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Today in Dungeonmans, I took a portal to a monster party, taunted all the monsters so hard they rage-promoted into champions, and then blew them up with the backblast as I rocket-jumped to safety.
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Jan 5, 2020 23:06
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Serephina posted:Ok, so if we're gonna talk about it here I'll chip in: My entire point was that not everything is as cut-and-dried as pudding farming. It's a straw-man argument. You go "haha the hypothetical optimal man sucks, just don't do it lol" but in practice most of these dumb things aren't big red buttons that say "BE BORED AND GET INFINITE XP," they are normal parts of the game taken to an extreme. No poo poo, nobody farms the starter dungeon for a million hours, but do you think nobody ever grinds, at all? Of course they do, everyone kills wimpy non-threatening monsters for XP sometimes. That does not make them pedantic assholes we should scorn and ignore, it's a normal thing everyone does to some extent. But -- as I said -- that extent is determined by how willing they are to bore themselves, and that is not a decision they should be forced to make. megane fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Jan 5, 2020 |
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Jan 5, 2020 23:17
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For an example of the pudding farming thing in action you can look at Dead Cells. The optimal way to play the game (very, very slowly) isn't fun at all, and the game is so punishing that every time you either die to impatience or a boss. It made me stop playing. The solution to every problem you have during a level is "just go slower" and eventually it isn't a rewarding gameplay loop. The solution in Dead Cells would be the same, by the way, but instead of "digs" the constraint would be "time", and the game would be better for it (though it would require rearranging some other things).
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Jan 5, 2020 23:18
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megane posted:My entire point was that not everything is as cut-and-dried as pudding farming. It's a straw-man argument. You go "haha the hypothetical optimal man sucks, just don't do it lol" but in practice most of these dumb things aren't big red buttons that say "BE BORED AND GET INFINITE XP," they are normal parts of the game taken to an extreme. No poo poo, nobody farms the starter dungeon for a million hours, but do you think nobody ever grinds, at all? Of course they do, everyone kills wimpy non-threatening monsters for XP sometimes. That does not make them pedantic assholes we should scorn and ignore, it's a normal thing everyone does to some extent. But -- as I said -- that extent is determined by how willing they are to bore themselves, and that is not a decision they should be forced to make. much as i side-eye the outcome in Crawl's particular case, the principles expressed in this post are 100% correct
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Jan 5, 2020 23:55
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No Wave posted:For an example of the pudding farming thing in action you can look at Dead Cells. The optimal way to play the game (very, very slowly) isn't fun at all, and the game is so punishing that every time you either die to impatience or a boss. It made me stop playing. The solution to every problem you have during a level is "just go slower" and eventually it isn't a rewarding gameplay loop. I get this with cogmind. The optimal way to play is zero fun and everything is tuned around it so that any alternative styles of play have to be kneecapped repeatedly till they're just as boring and zero fun as their drooling older sibling.
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Jan 6, 2020 00:12
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I don't play Crawl, but I've never understood the 'X is optimal, so we're going to get rid of it' school of thought. Baring a truely serendipitous feat of design, something is always going to be optimal. You might create a result such that there are more scenarios in which different things are optimal, but something is always going to be the best response in a given situation.
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Jan 6, 2020 01:45
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It's not "X is optimal", it's "X is optimal and also tedious/boring" in cases like what we're talking about.
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Jan 6, 2020 01:46
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If it's tedious and boring don't do it. If you can't stop yourself from doing it see a therapist instead of playing roguelikes.
