Chaosforge Forum
DoomRL => Discussion => Topic started by: Napsterbater on March 31, 2012, 00:05
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So, I like to play Ao100 and go for Malicious Blades. It's my favorite because I love being able to look at a Vile-Pack and be like, "only three Viles with those Mancubi?" with nothing more than a pair of not-even-fully-modded knives, nanofiber armor. and cerberus boots. Being able to charge right at a Revenant un-zerked without even blinking puts a wonderful feeling in my gut. 70 levels of pure, God-like bliss.
I'm even learning to like the game of getting there. It's just the pain of the stupid death that makes me think every time, "there's gotta be another way." Just today I was 70% to MMB bliss, just about to make the decision between a WhizKid detour or straight for the Blades. I was sitting in a cleared room reloading my Combat Shotty when a former commando comes in and wastes me while I'm busy pressing 'r', 'r', 'r', 'r', 'r'.
I know, I know, I'm supposed to not slam on the keyboard in a dangerous area like there isn't a care in the world. But DoomRL is fun precisely because I can get that feeling like I've merged with the '@' and I'm slaughtering those 'i's and 'M's and such personally. And it just really breaks that feeling when the game doesn't let me play like that, simply because of some silly interface wiggles.
DoomRL is not my first roguelike. I played Nethack and Angband before this. Angband is interesting because the interface, in its own way, can reward both playstyles. If you dive, then every keypress could be your last, so you don't make a single step you're not absolutely sure of. If you clear levels, well, you can march right through them like they were so many ants without a care in the world, within reason of course. Personally, I thought diving was more interesting. But that's Angband.
I never got good enough with Nethack to be able to really analyze playstyle.
There's gotta be a good way to make fast and furious play in DoomRL not so retardedly dangerous. I really think the game should stop me if I hold the right button down and a chaingunner shows up in the hallway. Or marching right into lava by accident when your guy has 10% health remaining or there's enemies present.
Please please don't just tell me to learn how to play more patiently. That's not why I play DoomRL. Ask yourself, do you really think it should be necessary to hit the button 20 times to get across a long hallway? Yes, I know there's the run command for that, I really wish I could make it shift and direction instead of comma, but shouldn't the interface work with the way your brain wants to work with it instead of forcing you to unlearn admittedly-bad habits? DoomRL is really about tactics, right? I never mind when I die to a bad tactical decision.
Doomguy would not keep loading his shotgun if a commando showed up in a doorway. I don't see why I need to be held hostage to a key buffer. I think 90% of the problem could be solved with sensible decisions to clear the key buffer and not let any more actions go through until the danger is acknowledged on certain criteria. Enemy present, you have to hit 'y' to move into acid. Or not even 'y'. It could be a remappable key close to where your fingers are where you wouldn't ordinarily hit. I like the space bar, I don't usually have to hit it ever since I turned off the more messages prompt. Call it "acknowledge danger". Certain events make you hit it before you can proceed.
I think, if the criteria are carefully selected, it will yield a much more playable game. Especially for newbies unused to roguelikes. That is the idea behind the graphical version, isn't it?
Any ideas?
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Take the reloading thing with enemies in view. Maybe, for certain weapons, reloading with enemies in view while there's still rounds in the magazine requires you to hit the "acknowledge danger button." If you hit the 'r' button in this situation, nothing happens, and you might get a message saying, "Danger, enemy in view, are you sure?" You can then hit the space button if that's where it's mapped, and then the game will reload. If you didn't see the danger, then you could choose to move instead. This would be jarring if you had to hit the 'n' button, breaking flow. But if there were just one button that basically means "yes, I know this is stupid, and I'm doing it anyway." So you're running around and suddenly your guy just stops moving. You can just hit the space bar and keep moving, if it's a false positive or something you wanted to do anyway.
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The 'acknowledge danger button' should be at the start of the game, so's you only have to press it once. From that point on, you should acknowledge that you're in danger. I know you specifically said not to say it, but if you don't want to play just a slight more patiently, then YASD you shall reap.
By the way, you can also press 'R' instead of 'r''r''r''r''r'. It saves wear and tear on the keyboard, but the net result will still be your death.
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if you don't want to play just a slight more patiently,
Is this, or is this not Doom?
It's not that I can't play more patiently. Sure I can. It's that doing so sucks. Anti-Doom. Every time I have to do it, I whine a little. "Do I have to?"
I love DoomRL's game design. Really I do. It's a hell of a lot of fun as-is. But this feature could, I believe, turn a great game into quite possibly the perfect game. All it really needs to do is compensate for information which a player would never ignore were he really there, but the interface makes it really really easy to.
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Don't get me wrong btw - I'm still pretty much of a newbie myself and I'm not taking a swing at you, but the way I see it, asking for this game to be fast and furious is sort of like asking for a boxing match without punches - it makes no sense. The reason I'm so totally hooked on this game is the fact that it does require you to take a moment to think about your next move instead of the think-on-your-feet attitude of the original.
And different styles of playing may well satisfy different urges. If you're going to use a shotgun, you'll likely be furious, but you're going to have to select your traits carefully if you want to be fast as well.
As this was written while you were replying yourself, the answer to "Is this, or is this not Doom", frankly, is "Yes". Yes it is, and yes it's not.
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In graphical mode, if you click a tile down the hall and an imp wanders into view while you're marching, you stop marching. It won't let you make long movements while an enemy is in view, so mouse-users don't get splattered if they click the wrong tile and send Doomguy marching across the level while in a crossfire. This is already a thing. And the pathfinding system it uses will route you around lava, at least when you're trying to navigate through a patch with 'islands' on it, making it easy to navigate around static obstacles like those safely. Since my laptop doesn't have a keypad and the Home/PgUp/PgDown/End keys are arrayed vertically, using the mouse is essentially the only way to navigate both safely and quickly for me. I find this helpful.
But I don't ram keys even when I use the arrows, because that's stupid. In Doom, you didn't last long if you got tunnel-vision and ignored things while running to the end of a hallway, and the game didn't stop you if an imp took a potshot while you were wandering around and not paying attention. Doom was not button-pounding repetition and the game wouldn't hold your hand if you didn't keep an eye out all on your lonesome. Situational awareness was a key factor.
If you're pounding reload a billion times and not paying attention to what it's going to do, you'll die here. You'd die in Doom for that too; there was no timeout while the shotgun reloaded, you dodged like a mofo or you died. Same here; you have to manage your actions yourself, so pick the right ones. This doesn't mean "play with patience". This means "don't zone out like a putz." Taking a quick look at the screen to see that an imp hasn't wandered into your line of sight doesn't take more than a split second.
You can TOTALLY do the "no patient planning" thing here; go running in without any idea of what badges/medals you want. Pick staircases when you see them instead of planning which levels you want to hit before you play. Grab your traits on what you think is cool right now instead of aiming at a specific build. All that stuff works; this isn't Nethack, you don't have to spend time planning your run or ascension kit if you don't want to.
But if you're reloading and zone out while pounding that 'r' key, you'll die. Not because you aren't patient, but because you zoned out.
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I play Intuition builds for basically this reason. It gives me more time to react to something when I'm rolling around carelessly.
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In graphical mode, if you click a tile down the hall and an imp wanders into view while you're marching, you stop marching. It won't let you make long movements while an enemy is in view, so mouse-users don't get splattered if they click the wrong tile and send Doomguy marching across the level while in a crossfire. This is already a thing. And the pathfinding system it uses will route you around lava, at least when you're trying to navigate through a patch with 'islands' on it, making it easy to navigate around static obstacles like those safely. Since my laptop doesn't have a keypad and the Home/PgUp/PgDown/End keys are arrayed vertically, using the mouse is essentially the only way to navigate both safely and quickly for me. I find this helpful.
Graphics. Ick. Mouse control. Ick. What I do with the laptop thing is I use standard roguelike keys. Sucks doomrl doesn't have a separate keymap for this, and that the binding language gets changed with every release, but at least you can do it. If you've never used roguelike keys before, you should definitely give them a shot. Once you get used to them, you'll never go back to a mouse. Then maybe you'll actually understand what I'm complaining about. I play fast. I try to be hyper-aware of everything, but my laptop screen sucks and sometimes I miss an enemy that shows up out of nowhere. Usually it doesn't kill me. But sometimes it does.
Not because you aren't patient, but because you zoned out.
I don't zone out when I play. I just like to play on the edge. That means that every mistake has more potential of killing me. Most of the time this isn't a problem. No matter how sticky the situation, I can deal. Technicians can use medkits with no time, so unless I string together so many of them that I run out, I can usually stay alive a little while longer. It's the stupid mistakes that kill, for no good reason. I'm arguing that a lot of these things that we call stupid right now could be easily fixed with a bit of programming. Sure, it's stupid to hold your finger on the left key. But it doesn't have to be. That's what I'm arguing. It's only stupid because of the interface. Well, interfaces are easy to change. I'd do it myself but I don't have the source.
Think about it this way. What if holding your finger on the left key did the same thing the run button did? Moved you until an enemy came into view, then stopped you. Wouldn't be so dumb then, would it?
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Here's where I think we're having a bit of a communication breakdown:
It's the stupid mistakes that kill, for no good reason.
That's your statement, while my own (And most other DoomRL players, from what I gather) would think the mistake IS the reason you get killed. And that it's a pretty good reason. If you don't want to die, you learn to make less mistakes. None, preferably. It's not really an interface issue here; the whole "compensate for information which a player would never ignore were he really there" concept is already there, in that it gives you all the time in the world to examine the situation before acting. You simply aren't using it, because it's not your "style". You even acknowledge that it's a bad habit, but you do it anyway. You know it's a mistake and that the game will kill you for it, and that the game has a way to not have it happen, but do it anyhow because the game's solution isn't one you like. That... isn't really a flaw in the game.
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That... isn't really a flaw in the game.
Yup that's what makes this Doom 'the Roguelike' - The hallmark feature of (fun) roguelikes is instant, unexplainable/unavoidable death.
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By the way, any NetHacker will know that NetHack has very, very many more so-called 'interface wiggles.' ;) I'm surprised just how forgiving DoomRL is in comparison.
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Yup that's what makes this Doom 'the Roguelike' - The hallmark feature of (fun) roguelikes is instant, unexplainable/unavoidable death.
I disagree. Sure, that's one of the classic features of roguelikes. But that's not a defining or even necessary feature. And DoomRL doesn't even really have it.
