Here's a game that will be thoroughly interesting to see on a Steam Deck. Caves of Qud is a fantastic science fantasy roguelike epic and the developers have been busy.
In the latest update not only have they added in a ton more content like two minor late-game regions, 48 new Achievements, makeovers to multiple areas, new animations and more — they've also made big improvements to gamepad support.
This new input system isn't fully ready and so it needs be manually enabled in the control settings under the pre-release option, but even so testing with an Xbox pad today it feels pretty great. It's good news for the Steam Deck too, as it's enabled by default if it detects you playing on it and scales things up a bit to be clearer.
Never thought this would work so well with a gamepad.
Game Features (to name just a few...):
- Assemble your character from over 70 mutations and defects and 24 castes and kits—outfit yourself with wings, two heads, quills, four arms, flaming hands, or the power to clone yourself—it's all the character diversity you could want.
- Explore procedurally-generated regions with some familiar locations—each world is nearly 1 million maps large.
- Dig through everything—don't like the wall blocking your way? Dig through it with a pickaxe, or eat through it with your corrosive gas mutation, or melt it to lava. Yes, every wall has a melting point.
- Hack the limbs off monsters—every monster and NPC is as fully simulated as the player. That means they have levels, skills, equipment, faction allegiances, and body parts. So if you have a mutation that lets you, say, psionically dominate a spider, you can traipse through the world as a spider, laying webs and eating things.
- Pursue allegiances with over 60 factions—apes, crabs, robots, and highly entropic beings—just to name a few.
You can purchase a copy from GOG, itch.io and Steam.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
Agree with Samsai, Roleplay mode is the best thing they ever did to the game (although you could turn on save/load and turn off permadeath before, but it was buried deep in the options). I highly recommend playing that mode, and the presets are pretty good. The winged gunslinger with a force bubble is especially good for survivability.
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mZSq7Fq3qs Feb 21, 2022
Quoting: SamsaiQuoting: mZSq7Fq3qsDied maybe 8 times today but it was always my own fault.Caves of Qud does still occasionally have a problem, where you just end up dying and you didn't really have any reasonable way to avoid it. Stumbling into ruins as a low-level character and being ambushed by a chitinous puma that you can neither run away from or kill or running into a surprise rifle turret around a corner and being instantly killed sucks. On this aspect I think Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup does better, because it feels like 95% of deaths are due to hubris or panicking whereas CoQ deaths are sometimes super unavoidable unless you grind very hard early on and maintain a paranoid playstyle.
But the Roleplay mode helps immensely and if you want a character to last I recommend it highly. Qud has a ton of content already and permadeath eats a lot of low-level characters, so it's fairly hard to get to the meat and potatoes part of the game with it enabled.
Thanks for the tip. Never tried stone soup.
I feel that permadeath is big part of roguelikes but probably will give roleplay mode at some time.
Big part also why COQ feels so good right now is that it has a quite unique theme (atleast for me ).
I've played nethack a lot lately and it feels fun to be in a sci-fi setup.
Last edited by mZSq7Fq3qs on 21 February 2022 at 5:55 am UTC
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Quoting: mZSq7Fq3qsQuoting: SamsaiQuoting: mZSq7Fq3qsDied maybe 8 times today but it was always my own fault.Caves of Qud does still occasionally have a problem, where you just end up dying and you didn't really have any reasonable way to avoid it. Stumbling into ruins as a low-level character and being ambushed by a chitinous puma that you can neither run away from or kill or running into a surprise rifle turret around a corner and being instantly killed sucks. On this aspect I think Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup does better, because it feels like 95% of deaths are due to hubris or panicking whereas CoQ deaths are sometimes super unavoidable unless you grind very hard early on and maintain a paranoid playstyle.
But the Roleplay mode helps immensely and if you want a character to last I recommend it highly. Qud has a ton of content already and permadeath eats a lot of low-level characters, so it's fairly hard to get to the meat and potatoes part of the game with it enabled.
Thanks for the tip. Never tried stone soup.
I feel that permadeath is big part of roguelikes but probably will give roleplay mode at some time.
