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[Radagast]

Yesterday I learned the "hard way", that I should have never tried to play nightmare.

No I'm not talking about the difficulty which yes it is absurd, but I'm talking about the fact that you can't even save your game and come back to it later. What's up with that? How come?

You do realize you block players completely with this... Some of us enjoy this game playing at our own leisure and we also have work in the mornings/noons and can rarely play consecutively for more than 1 or 2 hours. It's pretty obvious a nightmare run is impossible in such a short time length.

My experience in this game is mainly from HMP and UV games. Some of you here have seen few mortems I've posted recently, I take my time in my games, that's how I enjoy doomrl, so I usually do 5 to 10 hours for each normal run, entering as many special levels as I can and playing carefully, it's just my style I can't play faster really, it's a tactical game after all.

But I made the mistake of thinking that I could give a try to nightmare too. With all that corpse resurrection and gibbing and thinking you must do just to "survive" and not die, how the hell am I to finish any run (I know I can't with my current skills, but even if I could) if I can never even save my game? ... I just cannot understand the logic behind it...

It's probably the only real complaint I have, for an otherwise great and free community game.

PS: For the record I had to quit the game before the arena due to a RL reason...

[Klear]

See this thread.

Basically, saving on n! is not going to happen, it seems.

[LuckyDee]

I agree with Radagast (and others) that however rediculous N! is in its own right, the inability to save is just one bridge too far.
The slow pace of playing is something that should be conquerable though, given time.

However, since I'm still stuck on HNTR, I don't see myself in a position to actually argue for either side of the discussion.

[thelaptop]

N! is not supposed to be fair and is designed for people seeking a challenge.

No compromises on this one.

[Klear]

Personally, I rarely save even UV games, and when I try n!, I never play for that long. Well, except for when I was attempting Ao100. I had to leave my computer running a couple of times there, despite barely making it to half of the game.

[Radagast]

Not being fair is pretty fine as I said. Obviously I seek something harder when I choose nightmare over UV to give me incentive and motive through challenge alone.

But having to compromise my RL to play 5 or 10 or 20 hours straight just to finish one single run, is certainly the most silly thing I ever encountered in game design from the days of my youth. - it's not personal, I just feel that way about it -

If the game was indeed a coffee break game I might have thought otherwise, I certainly wouldn't have that issue.
Anyone who has played desktop dungeons?? Now THAT's a coffee-break roguelike game.

But srsly this game would be coffee-break only if it had just 10 levels or so. With no special levels at all. I'm pretty sure in oldest versions of doomrl, you wouldn't even care to save and exit since the game was so short in length. But with 10+ special levels and another 24 normal levels, how anyone would even remotely think of this as a coffee-break game is truly beyond me.

Not to mention the Ao100 and now the even more absurd Ao666 challenge game. You might as well change the difficulty name "Nightmare!" to "2Dev" difficulty in the end, since you are just targeting a 1-2% of the player base after all, blocking almost all the others. And I thought accessibility in open source gaming, was by far the most important part of game design.

Have fun trying to finish Ao666 taking weeks or even months of your life with a powered-on computer. Just pray to the Goddess of Luck Tymora that no power failure happens. And that no-one else in your family might accidentally shut down or restart your computer........

[Klear]

It might be best to think of DoomRL as roguelike rather than a coffee break game. You'll suddenly find it extremely forgiving and accommodating. In my days of youth, there often wasn't any saving at all...

Oh, and archangel of humanity already has the difficulty rating of "twodev" =P

[Radagast]

It might be best to think of DoomRL as roguelike rather than a coffee break game. You'll suddenly find it extremely forgiving and accommodating. In my days of youth, there often wasn't any saving at all...

@Klear, just fyi I'm 31 and started with Ataris/Amigas and DOS playing b&w games before color and windows OSes appeared. I grew up with a pc since I was 4 or 5 always a gamer. Even if there wasn't a save game option in many of that eras games, it doesn't mean they necessarily needed one. Most were too short to actually need one. The ones with real good design though, had also that aspect of the game covered.

I still love oldschool games from  the 80s-90s, at times I even play some of them just for the nostalgy, but the fact that we could not save in all games of our youth does not mean that it was in any way "good" or "convenient". We just accepted it back in the day cause we didn't have much choice. Nor does it mean that we should be using those days as excuses for bad modern design. Things change. Eras change. Just my two cents.

PS: Also we were kids at the time, which means we had endless free time, which also means we didn't care that much if something did have a save feature or not. A bad comparison for the roguelike genre, since it is not exactly a kid-friendly genre. Imagine playing adom as an 8 year old? Obviously we can't. When you see something new as a kid, you get excited easily, you don't really see the faults in it, you ignore them. This doesn't mean old games were flawless though and that we should make new modern games based on their faults too...Does it?

[Lord Typh]

You know, you could just try having a 'Suspend' option in place of a save feature.  If you wanna stop and come back to it later, just suspend the game and it'll close.  When you load up a suspended game, it deletes what was saved and loads it up for ou, preventing save-scumming.

Sound alright?

[Klear]

You know, you could just try having a 'Suspend' option in place of a save feature.  If you wanna stop and come back to it later, just suspend the game and it'll close.  When you load up a suspended game, it deletes what was saved and loads it up for ou, preventing save-scumming.

Sound alright?

How is that different from the way saves already work?

In any case, I believe the point is not to discourage save-scumming per se, more like to make sure n! doesn't play soft with the player.

[Lord Typh]

There's being reasonably hard and then there's just being rude.

At the very least, you should be able to pause the game and take a break for a while without having to leave it running.

[LuckyDee]

There's being reasonably hard and then there's just being rude.

Are you kidding?  N! begins with the question:
Are you sure?  This difficulty level isn't even remotely fair! [y/n]
And you're complaining about the continual handicapping of fair players?

That, I guess, is Nightmare! for you.

[Matt_S]

Ahh, this can of worms again.

It might be best to think of DoomRL as roguelike rather than a coffee break game. You'll suddenly find it extremely forgiving and accommodating. In my days of youth, there often wasn't any saving at all...

It's funny because roguelikes allow saving.  Even the original Rogue.

[thelaptop]

Why debate something that is already stated outright to be uncompromisable?

If you can't "beast" N! within 2 hours, perhaps your skill in the game hasn't reached that level.  In that case, play at a level that you are comfortable with.

We take feedback seriously here, but when it comes to saving on N!, the official stance is that it is not going to be supported, and that the decision there is uncompromisable.

[Tormuse]

I just had a thought...  (Sorry thelaptop, I know you would prefer this discussion not continue)  Since this version of the game connects to a server, (for downloading mods) how hard would it be to have the game upload Nightmare saves to the server?  That way, the devteam can control and monitor the saved games, prevent save-scumming and any other form of cheating, and then the save feature would truly just be used for taking a break so you can come back to the game later.  I know you said there won't be compromises, thelaptop, but I think that could be a good compromise.