![]() It had a full array of attributes, races, classes, and abilities before NetHack did. On the other hand, Moria does have a number of its own innovations, including a town level and more complex shops. There are no alignments or religious system.There are no special encounters like thrones, sinks, and fountains.Items cannot be used in conjunction with each other.It is not a worse item, intrinsically, than a non-cursed version. While items can be "cursed," the effect is simply to make the item non-removable.Valuable items are found randomly in the dungeon, not on slain foes. Enemies don't drop any equipment and only rarely drop treasure.There are no intrinsics (save the "abilities" that we'll talk about) and no eating of corpses.I'm going to cover each of the major sections of the game in detail (most in the next post), but before I do, let me simply mention some of the main differences from NetHack for those of you stuck (as I was) in a NetHack mindset before playing: You don't so much "win" Moria as outlast it.Īs with other roguelikes, inventories can get out of control very fast. In Moria, I've played twice that long only to die on Level 20. NetHack took a long time to win because of the difficulty, but my actual winning game took less than 8 hours of actual gameplay. Perhaps most important, the sheer number and size of the levels increase the cumulative probability of death. Harder monsters may get multiple movements to your one (more on speed variances in the next post), making it hard to kill them and impossible to flee them. In the later stages, on the other hand, Moria can be a real bastard. White worm masses replicate and swarm, leading to a rare early-level death if you're so stupid that you take them on. Finally, because you can get a brand new level just by leaving and returning, you don't feel the same obligation to explore every corner that you do with Rogue. Enemies are relatively weak, and conditions like "poison" are only temporary and do not affect attributes, only hit points. Because enemies hardly ever re-spawn, you usually have very large, cleared "safe" areas in which to dither around and regenerate hit points. It's quite hard to die in the first five or so levels, except through carelessness or really bad luck. I found the game relatively easy in its early stages. Monsters respawn extremely slowly on levels you've already cleared.Upon arriving on a new level, you must find new staircases both to go down and to return to upper levels. Because of the random generation, all staircases are one-way.There's no need to exhaustively explore a level, as you only have to go down and then back up to regenerate the level with new monsters and treasures. Although you can move both up and down in the dungeon (and return to town), dungeon levels are randomly-generated every time you visit.The dungeon levels are very large, occupying multiple screens.Several characteristics of dungeon generation make Moria significantly different from Rogue and, ultimately, NetHack: Killing it immediately and victoriously ends the game. Assuming the player makes it that far, the balrog is found somewhere around Level 50. From here, the player descends into 50+ levels of randomly-generated dungeons, slaying monsters, increasing levels, and finding better pieces of equipment on the way. The game begins above-ground, in a town with multiple shops and a handful of crude NPCs. ![]() (The two names are lifted from the works of an obscure 20th century British author.) There's no other back story or context to the game world. Moria's main quest is to descend into the mines of Moria and slay a balrog. Another centipede awaits me in the room beyond, as well as a potion. ![]() On Level 1 of the dungeon and character Level 2, I fight a giant white centipede, who happens to be standing right next to a kobold. In discussing the game, I'll try to make more comparisons to Rogue, its predecessor, than NetHack.Ī typical Moria screen. Ultimately, NetHack is a much better game, but of course it's also much later. Having invested an absurd number of hours in NetHack last year, it was very difficult to re-learn the interface and conventions of a visually-similar but mechanically-different game. Some, but not all, of the commands, items, and monsters are the same. Unsatisfying and disconcerting, I should say, because the game looks like NetHack and yet operates under different rules. Moria is certainly a good roguelike and a good CRPG for 1983, but it's somewhat unsatisfying playing it after NetHack. The frequency and permanence of this screen separates roguelikes from normal RPGs. Most of them also feature some kind of complex logistics associated with items, including an identification system, creative ways in which they interact, and a large variety of items to wear, wield, and use. These four elements seem to be on everyone's list.
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