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Jan 6, 2020 02:06
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I also want to win the videogame, and ideally playing to win should be fun
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Jan 6, 2020 02:07
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packetmantis posted:If it's tedious and boring don't do it. If you can't stop yourself from doing it see a therapist instead of playing roguelikes. megane literally just explained why this incredibly dumb take doesn't actually work in reality
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Jan 6, 2020 02:08
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In my experience with this kind of situations (which, again to note, is not this one in particular) is that anything that is optimal will come to be considered boring simply because you'll wind up doing it over and over again. E: also, I was talking about the cutting of all the good spells everyone uses, not the 'should grinding be a thing' conversation. I'm surprised it doesn't use a system like angband where lower level enemies give less and eventually no experience. Fantastic Foreskin fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Jan 6, 2020 |
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Jan 6, 2020 02:17
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cock hero flux posted:Balance only matters in multiplayer games because then other people exploiting busted poo poo can gently caress over people who choose not to. In solo games, if some people want to exploit busted poo poo and other people don't then those people literally never have to interact or affect each other in any way and there's no particular reason to stop either of them from doing what they want. The compulsory reply: Josh Sawyer (SA poster rope kid), design director at Obsidian and project lead on a bunch of single player RPGs, writing on balance in single player games. Note, I don’t think the LRD issue is inherently tied up with balance, and balance in Crawl is significantly different from the games discussed in that post. But I just can’t let a “balance is unimportant in single player games” comment pass unchallenged, and I think some of Sawyer’s points are relevant here as well. Regarding LRD, I agree with Megane’s overall point. Games shouldn’t present tedium as a tradeoff for optimal play. However, what’s tedious for some is not tedious for others. I’m neutral on the LRD issue, because I never felt compelled to use it in a boring way and in fact never used it to create kill holes at all. I am sympathetic to the argument that digging should be a limited strategic resource. But regarding Megane’s other examples, some of them are very subjective. Killing “trash monsters” for xp might be important downtime in between points of having to be “fully on” in gameplay for some players, and for them, turning every combat into a major tactical problem would be exhausting. Some people might prefer a longer dungeon or game in general. Megane, you may think bolts are “boring-rear end”, but for others they’re a crucial part of the game feel of playing a wizard, and finicky positioning based skills are tedious and frustrating to use. There’s nothing inherently wrong with those points of view.
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Jan 6, 2020 04:06
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There's nothing wrong with having weak monsters or less-intense moments or whatever. The game just shouldn't reward you for sitting there wasting time, or at least shouldn't keep rewarding you indefinitely. Something like making monsters below the player's level not give XP or items mostly fixes it. You can kill them if you need or want to, but there's no incentive to bore yourself. The other things were more just examples of stuff that someone might dislike, and be unable to "just not do." megane fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Jan 6, 2020 |
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Jan 6, 2020 04:39
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megane posted:There's nothing wrong with having weak monsters or less-intense moments or whatever. The game just shouldn't reward you for sitting there wasting time, or at least shouldn't keep rewarding you indefinitely. Something like making monsters below the player's level not give XP or items mostly fixes it. You can kill them if you need or want to, but there's no incentive to bore yourself. Are you referring to Crawl in this example or just talking about rpgs in general? I agree, if you’re speaking generally, but disagree if you’re referring to Crawl in particular. If you’re just using the example of grinding indefinitely as a counter to “it’s a single player game, let people do what they want”, then yes, I think that’s the perfect counter example. On the other hand, if limited “low pressure” fights are going to be a part of the game, I think they should reward the player in some way. If you can fight weak enemies indefinitely with no gameplay pressure to do something else, then obviously they should stop giving rewards at some point. I enjoy getting some xp from holding down tab against troll packs in depths. It takes less than a minute and makes me feel like a badass while lighting up some reward centers in my brain. And there’s always the possibility something will go horribly wrong and shock me into paying attention. I don’t enjoy old school jrpg style grinding, where you do the same thing over and over again to get stronger with no significant tactical challenge or strategic choices involved, and I would despise that in a game with perma-death.
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Jan 6, 2020 05:00
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I've spent a couple hours enjoying gritty old school roguelike fun when I discovered Stoneshard: Prologue. It is free on Steam. https://store.steampowered.com/app/869760/Stoneshard_Prologue/ The beta escapes into Early Access this February. One of the notable differences between this an a standard Diablo based roguelike is that there is a health management system that includes health for different body parts, splints to deal with said health, pain, sanity and drunkeness (which mitigates pain yet creates other problems).
