I am looking for the longest (in terms of hours) and most difficult (in terms of complexity).
I’ve played a lot of Final Fantasy, Diablo Series, WoW, Everquest 1 and 2, Skyrim, Divinity Original Sin: 2, etc…
Older gameplay styles are preferred, but not a requirement.
So, what’s the hardest shit out there?
cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 hours ago
Hack, or its modern incarnation, NetHack. (No relation to the .hack comment. That’s a game based on an anime. Hack is a Roguelike from the 1980s, came out shortly after Rogue itself, follows a very similar format, and is arguably if not definitively the oldest true Roguelike currently developed. I mean, you can get NetHack on iOS and Android, not to mention all modern computers, and it still looks like it’s running on UNIX in the 1970s. ASCII art and all. Though there are “tile sets” that give it graphics, the original does not have any [graphics] to speak of (aside from the icon, I suppose). You are the @ symbol (well, that’s the symbol for humans), floors are periods/full-stops, walls are dashes and pipes and plus symbols for corners, dirt paths are pound/hashtag, and most monsters are letters (and uppercase is not the same as lowercase; d is dog and D is dragon, IIRC).
It’s a procedurally generated game. You start on floor 1 of a dungeon, and you have to find stairs down (>) and advance to the 35th or 37th (I forget) floor, at which point the Amulet of Yendor has a chance to spawn. The game is won when you exit the dungeon via the first floor. The bad ending is doing it without the Amulet (including right at the start!). You live a long life in obscurity. The good ending is exiting with the Amulet, in which case you live a long life, rich and famous. If you die, you get a tombstone showing what you accomplished. And you can potentially leave a ghost behind which you can fight in later runs (and get all those items if you defeat it).
The game is based on D&D, so you can level up. It’s also based on Tolkien lore, and there are a ton of neat things you can do (for example, engraving the name Elbereth, IIRC, into a floor space means certain enemies treat that space like a wall. Walking over it gives them a chance of being able to pass over it. It’s also turn based, you pause the game by not doing anything. Time only advances when you move. Hunger is also a thing, so you have to find food, or eat what you kill (some enemies are poisonous, and some give you perks, like eating a Floating Eye sounds disgusting, but you can see life forms through walls from pretty far away.
Did I mention the game is 100% free? And actively developed?
www.nethack.org/common/index.html ← Latest version released February 2023. So not actively actively develped, but updated more recently than, well, most games in this thread! Considering this is a game from the 1980s, that’s pretty impressive! They’re still fixing bugs and adding features.