Big part also why COQ feels so good right now is that it has a quite unique theme (atleast for me ).
I've played nethack a lot lately and it feels fun to be in a sci-fi setup.
I've said it before, but I believe that permadeath in CoQ is an artifact left over from early in development, when the game was a more traditional roguelike. The game itself has strayed considerably from those roots and become a much different experience. Outside of challenge runs like the dailies, it's now more focused on the story and worldbuilding, which is very hard to appreciate when you're constantly being sent back to the beginning thanks to bad luck.
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mZSq7Fq3qs Feb 22, 2022
Quoting: NezchanQuoting: mZSq7Fq3qsQuoting: SamsaiQuoting: mZSq7Fq3qsDied maybe 8 times today but it was always my own fault.Caves of Qud does still occasionally have a problem, where you just end up dying and you didn't really have any reasonable way to avoid it. Stumbling into ruins as a low-level character and being ambushed by a chitinous puma that you can neither run away from or kill or running into a surprise rifle turret around a corner and being instantly killed sucks. On this aspect I think Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup does better, because it feels like 95% of deaths are due to hubris or panicking whereas CoQ deaths are sometimes super unavoidable unless you grind very hard early on and maintain a paranoid playstyle.
But the Roleplay mode helps immensely and if you want a character to last I recommend it highly. Qud has a ton of content already and permadeath eats a lot of low-level characters, so it's fairly hard to get to the meat and potatoes part of the game with it enabled.
Thanks for the tip. Never tried stone soup.
I feel that permadeath is big part of roguelikes but probably will give roleplay mode at some time.
Big part also why COQ feels so good right now is that it has a quite unique theme (atleast for me ).
I've played nethack a lot lately and it feels fun to be in a sci-fi setup.
I've said it before, but I believe that permadeath in CoQ is an artifact left over from early in development, when the game was a more traditional roguelike. The game itself has strayed considerably from those roots and become a much different experience. Outside of challenge runs like the dailies, it's now more focused on the story and worldbuilding, which is very hard to appreciate when you're constantly being sent back to the beginning thanks to bad luck.
Ok, I undestand wha you mean. Is there any penalty for dying? Other than youll go back to the starting location?
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Quoting: mZSq7Fq3qsQuoting: NezchanQuoting: mZSq7Fq3qsQuoting: SamsaiQuoting: mZSq7Fq3qsDied maybe 8 times today but it was always my own fault.Caves of Qud does still occasionally have a problem, where you just end up dying and you didn't really have any reasonable way to avoid it. Stumbling into ruins as a low-level character and being ambushed by a chitinous puma that you can neither run away from or kill or running into a surprise rifle turret around a corner and being instantly killed sucks. On this aspect I think Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup does better, because it feels like 95% of deaths are due to hubris or panicking whereas CoQ deaths are sometimes super unavoidable unless you grind very hard early on and maintain a paranoid playstyle.
But the Roleplay mode helps immensely and if you want a character to last I recommend it highly. Qud has a ton of content already and permadeath eats a lot of low-level characters, so it's fairly hard to get to the meat and potatoes part of the game with it enabled.
Thanks for the tip. Never tried stone soup.
I feel that permadeath is big part of roguelikes but probably will give roleplay mode at some time.
Big part also why COQ feels so good right now is that it has a quite unique theme (atleast for me ).
I've played nethack a lot lately and it feels fun to be in a sci-fi setup.
I've said it before, but I believe that permadeath in CoQ is an artifact left over from early in development, when the game was a more traditional roguelike. The game itself has strayed considerably from those roots and become a much different experience. Outside of challenge runs like the dailies, it's now more focused on the story and worldbuilding, which is very hard to appreciate when you're constantly being sent back to the beginning thanks to bad luck.
Ok, I undestand wha you mean. Is there any penalty for dying? Other than youll go back to the starting location?
You have to make a whole new character, and obviously you need to do all the early game stuff all over again. But you're not starting with a debuff or anything, no.
It is a bit tiresome the 30th time you have to go to Red Rock though, because you can't get past [REDACTED] or are unlucky enough to run into a [FNORD].
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