I've played Angband almost as much as I've played DoomRL. Angband is much, much more dangerous than DoomRL in this way. There are so many enemies which, if you're not aware of their abilities, can bring you from 100% health to 0% health in one turn. That's instant, but not unexplainable/unavoidable. You can almost always avoid death in Angband by being prepared and using detection spells. It's the rare, one in a dozen games or so, that ends any way other than an avoidable mistake on the player's part. The control interface is cohesive in giving you all the tools you need to do so. It's streamlined. It works with your playstyle, not against it.
Sure, if you step out in front of a bunch of Mancubi/Revenants without fire protection and a lot of health, you're dead. But you (almost) always know what's around because of the sounds. Instant death in this fashion is practically non-existent. Angband does have it, but it's rare, and the monsters that can do it are (almost always) easy to detect and avoid. Sometimes you get into real pickles, but then that's what escape spells are for. They don't always kill in one blow.
And that's not what I'm complaining about. I submit that DoomRL is hampered by being tied down to this old roguelike chestnut. "Thou shalt not hold down arrow keys!" Why is that? There's only one reason, the key buffer, and that can be changed. Angband has a trap system. Angband's traps can kill you. You can also detect traps. There's a neat green line that delineates the area you've detected. Angband does the decent thing and makes it so you can't run willy-nilly over that line. You have to confirm.
All I'm asking for is that DoomRL give the player the same courtesy. It won't make the game any easier. But I do think it will make it more fun.
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It's not really an interface issue here; the whole "compensate for information which a player would never ignore were he really there" concept is already there, in that it gives you all the time in the world to examine the situation before acting.
DoomRL's gameplay is geared towards fast play. There's certain situations where you know to slow down. You first start hearing Revenant screams and you slow way the hell down, because getting out in the open with them when they first start appearing is very very dangerous. So you stick to corners and scan the screen after every move.
But that's not the default mode. The default mode is, you know (generally) what kind of danger you're in. Excepting commandos, every truly dangerous enemy can be heard. And you know the general pattern enemies move in. So you move in ways that diminish the number of opportunities they have to waste you. Sticking to cover, or not depending on what you're up against.
Most of the time, these decisions can be made fast. So you play fast. Or, I do. And it works great. Slowly I work on those tactical decisions, (which kill me half the time) but I'm having loads of fun doing so because speedy play is ten times funner than slow play.
But when you play fast, you make mistakes. DoomRL is a game that you could play fast the whole way through, if you just had enough help from the game to mitigate some of the more dangerous of those mistakes.
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For a while now, I've had an idea for a "safety mode" which I haven't suggested because I figured most people would just say to be more careful. Basically you hit a key to activate the safety mode, and then you cannot walk on dangerous fluids (unless maybe you have 100% resistance, but then it should stop you if you have an envirosuit pack about to wear out) or move when there's enemies around (or out of sight enemies that shoot at you from weird positions) until you hit the key to deactivate the safety mode. Or maybe things like shooting would also deactivate it since you're clearly acknowledging danger. It would have basically the same safety features that the game already has for mouse motion and automove except you control the movement the normal way.
By the way, I really wish that there would be an option for intuition symbols to stop automoving rather than have the game run down a hallway, sense the enemies from out of vision range, then walk until they can see you as well. And maybe having tracking data should stop automoving when enemies are right outside your vision range, as well.
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So basically, you're suggesting they implement a no-punishment clause for sufficiently stupid mistakes.
I don't know, man, maybe you should learn to play a tiny bit slower. DoomRL is not exactly Doom, and both are more games of tactics and patience than you might think. It is also honestly not that hard to stop leaning on arrow keys to move; I did it, and I'm an idiot.
Play slow, learn how to react to (or prepare for) various situations, and eventually you can probably go back, making those decisions you've learned about while taking your time faster and furiouser.
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DoomRL is just where it needs to be in terms of death issues, with one exception. I would really appreciate a warning (like the Arena continue) for when you're about to step into harmful fluids when at very low health. This is a stupid, avoidable mistake which has claimed more characters than I can count and is never even slightly fun. Lava is just really hard to see sometimes, especially when its a single tile amidst a sea of blood. It makes me sad.
As for other games, Nethack is completely idiotic for how many ways its come up with to kill characters without any warning or feedback. The game is unreasonably frustrating and I have no idea how anyone plays it. Malice is not a design feature.
On the other end of the spectrum Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is just about perfect. It allows you to die -- but those deaths are all of your own making. Are you too weak to fight that ogre? You die. Did you try to play cheap on the health potions? You die. Did you just try to walk into deep water without knowing how to swim? You... don't die. It won't let you. Did you wander close to said deep water while confused so you can't fully control your movement? You.. don't die. It asks you if you really want to do that. Answer: you don't.
This is how the games should be: they let you die through *expected* game mechanics, but don't blindside you with idiotic instakills and prompts you when you're about to do something spectacularly stupid, even if you don't know you're about to do it. You're playing the game, not the game engine.
As for the specific debate going on overhead: if you hold down the run key you deserve everything you get. Do not do it.
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It is also honestly not that hard to stop leaning on arrow keys to move; I did it, and I'm an idiot.
As for the specific debate going on overhead: if you hold down the run key you deserve everything you get. Do not do it.
If I wanted to walk from point A to point B, stopping when I saw any enemies, what are my options?
- Use "," but force it to stop and change directions all the time because my destination probably isn't going to be in a straight line.
- Use mouse motion, which automatically means I have to take a hand off the keyboard and move my mouse to where I want to walk, hope that the pathfinding doesn't just run me into a wall, then put my hand back on the keyboard. Also, I'd better be playing the graphical version.
- Moving one space at a time using the regular movement keys, making sure after every single move that there aren't any enemies in sight, taking far longer than it has any business to.
What you don't seem to understand is that just about every single one of the safety features being requested already exist in the game, and I've never heard any complaints about it. The only thing is, they put the steering in the hands of the game and they can be awkward to use.
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I'm even learning to like the game of getting there. It's just the pain of the stupid death that makes me think every time, "there's gotta be another way." Just today I was 70% to MMB bliss, just about to make the decision between a WhizKid detour or straight for the Blades. I was sitting in a cleared room reloading my Combat Shotty when a former commando comes in and wastes me while I'm busy pressing 'r', 'r', 'r', 'r', 'r'.
This happened to me a few nights ago - this exact situation - while I was doing a HMP Tac Launcher run, for the sake of trying it out. I'd been tired, I saved the game, and it tells you to hit "enter" to leave after saving - but I tapped it twice, and so the god-damned thing reloaded the game! Sigh. Had to finish one more level before I could re-save and exit.... and thus I died with an inventory full of large med-packs.
I deleted my 9.9.6. folder after that. All medals, badges, etc, I just clicked on it, dragged it to the trash, then emptied the recycle bin.
I've suffered ragequits before - you've got to me Mother Theresa to play Nethack and not rage-quit occasionally - but this is the first time in my life I've actually deleted a game folder. And it's percisely because of what Napsterbater said - Doom RL is so fun because it really is suited to a quick-and-dirty playstyle. Sometimes you have to slow down and think, but when you come down to it Doom RL is a lot more straightforward then most other Roguelikes out there. There's no herb-growing system, there's no complex potion miscibility tables, there's no alignment system and altars to convert and spell/skill advancement system: you've got a few trait trees and a ton of demons to kill, that's it. So when you get killed for playing fast - when playing fast got you to level 6 of Deimos without a problem - that tends to piss you off.
Doom RL is not your average roguelike; which is a good thing. So to say "that's typical Roguelike interface quibbles suck it up" isn't an argument I've any sympathy for. At the very least a full reload by pressing shift-R should be interrupted by a monster appearing in vision - it takes the exact same time as pressing 'r' five times, it just saves some wear on your keyboard, is all. But since it is not interruptable, you recognize shift-R as AN EVIL COMMAND THAT WILL GET YOU KILLED. So you get into the habit of tapping 'r' incessantly... and it gets you killed.
And the Run command, which never saves anybody. It's not neglecting the Run command that gets you killed; it's the one time you hold the arrow key down for two seconds because you're tired, or your cat jumped into your lap, etc. I can't tell you how much I love losing hours of patient, grueling gameplay advancement because I held a key down for 2 seconds instead of 1.5 seconds, then coming to the forums to be called stupid. I play games to have fun, not to be kicked in the balls. I play IL-2, and that takes intense focus and concentration and effort, to keep a fighter in the air, on the razor-edge of the performance envelope - but when I die, I just re-plane and hop back in. And I'm focusing on the game, not on the interface. IL-2 doesn't kick me in the sack and steal my pocket change if I bump the joystick wrong.
Setting up the key-buffer to automatically stop you, and force a new key-tap for every action once an enemy comes into view - that'd be amazing.The key-buffer idea would actually save you frustration in those situations.
Oh, and the Run command.
The only thing is, they put the steering in the hands of the game and they can be awkward to use.
Indeed. A feature so awkward that nobody ever uses it is... useless.
If we wanted Doom RL to be a game designed to extract our tears and rage, designed to exclude everybody but the most demented, cave-dwelling neckbeard from our secret club, we'd be playing Nethack with Chain-Guns, which is demonstrably not the case. The fact that Kornel put in tooltips - freaking tooltips - and the entire graphical version speaks to this, I think. With the difficulty levels and numerous challenge modes Doom RL is a remarkable game in that it scales to many different levels of player competence and difficulty, and that's really neat - but interface pitfalls can and will ruin your day on ITYTD just as easy as on HMP. I've experienced it myself, many times. I wager we all have. We're not asking for the game to compensate for our stupid decisions or Cat-Who-Dances-On-Keyboard pow-wows; nothing can do that, but a few simple, obvious interface improvements that would really cut down on the incidence of rage-quit inducing deaths. The loss of hours of gameplay, with NO SAVES ALLOWED, make this a priority.
And while we're on the topic of improvements: the game's first four levels badly need re-balancing. Most of my runs require five or six deaths/restarts until I get a character who doesn't get RNG raped on the first few levels. After that it's actually easy, unless the stairs dump me next to eleventy-billion formers on the next level. How many Sergeants you see on the first two levels determines if you've enough ammo to do Hell's Arena, which is a pain in the ass when you're gunning for medals or badges, which you'll be doing soon enough if you're a decent Roguelike player. Once you get past the start, Doom RL is lovely fun, but the start is just a bitch.
