On a related note, throughout alpha I've felt the need to avoid spoilers, because I strongly believe in the value of overcoming significant challenges to makes discoveries in a roguelike, though honestly everything is eventually going to be documented in the wiki anyway, and anyone who wants to will have access to this information.
Will throw in here I've definitely been more fond over the years of roguelikes that are either very transparent (Incursion would probably be close to my gold standard, here, and so far as personal inclinations go it's almost certainly the RL I've achieved victories in the most, despite seeming to be considered a fairly hard one) or have a robust internal spoiler system available if desired (can't recall an ideal, there, but some of the *bands come close). Similarly, stuff like DCSS... I've beat it a couple of times, but it took having its wiki/knowledge bot whatsits open the entire time I was playing and I'll probably never go back to the game at all at this point largely due to exactly that.
There's a lot to be said for discovery, but at the same time it's
intensely frustrating to have runs ended because you ran into something that did stuff you had no way besides experiencing it to predict coming, or that you forgot about for whatever reason (long hiatus from playing, just a bad memory, whatever). Easily a common problem with RLs is that they let the metagame/discovery process be a significant drain on everything
else the games do, by obfuscating systems, hiding information, and giving enemies little to no tells for what they're capable of, so on, so forth. Generally just tucking away much of the information the rest of the game needs as input to avoid being unenjoyable. There's a lot of the RL community that's pretty enamored to it, but it's honestly just kinda' bad design for a game qua game, precisely because it undermines the rest of the game's mechanics. Discovery is one thing, but when it amounts to memorization at the cost of significant time it starts being less of a
pleasant thing.
... what it boils down to, is that so far as suggestions go, some kind of built-in spoiler system would be great. Either as a lower difficulty type thing, a(n easily accessible) debug/cheat(/wizard, heh) option, or something along those lines. Even something limited to key bits of information* would be great, and there's a lot of room to build visual and textual tells into a game (aural, too, but I'd probably recommend avoiding that save as in addition to the other two. Lot of folks play with sound off for various reasons), which are a lot better than the sort of "oh well, it killed you, better luck next time" thing that's pretty common. If time and effort allows, at
least having it so information updates and retains between characters as you encounter it would be incredibly nice, and a serious boon to those of us who aren't braining quite as well as they used to, heh.
... and, as almost always, at least having the
option is going to be better than not having it, from the player's perspective. Folks that don't want that aspect can not have it, those that do, can. When it's optional you avoid turning off/making the game less fun for either group. Which is usually a good thing, particularly if you're going commercial, heh.
*Had a sort of textbook example in Caves of Qud recently. Using a pretty powerful weapon, at one point I encountered an enemy that just happened to be able to reflect that weapon's damage type, and ended up one-shotting myself in the face. While that sort of interaction isn't necessarily bad, the fact that I had no way short of code diving to know the weapon
had that damage type, nor a way to tell the enemy had the particular ability besides it happening or the AI happening to use an attached ability it doesn't particularly like to use, is something you really just want to avoid. Even if you don't have outright spoilers, tells of some sort are incredibly important unless you're just trying to make the player suffer (or as something optional so they can make themselves suffer, ehehe).
