This is one of the first games which changed so much that I picked it up again and realized it's not the game I liked anymore. It may still be a fine game, but it has little association to Linley Henzell's Crawl left.
These days, as more non-open games go into "updates forever" mode, it's probably going to happen more. I can see it happening real time with Minecraft.
I was pretty shocked at the rate of change in Crawl. I played it for a couple of years and during that time entire major game mechanics changed, like moving from many kinds of food, to only one kind of food, to completely eliminating food and hunger (while adding a completely new form of clock to kill players who didn't keep moving).
Why was the rate of change so huge? And the changes so deep? These roguelikes particularly tend to be stable, almost frozen - at least in terms of mechanics.-
There were a couple of people who were very active in development and were very opinionated about good game design. Then they slowed down a bit, and some other people came in with more ideas, they may not have been quite as radical but by then it was established that upending designs was something DCSS did. (A bit of like the problem the Esperanto offshoots had).
It was at all time driven by very heavy players, and IMO the theme especially suffered from it (by the time you're a heavy player, you have completely abstracted it into a bunch of systems, and it's very hard to see it like a new player would see it).
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It was at all time driven by very heavy players, and IMO the theme especially suffered from it (by the time you're a heavy player, you have completely abstracted it into a bunch of systems, and it's very hard to see it like a new player would see it).