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Originally Posted by Nick
In particular, tangar, I don’t think you actually play Vanilla Angband very much. It seems to me that you’re treating it a bit like your childhood home – you don’t want it to change, but you don’t want to live there either. Whereas the people who actually live there are probably the ones I should be listening to the most.
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I played TomeNET ~4 years which is basically multiplayer vanilla with whistles and bells. As I do not play in party, I always play solo – my gameplay experience is very close to Angband singleplayer (but with real-time which makes game much harder). And now I work/play at Tangaria which is based on PWMAngband which is much, much closer to vanilla then TomeNET; all PWMA gamedata is just a copy of V-Angband with a few additions.. And if TomeNET is based at old Angband, PWMA based at modern core.
And before that I played Moria and Rogue. So I know where this staff came from. Btw, speaking about Moria – a few years ago I’ve wrote an article to popular Russian game magazine which had a name: “Roguelike: where do Diablo’s ears stick out”: http://tangar.info/game-magazine/roguelike-history, to popularize rlg genre.
So I know Angband lore and spirit firsthand. I know monsters which you delete from the game. I know a lot of their properties by heart as while you play in real-time – you can not look in spoilers.
And I’m not just playing the game, I’m streaming – communicating with viewers, reading their comments at the same time when I play real-time Angband. It’s pretty special experience which require some skills (yep, I’m not too humble when someone occuse me being incompetent).
But it doesn’t matter – the most important that I love Vanilla World. I learned A LOT from it.
I was Tolkien maniac for a long time. I didn’t read much fantasy exept him, I’ve continued to read LOTR again and again. But after playing Angband (TomeNET) – I’ve met there a lot of monsters which I didn’t recognize. I’ve read their description and I opened new books and new fantasy universes and worlds for myself. This is USEFUL, educational element of the game which you destroying right now. Even having Medusa giving some new lore to ‘modern’ gamers who do not really read a lot of books, but watching movies.
Vanilla had HUGE advantage towards strict-universe games cause there you got a lot of different mythology. Devs should enhance this direction for the game – it gives players new knowledge. Having a lot of Tolkien is cool thing too, but purging everything else and making it pure-Tolkien game is a mistake.