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Thread: When and how did you start playing ADOM ?

  1. #1
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    Default When and how did you start playing ADOM ?

    Hi guys!

    How did you guys start playing ADOM and when ? What has kept you interested in the game so long ?

    I started back in 2000. I was 12 at the time. My friend's neighbour who was a little older was an avid player already, and my neighbour kinda looked up to him at those times and started playing too. Me and him used to play together a lot.. suffice to say, at that age, the game was kinda difficult and save-scumming was absolutely necessary at those times :P

    Since those days I've played ADOM a lot. I managed to win without any exploits in 2008.. After that, I won multiple times and completed some melee speedruns. I believe I was the first to finish a melee run in under 30k turns. It was on the server high score, too bad jaakkos took it down

    Like with many of the more experience players, the game's challenge value became seriously reduced for me too in the latest years, and I lost interest. Luckily, with all the changes lately and with the ones yet to come, I'm looking forward to playing the game again

  2. #2

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    Hi!

    Why do you ask?

    Well, I started with Rogue on the CoCo2 & 3 in 1986. Had some UMoria on the VAX/VMS in college, but I was really wrapped up with MUDs most of the time. Buddy was big into Angband ... he's always been a tolkieneer, but I didn't appreciate most of the extra complexities. ADOM was the only mature roguelike that caught my eye when I was in the military probably in late '94 or '95 perhaps. Was playing around and really liked it although it felt a bit lacking. But the next thing you know... BAM! There was a wilderness. I can still remember saying stuff like "remember that little game I showed you? Well now it's HUGE!" -- iirc, it took me as long as a couple months to realize where the Caverns were relocated to, lol.

    At that time, there were only *Band's and ADOM in development -- I mean, maybe a dozen RL projects, but so few were actually "version 1.0" ready. Well, maybe Nethack should be included too, of course, but that was always on my "joke" list, and not taken seriously. If I had to pick one element, I think I would say ADOM's missle combat pleased me.

    Anyway, don't mistake this for any kind of proclamation about knowing what's going on. I've never made it as far as the casino yet (Spent the first 10 years never looking at spoilers). But it does pain me to be a true veteran who missed the fundraising. Oh well, I've waited years, I'm happy to keep waiting for next full release
    Last edited by Esoteric Rogue; 12-27-2012 at 02:35 AM.

  3. #3
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    Quote Originally Posted by Esoteric Rogue View Post
    Hi!

    Why do you ask?


    Just because I really enjoy reading these forums, lots of great people here, new and old players. Everybody have their stories about how they came to play this game, and it's really cool to hear them :-)

  4. #4

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    Oh! Now I remember.

    The eventual selling point of ADOM for me was the skill system. My own idealized RPG was skill based as opposed to classes and character levels. I remember TOME was starting to pull past ADOM for me... but fortunately for us, I found a reason to boycott DG by reason of insanity.

  5. #5
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    Well, I had a small Acer laptop a couple years ago. I went to a site called Dosgames.com and found the game, which I downloaded, and played. I enjoyed the game till I broke my laptop, and have only recently been able to rejoin. I honestly have never beaten ADOM, mainly due to my not knowing when to run, but I never get discouraged.

  6. #6
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    At some point in mid-late 2006, at the age of 13 years, I stumbled upon NetHack, my first roguelike ever. I was quickly fascinated by this concept completely alien to me, of a fantasy world where your imagination puts the scenery together, possessing unimaginable detail, and where surviving can take a long time to master. As usual for newcomers, I was far from good at it, but that didn't prevent me from playing it to death (pun not intended). After school, and during weekends, guess what I desperately rushed to do right after turning my PC on. I even made a portable version to take at the computer lab and hack through the dungeons during breaks, because it was that enjoyable.

