Question about "ToME 4" title

[ᴧ]

Why is this game occasionally referred to as ToME 4? What's ToME 1-3?

[Micbran]

Older iterations of the t engine. Current t engine is T-Engine 4, others were built upon older versions of the T-Engine. I probably have this all wrong but, the game was originally called Tales of Middle-Earth and started as a form of angband. Then we got ToME 2 (which was still middle earth) and that was played for quite a while. ToME 3 was uh... rough time. We don't talk about it and it was never formally released IIRC. And now we have ToME 4, which was the first one to be called tales of maj'eyal.

[ᴧ]

Ah, alright. Thanks!

[wckowalski]

Earlier attempts at making a roguelike by the same guy in charge of this one. The first two instead of being Tales of Maj'Eyal were Tolkein based Tales of Middle Earth.

[JacksonTriggs Fan]

Much older games. Speaking from long memory ago, so bear with me and any mistakes I make. ToME stands for Tales of Maj'Eyal, as you likely could intuit from the game title. But it also stood for "Tales of Middle Earth" a long, long time ago, back when this was a fangame of minor proportions, but got hit with a DMCA (and rightfully so) by the estate of the late Tolkein. ToME still has a Tolkein discussion board in respect of this origin on their website. This was ToME 1. 2 and 3 were as it became its own beast.

You can actually still find ToME 2, it still has active message boards. It's much more true to the Angbad type games than ToME 4, which is its own animal, but it has its own fanbase because of the differences. ToME 3 is just kinda dead.

[errantstar]

Tome 2 was an angband clone, Tome 3 was the prototype T-Engine and i have no idea what tome 1 was

[DarkGod]

It all started with PernAngband, a variant of Angband where I added (more and more and more) stuff I wanted. This was fan work but the lawyers of Anne McCaffrey thought that it'd be a good idea to crack down on fanfaction stuff because they wanted to make a pern game so I got a C&D letter. I switched to ToME1 as Tales of Middle Earth, which was simply a renaming/theming of the latest PernAngband at the time. (And no I never had troubles with the Tolkien Estate, who are rather nice and lenient people).

I continued dev and it was so big it warranted a version change to ToME 2 (first version to support basic modding too). So no ToME2 was not just "an angband clone" lol.

ToME3 was a continuation of ToME2 with the goal of rewriting stuff to be even more moddable & flexible but in the end it failed because I fought against the old angband codebase instead of doing new stuff.

ToME4 is well, you know what it is :)

[DaetherX]

I'd like to point out that on Humble Bundle there's a "Tales of Maj'Eyal: Volumes I-III" pack that is actually TOME4 + AoU DLC + EoR expansion. When I saw it the other day I got excited for second to maybe see what the previous ones were about, but then I looked at the description.
It's oddly named.

[Glitter Trash]

that's the same thing they call the bundle (game+dlc) on the steam store, I'm pretty sure you can still find old versions of tome for free though, definitely tome 2 at least, look on the official forums.