OneMoreNameless
Level: Master Delver
Rank Points: 131
Registered: 07-31-2010
IP: Logged
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Re: Does the Epic Blunder get any less terrible? (+2)
Let me try this again without with less snarking.
The hold begins with the exciting task of running across several empty rooms. After reaching and completing the first major levels, I then had to backtrack through many solved rooms and cross the same dull hub area to proceed with the next location. There is plenty of indication that this will be required many more times throughout the full hold. It's annoying, and feels especially needless compared to previous DROD games wherein you just descended to the next level. At the very least, the introductory puzzles could have been placed in the 'overworld' for your first pass. Or give the player a dialog option to jump straight to the next location, really.
For the record, I played 63 rooms before stopping and they felt like very little BUT tutorials. Frequent voice overs explained each game mechanic. Entire rooms were dedicated to showcasing single basic interactions. Room design was extremely simple, with elements spread out and needlessly repeated (more roaches than required by the 'puzzle' etc.) to avoid any confusion and emphasis the solution. The number of choices to progress was low or nonexistent, leading the player down a set path to observe a demonstration rather than experiment with or discover it themselves. The pace at which these were taught to the player was also very slow; I'm obviously biased on this point but I feel it's unlikely that a player would need three separate rooms to demonstrate that the guards' swords will also effect orbs, and yes, roaches, and yes, crumbly wall.
What hurt my enjoyment the most was the lack of pay-off for these lessons. Using Bractea Town as my example again, I'd spend the first room familiarising myself with guard movement and learning how to defeat them one-on-one. Okay so far. The next room just demonstrates guard vs hapless roaches while you run in thoughtless circles, then eventually kill the guard one-on-one. Next room, you can watch guards path around some rocks, but then they still reach you staggered enough to be killed with the same one-on-one method so there's nothing extra to do or figure out. Next room, you can observe guards being attracted by an ally ... so you walk forward and kill them one-on-one as they break off. Next room, you can see them destroying some crumbly walls but those walls form a basically linear path that you move through and kill them one-on-one in. There's no actual puzzle! It's only watching an interesting interaction and then having nothing done with it that requires thought. The town had all of one non-secret room that required some puzzling (a roach near an arrow effectively preventing your movement, you manipulate a guard's pathed/non-pathed movement to get a couple of orbs hit), and come to think of it, that trick was about the only one that wasn't explicitly demonstrated beforehand.
Anyway, after seeing and learning the many cool interactions that guards have, I reasonably expected that a few more involved rooms would follow as a way to test what I, the player, had just learned. Nope. The level abruptly ended and the next location I visited (Skondusk Marshes) appeared ready to start the whole process again with rafts, so I cut my losses and quit. And then spent even longer writing these two posts. I am not good at time management.
Here's the thing about secret rooms as still implemented by DROD: Finding them is not a puzzle, it is an out-of-context exercise in observing a slightly modified graphic. Their hiding is not clever, as AFAIK they are all hidden in exactly the same way through multiple games. They are not fun to locate, you either happen to notice them or else run through each room again later monotonously scanning each outside wall. They are not even really a secret, since the hold tells you how to find them. All that they are is a chore the player must complete before being allowed to acess the extra puzzles. Optional difficult levels are good but this way of including them is bad game design.
The trial and error scripting room I'm referring to is Rasarun Court 1N 3E. An NPC requests to be let out of a locked room, but there is no indication of what he will do or that it is required to solve the room. To let him out involves deliberately trapping yourself, and requires restarting unless you've already correctly set up the rest of the doors in the room. Even if you have deduced that the room is unsolvable without the NPC's (unexplained) aid, there is no way to know that he is scripted to walk into and stop in any room that contains a bush or dead end. And yes, I checked, avoiding trial and error puzzles is 5th in the list of 'Ideas for Architects' provided with the game.
The combo counter is trivial, but it adds nothing to the gameplay and is likely to encourage hold designers to spam monsters rather than focus on clever puzzles, so I stand by it being a slightly bad idea. I'm also serious about being able to click doors to view which orbs are connected to them; this would be convenient in some rooms and gives the player no more information than is already available to them by clicking the orbs to view connected doors, so I really can't figure out it's continual omission.
[/rant]
I'll give Flood Warning a go this evening, then. Gigantic Jewel Lost also sounds like a worthy replacement for my smiting preference. On a sidetracked note, I can't think of any puzzle piece I specifically disliked from the early games; tarstuff was a drag at times, but that was only because of its slower pacing combined with the developer's insistence of lumping 90% of its puzzles together. Serpents and variants were my favourites, true story.
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