DRL > Requests For Features

Purpose of Unlockables

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ChaoticJosh:
I understand we are of differing opinions, and I can see your point of view, but the way I think of it:

The ranking system can be divorced from the unlockable system with little harm to the goals you've mentioned. Aiming for a higher rank will still be a perfectly viable pursuit, but now players wouldn't need to have to play many hours worth of play, or have to struggle in the earlier challenges to unlock the things. They can just go to what they want and participate in the same ranking system in their own way.

This may be harsh of me, but the unlockable system, to me, seems like a way of artificially increasing play time. It's like, instead of giving the player an in-game reason to continue playing, it's providing a metagame reason.

You see, to me, there's no reason why I should have to do all these other things if I want to see all the features of the game. That's all I'm trying to say.

Jimmy:
Unlocking things and improving one's profile is a huge draw for many people.  It's one of the main reasons kongregate has been successful, compared to other flash gaming sites that don't have challenges or medals.  It's one of the reasons for goldeneye's huge popularity back on the nintendo64.  Going back even further, it's comparable to completing challenges in order to unlock characters in fighting games- in tekken for example, every character has a sub-boss character they must fight before the last boss.  Those subbosses are all unlockable by winning the game with the character that fights them, and then the last boss by winning with all of the subbosses.

The idea, I guess, is that it's that process that is the draw.  This is why some modern games have absurd numbers of unlockables.  Smash brothers brawl is an example of a game that does this well.  There is an insane amount of unlockable content, but there are multiple ways to unlock the most important content, (the extra characters) and much of the content would be meaningless to people that don't care about being a completionist (stickers, medals).

In my case, I haven't played doomrl in a few months now because I've been eagerly anticipating the new release, and don't want to waste my time on my old profile that won't be transferred.  ;) 

Rabiat:

--- Quote from: ChaoticJosh on September 22, 2009, 10:36 ---The ranking system can be divorced from the unlockable system with little harm to the goals you've mentioned. Aiming for a higher rank will still be a perfectly viable pursuit, but now players wouldn't need to have to play many hours worth of play, or have to struggle in the earlier challenges to unlock the things. They can just go to what they want and participate in the same ranking system in their own way.
--- End quote ---

Kids today. Back in my day, we didn't have challenge modes, we didn't get to unlock crap, we didn't have weapon mods, or even Doom sounds! We set the code page manually, fired up the game from the command line, blasted our way through one godforsaken spider cave after the other, lost every fourth run to a different crash bug, AND WE LIKED IT!

I guess what I'm saying is that challenge modes and ranks were added to DoomRL together. Yes, separating them would make perfect sense. The only reason I'd hate to see that happen is because you're WRONG! because I feel unlocking an actual, playable game mode is a more tangible reward than receiving a disconnected rank in the player stats for its own sake.

Kornel Kisielewicz:

--- Quote from: ChaoticJosh on September 22, 2009, 08:03 ---Comparing DoomRL to Nethack is a pretty hard sell, you don't have to unlock anything in Nethack, you just start and everything is there.

--- End quote ---
No it isn't. I played a lot of it, and still didn't manage to "unlock" access to Gehenna. Moreover, it's a stupid kind of access, because I need to do all the needed dungeon level challenges again each time I die or ascend, instead of just hopping into Gehenna game.


--- Quote from: ChaoticJosh on September 22, 2009, 08:03 ---You say that newer players wouldn't be interested in the extra-hard challenges, but you're not being very considerate to the player that would like to play on a public computer, has had their data wiped because of computer problems, or if it was accidentally deleted by a meddlesome sibling. An experienced player starting up the program would have to jump through all the hoops just to get at what they want, which I feel is counter-productive in terms of what a game is supposed to be: fun for the player.

--- End quote ---
In the current beta you can probably unlock every difficulty by completing a well thought out challenge game (planning your playthrough to maximize badge aquisitions).

Aki:
@Josh: The current Beta has backups of Player.wad's, so there'll be little to no problem with data deletion.

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