Bay 12 Games Forum

Sorry, after watching close to 8 total hours of "Cave, splat. Cave, splat. Cave, splat. Cave, splat. Yay, we finally accomplished something" I'm feeling the need to stratergize so in MP it's not 2 hours of group stupidity.

Strategizing... I'unno, I'm sorta' doing it, but it's hard for me to really measure without actually, yanno', playing. Both the dev lpers and Pbat have absolutely glaring combat flaws - P's really weak with the grappling hook (which is just lawlrape in the caverns -- latch onto the ceiling, drop a torch from your inventory, spam with bow/shuriken. Everything dies!) and th'dev fellows have generally crap timing abilities with their swings and seem to have no survival instinct when it comes to not getting hit. These critters aren't moving in any way we haven't seen a million and one times in old platformers... not being where the slime is shouldn't be that difficult

Being a bit overly critical, sure, but the controls seem fairly responsive -- a lot of the damage in both LPs seem to be coming primarily from carelessness, maybe lack of familiarity, or just no attempt at actually, yanno', timing their swings. PBat's a bit better at it, but still... I can't help but think that th'GBA castlevanias (which have plenty of weapons with similar swing actions) would chew them up and spit 'em out. The critter patterns I've been seeing so far are really, really, easy to deal with and basically make damage a highly unlikely thing, if you bother to do something besides just kinda' swing randomly... though even that'll work with silver+ broadswords, especially if you've got two folks to synchronize their attacks. Buzzsaw blade walls!

The cthulhu eye fight seems to be a really simple one if you bother to do some setup before hand. A large box, just the right size to grapple around, or a large open area seeded with grapple target platforms, would be perfect for it -- you just use the hook to dodge to <2k hp charges while spewing shurikens, which you can easily have a 200+ stack of from the merchant. That's solo, too -- with multiple people, a couple of dedicated cthulhu-eye matadors bouncing around while folks a fair distance away spew ranged attacks would drop th'eye toute-suite. >2k hp, you just spew shurikens. That'll kill both the eye spawns and do plenty of damage.

Proper use of dirt would make a lot of both lp's problems just disappear, too. Regularly putting some 1-2 spaced dirt lines above the players could massively reduce the chance of something dropping on top of 'em when they're cave diving. I could see using the bow in conjunction with rapid dirt emplacements to easily handle attacks -- seven or so blocks, three on each side of your and one, maybe two just above, would render you mostly invincible to everything except worms and able to fire and murder with impunity... if you don't just, yanno', hang from the ceiling.

I'm really stoked about what I'm seeing, but it definitely seems like a more competent player is going to be able to just demolish the early challenges that we're seeing. Groups of said players... man, devastation everywhere.

Anyone else think that the value of tools are being heavily underestimated in both LPs, so far? I keep wanting to strangle P for not getting a bloody gold pickaxe

LP part 13's up. Twitter/reddiit are apparently good ways to keep a track of when this stuff happens

http://wz2100.net/

Only thing I can think of off the top of my head.

Mm... actually, 7th Saga had something neat going on, it being one of the exceedingly rare cases where localization actually increased the game's difficulty. I forget the exact reason (something to do with leveling, maybe), but apparently a slightly misplaced bit of code in the english version of the game ramped the difficulty through the roof, making 7th Saga one of the hardest SNES rpgs to ever hit the States. Nowadays, there's patches that revert the game back to its original difficulty. I've played a little bit with one applied, and it's quite the different experience. Definitely still rather good.

In other news, 7th Saga's sorta' sequel finally got translated a couple years ago. It's a pretty awesome game.

The thing is... TomE4 and Incursion do not represent the majority of Roguelikes.

Nethack does.

Which would make my point even stronger... nethack has been effectively solved by more than one person. It's certainly not genuine randomness that's stopping people from winning.