Malice is not a design feature.
Quoted for truth, justice, and the American Way.
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Most of the time, these decisions can be made fast. So you play fast. Or, I do. And it works great. Slowly I work on those tactical decisions, (which kill me half the time) but I'm having loads of fun doing so because speedy play is ten times funner than slow play.
And that's the thing, this is just your play style, that doesn't make it the correct one or the one everyone should or does play, nor does it signify what type of game DoomRL is. You call it "fast and furious" but that doesn't make it so. Me personally? I think if you spam "r" without looking at what you're doing you should die. Period, the game should not save you from your own foolishness. If you step in lava because you didn't look first or hit the wrong key, you should die. You made a mistake in doing so and that's your fault. You refuse to accept this and repeat "That wasn't my mistake" or "I wasn't zoning out" but the truth is it was and you were. If you hadn't made the mistake of not paying attention you wouldn't have died. Blaming the game for your personal mistakes (pushing a button too much or being too tired to play correctly) and asking it to hold your hand isn't how I personally think the game should be handled.
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Wow. Okay. There are several coherent points in there which I hope I can touch upon satisfactorily.
Moving one space at a time using the regular movement keys, making sure after every single move that there aren't any enemies in sight, taking far longer than it has any business to.
This is not as hard as you're making it out to be, and is in fact a valid strategy for not wasting dozens of games because of lazy moves; you're going to save time in the long run if your games take twice as long, but you die less than half as often/early. Making sure after every single move that there isn't an enemy in sight involves simply watching the LOS squares you're going to reveal as you walk, and listening to monster cries and slowing down if one is loud, and remembering, if monsters are nearby, where they're likely to be lurking. Or getting Int2.
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Okay. So. DoomRL is a Roguelike. It controls like a Roguelike. Okay, sure, it's probably possible to get a keypress buffer interrupt doohickey in to prevent mistakes like this, but arguing about it is not going to manifest it in the game, and if and until it's a feature, it's not going to make holding down or hammering a command in a turn-based game any less of a bad idea.
I understand where you guys are coming from. I have a few stings from early on when I accidentally moved too fast or held down a key. Alt-reloading for some guns is pointless in a lot of situations, and I agree that saving should probably require a key besides 'enter'. I think save-anywhere will probably be implemented at some point, too.
I don't think you understand where I am coming from. I'm going to re-iterate here: DoomRL is a turn based game, one that tends to reward caution regardless of build, and this is from someone who likes shooting rockets indiscriminately when he's not in melee. In almost any game besides, like, Sonic, what happens if you do things with potential punishments without thinking them through? Instead of asking that the game be changed and continuing to play as you are, give changing to suit the game a try in the interim and see how it works out. (Not to imply that every move you make is a stupid hold-key dash - just try catching yourself before you do it.)
Now, I'm going to go shave my neckbeard.
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This is not as hard as you're making it out to be, and is in fact a valid strategy for not wasting dozens of games because of lazy moves; you're going to save time in the long run if your games take twice as long, but you die less than half as often/early.
Forget strategy. This is about fun. Sure, it's technically the 'right' choice to waste a tenth of a second before every move and ascertain whether it's the right one or not. But is that fun? I don't think so. I'm arguing that a more forgiving interface makes for a funner game.
arguing about it is not going to manifest it in the game
Err, yes, it is. Discussing these things on the forums is exactly how Kornel gets the idea for new features. If there's enough of a demand, and the feature is well-defined enough, it can also be taken to the bounty board to incentivize Kornel to implement it.
I understand where you guys are coming from.
I don't think you do. "Taking a few stings from early on" is not what we're talking about. My focus when playing DoomRL is not to win. This might seem counter-intuitive but I don't play to win. I play to have fun. Taking a few stings due to overzealousness is just part of the game.
I don't think you understand where I am coming from. I'm going to re-iterate here: DoomRL is a turn based game, one that tends to reward caution regardless of build, and this is from someone who likes shooting rockets indiscriminately when he's not in melee.
DoomRL does not reward caution. At least, I don't feel rewarded when I have to exercise it. I feel punished. I feel like, rather than walk the tight tight line between life and death, I have to fight an interface. It's no longer me and Mancubi and Arch-Viles, it's me and the effing reload button. Rather than making decisions like, "can I make it to this pillar before the Vile rounds that corner, revives the Mancubus and it blows up the pillar?" I have to scan for enemies for a fifth of a second after every time I hit 'r'. Every time I have to find the comma key so I can run rather than just do what every other roguelike does and let me shift-move to run, it breaks the feeling of fun. Now I'm fighting a keyboard.
If you want to sit around and take half a second between moves that's up to you. You might think that's fun, I don't.
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If you step in lava because you hit the wrong key, you should die.
I'll keep that in mind whenever I walk into lava after fumbling with my laptop's awkward numpad feature, and I will curse myself for not having a proper keyboard.
And I'll keep that general idea in mind when I accidentally double tap u, or hit i and u, and waste that brand new hatred skull because there's apparently no longer an option to change the menu behavior.
And in the past I would have kept that in mind if I pressed f without any bullets in my gun, and then accidentally walked into the open and die when I try to aim. But now the current version is babying people because it allows a prompt if you try to fire without any bullets in the gun. Come on, they deserved to die!
This is not as hard as you're making it out to be, and is in fact a valid strategy for not wasting dozens of games because of lazy moves; you're going to save time in the long run if your games take twice as long, but you die less than half as often/early.
I never said it was hard, but it's far more annoying and time consuming than it ought to be. Consider auto-travel and auto-explore in DCSS. Consider the heavily detailed auto-inscription system and remembering potions and wands and scrolls. Is it "hard" to play the game without these? Why not just move one space at a time? Why don't you just grab some paper, or open up notepad and keep track of items yourself? What about map memory? In the old days people kept track of that on graph paper (not roguelikes, but other rpgs)! I don't always like the direction they go with development, but I very much agree with DCSS's philosophy that choices should be interesting and meaningful.
Going back to DoomRL, let's say there's a health globe several spaces away that I want to grab. If I'm playing the graphics version, I can click it and Doomguy will walk towards it as long as it's safe - the game automatically looks out for enemies and dodges lava tiles. If I'm not, I have to avoid lava and watch out for enemies myself. I already made the interesting choice to go get the health globe; playing screenwatch until I get there isn't interesting. If I encounter an enemy, then I have an opportunity for another interesting choice, but if I don't then the game just wasted my time. I'm just asking for the same safety of mouse movement with the keyboard.
Okay. So. DoomRL is a Roguelike. It controls like a Roguelike. Okay, sure, it's probably possible to get a keypress buffer interrupt doohickey in to prevent mistakes like this, but arguing about it is not going to manifest it in the game, and if and until it's a feature, it's not going to make holding down or hammering a command in a turn-based game any less of a bad idea.
If all unbound keys made Doomguy shoot himself in the foot, it would certainly be a bad idea for players to accidentally press any of those unbound keys. The question is whether it's a good design decision, and that discussion is kind of what the discussion forum is for.
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I'm arguing that a more forgiving interface makes for a funner game.
I'm not sure how the feature you want is able to be implemented. What if I want to lean on the keys while an enemy is visible? What if I can see an enemy but it can't see me? Then your feature is actually a hindrance.
I don't think you do. "Taking a few stings from early on" is not what we're talking about. My focus when playing DoomRL is not to win. This might seem counter-intuitive but I don't play to win. I play to have fun.
Then why are you so bummed when you die?
DoomRL does not reward caution. At least, I don't feel rewarded when I have to exercise it. I feel punished. I feel like, rather than walk the tight tight line between life and death, I have to fight an interface. It's no longer me and Mancubi and Arch-Viles, it's me and the effing reload button. Rather than making decisions like, "can I make it to this pillar before the Vile rounds that corner, revives the Mancubus and it blows up the pillar?" I have to scan for enemies for a fifth of a second after every time I hit 'r'.
As opposed to what, exactly? It seems absolutely absurd to me that you complain about getting hit if you reload while enemies are in line of sight. What else is supposed to happen? Reloading is part of the tactics in this game. You have to do it intelligently. That's why there are traits to improve reloading time. And that makes it a fun consideration for the majority of us.
If you want to sit around and take half a second between moves that's up to you. You might think that's fun, I don't.
I'm not sure why this is such a problem. In the graphic version, at least, the move animation allows plenty of time to scan for enemies, and prevents the key buffer from queuing moves.
I will agree with you that full reload is pretty sketchy in this game and should either stop when an enemy comes into sight, or be scrapped entirely. But I have no sympathy for you when you complain that tapping 'r' while enemies are in sight gets you killed. Or walking into lava gets you killed. Where do we draw the line? "Are you sure you want to walk around that corner? You might get hit if you do! Y/n" ?
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Not sure if I can better articulate my playstyle so you could understand why I'm complaining about these things. Oh well.
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Okay, I have to apologize. I read through the whole thread and came in late and was pretty biased.
I agree that a lot of the things you people are saying - a better run function, some streamlining of awkward commands - would be nice. It's just that a lot of it is cloaked in words that I perceived as whining which read 'I pushed (key) too many times and died, fix it' so you can potentially have more fun with a run and gun playstyle.
Also, things like this.
forget strategy
This game is all about strategy. Yeah, you can play it how you want, and if you don't mind getting killed rather than winning most of the time, there you go, have fun.
re: pillar archvile mancubus firestorm: The definition of 'caution' seem to be different between some of us; mine is more akin to being proactive, shotgun scouting, listening to monster calls, and I guess spending a tenth of a second per move checking to see if there are monsters. Yours seems to be waiting until you're in trouble before trying to play it safe, which might just not be fun for you.
re: manifesting the feature: yeah, arguing about it gets discussion going, I kinda worded it wrong. If/Until something like it gets implemented, you're going to have to play as you are and possibly wind up with preventable deaths, or not play and wait.
I might recommend cleaning up the ideas in this thread and posting the basics in Requests For Features.
I guess I kind of like old-school roguelikes, where anything beyond shift+direction was a single move that you had to think about.
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It's just that a lot of it is cloaked in words that I perceived as whining
Yes, we must distinguish between conscious gameplay decisions and unintentional actions input into the program because of human/machine interface issues. If we're expected to devote time to making proper use of the interface as-designed a second-nature habit, then I'll probably never play Doom RL again. I'm an adult, you know? I've got a job, and responsibilities, and the paperwork and everything. I have enough time to play games but not enough time to make a fucking study of them. Which is exactly why I don't play Nethack anymore; games I used to play when I was a basement-dwelling CHUD of the highest order.