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Jan 6, 2020 05:09
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megane posted:You can say "haha just don't do it," but I'm fine with digging sometimes. The problem is not that HOM digs every time, it's that the more often you dig killholes, the more you benefit, so the amount of digging you do is entirely decided by how you weigh your own boredom against your chances of winning. It's a continuous scale; pick your own level of tedium. When does it go from a fun "desperation move" you do in a crisis, to a degenerate strategy you do often enough that it bores you? Should I use the wacky cheap strategy this fight? How about this one? "How bored are you willing to be" is not a balance the player should be forced to strike. extremely different game but this has been bothering the hell out of me the further I move up difficulties in dead cells. in EA it was looking like the game was going to push hard into rewarding speed and moving as fast as possible thanks to the timed door and killstreak mechanics, except everything they've done since then has pushed it in the opposite direction. there's an enormous number of little optimal things with no reason not to do them except how bored you're getting, such as leaving food on the ground to run back for it later, standing around waiting for enemies to turn away before you move onto their platform, standing around waiting for cooldowns to reset, standing still waiting for enemies who attack you through walls to shoot projectiles at you so you can parry and kill them safely, etc. you can defuse most of the enemy groups in the game with just the powerful grenade, and the only reason not to use it on everything is because it's boring to wait for its 13-second cooldown to reset between each use rather than because there's any mechanical reason not to wait for it.
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Jan 6, 2020 05:35
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Motherfucker posted:I get this with cogmind. The optimal way to play is zero fun and everything is tuned around it so that any alternative styles of play have to be kneecapped repeatedly till they're just as boring and zero fun as their drooling older sibling. What on earth is the optimal playstyle in Cogmind, do enlighten please?
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Jan 6, 2020 06:26
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Gay Rat Wedding posted:extremely different game but this has been bothering the hell out of me the further I move up difficulties in dead cells. in EA it was looking like the game was going to push hard into rewarding speed and moving as fast as possible thanks to the timed door and killstreak mechanics, except everything they've done since then has pushed it in the opposite direction.
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Jan 6, 2020 07:14
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Heithinn Grasida posted:The compulsory reply: Josh Sawyer (SA poster rope kid), design director at Obsidian and project lead on a bunch of single player RPGs, writing on balance in single player games. Note, I don’t think the LRD issue is inherently tied up with balance, and balance in Crawl is significantly different from the games discussed in that post. But I just can’t let a “balance is unimportant in single player games” comment pass unchallenged, and I think some of Sawyer’s points are relevant here as well. Player vs content balance is important, yes, but that's a given and isn't what I mean when I say balance. For the game to fun, players have to be able to do things, and if you make a class too weak to actually accomplish anything then it will exist purely as a challenge run for masochists(which is totally fine if it's one or two classes out of a big roster). Player vs player balance is utterly irrelevant, though. Wizards being supreme dick kickers and warriors being weak and pathetic in comparison does not matter even the tiniest amount in a single player game if both of them are able to reasonably make progress.
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Jan 6, 2020 13:59
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cock hero flux posted:Player vs content balance is important, yes, but that's a given and isn't what I mean when I say balance. For the game to fun, players have to be able to do things, and if you make a class too weak to actually accomplish anything then it will exist purely as a challenge run for masochists(which is totally fine if it's one or two classes out of a big roster). Player vs player balance is utterly irrelevant, though. Wizards being supreme dick kickers and warriors being weak and pathetic in comparison does not matter even the tiniest amount in a single player game if both of them are able to reasonably make progress. First of all, I’m not sure how “player vs. content” and “player vs. player” balance are different here. Different levels of player power create different experiences of difficulty when facing game content. That’s exactly what Sawyer is saying. Wizards being supreme dick kickers and warriors being weak and pathetic is not something that, in general, players will know about without a lot of experience in the game or a certain degree of system mastery. So when a player makes a party full of martial classes in old infinity engine games (without any of the overpowered martial kits) and finds the game terribly difficult, even uncompletable at their skill level, that’s a failure of the game design. Similarly if a player rolls a wizard, picks and casts all the right spells because they think they look cool, and then stomps all the content without being challenged. Game difficulty shouldn’t be tied to arbitrary strategic choices. If a certain spell or strategy makes the game trivially easy, it’s good design to nerf it. Crawl has significant differences from the kind of crpgs Sawyer directs. Namely there are explicit difficulty levels attached to starting races and backgrounds, system mastery is demanded of the player and expected to be learned through repeated failed runs, and not every option is available to the player in every game, in fact what’s available is randomly determined, so it’s fine, and in fact good, for there to be weaker options overall that a player might recognize as the best choice for that specific game. But the overall principle still applies. Specific spells or strategies that dramatically warp the difficulty of the game away from what the designers intend should be changed. And that’s especially true if they’re obvious strategies that also involve boring, repetitive play. Of course, where you could reasonably criticize the crawl devs is that it’s also up to the designers to accurately identify those strategies and perhaps attempt to preserve what players like about them. I would say that in some cases, crawl devs have made mistakes on identifying what’s actually degenerate or haven’t attempted to preserve interesting aspects of degenerate systems. Personally, I respect the vanilla devs, think they have an excellent overall grasp of game design, and also think as the game has aged the tastes of players have grown more particular. Vanilla devs have shifted somewhat towards one group, while my tastes have changed in another direction.