Being fair, though, I don't notice the nethack influence in most roguelikes, largely because I've never played nethack for more than a few minutes, despite playing the majority (Probably better than 2/3rds by this point, heh.) of english language RLs.

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Most deaths in roguelikes aren't due to randomness, but carelessness

It depends on how well you can play. If you play very well then it is almost all due to randomness.

Except not I didn't say "most deaths for good players," I said most deaths, period. Yes, the deaths that hit very good players tend to be due to randomization -- but 90% or better of the time, they could have mitigated that random cause, through one means or another. Certainly the majority of deaths, overall, in RLs is due to a combination of carelessness and unfamiliarity with the game's mechanics.

However you forgot the OTHER aspect. Not Randomness but "Unfair" or "Unknown" mechanics. A lot of the time people who are able to continuously beat roguelikes are ones who are aware of these unknown mechanics you have no way of knowing.

Fairness has nothing in particular to do with difficulty in an asymmetric game (i.e. most games, these days.), except to the extent which the situation has been balanced toward one side (player, non-player, etc.) or the other. Certainly a asymmetric game isn't going to be fair, for one side or another. The issue isn't fairness but enjoyability (which is largely subjective) and if it can be beat (which is not subjective). "Beat regularly" may or may not be something desired or actively fought against, depending on the designer, of course.

As to the unknown aspect, that is somewhat fair. Much of the intial difficulty in RLs can, indeed, come from hidden mechanics. However, the 'people who are able to continuously beat roguelikes' don't have some special case method of gaining knowledge -- they gain it through experiential testing (i.e. playing the game), 'spoilers' (advice from those more experienced), or code diving, same as anyone else. There's nothing really stopping anyone here from being able to streak on nethack except the time and effort investment.

So REALLY you have to split roguelike deaths into three
1) Stupid mechanics, 2) Randomness, and 3) Genuin[e] fault of the player

One is largely subjective, and somewhat self-contradictory -- if the mechanics were genuinely stupid, they'd be easy to identify and circumvent, not leading to many overall deaths at all. Certainly there are some mechanics in RLs that aren't entirely well thought out, but name me a computer game that doesn't have that issue.

Two and three are tied together -- a great deal of the strategy in roguelikes is, specifically, mitigation of random events. The RNG is quite likely to be actively out to kill you and preparation and appropriate reaction when the time comes is very strongly in the hands of the player. There are, of course, cases where there is genuine death-by-RNG: Running into an exploding dart throwing kobold 3 steps from the starting tile in Dungeon Crawl is a good example. There's also cases in bullet hells where you die because you sneezed

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I don't like bullet hell games myself, and if I did make a game, I wouldn't implement many of their design choices, but I don't go about saying they're badly designed

No... Those games are genuin[e]ly difficult where while a large amount of memorisation is required it isn't sacrificed for gameplay.

I am talking about Roguelikes where the majority of the time the difficulty comes as a sacrifice to gameplay or by degrading gameplay.

So gameplay is a combination of memorization and fine motor control? The difficulty in roguelikes have always struck me as specifically built to encourage and direct the player toward a particular sort of gameplay, namely long term and/or logistical thinking, with short-term action being devalued. How does RL's particular brand of viciousness sacrifice or degrade gameplay of the type engendered by the genre?

There's, uh... Sengoku Rance. There was an aborted attempt at an LP in th'let's play forum not terribly long ago. As a game qua game, it's... pretty good, actually. Definitely RoTK style. I'd recommend it if you and your wife can stand the, ahem, ancillary content. Don't remember if there's any multiplayer-type aspect to it, but hotseat play would definitely be possible.

Wait a bloody second... you're the same Qloos...

Huh. Man, my mind is somehow blown. I've killed you before

CA all th'way, man. All the way.

I don't normally indulge in short posts completely unrelated to the thread's topic, but I have to say I'm vaguely amazed to read that on Dwarf Fortress's forum

Usually folks disliking that sort of thing keep quite the distance from DF, heh.