Ancient Domains of Mystery

aka: ADOM, Ancient Dungeons of Mystery
Moby ID: 1781
Buy on Windows
$7.49 new on Steam

Description

In Ancient Domains of Mystery, the player character is an adventurer who has traveled to a remote mountain range to save Ancardia, the world of the game, from the forces of Chaos. The player can either continue on with this quest or join on with Chaos, depending on the choices that the player makes in the game. Becoming corrupted by the forces of chaos causes mutations which have positive or negative effects.

The game features a wide range of character races and classes, a point-based skill system, many subplots, and a detailed world which allows to grow herbs and repair/upgrade weapons with smithing.

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Credits (DOS version)

1,001 People (727 developers, 274 thanks) · View all

Designed and Programmed by
Created by
Maintained by
Ported to DOS, Windows and Windows 95 by
Ancient Domains Of Mystery Credits   An Interactive Adventure In A Fantastic World Copyright 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998 by
Dedication
  • To my parents for always allowing me to choose my path in life.
To
Many people were involved in the creation of ADOM. At this point I'd like to thank
  • my great testers[who sacrificed their precious time to test the work of a madman.]
Thanks (in alphabetical order) for their efforts in testing pretty buggy alpha software and enduring endless program crashes go to:
Miscellaneous credits (for inspiration, ideas, more testing and similar contributions) currently go to:
  • Boudewijn Wayers (for providing some space on his FTP site for this game and for creating the first ADOM WWW page.)
  • Cenk Ergan (for providing the new official ADOM FTP site and for providing web space)
  • Dan Shiovitz (for doing all the work necessary to create the newsgroup rec.games.roguelike.adom.)
  • Richard Fowler (for maintaining the FAQ for ADOM. Direct all questions to [email protected].)
  • Erwin Mascardo (for being the first FAQ maintainer.)
  • Sandra Whiting (for being a wonderful proofreader for the manual and for creating a Winword-based manual.)
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 81% (based on 4 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 31 ratings with 1 reviews)

ADOM is one of the best of the rogue-like games.

The Good
ADOM is a great game because it takes all of the things I liked about Nethack: the items, fights, and character building, and does Nethack one better by adding a real story and more interesting quests. Character development is well done, without the useless challenge classes like Nethack's Tourist. The weapon skills system is the best strength of the character development as it lets you develop proficiency in the weapons you use rather than just gaining abilities with character levels. Magic is generally a lot of fun to use and can be used by everyone (unless you don't know how to read) so you can have that fighter that casts the occasional spell when he really needs it.

The settings of the game are varied enough so that you really have an incentive to explore instead of every level being randomly generated. Some of the unique environments are a lot of fun to explore and are quite a challenge.

The Bad
ADOM shares the problems of all rogue-like games: lack of a real save game feature and too much dependence on random encounters. I am an experienced player and I have never been able to get past level 15 (which is only about 1/4 of the way through the game or less) without "cheating" by backing up my character so I could restore if I got into a particularly nasty random encounter.

The randomness also can start your character off at a huge disadvantage -- especially if you are a wizard and you get a bad selection of spells at the beginning of the game.

There are also a few quests that can get very irritating because they ask you to retrieve items that can only be found randomly in the game (and they are rare too). So if you want to try for one of the harder endings, it can be nearly impossible even if you do use character backups.

The Bottom Line
ADOM is a rogue-like RPG that puts you in the role of a wandering Hero that is called upon to investigate the source of the corrupting evil in the Drakalor Chain. You will travel through many locations, from the wilderness to the darkest caverns to discover the source of the corruption. If you aren't careful, you may succumb to the corruption and become a servant of chaos yourself.

ADOM allows you to make a wide variety of characters and develop them in many ways, due to the unique skills and level-based abilities that you can develop and the many strange and wonderful items you find along the way. It is superior to most other rogue-like games because it is not just another random dungeon crawl.

DOS · by Droog (460) · 2000

Discussion

Subject By Date
ADOM - Downloadable version Indra was here (20756) Apr 20, 2014

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Related Sites +

  • QHack
    C++ rogue-like engine, used in Ancient Domains of Mystery, created by the same developer.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 1781
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Christine Indigo.

Macintosh added by firefang9212. Amiga added by Martin Smith. Windows added by Pseudo_Intellectual.

Additional contributors: Droog, Sciere, Pseudo_Intellectual, Aaron A..

Game added June 26, 2000. Last modified November 4, 2023.