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MMF Freeway posted:Pretty soon you end with like 1600 cheeves, ToME style Fun fact. Apparently ToME had way more achievements than Steam could handle so Valve had to make an update specifically for it.
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Mar 15, 2018 17:34
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The purpose of achievements is to tell the player "hey, you achieved something!". It activates that reward center in the brain for a few seconds when the cheevo popup flashes. I'd argue that's the only fundamental purpose of achievements. Using them as a competition to see if you got those cheevos your friends didn't, or as a way for the developer to get some metrics on how people play the game, that's all fine, and plenty of people do it, but I don't think they're fundamental in the same way. And if you want to use cheevos that way, then you can't hand them out as freely as you can if you just want to tell the player "Hey, good job! You did a thing!" One of the things I never really noticed about a lot of games until I played Celeste is that they gloat when you fail. Big "YOU DIED" text pops up, or sad music plays, or enemies taunt you, or you explode in a shower of blood and giblets, etc. and the goal is to make you feel bad for having screwed up. Many games also call out their easier difficulties as being somehow a sign of weakness, like the people who have to use them somehow aren't real gamers. Using labels like "wuss" or "wimp", the pink bow in IWBTG, and locking out game content / achievements are all aspects of this. Meanwhile, Celeste does a fantastic job of encouraging you in the face of difficulty. Failures have minimal ceremony -- a half-second animation, a fade, and you're back at the start of the room. If you feel the need to punish yourself, that's fine, but the game's not going to do it for you. I can 100% get behind that, and I think it's telling that out of the challenge platformers I've played, and I've played a few, Celeste was the first one where I never got angry at the game. Meanwhile, successes are rewarded as they normally are -- through story, game content, new areas to explore, new music, etc. Even just succeeding at a room that's killed you fifty times in the last ten minutes, that's one hell of a reward in itself. There's no need for an adversarial relationship between the game and the player, and I'd wager most games would be improved if they presented themselves as wanting the player to succeed, rather than (as is more typical) seemingly wanting the player to fail.
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Mar 15, 2018 17:42
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To be fair, in some games the spectacle of failure ends up being a compensation in its own right. Like the Void Dimension death scenes in RE2.
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Mar 15, 2018 17:44
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Into the Breach has the best achievements I've ever seen: it rewards you to finishing the game on different difficulty levels once - beat it on Normal, beat it on Hard - and then it disregards difficulty entirely, asking you instead to do wild things like destroy time pods or whatever. It makes achievement hunting fun, and doesn't punish a bad player for wanting to have fun on easy mode all the time.
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Mar 15, 2018 17:54
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I don't mind there being distinct achievements for "beat the game" and "beat the game on hard/not-easy/with hard mutators." It is an achievement after all, I don't mind some of them being hard to get. So long as you don't gate unlockables behind absurd achievements like Isaac does, it's fine imo. Pulling the Cuphead route of locking players out of the actual game content on Easy is insulting and bad, though.
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Mar 15, 2018 18:43
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Why would you even play roguelikes if you aren't interested in bragging about difficult victories or overcoming a game that wants you to fail? Like, by all means have achievements for every difficulty level, because it's more about about the process of getting good than reaching any specific level. But if you're going to put mutators in your game, that creates an impractical number of possible combinations, and disabling achievements is a next-best solution to "won the game on regenerating health, 2x enemy damage enemies, drop more bows and fewer swords mode." Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Mar 15, 2018 |
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Mar 15, 2018 18:46
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Why would you even play roguelikes if you aren't interested in bragging about difficult victories or overcoming a game that wants you to fail? My reasons for playing roguelikes are because I like to have fun. 
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Mar 15, 2018 18:47
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I don't play roguelikes to brag about difficult victories, I couldn't give half a poo poo about achievements and I usually just play games on normal. There is more to the genre than just being hard and spiteful toward the player. Speaking of mutators though, the Daily Run mode in Slay the Spire is super good. Now that they balanced it away from "three ultra-hard mutators" and toward "maybe one mutator makes it hard and one makes it wacky as hell" it's a ton of fun. The run from the other day where every fight gave you a relic instead of a card was absurd and so much fun, even though it was the freest win ever. RyokoTK fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Mar 15, 2018 |
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Mar 15, 2018 18:48
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Why would you even play roguelikes if you aren't interested in bragging about difficult victories or overcoming a game that wants you to fail? they're fun and i enjoy the unique style of gameplay they provide compared to other genres?
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Mar 15, 2018 18:51
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i play roguelikes or the government implant in my brain liquefies me
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Mar 15, 2018 18:56
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Tollymain posted:i play roguelikes or the government implant in my brain liquefies me But what if you get extra achievement for winning as a jellosapiens?