You diamond-badge earning Roguelike ninas; I respect and fear your skills. We surface-dwellers may speak glibly, but at night we tell of your exploits in awed whispers. But at the moment, the price of following your steps is too high.
What if I want to lean on the keys while an enemy is visible?
Nice strawman. Because I'm sure there's people who really really really want to commit guaranteed suicide. I'm sure there's legions of people who consider the current ability to do that a feature they'd sorely miss.
And it's a silly argument anyways, because that's what .ini files are for, toggling options like that. Like the first-level tooltips.
It seems absolutely absurd to me that you complain about getting hit if you reload while enemies are in line of sight?
The point is that the interface itself ferments the habit of tapping 'r' really fast, because that's the only halfway safe method of reloading when shift-r is guaranteed suicide most days. The interface helps form the bad habit. But if shift-R would interrupt you mid-reload if an enemy becomes visible, you'd use shift-R for the cleared-room reloads and never develop the bad habit of tapping 'r' fast, because you'd only use 'r' when in actual danger.
and prevents the key buffer from queuing moves.
So why isn't this an option for the console version? Dear Mr. Kornel, please add this feature to the console version for next release, if possible. Love, Internet.
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From what I understand, they were really pushing the graphical version. I had read in places before that the feature was intended for DoomRL 1.0.0.0. The game's not perfect yet.
I don't really count myself among the super pro, but you might come off as a little less hostile if you reined in some of the metaphor.
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UAC Diamond. Pacifist Gold. Speedrunner Gold/Silver/Bronze.
The game idea and UI may push the player towards slow and cautious play but the badges certainly also require fast and furious.
I wouldn't mind some UI improvements since currently doing any speedrunning is a bit aggravating...
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Going back to DoomRL, let's say there's a health globe several spaces away that I want to grab. If I'm playing the graphics version, I can click it and Doomguy will walk towards it as long as it's safe - the game automatically looks out for enemies and dodges lava tiles. If I'm not, I have to avoid lava and watch out for enemies myself. I already made the interesting choice to go get the health globe; playing screenwatch until I get there isn't interesting. If I encounter an enemy, then I have an opportunity for another interesting choice, but if I don't then the game just wasted my time.
Each move is potentially important in DoomRL. In most roguelikes, your moves don't matter until enemies are visible. In DoomRL, the very next move you make could be a dodge. Maximizing this potential is one of the hallmarks of a veteran player.
I'm not opposed to an auto-explore function or improved run command by any means. But I am pointing out that it is disingenuous to say that 'the interesting choice has already been made' when there are still several more interesting choices to be made to get there.
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Yes, I posted this to get discussion going, and it seems the best way to fix this would be to add three things:
1) Have Shift-R on combat shottys interrupt when an enemy comes into view.
2) A smoother Run function. I suggest making shift-move work.
3) Make the character confirm moving into a fluid that will damage him. Optionally, only make him confirm when it would do a certain amount of damage or percentage of current health.
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I'm already a 4-diamond ninja, yet my knowledge of the exact mechanics and strategy are far from optimal. I'm also a relatively fast player.
Yeah, there are some annoyances (shift+r IS pretty much useless), but most of these complaints and the arguments for them are too typical and exaggerated to be taken seriously.
Also the G-version most certainly doesn't buffer anything. In fact the buffering problems are even worse IMO.
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Each move is potentially important in DoomRL. In most roguelikes, your moves don't matter until enemies are visible. In DoomRL, the very next move you make could be a dodge. Maximizing this potential is one of the hallmarks of a veteran player.
I'm not opposed to an auto-explore function or improved run command by any means. But I am pointing out that it is disingenuous to say that 'the interesting choice has already been made' when there are still several more interesting choices to be made to get there.
Perhaps, but my other point still remains that I can use a mouse click in the graphical version and let the game safely walk for me. Do you think that should be removed? If not, why shouldn't the same feature be given as an option for standard keyboard motion? Edit: rather, let me take care of the walking and let the game take care of the safety.
The interface has nothing to do with it. It sounds like you have this subconscious idea that 'the faster I tap r, the faster I'll be able to deal with these enemies.' But it doesn't work like that. You need to develop a healthy respect for reloading taking a decent chunk of time in this game.
I'm all for improving the interface, but it sounds to me like you're talking about nerfing 1/3 of the tactical consideration in this game. There is not a way to 'fix' this without making reloading overpowered. And please don't even think about a confirmation for reloading while enemies are in sight. ;)
I think you're missing what he's saying. It's not about reloading taking too much (game) time, it's about "oops, I didn't realize that a Baron walked into my sight and I accidentally reloaded another shell into my shotgun and got a face full of acid". Telling the player "An enemy walked into your sight while you were busy doing tedious stuff!" doesn't remove any of the tactics about when to reload or what to do when the player faces an enemy without a fully loaded weapon. Personally, I don't think R should be interrupted by enemies; I think it should take less time to reload a full set of shells but still be uninterruptable.
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Yeah, I always thought it'd be a good idea for full reload to give you a time discount over reloading individually. I could go for either idea over what we have now.
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For all you people saying that shift-R is useless, consider: the Invulnerability Globe grants 50 *actions* worth of invuln. You can either tap 'r' 5 times and spend 10% of your invulnerability time... or you can shift-R and reload the whole thing in 2%.
Just sayin'.
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For all you people saying that shift-R is useless, consider: the Invulnerability Globe grants 50 *actions* worth of invuln. You can either tap 'r' 5 times and spend 10% of your invulnerability time... or you can shift-R and reload the whole thing in 2%.
Just sayin'.
That's kind of esoteric, but you do have a point.
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I didn't know that. Cool.
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I sometimes suffer from such mistakes, because i think like "Ahh, respawns, respawns, i need to be faster" and instead of playing efficiently i tap the keys like mad.Or i just press move key one more time and die, when i'm not using run.And i'm not using it because it's safer to move diagonally or with zig-zags.
I believe that problem is not in the game, it's in TS's playstyle.Also about danger message - basically 95% of gametime you are in danger, and let's say that one third of that time is when you're in grave danger and you can just die after one wrong turn.Or there were no wrong actions, it's just two mancubi came out simultaneously.
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Speaking of mancubi, if there's one thing everyone agrees on, it's that they are assholes.
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Speaking of mancubi, if there's one thing everyone agrees on, it's that they are assholes.
But are damn good at dancing.
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Depends.It's like they're but there are revenants who have homing attack, but there're arachnotron caves, but viles bother you with respawns, but commandos are even more painful, but barons chew your medpacks and deal acid damage, but...So i'd say they are all balanced to torment you.
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Mancubi are the worst mainly because they make swiss cheese out of your cover if they get even a single shot in.
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Depends.It's like they're but there are revenants who have homing attack, but there're arachnotron caves, but viles bother you with respawns, but commandos are even more painful, but barons chew your medpacks and deal acid damage, but...So i'd say they are all balanced to torment you.
Arach caves don't bother me as much as they used to. By the time I get to them, I've got plenty of red/blue armor to deal with the short time I need to get to cover. Then I pull my shotty out, pop a few to rile them up, then switch to non-knockback weapons to finish them off when they get in melee range. If I get in trouble, switch on run and find cover. If I absolutely have to, I'll line them up so the rear Arach shoots through the near one.
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That's good.
But when i get to lvl6 after 30 minutes of carefully clearing HA and CC+ and spawn in the middle of arachnotron cave i start praying.Or more like cursing.
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For all you people saying that shift-R is useless, consider: the Invulnerability Globe grants 50 *actions* worth of invuln.
Is this still true? I know it was (and might still be), but I thought powerups were switched to a set amount of game time in some recent version.
Speaking of mancubi, if there's one thing everyone agrees on, it's that they are assholes.
Naw, they're cute bags of meat. I love filling them with bullets and then punching them to death.
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1) About the difficulty, DoomRL is already really easy compared to many other roguelikes. DoomRL won't kill you if you fail to remember that you can engrave "Elbereth" in the floor to repel monsters. DoomRL doesn't require you to memorize the entire table of item weights to identify items. In DoomRL, you won't ever get stuck wielding a cursed butter knife, and the only items that are cursed are either obscenely powerful or the Cybernetic Armor. In DoomRL, death is very rarely random. You got what you deserved for being stupid. If you didn't listen for what's on the other side of the door and you get melted by plasma, it's your fault.
2) About the interface: DoomRL has the best-designed interface of any roguelike I've played. It's simple and elegant, and you can see the entire level on the screen. This is why I don't use the graphical version. If you're complaining about having to learn a new set of commands to play a game, and you can't be bothered to script your own custom commands, then you probably should go back to Call of Duty. Games have different sets of commands. You don't have to be an absolute master to play DoomRL, and nearly everyone can win on ITYTD.
3) On random deaths: They don't happen, except in AoOC, on the start of the game. You need to know what's likely to happen, and to freaking listen. If I hear an enemy on the other side of the door, or near me, I'll back off from the door, and blow it away with a shot or two. Then, I don't have to worry. It's not like ADOM, ffs. You don't have to always open doors diagonally for fear of stone blocks falling on your head. You don't have to carry tons of junk items around to avoid having your weapons blown up by a freaking door. And, you won't ever have to deal with an enemy summoning 12 banshees at the same time, and instakilling you. DoomRL is incredibly forgiving, and it's the least random Roguelike I've played.
To summarize:
I feel that a lot of the complaints about randomness/interface are actually barely disguised complaints about difficulty. In mainstream games, everything is handed to you on a plate. Most of them are of the "Press X not to die" variety, with some going far enough to not actually let you die at all. They are designed so that you can beat the game on your first playthrough. They are more like a movie than a game. With DoomRL, you actually have a hard game. Diamond badges are actually a real accomplishment, and are hailed as such. This is why DoomRL has such staying power and replay value. If you're anything like me, and given that you're reading this you probably are, playing mainstream games will leave an empty, ashen taste in your mouth. It's not like you really did anything worthwhile, because it wasn't a challenge. That adrenaline high that you get when you do something awesome has to be earned. Otherwise, it doesn't mean anything.
