Ancient Domains of Mystery – ADOM, to it’s mates – has been kicking round for lengthy whereas. A posh and conventional roguelike within the vein of Nethack, the place all the pieces appears to work together with all the pieces else on some degree, and loss of life appears inevitable with out intensive trial and error.
The previous few years have been treating this outdated workhorse effectively. While historically freeware, it returned to full growth due to gross sales of a Deluxe version of the sport through Steam, and a crowdfunding drive, giving paying gamers entry to new builds early. Now a serious new replace for the sport has simply rolled out for everybody, bringing all gamers free and paid alike as much as the identical level.
For those that haven’t performed ADOM because the days of ASCII, it feels virtually like a brand new sport, and considerably extra accessible due to an in-game tutorial and a mouse UI that, whereas nonetheless utilizing some text-based screens, permits for way more intuitive play total. That’s to not say that that is a straightforward or forgiving time; ADOM is notoriously merciless and troublesome and would require intensive play and observe to study simply how exhausting you must push to finish the sport earlier than the creeping tide of chaos warps and mutates your character into uselessness.
While the vast majority of the modifications because the final main model (2.three.eight) are bugfixes, there are fairly a couple of new additions to the sport which you can see detailed in full here, together with 46 new artifacts to find and a number of new scripted quests scattered across the game-world. Probably probably the most worrying addition is the ominous sounding ‘Ultimate Nihilist Ending’, which I can solely presume is a lower than cheerful strategy to finish the sport, and the patch observe “Tone down the frequency of vomiting darkness” doesn’t bode too effectively both.
Developer Thomas Biskup’s weblog mentions that ADOM ‘classic’ because it stands will nonetheless obtain some help and doable bug-fixes from this level on (as will the Deluxe version on Steam), however he’s now targeted totally on a sequel, Ultimate ADOM. While his plans for the subsequent sport sound maybe a bit over-ambitious (a number of variants of the sport throughout a number of platforms appears like loads to deal with), I want him the most effective of luck, and might’t wait to see what comes of the undertaking over the approaching years.
This new model of ADOM Classic is free for all, and you can find it on IndieDB here. There can also be the commercial Deluxe edition on Steam for £11/$15, which provides issue customization, day by day challenges and world scoreboards, though no actual additions to content material or interface in any other case.