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Mar 15, 2018 19:03
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I'm not 100% committed to making difficulty-lowering stuff disable achievements, it just seems right to me? There are people who legit give negative reviews (in part) due to things related to achievements and I kind of don't want to give people any more ammo to lower the game's review score. That's the main motivation.
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Mar 15, 2018 19:12
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I think having these options alone is going to offend some people, so you're not going to win there.
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Mar 15, 2018 19:18
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zirconmusic posted:I'm not 100% committed to making difficulty-lowering stuff disable achievements, it just seems right to me? There are people who legit give negative reviews (in part) due to things related to achievements and I kind of don't want to give people any more ammo to lower the game's review score. That's the main motivation. Och, designing a game for the reviewers is rarely a good idea.
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Mar 15, 2018 19:21
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On a different note, I was reading the CRPG Book Project and found its entry on Rogue, and...quote:It’s rare, but the clarity of design found in Rogue  Sir, you're wrong in a lot of ways. But Brogue is good.
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Mar 15, 2018 19:23
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zirconmusic posted:I'm not 100% committed to making difficulty-lowering stuff disable achievements, it just seems right to me? There are people who legit give negative reviews (in part) due to things related to achievements and I kind of don't want to give people any more ammo to lower the game's review score. That's the main motivation. I think the suggestion above to increase the overall number of achievements is pretty solid: "Achieve goal" / "Achieve goal with no easy modifiers" / "Achieve goal with only hard modifiers"
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Mar 15, 2018 19:24
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I don't really get what's so bad about just having an "achieved goal" cheevo, which you get regardless of which game mode you were in.
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Mar 15, 2018 19:36
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I hadn't actually looked at the achievement list until just now, but I wouldn't do it with the entire set like ToME does either, if you do go that route, because 1638 achievements is maybe too many. Just things like Ascension and whatever else makes sense. Or just don't gate them at all. I wouldn't do it just for the possibility of maybe avoiding some negative reviews, and some people may be more inclined to give positive reviews if the achievements aren't "impossible" to get.
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Mar 15, 2018 19:37
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Johnny Joestar posted:they're fun and i enjoy the unique style of gameplay they provide compared to other genres? The unique style of gameplay they offer is pretty much defined by difficulty and their attitude towards the player's efforts, though. (An attitude that could be interpreted as "spite" although I'd say it's a little more nuanced than that.) Roguelikes have permadeath, which basically tells the player unless they can get every stage of the game right, their efforts are going to be for nothing. It's a major part of what distinguishes them from other games that are just difficult -- it ultimately doesn't matter if a roguelike is encouraging or taunting when you die compared to something like Celeste, because when you die in a roguelike, you lose everything, and that speaks louder than any amount of superficial presentation. Roguelikes keep anything that isn't pure goal-oriented gameplay to a bare minimum; there's basically no story to see the end of, no sandbox to build in, no visual splendor or cutscenes, and diverging significantly from the path that leads to victory is discouraged because it increases the likelihood that you'll lose all your progress -- a much harsher penalty than most RPGs or games in general have. Roguelikes are just generally designed as a filter; it can take years just to get to the point where you can win one at all, and many people don't persevere that long. This is naturally frustrating and discouraging, but it's also inseparable from (and the source of) the sense of accomplishment for winning. ("Bragging" is really more of a stand-in or way of measuring this -- it's not really telling other people about it that's important, it's just a common and natural response to excitement.) Most of these things are only positives because they serve as obstacles; they're basically designed to evoke that sense of "I climbed the mountain because it was there." If you don't buy in to that, you're paying a massive amount of frustration and repetition to get your turn-based RPG fix.
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Mar 15, 2018 19:48
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StrixNebulosa posted:Och, designing a game for the reviewers is rarely a good idea. Even if it undermines my other point, I agree with this 100%.
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Mar 15, 2018 19:48
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Captain Foo posted:I think the suggestion above to increase the overall number of achievements is pretty solid: "Achieve goal" / "Achieve goal with no easy modifiers" / "Achieve goal with only hard modifiers" Like, from my point of view, I like achievements as a way of tracking progression or giving me something to aim for (like how Into the Breach does it). As such, I don't see why it matters that I did the thing on Easy or Normal or Uberhard, especially since once that PDINK happens nobody else is really going to care. And like TooMuchAbstraction said, I like that little Pavlovian response for reaching these milestones. To tie this back to the original topic, I'm really enjoying Tangledeep, and even though I'm not playing on permadeath mode the game is still challenging enough that I have to work for progress. That said, I wouldn't mind playing with "pets return to the corral" or "you regen stamina out of combat" on since those are like my only two real major complaints about the game, and it feels off to me that doing so would lock me out of achievements. (Oddly enough, I just went to the Steam achievement screen and noticed that the achievements that track progress don't seem to be tracking for me. But that's probably a bug or something so I'll take that to the Steam forum.)