I know that I'll catch a lot of flak from the new/casual community for this, but learn to play. This is a game designed to be uncompromisingly brutal, and if you can't handle it, turn down the difficulty. You'll get better eventually, until you can slowly work your way up the challenges, on a bridge built from dead Doomguys. Look at me for an example. I started with dying on HNTR, and I steadily got better. I might be an edge-case, but the potential is there for another DoomRL master.
Personally, I feel that Kornel made an incredible concession in not starting the game's difficulty at UV, and if you're playing on the low difficulties, feel glad that they're there at all. They're there for you to learn.
Kornel: Keep up the good work. And, I want something beyond N! for difficulty. I'm looking forwards to whatever you add to the game.
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you might come off as a little less hostile if you reined in some of the metaphor.
I laud them as "ninjas" who's exploits are spoken of in tones of awe and I'm coming across as hostile? I honestly apologize. I never want people to read hostility in my tone unless I explicitly intend it.
If you're complaining about having to learn a new set of commands to play a game, and you can't be bothered to script your own custom commands, then you probably should go back to Call of Duty.
2DeviationsOUt, I wish to explicitly express great hostility to you. I'm a lifelong Roguelike player, Multi-User-Dungeon player and simulation gamer. I play IL-2 as often as I'm able, and IL-2 has dozens of critical controls completely unscripted - no default keys, you've got to set them up yourself, and best be hoping you've set keys for opening your canopy, raising your seat, engaging/disengaging wheel chocks and manually cranking up your landing gear if you ever want to look sideways at an F-3F Wildcat. It's even more fun with Complex Engine Management; enjoy setting up keys for mixture control, prop pitch and radiator flaps. Let's not forget bombsight controls; increase/decrease speed, altitude, target altitude, adjust bombsight angle, toggle auto mode. Like most adults with a paying job I can't "study" a game so obsessively that even compensating for UI quirks becomes flawless, unconscious muscle reflex - but you might say I've scripted a few commands.
And unlike a Roguelike, you're using all these keys in extremely "fast and furious" combat; e.g. "closing with a Bf-109 in a head-on merge at 700 combined MPH" fast, making snap judgements on speed, angles, energy, potential energy and positioning as you think ten steps ahead in about a second and a half.
So try to appreciate just how much it pisses me off to have you telling me to "go back to Call of Duty." Because I complained about "having to learn a new set of commands." I've got a $40 copy of Shaw's Fighter Combat sitting on my desk - that's a textbook still used to teach actual fighter pilots how to fly. I learned how to play submarine simulators by reading books written by WWII submarine commanders. "Learn a new set of commands?" Chum, I do homework for my games.
So when I, of all people, say a particular user interface can be a pain in the ass, you may consider that a statement.
I feel that a lot of the complaints about randomness/interface are actually barely disguised complaints about difficulty.
Despite some very succinct explanations meant to counter that exact accusation:
Yes, we must distinguish between conscious gameplay decisions and unintentional actions input into the program because of human/machine interface issues.
However, this isn't fair. I'm new here, after all; quite likely this is a recurring thread oft filled with the bitter tears of newbies whom did not fathom that the "Living Hell" part of Doom RL was not entirely metaphorical. So even though nobody in this thread is whining about difficulty levels, you just jumped the gun and spoke directly to the typical root of most UI complaints. I get that.
But please understand that not everyone raising these concerns are "new/casuals" who need to "learn to play," and so glibly blowing them off as such while you talk down to them might really, really, really rustle their jimmies.
I thank you for your consideration.
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Ummm you wonder why you come off as "hostile" (or at the least unsympathetic) when you say stuff like this?
I'm an adult, you know? I've got a job, and responsibilities, and the paperwork and everything. I have enough time to play games but not enough time to make a fucking study of them. Which is exactly why I don't play Nethack anymore; games I used to play when I was a basement-dwelling CHUD of the highest order.
You diamond-badge earning Roguelike ninas; I respect and fear your skills. We surface-dwellers may speak glibly, but at night we tell of your exploits in awed whispers. But at the moment, the price of following your steps is too high.
Not only does the "awe" and "ninja" stuff come off as sarcastic and perhaps mocking but just prior to that you basically say that people who do actually take the time to think about what they are doing and not spam the "r" key are "basement-dwelling CHUD"s with no jobs, responsibilities, and the like. Not everyone who plays the game and handles the situations that are being brought up here lack a real life nor does not spamming the "r" key (or not walking into lava) equal making a study of the game. Simple common sense and a smidge of restraint handle that just fine.
This kind of stuff, plus comments (from other posters) about "Forget Strategy. This is about fun" and "Let the game take care of the safety" are the reason your position comes off as complaining and likely what provoked the "Go back to Call of Duty" response.
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I feel that a lot of the complaints about randomness/interface are actually barely disguised complaints about difficulty.
I'm just going to come out and say this: I don't think you know what you're talking about. I know now that I'm not a good player, though I used to think otherwise. Sometimes walk into lava because my fingers are misplaced, and sometimes I accidentally hit i+u and waste an item, and sometimes I don't notice that an enemy has appeared and I take another step or reload another shell, and in the past I used to hit f without realizing I didn't have any ammo and I'd walk instead of aim. But that's not why I'm a bad player. I could name a ton of reasons, among them the fact that I can hardly play anything but overpowered melee builds nowadays, and that I'm still awkward with corner shooting, and that I don't handle being surrounded well at all, and that I don't know how to manage my inventory when I do have to carry a lot of ammo, and that I'm not very good at using any chainfire weapons. Sparing me those input accidents won't make me a good player, but it'll make things a lot less frustrating.
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So when I, of all people, say a particular user interface can be a pain in the ass, you may consider that a statement.
I disagree with 2Deviations as well, in that this is not a difficulty issue. I do, however, find it hard to conceal my amazement at the 'interface issues'. As I mentioned to Napsterbater, yes this game is Doom and yes this game is not. In fact, in a lot of respects it comes really close to chess. The run command issues (and comparable) put aside, the faster you play, the more likely it will be that you'll make mistakes - you'll press the wrong key, press 2 at the same time, etc. I got slaughtered by 2 Revenants yesterday when I miscounted my ammo and stepped out from cover thinking I was aiming for a cornershoot.
The only reason I died was because I was going too fast: no one was urging me on, there was no clock ticking away, and dinner wasn't getting cold. I wasn't paying enough attention and pressed the wrong keys - and paid for it.
Back to chess: you can (and will) guess at what your opponent's next move(s) are going to be, and plan a few of your own ahead accordingly. If you then execute these planned moves without bothering to check if your guess at the countermoves was more or less correct, you, generally speaking, are a great big nincumpoop. And without wanting to be offensive, the remark that started this discussion ('I pressed 'r' 5 times in a row without thinking') falls smack dead in the middle of this category.
So, in summary:
* Actual design flaws in the game should be rectified. So far, I've seen none discussed in this thread.
* Interface errors are more or less non-existent - I can point out a few, be not enough to start complaining about them. I agree that either a numpad or custom bindings are vital, but the result will always be Press This Key - Watch That Happen. All you need to do is make sure you know what the keys do, and press them in the right order.
* If you use the 'run' function instead of thinking for yourself - which in my perception makes no difference in the time it takes, unless you want to make coffee while Doomguy does the running - don't complain if it doesn't think like you do. In my opinion, it shouldn't think at all, and drop you straight into a pool of lava if it happens to be in the way.
* If you want to play fast, don't complain if you're fingers are faster than your eyes. The game wasn't built for speed, it was built for strategy. Live fast, die young.
All this aside, if you feel changes to the game should be made - as Matt demonstrated - go ahead; as long as I don't have to pay the price for having a different style of play than someone else, you won't hear me moaning about any 'improvements'. And additionally: great discussion. Lots of input from lots of people, nice to see how everyone experience the game.
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I think 2DeviationsOut is right on the money.
The one thing I'd disagree with him on is that he thinks NetHack is less forgiving than DoomRL. I get that I'm kind of new to this game, and that very may well be why I think this way, but.. I don't know. He brought up the E-word. That mitigates 90%+ damage in that game, effortlessly. I sure wish I had E in this game. I will surely concede that something like an illiterate atheist NetHack ascension is much harder than most DoomRL badges, but not all or even many by a longshot.
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It's utterly ridiculous to say that DoomRL has the best interface of any roguelike. Full-stop. The three other roguelikes mentioned in this thread have been in continuous development for 17+ years, by teams much larger than DoomRL's.
And could we please save the flames for the cacodemons?
2dev, you like DoomRL's game mechanics. That's great, so do I. I don't currently play any other roguelike. Angband takes too long to get started and I don't last long enough on the interesting parts. It takes 2-3 hours of fast gameplay to get deep enough where you start finding the cooler items/monsters. Then I maybe last half an hour or so before I die. Too much buildup. Don't take this as a complaint against Angband. If I had oodles of time to while away, I would play Angband. On the whole, it's the better game, believe it or not. Most of Angband's *variants* are better than DoomRL, the top-shelf ones, anyway.
I put up with DoomRL and the sillier of its design decisions because it's the roguelike I can take a break with. It's a game I don't have to do any real mental heavy-lifting to play. It's fun even when I die. Dying is not fun in Angband. I can stare at the tombstone for 5 minutes before I clear the screen.
I don't think you're quite understanding my complaint, nor of the others who've voiced support for my proposed changes.
I get difficulty. I don't like games that aren't difficult. I play DoomRL because every single Wii game I've ever played was shit. The console world hasn't seen a difficult game since the Super Nintendo. Easy games are not fun. I expect a learning curve from every game I play. I expect a slow buildup of skill. I just don't think that certain things are skills. Taking any more time than it takes to form a tactical plan to move is not a skill. It's a waste of time that detracts from the real game.
I get game balance. I don't complain about the five or so early levels which are more perilous than the last fifteen. Because I can see how difficult it is to balance all that out. Making the first levels more interesting while being easier than the rest is, well, I'm not even sure it's possible. You either get tedium like in Angband, or painful difficulty/randomness like in DoomRL. Not a lot of middle ground.
Before you make more blanket statements about how you assume I play the game, check back to the three requests I made and actually look at what I'm suggesting. I started this thread looking for ideas, not just to complain. I don't see how fixing interface problems makes the game easier. In fact, it can open the way for making the actual game even harder, through monster AI improvements or whatnot, which I would welcome. I've been following roguelike development cycles for a few years now, mostly Angband's. They devote a lot of time to streamlining the interface. And it shows.
