Oneiromancer wrote:
Heh, IVAN was one of the few roguelikes that held my attention for more than 15 minutes, although that may be mostly because it wasn't ASCII. What exactly did it do badly, again? I'm having much more trouble deciphering this post compared to the previous one. 
Oh, I'm not saying IVAN isn't
fun; I'm saying that the way it handles the storytelling part is bad (pages of text which never vary and which you're likely to start skipping after your tenth death in the underwater tunnel; not so much bad actually as overly conventional). Basically, when it comes to roguelikes the usual implentation of permadeath forces repetition of the entire game; messing up in Zot means you have to start over from the very beginning in Crawl, and getting to Zot is a quite large time investment. The usual means of storytelling suffers heavily as a result because you see most of the story a zillion times and only see new content/the end after playing for long enough to know how to survive to the end. Now, Crawl gets a pass because it takes a route similar to Doom by restricting its 'story' to a bit of background fluff and the story the user generates as a response to the randomly constructed content (which can be anything from the sad, short tale of a hopeful mage cruelly clubbed to death not even a minute after he entered the dungeon to a long tale of a successful warrior who manages to overcome all foes and escape with the Orb). Roguelikes that try to put a conventional story in the game in the same way console games use cutscenes don't succeed nearly as well since, while the console player can repeat a battle/level over and over until it's finally beaten and thereby progress in the story, the roguelike with permadeath asks for perfection and thus forces the player without the ability to do such all the way back to the beginning. It's sort of like what would happen if you have a book that you want to read and find a word you're not familiar with; the console version will let you read the rest of the sentence to try and get context, then pick up where you left off, while the roguelike version shuts itself the instant you fail to grasp something and forces you to read again from the beginning. The upshot here is that longer or complex plots are hard to support as a feature in games that force you to restart from the beginning, and the IVAN reference was part of my way of saying that even simple plots handled in conventional storytelling fashion can become more of a nuisance than a feature (in IVAN's case, it's not that the story isn't fun but that finishing the storyline, or even reaching Attnam if you're a newbie, takes so much time that the previous bits of story become old-hat; it's sort of like why you don't see terribly complicated storylines in arcade games, only those who have the change and time to spare for an arcade game will see the end).
You Only Live Once, while a little obscure (though I rather think it's not hard to find on Google), is mentioned because it alters the permadeath conditions in a rather pleasing way; the story isn't instantly reset when you die even though your original character stays dead, which means that even though the story is quite simple, it progresses and thus remains as a feature instead of just being fluff or a nuisance.
[Last edited by BDR at 01-10-2008 06:39 AM]
Unavoidable. I quite like ToME for that reason - solves a lot of the issues (while introducing entirely new ones!)