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Mar 15, 2018 19:59
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Roguelikes keep anything that isn't pure goal-oriented gameplay to a bare minimum; there's basically no story to see the end of, no sandbox to build in, no visual splendor or cutscenes, and diverging significantly from the path that leads to victory is discouraged because it increases the likelihood that you'll lose all your progress -- a much harsher penalty than most RPGs or games in general have.
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Mar 15, 2018 20:25
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:The unique style of gameplay they offer is pretty much defined by difficulty and their attitude towards the player's efforts, though. (An attitude that could be interpreted as "spite" although I'd say it's a little more nuanced than that.) This is firmly in "what is a roguelike" territory. For you they're about difficulty and that's totally fine, but it's not the only reason someone might want to play a roguelike. I play plenty of roguelikes that I have already demonstrated systems mastery of, just because I like working my way through iterations of the same basic puzzle. Kinda like how people do Sudoku puzzles or solve Rubiks cubes -- once you've solved a few, you probably aren't really struggling with how to achieve victory, it's just a matter of going through the motions. Sometimes those roguelikes are easy, sometimes they're hard, sometimes they're content-lite, sometimes they're more fleshed-out. In fact, I daresay I rack up far more hours on "solved" roguelikes than I do on ones that I haven't solved, because frankly a lot of entries in the genre are obtuse and/or tedious.
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Mar 15, 2018 20:32
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Metaprogression is a far greater bane to the genre than difficulty settings. Some games get away with it like Dungeonmans since it's more about avoiding early game grinding than anything else but if there's more of it than that it really does miss the point of the genre imo. In my eyes the benefit to permadeath is forcing every decision to matter, and how it changes the way game designers do other things. The rest of the genre is built to accommodate and enhance the effects of permadeath. Random generation to give players at least slightly new decisions to make every time, turn based combat to allow players to consider decisions and deal with a wide variety of options, and a wide variety of monsters and items to reward game knowledge and a variety of tactics. Difficulty is a strong enhancement to most of these things, it helps remove luck and forces the player to exploit all the options available to them. Some level of challenge is obviously necessary. That said, I'd still be happier calling an easy game that otherwise sticks to the tenets of roguelike design a roguelike than something like Rogue Legacy or Heroes of Hammerwatch which do not give you a clean slate every time you die and require grinding. They're just RPGs that require you to restart your progress every time you want to level up.
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Mar 15, 2018 21:09
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Even if it undermines my other point, I agree with this 100%. I don't mean reviewers like Metacritic (they don't give a poo poo about roguelikes, for the most part) I mean players. Sadly Tangledeep's score slipped from ~93% down to ~88% or so. I really want it to climb up to the "Overwhelmingly Positive" 95% range. Oh well. These are great points being made though. Maybe I should just make the achievements achievable regardless.
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Mar 15, 2018 21:11
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Herbotron posted:Metaprogression is a far greater bane to the genre than difficulty settings. Absolutely! Difficulty settings enable more players to have comparable experiences relative to their level of skill. Metaprogression on the other hand completely changes the type of dynamic that exists between the player and the game, and basically homogenizes the genre back towards all the traditional RPG cruft that roguelikes are largely and thankfully free from.
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Mar 15, 2018 21:11
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It's difficult, because I know that metaprogression is tedious and ends up making the initial 20+ of a roguelike tedious, but at the same time I barely play any roguelikes without it vOv. Something about it just scratches the itch of "here's proof that you've made some progress in the game". Gungeon is especially bad about metaprogression, not just in scale of all the unlocks but also the fact that almost *every* passive upgrade is locked away. It's not just a reduction in variety/options, a nothing-unlocked gungeon run is just straight up going to do less damage.
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Mar 15, 2018 21:14
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zirconmusic posted:I don't mean reviewers like Metacritic (they don't give a poo poo about roguelikes, for the most part) I mean players. Sadly Tangledeep's score slipped from ~93% down to ~88% or so. I really want it to climb up to the "Overwhelmingly Positive" 95% range. Oh well. Gamers are a whiny bunch and it really, really isn't worth trying to appease a bunch of naysayers. Remember, these are people who get mad that the character you play as is female.
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Mar 15, 2018 21:15
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zirconmusic posted:I don't mean reviewers like Metacritic (they don't give a poo poo about roguelikes, for the most part) I mean players. Sadly Tangledeep's score slipped from ~93% down to ~88% or so. I really want it to climb up to the "Overwhelmingly Positive" 95% range. Oh well. Those are still reviewers. While I have strong opinions on how games ought to be designed I'd rather have devs who ignore all popular input including mine than who are obligated to reach and cater to the largest audience possible. Auteur game design might have lower lows than broad appeal but it also has much higher highs.