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The game wasn't built for speed, it was built for strategy.
Can we dispense with this nonsense? People keep saying this without anything to back it up. It says right there on the DoomRL homepage:
"DoomRL (Doom, the Roguelike) is a fast and furious coffee-break Roguelike game, that is heavily inspired by the popular FPS game Doom by ID Software."
If you don't have the skills to play fast, then don't. But don't attack us for wanting to play fast and finding that the interface isn't as well-suited to it as it could be.
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Isn't this all just a matter of misguided expectations? If you have problems with the interface, which was built for strategy, aren't you playing the wrong game? I mean, extremely oversimplified this is like playing simcity and complaining that the firepower of your residential area is lacking. I mean, with a lot of games it's fun to play them differently than intended, but if it doesn't work, I think you're barking up the wrong tree.
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Do you know the difference between strategy and tactics? There is no strategy involved in DoomRL, save that of choosing an advancement path.
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I put up with DoomRL and the sillier of its design decisions because it's the roguelike I can take a break with. It's a game I don't have to do any real mental heavy-lifting to play. It's fun even when I die. Dying is not fun in Angband. I can stare at the tombstone for 5 minutes before I clear the screen.
You say that as though a guy can't faceroll through any roguelike until he dies without doing any mental heavy-lifting. But how many platinum and diamond badges has facerolling gotten you lately?
I guess what I'm saying is I don't see DoomRL's typical characterization as a 'light' roguelike as particularly meaningful. A game takes an hour or two as opposed to 8+, but what does it matter if I play eight times as much? Every action I take in DoomRL seems to matter a lot more than in most roguelikes. The gameplay elements all work together to support each other. A few core concepts combine to form a very rich and satisfying experience, which is something that most other roguelikes never capture. A lot of them feel like a lot of 'cool' stuff slapped together.
And don't get me started on the difficulty/badge progression in DoomRL. It's absolutely unmatched in the RL world. It complements this tendency to play more games fantastically by rewarding devotion in addition to skill. Whizkid gets better with age, as I gradually find more and more schematics. The XP/rank system, though maybe minor to some, is a really nice touch to me. I like how it rewards time put in as well as raw ability. It's always interesting to see how some people get a high rank in one but not the other.
Yeah, I rambled a bit. I guess the takeaway here is I don't like these subtle jabs I sometimes see about DoomRL being less 'deep' than other roguelikes. I don't agree at all.
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Do you know the difference between strategy and tactics? There is no strategy involved in DoomRL, save that of choosing an advancement path.
How can you state this after starting this discussion based on the fact that you require DoomRL to think for you instead of doing it for yourself? It's not that there's no strategy involved, it's just that you can't be bothered to figure it out and would rather do a mad dash to the finishline instead.
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He's talking about strategy and tactics as military ideas; strategy as in goals in an operational sense versus tactics being small-scale manuevering and whatnot to achieve short-term goals. The fact that even the people that want the game to require doubled keystrokes or a speed governor to stop you from going too fast wouldn't use the terms in a military sense because DoomRL isn't a military campaign isn't really something he's caught yet. I get the impression that's trying REALLY hard to show that he knows more stuff so that his opinion sounds more educated.
Honestly, the whole "The frontpage says FAST AND FURIOUS so I want a thing in place to stop me from going so fast that I make mistakes because that's not FAST AND FURIOUS" doesn't really help his cause. I like Matt and Demetrious' arguments; they don't claim the idea is to be FAST AND FURIOUS (And how the inputs forcing you to slow down is supposed to be FAST AND FURIOUS is simply beyond our slow-playing ability to understand). They at least just go with stuff like "I've got butterfingers sometimes and would like the game to not jump on me for it" and whatnot instead. Even if you disagree with that, it actually makes sense, as opposed to the weird "It's not FAST AND FURIOUS enough if the game doesn't stop me" argument.
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When someone questions our collective abilities to distinguish between strategy and tactics, this thread is over.
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When someone questions our collective abilities to distinguish between strategy and tactics, this thread is over.
The thread was over when the ideas stopped coming and the flames were kindled.
Which was a while back...No offense guys, but seriously...
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Moderation: It was brought to my attention that this thread is getting nasty. While I still have to review it to see who was at fault and how much I'd like to remind everybody involved to play civil and keep it cool.
Update: After reading through the thread I must admit to having difficulties as to figuring out at which point you've managed to pass from "heated discussion" towards "open flame". As such I am going to proceed as follows:
1) This thread is getting locked, at least for the time being, to avoid further escalation
2) As soon as I get contact with other people high-up this thread is getting forwarded to them for further evaluation
3) Regardless of results of #2 I'd like to remind everybody involved to cool thier heads. Continuing the hostilities elsewhere on the forums would be... unwise.
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Ok, I've followed this thread for some time, and yeah, it got nasty :). I'd like to remind people here, that DoomRL's *main* objective is to create a *fun* experience for *everybody*. The difficulty system is in place exactly for that purpose -- so die-hard players can challenge the Nightmare, while casual players can enjoy the ITYTD smooth gameplay.
That said, the differences between the difficulties will get more noticable in the subsequent (and DRL2) release. My aim is to (and I know not everyone will like it) provide a different experience on different levels of difficulty -- up to the possibility of streamlining the mechanics on ITYTD and HNTR. This will be especially noticeable in DRL2, but also DRL1 will get some of that as a staging area. Stay tuned. And, addressing the ideas in the first (and some subsequent) posts, this might appear as an option/default on lower difficulties. Nightmare gameplay (and probably UV) assumes you know what you are doing, and nothing will change here. Except that I might push it even more forward, by removing some of the prompts.
Now, I'll experimentally reopen this thread, but please keep the discussion free from personal attacks. Everyone has their way of playing DoomRL, and everyone's way is different, but by no means less valid. I won ITYTD twice, and *once* HNTR. Seriously. Still, I consider myself a hardcore gamer, who in the day won UFO: Enemy Unknown on Superhuman using Save/Load only to take breaks. One may seek hardcore play in DoomRL which doesn't make him enjoy "press X to dodge!" anyway less. And on the opposite, one may play Dwarf Fortress every day, but seek a fast and light experience in DoomRL instead of careful N! Diamond hunting. Anything goes, and everyone is welcome.
And as far as it is possible, I'd like to accommodate both extremes of the experience in this game. And I welcome any ideas to do so -- just keep in mind that any changes need not to detoriate the experience for the other end of the spectrum.
Play nice, write nice.
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And, addressing the ideas in the first (and some subsequent) posts, this might appear as an option/default on lower difficulties. Nightmare gameplay (and probably UV) assumes you know what you are doing, and nothing will change here. Except that I might push it even more forward, by removing some of the prompts.
While I would welcome improvements, I believe making it difficulty-based is really a step in the wrong direction.
It shows where our ultimate disagreement lies: you accept that punishing the player for inadvertent actions is part of difficulty, and I think difficulty should be from requiring important decisions. My idea isn't to stop players who want to walk onto acid from doing so because they might not know it's dangerous. I want to let players tell the game, "I know there's some acid pools lying around, and I just want to walk around without melting, without wasting more time than necessary."
It may not seem like a lot of time, but I'd say for someone like me who already plays slowly, having to take that extra time to check the screen for enemies, see where all the dangerous fluid is, and check what keys my fingers are on, could probably add half an hour to my play time for a win. And I think that's a conservative estimate, based off my time when I rushed through a game on ITYTD compared to when I would take it slowly; it might be as high as an hour on higher difficulties where I would have to be careful for longer before clearing a floor. That's an extra half hour of me just looking around before either proceeding to do what I already wanted to do (the most common result) or noticing something dangerous (the much rarer, but admittedly much more important result).
The best way to summarize my position is this: if I make a list of reasons why the diamond hunters are awesome players, "they don't accidentally walk into lava sometimes" won't appear. I don't think that's the sort of skill that people work hard for.
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Yes, but take a look at how long the diamond hunters spend on a game with a diamond. They. Don't. Rush. They take their time and observe. From what I've read of the thread thus far, the main complaint I've been able to gather is that some people equate "Fast and Furious" with "Safely Ignore Environment." You can't do that in any game, because that gets you walking into an Arch-Vile crowd/flying into the Eiffel Tower/running face-first into Bowser.
Having said that, compared to every other Roguelike out there, DoomRL *is* fast and furious. No, it's not perfect - it won't be until 1.0 has gone Gold Platinum Diamond - and there are problems with the interface. But here's the thing. The interface appears to be low-priority in comparison to the actual engine. Improvements to how Run works, Safety Mode, Keyboard-Pathing... Yes, those are all nice things to have, but (1) we've all been playing well enough without them, (2) it's still much better nowadays than when I first discovered this place back in 2008, and (3) there are more important things to fix, such as applying damage from explosions before calculating knockback (this was an issue in 0.9.9.5, but I haven't deliberately checked to see if it's been fixed yet - and that's really neither here nor there anyway).
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I don't consider myself to be someone who rushes. I routinely take 2.5-3 hours to finish a game, when I see some people finishing with the same feats in half the time.
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The best way to summarize my position is this: if I make a list of reasons why the diamond hunters are awesome players, "they don't accidentally walk into lava sometimes" won't appear. I don't think that's the sort of skill that people work hard for.
Actually yes I do think it would be though likely in the form of "paying attention to their environment and not rushing." I've read a number of posts talking about how the player saved the game and took a break from it to help keep themselves from becoming impatient and making mistakes during runs (which is exactly the kind of thing talked about in this thread, being impatient and making foolish mistakes). And again we're back to differing opinions on what makes a game (which is a far cry from the interface needing to be "fixed" which is something that was said a number of times here).
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I usually play HMP. I can get places in UV, I just find HMP to be more fun. It's the perfect difficulty level for my playstyle. I'd be satisfied with having a few of the changes I requested be part of HMP and earlier. UV is a pretty big step up. I have to play much slower and carefully, and the tweaks wouldn't have much meaning for that reason. Not really my style.
I actually think playing HMP the way I play it is more difficult than playing UV carefully. Maybe I'll upload a video one day of a good run to give people a good idea. But I doubt watching me pound through 100 levels at speed would be all that interesting.
And I don't think the difficulty level of games like Angband or Nethack is being properly appreciated. It takes years to win those games. Angband has been getting easier of late. At least the guys who've been playing for 15 years say that.