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Jan 6, 2020 14:53
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Heithinn Grasida posted:First of all, I’m not sure how “player vs. content” and “player vs. player” balance are different here. Let's take an arbitrary example: Class A and Class B are identical other than the fact that B is about 20% more effective at everything that it does. In player vs player combat, this is a huuuuge problem: anyone who picks A is going to get absolutely demolished. It's going to be tremendously unfun for them and eventually A players are going to die out and every server will be filled with Bs as far as the eye can see. Something has to be done about this because it's resulting in lots of people not having a good time playing this game. But what if it's a purely single-player game? Well, B is going to have an easier time of it in every scenario, but if the enemies themselves are still able to reasonably be defeated by people playing A, there really isn't a big problem. People who want a 20% easier time of it will play B, people who like 20% more challenge will play A, and people who like the idea of A or B will play whichever class appeals to them and not really care about the power differential. In this situation, the fact that B is stronger than A does not matter because there is no circumstance where these two power levels will ever be tested against each other, and A is still strong enough to overcome the AI. Player vs Player balance is "is a fight between A and B evenly matched?", to which the answer is No, and Player vs. Content balance is "can an average player of A reasonably win the game?" to which the answer is Yes. PVP balance does not matter in a game that does not have PVP.
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Jan 6, 2020 15:58
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Sure, and that's why players can choose between minotaurs and octopodes. The issue comes up when one of these options is so powerful or weak as to become a non-option; if character C is so strong that everyone could beat the game by holding down tab with no items equipped, then your options are "normal", "20% harder", and "we might as well just take you to the credits". There might be a very tiny segment of players who would be interested in facerolling the game once or twice under these conditions, but in the end it's the same as having two choices instead of three to enjoy the game long term. New players may not enjoy felids as much and hardcore vets looking for a challenge may not enjoy minotaurs as much, but the closer you stay to the center as far as power level is concerned, the more players can at least interact with the game in a meaningful fashion. If an option requires absurdly good luck and perfect play to win, or the same amount of bad luck and poor play to lose, it may as well not exist. The hard part is figuring out where to strike a balance, and that's mostly subjective-- should we cut character C because it's 50% stronger? 80%? 300%, at which point you have to go zig diving to find something that stands a small chance of killing you? I disagree with cutting many of the more interesting character options entirely like the dev team occasionally does instead of reworking them (hello Djinni and lava orcs!), but it's not an unreasonable stance to take that characters more powerful than a certain threshold should be toned down to increase the number of interesting decisions.
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Jan 6, 2020 16:19
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cock hero flux posted:Let's take an arbitrary example: Class A and Class B are identical other than the fact that B is about 20% more effective at everything that it does. In player vs player combat, this is a huuuuge problem: anyone who picks A is going to get absolutely demolished. It's going to be tremendously unfun for them and eventually A players are going to die out and every server will be filled with Bs as far as the eye can see. Something has to be done about this because it's resulting in lots of people not having a good time playing this game. I think you’re moving the goalposts from “balance literally doesn’t matter at all” to “balance doesn’t matter within a certain range”. But that final position is something everyone already agrees with. Nobody thinks balance can be completely even across different choices or that there will never be a strongest class in an rpg. Nobody likes nerfs or removals, but they’re overall crucial for the long term health of a game. And I say that as someone who is overall critical of vanilla crawl dev.