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Mar 15, 2018 21:18
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metaprogression that makes a game easier makes me extremely mad and very unlikely to play a game because it means that every subsequent run matters less and less. when I just barely die on one of my first runs and unlock more damage or healing or something as a result, it just... kills my desire to play. because my desire to play was predicated on knowing that, going back in, I could win it on another run. but when the game decides to make things easier on me it's like I'll never have that first victory that I was so close to, not really anyways. I don't want to win through stats, I want to win through improving my own personal skill. when the metaprogression that makes it easier is optional that's also bad because build variety is usually locked behind it as well.
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Mar 15, 2018 21:19
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zirconmusic posted:I don't mean reviewers like Metacritic (they don't give a poo poo about roguelikes, for the most part) I mean players. Sadly Tangledeep's score slipped from ~93% down to ~88% or so. I really want it to climb up to the "Overwhelmingly Positive" 95% range. Oh well. valve has a terrible track record when it comes to review brigading and harassment on steam. so my guess is that you would be better off looking into a QA/marketing/community-relations strategy for this rather than a game development one (your accessibility idea overlaps into QA, of course) disclaimer i am not genuinely qualified to offer an opinion in any of these areas
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Mar 15, 2018 23:28
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There is one good use for metaprogression in a roguelike, and that is letting you skip the early game weakness tedium and jump straight to early-mid. See: Necrodancer, Dungeonmans, Sproggiwood
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Mar 16, 2018 00:03
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That seems less like an argument for metaprogression and more an argument for not having the player start out as "ye old shitfarmer fighting giant rats" in the first place.
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Mar 16, 2018 00:14
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PMush Perfect posted:There is one good use for metaprogression in a roguelike, and that is letting you skip the early game weakness tedium and jump straight to early-mid. See: Necrodancer, Dungeonmans, Sproggiwood
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Mar 16, 2018 00:29
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:That seems less like an argument for metaprogression and more an argument for not having the player start out as "ye old shitfarmer fighting giant rats" in the first place. Why would you even play roguelikes if you're not interested in the progression from having limited powers and the early game being very risky and then getting through that so you can brag about difficult victories or overcoming a game that wants you to fail (at least in the early game when you're a shitfarmer fighting giant rats that can easily kill you)?  I like metaprogression because it means you can get back to the mid-game easily which is where I tend to gently caress up in roguelikes, and gives you interesting options for doing stuff that you didn't have before, or letting you stomp through stuff that was previously dangerous. It's also a pretty good way of getting round the problem quite a few roguelikes have where the early game can be very samey before you get to the gear/abilities that differentiate runs, but without having to actually put in the complexities of alternate starts (which is awesome when it happens, but a lot of roguelikes seem to be single developer labour of love type efforts, obviously)
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Mar 16, 2018 00:31
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Danger - Octopus! posted:Why would you even play roguelikes if you're not interested in the progression from having limited powers and the early game being very risky and then getting through that so you can brag about difficult victories or overcoming a game that wants you to fail (at least in the early game when you're a shitfarmer fighting giant rats that can easily kill you)? Because in most roguelikes the early game is the part where your decisions matter the least (and you typically haven't made very many yet) and the potential for the game to just decide to end you by a confluence of bad luck is the greatest, both of which are precisely the opposite of what's interesting about accomplishing something difficult by making correct decisions. Conversely, by midgame in ToME or Crawl or DoomRL or whatever, most of your deaths are either going to result from serious tactical errors or from an accumulation of bad choices with respect to your build and gear, or a combination of both. Basically the more meaningful options you've been presented with and picked between, the greater the degree to which your success or failure is attributable to your own efforts. e: although DoomRL's kind of a weird example in this case because it has a fantastic early game; your build options are a bit limited but the tactical side of things in that game is so good (and since the mechanics of it are mostly universal) that good decision-making can make the difference between finishing a level nearly untouched or nearly dead right from the first floor Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Mar 16, 2018 |
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Mar 16, 2018 00:34
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I've grown to really like crawl's earlygame. Past that I mostly think I just die if I do something actually stupid, which in practice mostly means "when I get bored". Earlygame things happen that I really gotta think about much more often.
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Mar 16, 2018 01:39
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Early games are made good by having systems where a wild equipment drop can radically change your playstyle.
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Mar 16, 2018 01:56
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zirconmusic posted:I don't mean reviewers like Metacritic (they don't give a poo poo about roguelikes, for the most part) I mean players. Sadly Tangledeep's score slipped from ~93% down to ~88% or so. I really want it to climb up to the "Overwhelmingly Positive" 95% range. Oh well. I would say go with your original feeling on this. If someone wants achievements, they can play the game without easy mode modifiers. The game is not impossible to beat without them, it's difficult, but it's also a Roguelike, which should not be easy.
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Mar 16, 2018 02:52
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resistentialism posted:Early games are made good by having systems where a wild equipment drop can radically change your playstyle. Or just not having a straight linear progression through the early game. You can choose your starting dungeon in ADOM.
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