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I would say that an interface where you have to look for any changes after every action, when a lot of the times there won't be anything worth seeing, is flawed.
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I would say that an interface where you have to look for any changes after every action, when a lot of the times there won't be anything worth seeing, is flawed.
That makes the interface of 100% modern shooters flawed :P (and good God, I wouldn't have it any other way!)
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That makes the interface of 100% modern shooters flawed :P (and good God, I wouldn't have it any other way!)
I should have specified that I'm talking in the context of DoomRL. Observation and reaction are certainly valid skills for a real-time game, but I'm not good at that and so I avoid a lot of real-time games.
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First off, I want to say that one of the things that makes this game great is that it accommodates a wide variety of playing styles. You can play fast and furious, or slow and ponderous and still get a lot of enjoyment out of it. I have a lot of respect for Kornel and the devteam for being able to keep it balanced enough to appeal to both casual and hardcore gamers. I'm very firmly in the category of players who take the "slow and ponderous" route, but nevertheless, I'd like to approach this thread being open to the fact that other people will want to play it differently.
Napsterbater had a neat little summary of his points a few pages back:
Yes, I posted this to get discussion going, and it seems the best way to fix this would be to add three things:
1) Have Shift-R on combat shottys interrupt when an enemy comes into view.
2) A smoother Run function. I suggest making shift-move work.
3) Make the character confirm moving into a fluid that will damage him. Optionally, only make him confirm when it would do a certain amount of damage or percentage of current health.
1) This is reasonable. At present, using full reload on Combat Shotguns is completely useless. (unless you're invulnerable) Implementing this idea will make that feature useful again and benefit anyone regardless of playstyle.
2) If by "smoother," you mean clearing the buffer issue, then I'll agree that that's reasonable too. (provided it isn't a major headache to rework the input system; I'm not sure about the programming side of things) I've only leaned on an arrow key once, but I did observe the problem that I continued moving for over a second after I released the key, and so I took a lot more damage than I would have if I had stopped moving the instant I had released the key. Personally, I don't lean on the buttons any more, but I can see how fixing the buffering issue could be a big help to people who favour that playing style. As for using "shift-direction" to run, that's also perfectly reasonable. (Or just make a bindable key for it?) Perhaps it could even be made a toggle (Just like "fast-play" in the original Rogue!) Switching to "fast-play" mode would make it so that any time you push an arrow key, it treats it as if you did the run command. That feature alone, I think, would cover a lot of Napsterbater's complaints.
3) This one I would only accept if it's an option I can turn off. Even though I take things slowly anyway, I don't want the game prompting me every single time I step into acid. (That would just get irritating) My suggestion is to have a line in the config.lua file that says something like "safety threshold for fluids" followed by a number which would be your percentage of health. If you set the number to 0, then the game will never prompt you when you try to step in acid. If you set it to 200, the game will *always* prompt you when you step in acid. If you set it to, say, 20, the game will only prompt you if you're close to death. This way, it's customizable to fit any playstyle. (Obviously, it shouldn't bother prompting you if you're invulnerable or wearing an envirosuit)
As for difficulty balance issues... I'd like to draw everyone's attention to the line underneath my username to the left. I was once told that I "deserved to die" after I complained about the "unfairness" of a DoomRL game I had just played. I didn't take it as a serious insult, but it did raise an important point. I learned, that day, that the subject of DoomRL's difficulty is a real hot button on these forums. So, let's all keep that in mind if we decide to talk about difficulty again. :) The fact that we're all exchanging messages by text here makes it really easy to misinterpret emotions and intentions, so it's really easy to appear hostile when we don't mean to be. In cases like this, I think it's important to choose your words carefully. (Hopefully, mine are chosen carefully enough!) ;)
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I'd like to apologize for my rant, if anyone's interested in accepting my apology. Roguelikes and Counter Strike are my sole refuges against what I consider to be the plague of consoleitis and difficulty drops, so I tend to overreact when I think that something that I love as much as DoomRL would have it's sharp edges removed. Really, it's up to you how you want to play the game. I know that I'm incredibly obsessive and I won't stop until I've done everything that there is to be done. I also know that I'm not the majority of people, and I'm alright with that.
In summary:
The game should not hold your hand, and ask you if you're sure if you want to do something obviously stupid. This might be acceptable on ITYTD, but not on N!.
Any actual interface flaws should be fixed.
Perhaps there should be a greater difficulty spread.
In the future, I'll try hard to not discuss difficulty in games. It seems to be such a source of rage and flames that it's not worth bringing up.
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I'd like to apologize for my rant, if anyone's interested in accepting my apology.
No biggie.
The game should not hold your hand, and ask you if you're sure if you want to do something obviously stupid. This might be acceptable on ITYTD, but not on N!.
I agree that players shouldn't have to jump through any hoops if they really want to do something stupid. I think we disagree on what is and isn't hand holding. My "safety mode" idea is something the player turns on, with a keypress in-game, when they want it, and they turn it off when they don't want it anymore. I don't imagine it to be, and I don't want it to be, a "help me beat the game" mode. I imagine it as more along the lines of a "let me know when something happens" mode. Perhaps walking along until seeing an enemy isn't the best play (I very rarely radar-shoot, because I'm over the top with ammo conservation), but if so then that playstyle will be punished even if I don't accidentally keep walking.
Perhaps there should be a greater difficulty spread.
That depends on which end you want to spread :) I think ITYTD really needs some tweaking. There's already hardly any enemies, so the levels just feel empty.
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Still, I consider myself a hardcore gamer, who in the day won UFO: Enemy Unknown on Superhuman using Save/Load only to take breaks.
Kornel, it was not that hard, as there was bug within the game that was resetting the difficulty to the easiest after the first Load ;) .
Try Terror From The Deep on Superhuman, now this is something hard to play even with savescumming.
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There are a few things in here that could be worth implementing:
- Directional run buttons. The idea of using "SHIFT+[direction button]" is pretty appealing, and it would be a nice shortcut from the current setup. Eight separate keybindings for this is probably the "easy" way to do this, but it might be more fluid to have binding that simply selects which button you hold down and assumes you'll be using the same directional keys to step as well as run. (Note that you can very easily change the binding of the run command right now, making its use a lot smoother: in my case, since I use a numpad for movement, I have it on the INSERT key.)
- I imagine there's a way to add a safety buffer: that is, based on the same conditions that stop you during run, you additionally wouldn't be able to input anything for some amount of time. Definitely needs to be an option, though, since I know I would never want it on (as, perhaps ironically for some, it would break the fast and furious flow for me).
- Along the same vein, there could also be a confirmation to continue an action if you're caught by surprise. To prevent abuse, however, I'd only want this to be of use for particularly long actions, like (full) reloading: otherwise it'd be the same problem as waiting in 0.1s intervals. Thus, it would be tied entirely to the player's speed value (1.0s normally, 0.9s for scouts), and if something happens in between a speed interval, you could stop what you're doing to do something else.
- "Save anywhere" is slated for the next release, or at least Kornel wants to work towards it.
Insta-deaths are usually the result of two things: Mancubi and/or barrels. The Mancubus already needs a spread-attack rewrite, so that's something we can strive to balance appropriately; barrel-deaths are almost always the fault of the player, so I don't lose sleep at night because people aren't being as safe as they should be around them.
But let me just vaguely and briefly comment on the "other" dicussion here. DoomRL is meant to be a fast-paced game, and a lot of the design is centered around just that. This is not the same thing as saying it is a game that expects you to be reckless all the time, and I can't really think of a goal-oriented game that fits such a bill. Games require you to learn their rules, and you have to allow yourself the time to get used to them. In particular, this is one of the main contributors to difficulty in roguelikes: learning through death. Just as recklessness in Doom got you killed, so too will it occur here: at the same time, I believe that DoomRL is pretty forgiving when it comes to what you're allowed to do, just as you often have plenty of time to react to a given situation in Doom. This is already balanced quite well, in my opinion, but certainly we can accomodate a few things here and there to get players used to the setting.
EDIT: Oh yeah, I forgot the funny comment I was going to make.
I was once told that I "deserved to die" after I complained about the "unfairness" of a DoomRL game I had just played.
Maybe we should tell more people that: if they turn out the same way you do, we'll be swimming with veterans in no time!
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I imagine there's a way to add a safety buffer: that is, based on the same conditions that stop you during run, you additionally wouldn't be able to input anything for some amount of time. Definitely needs to be an option, though, since I know I would never want it on (as, perhaps ironically for some, it would break the fast and furious flow for me).
I'm glad to hear that. But I think a key to toggle it on and off in-game would be better than just a config option. I think even I'd get annoyed if it popped up, say, if an enemy I was already corner shooting popped into view and it made me wait. And just FYI, I used to play slower before I saw how fast you were in some of your videos :)
Along the same vein, there could also be a confirmation to continue an action if you're caught by surprise. To prevent abuse, however, I'd only want this to be of use for particularly long actions, like (full) reloading: otherwise it'd be the same problem as waiting in 0.1s intervals. Thus, it would be tied entirely to the player's speed value (1.0s normally, 0.9s for scouts), and if something happens in between a speed interval, you could stop what you're doing to do something else.
I do think something should be done to make full reloading more useful, and having it be interruptable by enemies is acceptable to me. I'm not sure about extending it to other long actions, though.
Insta-deaths are usually the result of two things: Mancubi and/or barrels. The Mancubus already needs a spread-attack rewrite, so that's something we can strive to balance appropriately; barrel-deaths are almost always the fault of the player, so I don't lose sleep at night because people aren't being as safe as they should be around them.
I mostly agree. But barrel levels can be pretty frustrating, especially if one wants to stay and kill enemies.
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My thoughts on the subject:
I've been playing a lot of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup lately because of how fun and straightforward it is to play, yet in spite of all the time it saves you wandering around the dungeon exploring safely and preventing you from doing stupid suicidal things like walking into zot traps and lava, you can still get into incredibly tough situations and really need to think about how you can best get out of this situation - and as a result, you have to think about what you take with you and what skills you train first. Streamlining the trivial and the mundane of DC:SS means getting to these kinds of situations more often as a proportion of time spent playing, and I like that.
In addition, DC:SS lets you customize its default behaviour, to do things like:
-Arbitrarily many messages/regexes can be configured to force a --More-- (meaning you have to press enter before any further actions will be considered by the game). For instance, I've forced it to wait when I try to cast a spell and no monsters are in range, preventing the 'attempt to cast and walk to where I wanted to cast' degenerate behaviour. Since every spell has a different circular range, you'll inevitably get it wrong.
