls align.

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Any enemies that can have nonstandard abilities have a brightly coloured outline, so in general that sort of thing shouldn't be surprising after the first couple of times.

The power of enemies does fluctuate wildly, that's one of the reasons I like the lives system - it puts the game at the perfect tension level for me.

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I'm getting much better at ToME, more than I feel i ever have with a roguelike. I managed to clear everything up to Dreadfall, and then died there to a room full of level 40 energy beings that I had no business fighting repeatedly with my summoner. Great fun all round. Time for a reroll, but I'm not sure what to go with.

Osmosisch, i see references to

the far east

in places. How do i get there? So far i generally do:

Opening level, trollmire, old forest, the orc tower, maze, old forest, worms, daiktana and then i guess dreadfall (only got passed all that once, i usually die perminantly somewhere in the temporal rift or daiktana). I aslo take on the smaller dungeons if i can.

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You get there by defeating Dreadfell and doing the followup quests, basically.

I always do all the starter dungeons just for more chances at cool artifacts.

I tend to duck into the golem graveyard sometime around the maze. I try to set the storm peak to a low level and then go do something else for a while because Urkis is a dick.

It's really amazing how much room there is for improvement in games like ToME. I rarely die now before hitting Dreadfell, though I've been playing less lately due to other games capturing my interest more strongly.

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