Ultimate ADOM vs ADOM Classic - The Overworld (and lack thereof)

One of the main points of criticism is that Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos seems to be much smaller in scope that ADOM is. After all, there's a huge surface world with multiple dungeons, quests ranging from saving puppies from deadly caves to befriending water dragons with multiple choices along the way.

Caverns of Chaos starts right at the entrance to the titular caverns, with the characters sent into the infested depths for a reason between them and their faction choices.

Few people remember ADOM actually started the same way - initially, it was all just one big dungeon with monsters becoming more and more powerful the longer you spent in a level to force you moving onwards. It featured no beings to talk with, no story lines and just an ever-growing amount of complex things you could do. Skills like Herbalism made it into the game long before any thoughts of a surface world existed!

We're not going the same way with Ultimate ADOM. There are plots, and stories, and factions to work with and appease or slaughter and loot. Quest chains will require player decisions and change the flow of the game accordingly. ADOM has a lot of different endings: Slay the evil God of ChAoS, usurp his throne or even destroy the universe. 

While we feel it's okay to spoiler a game that's been out for nearly thirty years now, we're going to keep quiet about the different endings you will be able to achieve in Ultimate ADOM - but there also will be different ones, including some which require a bit of outside-the-box thinking and experimentation. It will be possible to end the game by simply slaughtering everything if your character is sufficiently powerful and warded, though this may not be the most satisfying and valuable ending.

While Classic ADOM is a game focused deeply on exploring a large variety of dungeons and exploring, we want to put Ultimate ADOM's emphasis on cool gameplay mechanics. I wrote about the complexity already in detail last week, but there are also a lot of different environments to explore in the Caverns of Chaos! Players of our Alpha might have already discovered the Minor Chaos Temple located somewhere near the kobold caves, or the strange and deadly waters of Lake Gloom.

During Early Access, more locations will be revealed and implemented! Rumors of a strange temple populated by frog-like creatures featuring weird mind powers float around, and Rolf is sending out warriors to locate the remaining dwarfkin of Dwarftown somewhere deep below. A powerful slithering creature with snakes for hair has made her lair somewhere in the furthest depth, a mad alchemist is using the nearby source of ChAoS to empower their mad experiments and a very dangerous necromancer is using the many corpses these caves produce for his own nefarious purpose.

All of these areas - and many more - will feature questlines that are local or affect the whole dungeon and your faction's main story. So there is plenty to explore, and not everything will be available to visit every time you venture into the dungeon.

That's not to say there will never be a surface world. We roughly know where we want to go during Early Access, but the road definitely won't end there. While the area around the Drakkalor Chain has been corrupted, shattered and made thoroughly inhospitable due to the events happening in ADOM, there may still be plenty of things to do for an aspiring hero. But that's something for much later!

Ultimate ADOM vs ADOM Classic - Complexity and Details

Some of the comments we've been receiving about Ultimate ADOM is that it seems to lack complexity, and it's easy to see where that perception might come from. Unlike ADOM's multiple dungeons and expansive overworld, in UA there is a single dungeon (though with several branches both optional and mandatory), and we have gamepad support.

Being seemingly confined in a single, deadly environment and being more accessible when it comes to controls does not limit the complexity of the game however. Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos' underlying logic engine allows it to simulate things that have never been possible with ADOM.

Play with fire

Interact with anything. Extinguish torches and candles, light them (if your character has the tools, the skill or the appropriate magic) or destroy them with raw physical rage. Open fire has a variety of uses not fully implemented yet, but which will come when elemental combination effects hit our Early Access roadmap.

Bumping into burning braziers will cause the oil to spill to neighboring spaces depending on the direction of the bump, potentially setting poorly positioned enemies aflame. Please note that monsters will occasionally also stumble into these things, making fighting near braziers a dangerous but potentially rewarding tactical choice - unlike in ADOM Classic, monsters now have access to exactly the same skills and actions as the player character.

Potions

Like in ADOM, potions can still be used in a variety of creative ways apart from drinking them. For example, you can pour orange juice into a river or coat an iron maiden with poison if that is what you wish to do, because Ultimate ADOM is not going to stop you from doing that. You will even be able to coat your weapon with a healing potion, in case an enemy disarms you, picks up your blade and decides to pummel you with it. It's all about being prepared, and while these are all instances which had to be hard-coded in ADOM, UA's logic engine will just allow you to do all of this because it's possible to simply interact with all the objects in the game.

There's one major change though - we will not have any "unidentified" potions or scrolls anymore. While some players enjoyed the challenge of finding out over and over again if a certain potion is poison or healing this session, most did not enjoy experimenting over and over again and we decided that in the Caverns of Chaos, potions are clearly labelled this time.

Grafting, Limbs and meaningful critical hits

Here's something that also hasn't been possible in ADOM, and best of all: It's already in game when we hit Early Access on February the 11th. While every character (at least, for now) starts out with two arms, two legs, a torso and a head, they do not need to remain so for long. Powerful enemies skilled in wielding bladed weapons (especially axes) may score a lucky hit, sending limbs flying.

Additionally, some characters specializing in this may graft monster bodyparts to themselves, because what's better than wielding two axes? Wielding four axes, one for each arm you could eventually run around with. Found a really cool helmet but it's too small for your regular head? Kill a kobold, butcher its corpse and graft its head onto your shoulders. You now have a slot for wearing a smaller helmet.

Animate everything

Playing a White Necromancer in ADOM was quite difficult, because clay was hard to come by. The Animancy school of magic in Ultimate ADOM will allow your character to animate anything she desires. Spare weapons, coffins, corpses or even the walls of the dungeon itself - as long as you have enough power points spare, a wizard specializing in Animancy will never truly have to be alone.

You might even cut off a minotaur's arm in combat, animate it and then leave it to fight its original owner if you are feeling particularly cruel.

So while the dungeon's scope itself is a bit smaller than all the different locations of ADOM Classic (for now, at least, because developing roguelikes is something one does not simply stop just because it's feature complete), we feel we have added all the fun, complex bits we couldn't add to ADOM due to the code simply not allowing for it. And there's a lot more to come!