-Arbitrarily many messages/regexes can be configured to not interrupt running/resting.
-You can make it so some items are automatically inscribed to not be used without a prompt, e.g. so you don't use a scroll of blinking by mistake.
-You can set a 'low hp warning' or 'low mana warning' to appear at whatever % of maximum you like, and whenever either drops below that to force --More--.
Such 'safety mechanisms' are ESPECIALLY important when you play Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup online (as I always do), since latency means it would take forever if you had to stop and rescan the screen after -every- move. Of course, you should build a good mental picture of what's going to happen next, but it's also good to know that you won't accidentally kill yourself by playing a few moves ahead. (By the way, is there a DoomRL online server?)
A DC:SS inspired safety features package for DoomRL would look something like the following:
-Messages in the command prompt whenever one or more monsters come into LOS for the first time, indicating what their names are as well.
-A key like o for autoexplore. In crawl, autoexplore repeatedly moves to the nearest accessible unexplored tile, stopping every time something 'interesting' comes into view (like a staircase, or an item category on your 'stops autoexplore' list). In addition, if a monster is in view, it stops and won't do anything if you press it again. (It also says due to what monster(s) it won't continue moving for.)
-Shift+dir for running. In crawl, running makes you move repeatedly in that direction until you come into an intersection or are standing on top of something interesting. Like autoexplore, it will stop and not do anything if a monster is in view, making this another way to move around safely. In other games like angband, running can be configured to automatically go around bends in corridors and skip corners.
-A key like X, which makes a detached cursor you can move over the map through walls. If you hit enter with it over any known tile, it will make your character beeline towards that tile, going around hazards and stopping if any monsters come into view. In addition, if you hit the character of a glyph while in X mode, it selects the nearest instance of that glyph (e.g. > for stairs) and, if there's more than one instance of it, hitting it more times will cycle through all instances from clostest to furthest away.
-The ability to match regexes on any line of output (and certain other conditions, e.g. taking X amount of damage / going below X hp / invincibility or berzerk wearing off...) and force the player to acknowledge the new condition by hitting 'enter' before new input will be recognized.
-When doing any long action that makes you vulnerable, halt the player if any monster comes into view, and ask for y/n confirmation if a monster is in view at the start of it.
-Force a --More-- prompt if you're hammering r and a monster comes into view.
-Ask the player for y/n confirmation if you are currently not in acid/lava and attempt to walk into acid/lava (and you will take some damage from it).
-And possibly some more things I haven't thought of! But if you don't think a game like this could ever work/be difficult, try DC:SS at http://tiles.crawl.develz.org ;)
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I mostly agree. But barrel levels can be pretty frustrating, especially if one wants to stay and kill enemies.
Barrel levels are among the most annoying things in DoomRL, especially in the Hell mazes. They no longer have anything in common with "fast paced" game. Every damn step must be checked amd the following one must be calculated 10 times befpre you press the key.
Radar doesn't work at all, because every shot may cause instability in that crappy piece of russian reactor.
Playing Sokoban doesn't work too good either, as the remaining space is so small, that there is no use.
Of course monsters do not know about it at all.
I once lost AoMr run only because of the fact I could not distinguish Cacodemon from the damn barrel, and it blasted one of them (missed me), which led to chain reaction on the whole level.
Moreover, why are there so damn many napalm barrels in hell? Where is acid? Where are explosive ones?
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Kornel, it was not that hard, as there was bug within the game that was resetting the difficulty to the easiest after the first Load ;) .
Patched ;)
Try Terror From The Deep on Superhuman, now this is something hard to play even with savescumming.
I wanted to play it more, but the dumb looking for that last hiding Lobsterman finally took the better of me.
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-When doing any long action that makes you vulnerable, halt the player if any monster comes into view, and ask for y/n confirmation if a monster is in view at the start of it.
-Force a --More-- prompt if you're hammering r and a monster comes into view.
If those two are ever implemented, I hope they are optional. The first one seems against the spirit of the game (actions that take a long time are supposed to be dangerous) and the second one just seems annoying. Imagine playing city of skulls with that option enabled.
I like most of your ideas, though.
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I wanted to play it more, but the dumb looking for that last hiding Lobsterman finally took the better of me.
I finished the game, but I remember some of the missions till now. For example, colonies with their Tentaculats and 4 layers of infrastructure were the pure incarnation of sadism.
In the end I simply did not want to spend another few hours playing the mission.
I think they thought that UFO1 was really too easy - and did not know about its bugs that caused it to be easier than intended.
Therefore Terror received the difficulty it had :) .
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All this talk about XCOM is making me hope the X@COM (http://xcomrl.blogspot.com) guy keeps on chugging. It looks awesome.
And, yannow, the Firaxis remake of the original. That looks pretty ball'n too, helluva lot better than that nonsense 2K is peddling.
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I'm working on a remake myself in Starcraft 2, though I progress very slowly.
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All this talk about XCOM is making me hope the X@COM (http://xcomrl.blogspot.com) guy keeps on chugging. It looks awesome.
Nice one, I haven't known about it.
And, yannow, the Firaxis remake of the original. That looks pretty ball'n too, helluva lot better than that nonsense 2K is peddling.
Haven't heard about those ones as well, what do you mean by "nonsense"?
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what do you mean by "nonsense"?
The ultimate heresy in videogames: an X-COM FPS.
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Ow, !@#$ =( .
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Yeah, 2K wants to "remake" XCOM as a FPS that takes place in the 1950's and doesn't involve anything that came from the original XCOM. 2K has all but admitted they had the story and setting for the FPS decided on and in place before they decided to put the XCOM license over it. At least Enforcer pretended to care.
The Firaxis remake (http://www.xcom.com/enemyunknown/) is supposed to be an actual remake and uses a 3D tactical battleground, and remains a TBS. The changes they're thinking of making are smaller and grounded in the idea of "remake and enhance the original for the new generation" instead of "Buy the license and slap it on an alien-related shooter we were already going to make." It looks sharp and fucking awesome, and if anyone knows how to make a goddamn turn-based strategy game, it's Firaxis.
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Who cares? There have been so many attempts at remakes/sequels, both professional and amateur, and nobody managed to capture the fun of the original.
If Firaxis manage to make a nice game that's great, but the original UFO will likely remain the best one and there's nothing wrong with that.
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Glad to see some constructive discussion going on!
Barrel levels are only annoying to me when there's also "something really valuable here." If not I feel no qualms about blowing up every barrel from afar.
One minor thing I'd like to see happen is to have unique armors guaranteed to drop on dry land when the enemy holding them is killed. It sucks when I clear such a level and find no unique. But I suppose I could just make sure to always kill formers with weapons rather than push them into fluids whenever there's a unique on the level.
But whatevs. Uniques can make things interesting, but they're rarely useful when they spawn, especially the weapons. Onyx armor is probably the most-hoped for spawn in the games I play, but even then it's only useful after I get a power mod on it, and even then I usually favor bulk-modded red armor for the fire resist. But P-modded cerberus onyx armor is the only real kit I go gaga for for on my MMB Ao100 runs. But I don't really need it, bulk-modded red is plenty. Well, aside from cerberus boots, but those are easy.
Heh, I once found a nano mod and an onyx mod one level after the other. I had MMB and was itching to get that second level of WhizKid so I could assemble Cybernano Red armor. Last enemy on that level with the onyx mod was a former sergeant, which tagged me next to a lava barrel while I was overconfident and running around with only 25% health or so. Bye bye Cybernano. :-|
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Barrel levels are only annoying to me when there's also "something really valuable here." If not I feel no qualms about blowing up every barrel from afar.
One minor thing I'd like to see happen is to have unique armors guaranteed to drop on dry land when the enemy holding them is killed. It sucks when I clear such a level and find no unique. But I suppose I could just make sure to always kill formers with weapons rather than push them into fluids whenever there's a unique on the level.
You know uniques can't be destroyed by any means, even nukes? So if a unique spawns on a barrel level you may as well just blow them all up to get your shinies?
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Really? Pretty sure I've lost a few to barrels in the past. But that would mean that there was no unique in that level, which would indicate a bug in the program. Or that it was an armor and the possibility that a former would drop it into lava on death was overlooked.
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Really? Pretty sure I've lost a few to barrels in the past. But that would mean that there was no unique in that level, which would indicate a bug in the program. Or that it was an armor and the possibility that a former would drop it into lava on death was overlooked.
You mean exotics that are being destroyed? Uniques have a green aura and can't be destroyed by any means, exotics can be destroyed like any other item.
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If the "you feel there's something really valuable here" message is displayed, that means a unique. But I'm not sure if I've ever actually lost a unique to a barrel before, I was just pretty sure I had. I think next time I find the Anti-Freak Jackal in a MMB game, I'll see what a barrel does to it.
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Uniques can't be destroyed by lava, barrels, or anything else. I like to spite the RNG by throwing valuable-but-useless equipment into lava, and those are the only things that refuse to melt.
Exotics melt just fine though, as many a discarded BFG can attest to.
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Speaking of what certain objects do in fluids, has anyone noticed that if you drop an envirosuit in acid, it turns to water? I might be wrong, but I could have sworn I've done that before. You can even do it without walking in it if you place a bunch of junk items around.
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^ I'll have to try that.
As for Uniques, they are *mostly* indestructible. Dropping them in lava won't destroy them. Neither will nuking them, blowing up a barrel near them, or firing a rocket at them. But you *can* destroy unique armour by gibbing a Former who is wearing it. So, you still have to be careful about blowing up barrels if there are Formers are around.
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Speaking of what certain objects do in fluids, has anyone noticed that if you drop an envirosuit in acid, it turns to water? I might be wrong, but I could have sworn I've done that before. You can even do it without walking in it if you place a bunch of junk items around.
No, it doesn't do that. Besides, that would be incredibly useless. Also, Environmental Packs have the same rarity as Homing Phases, so I wouldn't want to waste them like that anyway even if it filled an entire pool.
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Barrel levels are only annoying to me when there's also "something really valuable here." If not I feel no qualms about blowing up every barrel from afar.
Then thank RNG for sending you tons of Env Suits :P . Blowing up every Napalm Barrel in the level can make it quite impassable.