Tangaria – free open-source multiplayer roguelike game loosely based on Tolkien’s lore and powered by PWMAngband; it combines the complexity and unpredictability of roguelike genre and social features of MMORPG: kill monsters together with other players, chat, PvP (on demand), buy a house and open a store to trade your goods… with advanced real-time gameplay – game become semi turn-based when your character is injured.
Roguelike features:
- permadeath. Every adventure – counts. Every death – is an achievement. Every new character – is the happiness of a unique exploration experience.
- absolutely random level generation. You are constantly facing extremely unimaginable gaming situations.
- very high degree of character freedom (loads of ways to act: kick, throw, dig, polymorph, etc)
- destructible dungeon environment – tunnel walls, chop trees, make an earthquake to blast everything around you!
- freedom. Not linear walkthrough of the game. There is even no walkthrough! Go wherever you want; every dive to the dungeon isn’t like previous one!
- perfect Hack’n’Slash experience – all boring auto-attacks your character will make automatically while giving you time to control essential stuff – casting spells and using skills and items. It’s ingenious combat system, you should try and you will be hooked, guaranteed!
- strong anti-powergamer roguelikish concept – it’s just you, your skill, your guts.. and your freedom. Grind won’t help you to survive.
- macro system which makes it’s perfectly alright to play roguelike game in ‘real-time’; any action (including targeting) could be put on a hotkey.
MMORPG features:
- real-time. But you could assign a certain HP threshold at which game will slow down and become semi turn-based.
- PvE in group. Game has great features for teamplay; the more – the merrier!
- PvP. You could duel with other characters if you will turn on PvP mode.
- Trade, barter, create your own shop. The economy is healthy because a lot of items and gold got washed out from market when characters die (quite often situation).
- Communication. Find friends, create a guild, buy a house, welcome your neighbours..
- …and much more. Game has a lot of tiny beautiful features, for example, feature about artifacts – they are real artifacts. There couldn’t be two ‘Orcrist’ swords. After you found a true artifact, only you at the server have it (and there are mechanics which prevent players from hoarding artifacts without using them).
Extra (special Tangaria’s stuff):
- oldschool graphics or ASCII – you could play in a lot of display modes.
- one character per account. It’s forbidden to have more than one account per person to prevent cheating.
- disconnected stairs. Up/down staircases are ‘not connected’ between levels to prevent stair-scumming.
- food matters. It’s not too easy to obtain food, it could be only found in the dungeon.
- no selling to NPC. It removes boring grind from the game; in return, you get extra gold in the dungeon and could trade with other players.
- rebalanced telepathy & detection: no boring mechanical actions; exploration matters!
- brackets system – prevents boredom cheezy grinding.
- deep storyline based on the unique fantasy universe inspired by Tolkien’s lore.
- beautiful world with handmade locations with inhabitants who will tell you their story.
- sounds, day/night change, Windows/Linux clients;
- diversity: 38 races, 18 classes, 1185 monsters, 24 dungeons, 557 items (multiplied with 122 ego types), 236 unique artifacts, 156 activation properties, 96 item’s parameters… and endless amount hours which you could spend in-game to have a great time!
Screenshots:
Also, you could understand how the game looks like by watching videos
Beneath the simple graphics can lie worlds of complexity seldom to be found in other games. “It doesn’t chase those ‘look modern’ appearances but matches networking with all the handiness of playing and profundity of contents in roguelike games.” — Jir
Sidenotes:
In this game your have to make REAL decisions which either would save your life or will lead you to the death. You constantly should decide ‘how to solve’ every particular situation to survive; and this situations always will be not the same as before. Even after years of playing it, you will still learn new stuff every day. In addition, each class got own style; to feel bottom of this game you should play all classes, they all give different feeling of gameplay; it’s really amazing actually how deep roguelike games is!
Tangaria is very complex as all roguelikes. You will die hundreds times, but ALWAYS because of your mistakes, not because of internet connection issues as in another MMORPGs with permadeath (for example, in Diablo 2 in 95% cases I died because of disconnects).
This game is quite hardcore. It doesn’t often giving you second chance. You have to have steel nerves and to play slowly or you would die fast. At the same time game isn’t based at your reaction; it’s not too past-paced and action-orientated. With introduction of MAngband slow-time mode now you always have time to make the right decision without haste: when your character injured – game become semi-turn-based.
Playing with another players in party great thing, but sometimes you could die because of your friend (carelessly opened door, triggred trap, awakened mosnters – and thats it); so you might consider to play alone while learning basics. Also it’s important to note, that Tangaria is solo-friendly game and if you like to be a lone wolf – you will have great time too. Learning curve quite balanced and you wouldn’t get more pain there then in NetHack.
To win the game you must build up a character, selected from any one of numerous races and classes, to be powerful enough to defeat Morgoth, Lord of Darkness, who lives in the dungeon deep below the surface of the town. As you work towards this near-impossible goal, you will chart unexplored dungeon passageways, do battle with legendary creatures, and find lost artifacts. And of course throughout your journeys you will encounter many other adventurers — whether they be friend or foe is up to you to decide!
Development:
Tangaria based at powerful PWMAngband (2007) game engine which was derived from MAngband (1998) and also got some TomeNET (2001) features. All three games are in active development, got very special and unique gameplay, make sure to try them! PWMAngband got latest vanilla Angband core (tileset support, new ID/curses/traps systems, item management, etc), modern MAngband features (like a ‘time bubble’ which slow down a time when you are on low hp, making game almost turn-based while in danger), ‘Necklace of the Eye’ support (you could try to play the game in 3D mode or even VR), new gameplay mechanics like necromancy, summoning, etc.
What the difference between Tangaria and PWMAngband?
Tangaria based at PWMAngband, so it’s got all great PWMA features. Additionally, Tangaria got:
- unique carefully designed hand-made locations
- the most advanced dungeon’s design (it’s not only rooms and corridors)
- advanced graphics with hundreds of new terrain features
- circumspection storyline which continuing Tolkien universe (rebellion against Valars and multi-dimensions!)
- 20+ new races and new class (archer/hunter)
- new monsters types (angels, mutants, djinns, fey, unicorns, ents; each type includes several species) and new monsters (several dozens)
- all races rebalanced to remove experience penalty
- NPC system (with a lot of dialogues)
- new dungeons
- rebalanced detection and magic mapping magic
- customized dungeons brackets system
- rebalanced food system
- strict fair-play (anti-cheating gameplay)
- new items, traps, stores, etc.
Tangaria focused to take all the best features from it’s ancestors and also get inspiration from great singleplayer roguelikes like Nethack, DCSS, ToME & others, with the influence of sandbox MMORPGs and MUD’s (text MMORPGs).
Contacts:
igroglaz@⒢⒨⒜⒤⒧.⒞⒪⒨
Also, you are welcome to ask any questions @ our Discord
Please note: game is in active development, so wipes happen from time to time – so we could be able to include new world updates to the game asap. But wipe in roguelike game with permadeath is nothing really. Just start a new character and have fun!