    Anyway, in November of that year, I found this thing called ADOM, looking for games similar to this so addicting one. Now, I couldn't tell you exactly what it is that I saw in this masterpiece at the time. It might have been the fact it had a wilderness and many dungeons, instead of beginning thrown inside one and not seeing much of the outside world, at least as far as my progress was concerned (never got farther than a few levels below what I think is the Gnomish Mines). It might have been the abundance of monsters that you can actually talk to, rather than just kill. The diversity of race/class combos... to date, I'm still not entirely sure. But it snatched me with even greater strength, and I swiftly forgot about NetHack in favor of this new wonder. As I posted on another thread, my very first dead PC was a dark elf necromancer, killed by a jackal pack in the wilderness, because this thing of pressing '>' to enter places rather than just descending stairs was unknown to me

    I had already "discovered" savescumming via NH, and so (like tapi) didn't hesitate to try it in ADOM after some time, because I was playing just as badly. Don't remember when I exactly found the Guidebook, but I think that by mid-December 2006, I already knew about, and had skimmed through, it. Which didn't do much for me. For whatever reason, I thought the Infinite Dungeon was the CoC, and so happily kept on descending (reloading from saves as necessary), wondering where these altars and pools and herbs mentioned in spoilers were hiding. A few FLGs of me dying in the depths of Infinity are still archived in my disk - a exploding door trap, and a threat room of ghost lords I tried to handle with 1-digit PV, spring to mind right now.

    Sometime in 2007, Google led me to the homepage of a certain program which made the process of illegitimately evading death and empowering of my player character a lot easier. It required me to play an old, patched DOS prerelease, but the upsides made that not relevant in the slightest. I remember packing a floppy disk with a hacked SVG of an uber character, WADOMF, and the game itself compressed so that everything would fit, so that I'd never be interrupted as long as I went anywhere with a computer. (Props to the hardware requirements, which make ADOM perfectly playable on very low-end computers!)

    I first reached Dwarftown a few months after finding the game. I think it was with an elf archer. My first savescummed victory came somewhere around July or August 2009. Reading about the temples, D: 50 and vaults in the Guidebook was one thing, but wading through them and facing the opposition by myself was just incredibly exciting and awesome. My memory's a bit hazy, but I believe I closed the gate with a female dark elf wizard, and was hit by a eternium quarrel from a wandering titan in my way out of the CoC, with predictable results (was low in HP). Not that it mattered, because 1. I had a backup, and 2. the game said I was "shot by a greater titan (after winning)". After winning.

    Since then, I've always kept on playing. There are times when I did so regularly, and those when I kept some distance due to temporary lack of interest, but ADOM always had a place in my hard drive, and I always found myself returning to it, eventually. My first and so far only truly legitimate victory was finally reached in 2011, almost 5 years after playing for the first time. Although heavily scummed, I still felt proud.

    Gee, I wrote quite a lot, so thank you if you've read this far.
    "And light there be!"

  7. #7
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    About year and a half ago I googled "roguelike games", as I heard many good things about genre. There was also a collection of about 20 roguelikes, including very old and very bad translated russian version of ADOM. Nevertheless, the game seemed quite exciting to me and I found the latest version not long after.
    I'm going to win with Dark Elves of all classes.
    Mindcrafter, Necromancer, Beastfighter, ULE Archer, UNE Barbarian done.

  8. #8
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    I also got ADOM from a freeware games website in 2002. It was and still is the first roguelike I played. I always loved fantasy and games, so ADOM fits that and I never fealt inclined to try anything else in the genre. I puposefully try to never cheat. So savescumming and spoiling is something I avoided until earlier this year. The spoiling part that is.

    I was able to close the gate sometime in 2005, I think. I knew about a possible other way of finishing the game, through songs and rumours. So, I seeked the trinity and found all parts. Never could figure out what to do after that, so stopped playing for 7 years. Got fed-up with WotC's MTG, so returned to ADOM and here I am.

    Spoiled in most of 1.1.1.'s tricks and so. Very happy to explore the new stuff being added.
    Learn to learn.

  9. #9
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    At around 2001 (I was thirteen at the time), I first got my hands on the internet. At that point I started scouring it frantically for downloadable freeware games. I'd played a couple of RPGs at that point, including some that were outright roguelikes or could be argued to be roguelike-like - for instance Castle of the Winds and Diablo I and II. I stumbled across ADOM, and that's where it started. I distinctly remember that I didn't get through the learning barrier the first time. About half a year later, sometime in 2002, I would download the game again. This time it was version 1.1.1 from the official website. (I'm pretty sure my first character was a human fighter, and even got to like level 6, but I don't know whether he died of starvation or something else.) There was no going back after that.

