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Or, "ignorance is fun."
(Inspired by this thread.)
Over time, Angband has lost a lot of its "magic" for me.
Pretty simple reason for that - I went from being an ignorant kid to a computer nut. (For which Angband is partly to blame.
) What I think is interesting is that I got to see a different side of it back then than I see now.
e.g.
When I started playing Angband I had no clue how the combat and magic systems worked. Magic items, oddball weapons, etc. were things I would mentally goggle at, thinking "What does this do?" Whereas my current knowledge of the game says there's no practical difference between a broadsword and a long sword, and that the silver wand I found on dlvl 1 is going to be Magic Missile at best.
Also, I'd never seen the vast majority of monsters, so things seemed to get weirder pretty fast as I descended. Every time I saw a new monster, I approached with some trepidation, because I never knew what it might do... Especially as I also didn't know all the possible effects on my character.
(One particularly memorable incident involved a Dwarf Warrior and a Green Glutton Ghost, circa 2.4.x I think. The character didn't have See Invisible, and I didn't know there were invisible ghosts, so it went something like: "It hits you. It hits you. You've been slimed! Oh no, it got your rations!" (x10 or so.) All the character's food was stolen, and he eventually died of starvation. That one had me thoroughly perplexed for a while.)
Anyway, part of the reason I've shied away from V for a while is because it no longer has that element of mystery to it. I feel that it's gotten too simple and too obvious. I'm cool with the increased transparency, but I feel that things have gotten too predictable.
What do I think can be done about this? Three things: granularity, complexity, and randomness. These are my terms, mind, not technical terms; I'm not sure if they're the correct ones.
Granularity as I define it is more fine-grained behavior of things in the game. The most obvious examples here would be with items. If the aforementioned broadsword and long sword differ only in terms of damage per hit and number of blows, that is not very granular. If they actually behave differently, and may therefore be more or less useful to certain characters, that is more granular, which is IMO what we want.
IMO v4 has made big advances in granularity with the finesse/prowess system, and also with the new ego system. I especially like the idea of each ego item potentially doing all kinds of strange things, instead of being limited to a few sets of flags.
Complexity to me just means more stuff. More items, more monsters, more races and classes. This is what I like about ToME 2; IMO it improves replay value if the game has aspects that you don't see on just one play through. Recent versions of Angband have improved this a little, with new level types.
(Shameless plug: this is why I've been stuffing so many severely unbalanced classes into Neoband. I don't think it's working too well though.
)
Randomness means you never know exactly what you'll find. Angband already covers a lot of this, with procedural dungeon generation, and more randomized ego items in v4; but maybe it could do more - e.g. boss monsters with level-appropriate random spells would be interesting...
Obviously too much of any of the above factors would be bad. But I think the introduction of a bit more of each to V, in a controlled fashion, would make the game a lot more interesting. A game can't be completely unpredictable, but IMO losing some predictability would be good at this point.
Any thoughts?
(Inspired by this thread.)
Over time, Angband has lost a lot of its "magic" for me.
Pretty simple reason for that - I went from being an ignorant kid to a computer nut. (For which Angband is partly to blame.
) What I think is interesting is that I got to see a different side of it back then than I see now.e.g.
When I started playing Angband I had no clue how the combat and magic systems worked. Magic items, oddball weapons, etc. were things I would mentally goggle at, thinking "What does this do?" Whereas my current knowledge of the game says there's no practical difference between a broadsword and a long sword, and that the silver wand I found on dlvl 1 is going to be Magic Missile at best.
Also, I'd never seen the vast majority of monsters, so things seemed to get weirder pretty fast as I descended. Every time I saw a new monster, I approached with some trepidation, because I never knew what it might do... Especially as I also didn't know all the possible effects on my character.
(One particularly memorable incident involved a Dwarf Warrior and a Green Glutton Ghost, circa 2.4.x I think. The character didn't have See Invisible, and I didn't know there were invisible ghosts, so it went something like: "It hits you. It hits you. You've been slimed! Oh no, it got your rations!" (x10 or so.) All the character's food was stolen, and he eventually died of starvation. That one had me thoroughly perplexed for a while.)
Anyway, part of the reason I've shied away from V for a while is because it no longer has that element of mystery to it. I feel that it's gotten too simple and too obvious. I'm cool with the increased transparency, but I feel that things have gotten too predictable.
What do I think can be done about this? Three things: granularity, complexity, and randomness. These are my terms, mind, not technical terms; I'm not sure if they're the correct ones.
Granularity as I define it is more fine-grained behavior of things in the game. The most obvious examples here would be with items. If the aforementioned broadsword and long sword differ only in terms of damage per hit and number of blows, that is not very granular. If they actually behave differently, and may therefore be more or less useful to certain characters, that is more granular, which is IMO what we want.
IMO v4 has made big advances in granularity with the finesse/prowess system, and also with the new ego system. I especially like the idea of each ego item potentially doing all kinds of strange things, instead of being limited to a few sets of flags.
Complexity to me just means more stuff. More items, more monsters, more races and classes. This is what I like about ToME 2; IMO it improves replay value if the game has aspects that you don't see on just one play through. Recent versions of Angband have improved this a little, with new level types.
(Shameless plug: this is why I've been stuffing so many severely unbalanced classes into Neoband. I don't think it's working too well though.
)Randomness means you never know exactly what you'll find. Angband already covers a lot of this, with procedural dungeon generation, and more randomized ego items in v4; but maybe it could do more - e.g. boss monsters with level-appropriate random spells would be interesting...
Obviously too much of any of the above factors would be bad. But I think the introduction of a bit more of each to V, in a controlled fashion, would make the game a lot more interesting. A game can't be completely unpredictable, but IMO losing some predictability would be good at this point.
Any thoughts?
) I mean, sure, giving the player an Uber Miracle Sword of Everything Slaying on level 3 is a bit much, but there really ought to be some useful items there...
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