DRL > Requests For Features

Less reliance on the wiki

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Zalminen:
I would have absolutely hated trying to find the assembly patterns by guessing or by Armory grinding. If it wasn't for the Wiki, I would have just skipped WK completely.

Maybe there could be a configuration option whether to hide the assemblies or not? And another one for the medals?

Benkyo:
Good to know about the A key, thanks for that! I assume that's a fairly new feature?

I should have known better than to write 'every' player, because that is guaranteed to get all the 'oh but I didn't' players to jump on the thread. I would be very very surprised if the vast majority of DoomRL players hadn't checked the assembly wiki page at least. It's currently the only page that I consider required viewing, the rest depends on how spoiled you like things.

I think I'm actually quite careful about not spoiling my own game too much, I do like discovery and I love the Roguelike idea of the player getting better being much more important than your character getting better - it is, after all, a key element of what distinguishes roguelikes from grindy RPGs and MMOs. That's why I think that in this age of the internet and wikis the balance between given information and hidden information has to be very carefully considered. I really really want to be able to play any given roguelike without EVER consulting a wiki for anything. So far the only really fleshed out roguelikes that have got the balance right for me are DCSS and Brogue... Brogue being the perfect example and DCSS barely scraping a pass. DoomRL is just too far out on a limb with all its deliberately hidden information and really hard to grasp mechanics. It really worked with it's simple coffee-break origins when all you were trying to do was kill the cyberdemon, but now it just makes things confusing for new players and diamond badge hunters alike.

I do agree that GUI clutter should be avoided. I agree that spoiling the limited selection of monsters would be pointless - you can get a feel for how to handle them very quickly. There is a lot of unused space in menu screens that could be put to better use without them feeling 'cluttered' though.

I also agree that the game is forgiving enough to let you win without any spoilers, but I disagree with the implications of "If you want to handle the tough stuff then yes, you'll certainly want to take whatever advantage you can get, but by then you're already playing a very different game." You should be able to attempt diamond badges using only the information provided in-game, and I don't believe that is currently really feasible for most people.

I've played hundreds and hundreds of games, and I still don't really understand shotguns, despite them being my favourite weapon. That's wrong. I think I die more often with a plasma shotgun than a shrapnel one because I never know if I'm going to destroy walls or not, and sometimes when I'm sure I've got all those lost souls covered I haven't, I die and that sucks. I've got all the basic assemblies and two advanced assemblies, but having looked at the wiki I can see there's no way I'd ever be able to guess all the remaining ones, especially with all the purple mods required. That's wrong. I've shot perhaps hundreds of thousands of bullets and yet I still have only the faintest hunch of a feeling as to how my point-blank hit % relates to hitting a monster at the edge of my vision. I think sniper packs are good...? They must be, right? Anyway, I think I've over-stated my case a little too vehemently and I doubt it'll make much difference so I'll let it drop, but I really hope the designers at least think a little on these points, as I'd love to see DoomRL become as polished as Brogue one day.

LuckyDee:
Personally, I'm in love with the wiki; I'm a sucker for achievements, and as 2DeviationsOut recently demonstrated, it takes about 3 months of continuous playtime to get them all. IMO, the game leaves enough randomness - especially with so many challenge modes - not to suffer from reading through the spoilers; most of the time, you'd only be surprised the first time around, and since there's no way of backtracking this will usually mean another run if the surprise is deadly enough.

If I find an item of which I'm unsure what it does, I'd rather check the wiki than attempt to use it to blow up the Cyberdemon just to find out it's actually a healing item. Having 2 kids means I don't get to play for days on end, so I'll gladly not redo an entire run because I had to guess at something and guessed wrong.

Game Hunter:

--- Quote from: Benkyo on March 31, 2012, 05:22 ---I'd love to see DoomRL become as polished as Brogue one day.
--- End quote ---
Brogue comes across to me as having way too much information given to the player (e.g., the enemy info screen). Throwing tons of explanations at the player slows the pace for beginners by a lot, and perhaps some people just want to dig in and figure things out for themselves without the constant bombardment of data. As far as I know, there's no way to actually turn this off, so becomes rather annoying to always see these large blocks of text on the screen, whether you're new and don't want to know or you're experienced and don't have to see it.

On the other hand, the game is designed to be challenging even if you know every last detail about the game, so it's important that players ARE given all of this information, because they're going to be screwed early and often if they don't. This is where the gameplay of Brogue and DoomRL differ: Brogue has a single, challenging difficulty, which encourages players to exploit everything they can in order to achieve victory; DoomRL has a wide selection of difficulties (especially when including challenge modes), in which easier difficulties allow the player to experiment and discover, while the harder difficulties expect a certain level of understanding. To this extent, I can't ostracize Brogue for its choice of user interface, since it's specifically created under the assumption that even the best players should be adequately challenged. DoomRL just takes a different approach.

I do think that we can make some adjustments that at least allow for some basic understanding of certain topics, like shotgun mechanics and accuracy. Maybe it was just me, but it didn't take a Wiki to figure how that shotguns do less damage from far away and that different shotguns do better at different ranges, or that your shots are less accurate from far away and also a lot less accurate outside of your vision. The exact numbers are harder to realize, but unless you're playing on UV or N! it's not a huge deal. This said, I don't think directly showing accuracy at a given tile, or shotgun spread and damage decay, would negatively impact the game's pace, so I don't see why we shouldn't at least try including it.

So yeah, DoomRL could use some data-presenting tweaks.

tehtmi:
I'm probably in the minority and DoomRL shouldn't necessarily cater to what I enjoy, but I'm one of those people who likes to figure out game information/mechanics on my own -- by any means necessary (including going below the line of the user interface).

I think roguelikes cater toward this kind of mindset more than many mainstream genres, and finding out stuff was always part of DoomRL's appeal to me.  Of course, I liked the game anyway or else I wouldn't have been motivated to dissect it.  So there is something to be said for making the mechanics more accessible.

Most of the mechanics mentioned by the OP were partly/mostly spoiled on the wiki already when I started looking at DoomRL seriously, but deciphering the way accuracy worked would have been quite enjoyable to me otherwise.

However, I'll admit that I may not have thought to look at accuracy very carefully since it is ostensibly reported in the UI.  A qualitative indication that accuracy decreases with distance could be nice.

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