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Jan 6, 2020 16:19
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Serephina posted:What on earth is the optimal playstyle in Cogmind, do enlighten please? huuuuugh you again, alright when I say optimal I mean 'from moment to moment making the most logically optimal decisions based on circumstances', not 'the hypothetical maximally efficient decisions', by its nature its a roguelike so you'd have to be cheating or statistically impossibly lucky to actually be playing the latter. When I say that its a chore, what I mean is the generally acceptable actions you'll be taking mostly involve: Avoiding combat save where strictly necessary and rapidly heading to the exit, taking only what you need to progress and generally keeping your head down, regularly replacing stuff and maintaining a full compliment of gear regardless of quality since its all replaceable and all expendable. oh god I feel more bitching about cogmind coming up from within me... Like, I'm all for innovation... but its generally accepted common knowledge that the reason bad guys attack you in video games is *hitting people with swords, is fun* combat in video games is a reward, generally, in a sense. Its a challenge to overcome and an opportunity to play with your toys and acquire new toys! In cogmind, the bad guys who attack you are obstacles only... they do not reward you, theres no XP, fighting them is not entertaining, there are about four different gun types, shooty, melee, emp and explosive. Lots of 'variants' in those categories that all function exactly like their peers, it may as well be 'laser, slightly more deadly laser, wow, its a laser' there's no 'shoots through walls laser' no 'bouncing sawblade' nothing to get too excited about. once you've experienced what all four of those can do you've basically seen what every weapon can offer you. So, fighting blows and you're encouraged to not do it. Fair enough, Now its opposite day and getting caught in battle makes you groan... only, enemies still come at you constantly, its a video game after all. You can do some things to avoid it but it still happens! You are punished with combat! But heres the thing The danger is still combat related, the only time you risk anything is in battle. And so the balance apparently needs to center around battle... anything that trivializes or bypasses combat needs to be toned down or more accurately loving gutted, I know I mention it every time but a real sore spot and one of the places you can really see the scar tissue is with hacking. See its a common tactic in... good games, to allow you to flip enemy power around on them and make use of the same stuff being brought to bear on you... its your xcom mind control, its your skyrim illusion magic, its a new enemy who ultimately drops a new and exciting gun to use. In cogmind you can be sure their guns will be linear bullet shooters that make number go down... But hacking threatened to make it slightly spicier! See you're only able to use what you can get in cogmind, so you'll be using the same linear plinkers the enemy uses most of the time, but hacking made it so you could theoretically flip a guy, and now you have two linear plinkers, one is even autonomous, imagine, converting all those robots... soon you could be legion, a firing squad of lovely lasers taking down robots like its the hong-kong riot. BUT, this would TRIVIALIZE battles, right? A herd of thralls for the low low price of basically doing the morrowind thing of stabbing them over and over till your stick lands. (with the fun risk of having it shot off and permanently losing your ability to do that all together till you replace it, cogmind!) So they took two steps back as usual and made it so you have to A) perform a boring and more importantly *combat intensive* ritual, breaking into a special side room full of guards to get a special red key. You also need a consumable item so that your thrall-herd numbers can be more strictly controlled. Functionally this means you can't gain a thrallherd because you'll be spending their expendable bodies breaking into guard rooms trying to get enough disks to perform the now 'so expensive its almost token' ritual of turning one unimpressive robot into your pal for the rest of their natural life which lasts about as long as it takes for them to get spotted by their friends. And you can see the labotomy marks on something that could've almost been were it not for a clear, concentrated effort made to SNATCH fun away. "NO!" the game seems to say "That would be TOO GOOD. You must bumble-gently caress around, pick up boring lasers off the ground and shoot people with them, sometimes, but not too much lest you get too excited and experience an emotion that isn't detached, boredom induced rage at the developers for completely loving what could've been a spiritual successor to paradroid by being as humorless and grey as the robots in this very game..." So yeah, I'll tell you the actual peak, optimal strategy for beating cogmind. Its not loving playing cogmind.
