[philsnow]

DCSS suffers from the "Star Trek hallway" problem. In ST:TNG, many episodes feature officers striding through hallways determinedly while not advancing the plot at all.

Similarly in DCSS the levels are so large and there's so much space between interesting bits, that you spend a fair amount of your time mindlessly pressing keys to stride through the hallways.

Mind you, DCSS is much better about this than Nethack because there are things like waypoints and fast travel, loot/stash search (with ^F), etc. I'm not contesting that it's better than Nethack in this respect.

But if I may say, Brogue is better about this in that there are very few 'wasted' turns: the food clock is very finely tuned so you really can't waste too much time or you'll die, levels are very compact so there's not as much exploring to do (but there's just as much tactical depth on each level, if not more, because of how the environment works in Brogue).

[athroway]

DCSS has been incredibly streamlined this decade with tons of quirky features being removed. You can spend most of your time playing it spamming the 'o' (auto-explore) and 'tab' (auto-engage enemies) key without missing out on much.

When you're not auto-o-tabbing, i.e. when you encounter more dangerous monsters, the game rewards tedious habits such as playing very conservatively (hide and seek, kiting, climbing up/resting/climbing down/etc.).

An explanation was that the dev team targets the top players first and doesn't want to allow them to find a way to suddenly cheese through the game, so they lock down on every quirk, feature or strategy that lets them do so. Problem is, the top players are really good and always find another way to cheese, so the devs play a game of cat and mouse to streamline the game further in the name of balance. Meanwhile, newbies struggle and mid-players get bored.