    My first successful characters by any stretch of the word were high elven archers. These were the first characters who would manage to beat the initial dungeons, including the slaying Yrrigs, who I thought at that point was a fairly buff end boss for the village dungeon. I reached level 10 or so reliably, but the first two times I tried to take them across the wilderness they starved; it took some time until I had enough of a handle on the game to get them all the way to the CoC.

    At some point, I discovered that while the savegames would be gone if a character died, I could go into the saves folder and make copies before they did - I'd discovered save scumming. (I only used the internet to find games at that time, and hadn't discovered ADOM resources yet - but I had used computers since I was six.) It felt awesome - finally I could save my progress and get farther in the game than ever before. Well, if I remembered to make the backups - when too much time had passed since one, I'd shrug and make another high elven archer.

    I still have several high score entries from one particular save scummed archer who died a multitude of different deaths in about the same area of the game. I'd reached Dwarftown, but since I didn't realize what I had to ask Thrundarr about I stubbornly tried to press on, or go other places, and always would end up dying gruesome deaths. That particular archer was my last savescummed character. I don't know if I'd read about it online - that it was essentially cheating - or if I'd come to the conclusion on my own (it was probably the former because I'm not that special), but I decided to stop. I've never regretted a decision less than that. It took only a couple of weeks for me to reach the same areas without save scumming that I'd reached with it before, and it was more intense and exciting than ever. I hated dying more than before, but I loved playing so much more that I never looked back.

    At some point after that I found the guidebook. It told me, among other things, that Thrundarr actually gave quests. All other places, I always spoiled myself silly when I even set foot in them, because I wasn't going to lose a character I'd kept alive for so long if I could help it. I was still scared shitless whenever I fought any of these dreadful foes for the first time, and the second time, and a number of times after that. The first character who slew the Snake from Beyond was another high elven archer, who perished a couple of turns later because I basically forgot she was poisoned. I didn't have poison resistance, though I did have cure poison potions, but mostly I just wasn't paying attention in the after-battle triumph. Perhaps that was a lesson to me ever after.

    My first character who really took off - that was in August 2005 - was a gray elven wizard who scored four of the five orbs and visited most of the places the game offered and who I'm confident would've gone on to win - if I hadn't let the battle bunnies breed out of control. While I was struggling my way through them one crazy über-leveled one took me to triple negative digits in one turn, and that was that. It was a painful loss, and to this day I refuse to do anything on the bunny level other than zap a wand of digging straight down and mutilate Bugs' face without a moment's parley. Three months later, I took a high elven archer to my first win.

    I scored a couple of additional wins directly after that, and then months of frantic ADOM would always be followed a couple of months of no playing ADOM whatsoever. There was hardly something inbetween - though I always kept posting on ADOM forums, first the Hall of Fame forums, then here. In 2009 I completed a high elven elementalist ULE, my first and only ultra ending. (Never bothered again ever since.) On Dec 27th 2010, I closed the gate with a gray elven bard, making me at least a one-time winner with each class.

    I haven't played a lot since then, but I definitely plan to sink my teeth into 1.2.0 thoroughly once it comes out.
    Last edited by Silfir; 12-27-2012 at 07:00 PM.
    ADOM Guides - whatever you wanted to know about playing a certain class, but have been afraid to ask!

    Check out my youtube channel to see my ADOM videos, including a completed playthrough of the game. I try to give instructions, so if you want to see some place you haven't been before and get some hints on how to deal with it, this might help! There's also some other games featured there that you might find interesting.

  10. #10
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    I started around 1999 or 2000. I got a summer job doing data entry for the local government. Super boring. I was actually scanning old documents and burning CDs of the data so they could move the physical files to a storage unit, but still have access to a digital copy if needed. I would slack off and play games a lot. I was young. When Yahoo pool was popular I'd play that. I eventually found ADOM. I was overwhelmed at first. I remember not knowing where the CoC was for the longest time. Once I found the Guidebook I was spoiled massively. I did everything on a pimped out caster I managed to make. Never looked back.


    Quote Originally Posted by Silfir View Post
    At around 2001 (I was thirteen at the time)
    Didn't realise I was older than you Silfir!
    Proud member of Team Silfir in the Treasure Hunter debate.

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