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Jan 6, 2020 16:21
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Yeah I don't think anyone is saying that OP things are bad, but I don't think anyone was talking about OP things either.
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Jan 6, 2020 16:24
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Heithinn Grasida posted:I think you’re moving the goalposts from “balance literally doesn’t matter at all” to “balance doesn’t matter within a certain range”. But that final position is something everyone already agrees with. Nobody thinks balance can be completely even across different choices or that there will never be a strongest class in an rpg. Nobody likes nerfs or removals, but they’re overall crucial for the long term health of a game. And I say that as someone who is overall critical of vanilla crawl dev. I'm not moving the goalposts, I simply failed to properly explain their original location. I've never heard the term "balance" used to mean anything other than balance between players before, and that's what I meant when I used it originally, and I am 100% still saying that that doesn't matter at all in purely singleplayer games. 1 playstyle can be literally 10 billion times stronger than another playstyle and as long as they're still both fun to play it does not matter at all.
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Jan 6, 2020 16:32
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cock hero flux posted:I'm not moving the goalposts, I simply failed to properly explain their original location. I've never heard the term "balance" used to mean anything other than balance between players before, and that's what I meant when I used it originally, and I am 100% still saying that that doesn't matter at all in purely singleplayer games. 1 playstyle can be literally 10 billion times stronger than another playstyle and as long as they're still both fun to play it does not matter at all. It can mean other poo poo, for example in my cogmind meltdown up there, sometimes it means balancing something powerful against a more 'core' thing, Trivializing combat with for example stealth where combat is the only risk to your well-being is a form of balance.
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Jan 6, 2020 16:35
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GetDunked posted:Sure, and that's why players can choose between minotaurs and octopodes. The issue comes up when one of these options is so powerful or weak as to become a non-option; if character C is so strong that everyone could beat the game by holding down tab with no items equipped, then your options are "normal", "20% harder", and "we might as well just take you to the credits". There might be a very tiny segment of players who would be interested in facerolling the game once or twice under these conditions, but in the end it's the same as having two choices instead of three to enjoy the game long term. You beat me on almost everything in my post, but I just want to add to one small point, that I think vine stalkers were supposed to be a refinement on the Djinni concept. If I’m wrong, I hope some of the devs, current or former, will correct me. Anyway, Djinni were a really cool idea, and vinestalkers are (in my opinion) more actually fun to play, but less interesting and ambitious.
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Jan 6, 2020 16:38
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I think there's also a difference between something you have to go way out of your way to set up like pudding farming, and a boring tactic that is effective in most dangerous situations. For example, pillar dancing (an aspect of gameplay, like victory dancing, that I've yet to see anyone mourn). Say my brilliant master plan to fight an ogre on D:1 goes south and I'm running for my life with a sliver of health with an ogre two tiles away. If I come across a freestanding wall, my options are to either pillar dance or almost certainly die. If pillar dancing is removed (or changed with randomized speed increments, which I believe is what they ended up doing) then I almost certainly die. I made a big mistake and now I'm dead forever, that's the roguelike guarantee. If pillar dancing is still around, my options are now do something stupid and boring to have a reasonably good chance at success, wandering monsters permitting, or actively choose to kill off my character, which is an absurd situation to find oneself in. It's like playing one of those mobile games where it exploits player psychology with false choices like "oh no, game over... unless you continue by watching a 30 second ad". While this is a contrived example using a mechanic that was rightfully gutted ages ago, the same kind of reasoning is applicable to less dramatic choices in typical gameplay. The player shouldn't have to actively curate their own decision space to have fun; "How do I beat Vaults?" is a fundamentally easier and more interesting question than "How do I beat Vaults in a way that balances strategic efficacy with gameplay that is interesting and fun for me, the player?" The onus to create a game that is fun and contains interesting decisions should rightfully rest on the developer and not the player. If a mechanic can be used to trivialize these decisions, and especially if it's boring, it's not doing anything for the game and should be considered for modification or removal.
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Jan 6, 2020 16:53
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I'll also mention that games that are easy get a lot more leeway because there's no reason to do the boring thing. When you make your game really hard, as so many roguelikes do, removing optimal but boring tasks becomes much more important because they can become the only way for a player to win.
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Jan 6, 2020 16:57
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I think WJC, the most recent god added in trunk, is a good example of both how good Crawl dev is at producing tightly designed results and also at how alienating and exclusive it can be to people who don’t share the values of the core clique. If SteelNeuron is still posting here he can correct me. But, my (maybe badly mistake) impression is that he felt that feedback could be very unfair and arbitrary at times, but also that the end result was almost always better. Certainly I think the release version of WJC is by far the best of any I played (and I played WJC a lot when it was in a test branch) even if I would have been satisfied with anything after it was changed to focus on the attacking while moving aspect of the god. SteelNeuron had a lot of great and creative ideas, some of which (skeletons and archaeologists, that I know of) are in gooncrawl. While the final version of WJC is certainly excellent, the dev culture of Crawl also probably has prevented a lot of fascinating ideas from being realized.cock hero flux posted:I'm not moving the goalposts, I simply failed to properly explain their original location. I've never heard the term "balance" used to mean anything other than balance between players before, and that's what I meant when I used it originally, and I am 100% still saying that that doesn't matter at all in purely singleplayer games. 1 playstyle can be literally 10 billion times stronger than another playstyle and as long as they're still both fun to play it does not matter at all. Okay, maybe I’m just being a pedantic gently caress, but I think you just moved the standards back again from ~20% to 10,000,000,000%. Obviously there’s a range at which it’s acceptable for options to differ in power in single player games, but one option completely trivializing the game while another can only complete it in the hands of a veteran with total system mastery is not good. I don’t think it’s helpful to assign numbers to those situations, since in some games a difference of 20% in defenses or whatever could mean inability to complete content!
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Jan 6, 2020 17:12
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No Wave posted:I'll also mention that games that are easy get a lot more leeway because there's no reason to do the boring thing. When you make your game really hard, as so many roguelikes do, removing optimal but boring tasks becomes much more important because they can become the only way for a player to win. This is a good point too, and should be weighed along with factors like how often the boring thing is relevant, how big of an advantage it gives you, and how difficult it would be to extricate the boring interaction from the surrounding game systems when deciding what, if anything, you should do about it. If there's a weird edge case that allows you to see enemies in a certain pattern of hallways one turn earlier, but would require an entire rewrite of the line-of-sight code and systems, it might not be worth it to fix compared to stuff like the old amulet of the gourmand swapping where you can completely eliminate game systems like spell hunger by micromanaging equipment and food.
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Jan 6, 2020 17:18
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I went back to my character history on CAO to see when I last played DCSS. It was 2015, on 0.17. It turns out I 15 runed a MiBe High Priest of Qazlal with the following skills: Level 27 Fighting Level 24.1(27) Long Blades Level 27 Armour Level 27 Dodging Level 27 Shields Level 23.5 Spellcasting Level 21.8 Air Magic Level 27 Invocations Level 27 Evocations I have zero recollection of this happening, and don't know what Qazlal is. I do love my converted berserkers though. All this crawl talk has made me want to go back and play some more with all these new races.
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Jan 6, 2020 17:57
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Heithinn Grasida posted:Okay, maybe I’m just being a pedantic gently caress, but I think you just moved the standards back again from ~20% to 10,000,000,000%. Obviously there’s a range at which it’s acceptable for options to differ in power in single player games, but one option completely trivializing the game while another can only complete it in the hands of a veteran with total system mastery is not good. I don’t think it’s helpful to assign numbers to those situations, since in some games a difference of 20% in defenses or whatever could mean inability to complete content! I haven't moved the standards at all, 20% was what I used in the example but anywhere from 0 to infinity is fine because it does not matter. It doesn't matter and there is no value at which it begins to matter. Of course, the higher the power swing the harder it is to actually make both options fun. 100 and 120 are a lot easier to fit within a framework than 100 and 100000000000. But if 100 and 10000000000 are both fun, however difficult it is for that to be the case, then the difference between them does not matter. The range in which it is acceptable for options to differ in power is infinite. It is ALWAYS acceptable for single-player options to differ in power relative to each other. It's not a concern in the slightest. And furthermore: one option making the game easy and one only being viable in the hands of a veteran IS GOOD. It's fantastic. Then you have the class that any player can pick up and do pretty well with to get a feel for the system and gain experience, and the tricky class that they can move onto when they've got a feel for it and want more of a challenge. Difficulty options exist in a lot of games for a reason, but having easy playstyles and hard playstyles is much better than having Difficulty options because doing something new and different and more challenging is more interesting than doing the same thing again but harder. cock hero flux fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Jan 6, 2020 |
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Jan 6, 2020 18:26
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I don't play Video Games the same as you, please argue for 3 pages now
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Jan 6, 2020 18:27
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cock hero flux posted:I haven't moved the standards at all, 20% was what I used in the example but anywhere from 0 to infinity is fine because it does not matter. It doesn't matter and there is no value at which it begins to matter. Would it be okay if one class killed every enemy in one hit and never died while another class couldn’t kill any enemies at all? That’s what “it literally doesn’t matter at all” means. Sandwich Anarchist posted:I don't play Video Games the same as you, please argue for 3 pages now I think game design is an interesting subject and it’s worth it to discuss what makes games, or certain changes to games good as opposed to bad.
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Jan 6, 2020 18:40
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cock hero flux posted:And furthermore: one option making the game easy and one only being viable in the hands of a veteran IS GOOD. It's fantastic. Then you have the class that any player can pick up and do pretty well with to get a feel for the system and gain experience, and the tricky class that they can move onto when they've got a feel for it and want more of a challenge. Difficulty options exist in a lot of games for a reason, but having easy playstyles and hard playstyles is much better than having Difficulty options because doing something new and different and more challenging is more interesting than doing the same thing again but harder. Hard agree here. One of the things I think crawl does very well is that its harder races (mummies, vampires, octopodes, yadda yadda) have strengths that are either subtle or hard to take advantage of without the expertise of a veteran. Octopodes may seem sucky to a newer player, but once veterans (who tend to play cautiously enough that the early game is less lethal in general) consider combinations like rings of sustenance and power and wizardry all at once there's a payoff that makes their very dangerous early game a worthy tradeoff, without eliminating the weakness of physical fragility entirely. The same content as approached by a mummy or a felid or an octopode can feel very different by nature of how those races tend to approach things, moreso than the straightforward races that are little more than bundles of aptitudes. There's a spectrum of choices in both race and god in Crawl that let you go from straightforward to flexible to very specialized and unorthodox and they all seem pretty significant, unlike your more maximalist *bands where a lot of character choices feel pretty redundant.
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Jan 6, 2020 19:08
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Of course, if certain options are considerably harder than others, there needs to be some sort of indication of that. There's little worse than coming into a new game and hitting a brick wall because the coolest sounding option is also 500% harder than the typical options.
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Jan 6, 2020 19:18
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Heithinn Grasida posted:Would it be okay if one class killed every enemy in one hit and never died while another class couldn’t kill any enemies at all? That’s what “it literally doesn’t matter at all” means. If a class can't win, that matters. If a class wins too easily for playing them to be fun, that matters. But a class winning more easily than another class does not matter, no matter how big the gap is. In singleplayer, every playstyle is in their own PVE bubble and no other bubble can impact them, and thus nothing that happens outside of their bubble matters at all.
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Jan 6, 2020 20:11
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Heithinn Grasida posted:I think game design is an interesting subject and it’s worth it to discuss what makes games, or certain changes to games good as opposed to bad. I like this too, game design is one of the most interesting parts of roguelikes as a genre and it's a pity that it only ever seems to pop up during the intermittent Crawl fights. Games like Brogue and Sil are polished gems of game design that owe a great deal to the decades-long open-source churn of classic roguelikes, and watching the divergent evolution of sibling games that have been in continual development for years is an interesting ride.
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Jan 6, 2020 20:22
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