Tweet
I think some of the perceived shift in difficulty is that over time, the game has been recalibrated towards a diving playstyle instead of the older received wisdom of "hang around at level X and go no deeper until you've got X thing covered". Consumable drops and so on are now balanced for a steady descent as fast as you dare instead of hanging around at safer depths scumming for items first.
-
-
Maybe curses could be an interesting way to introduce mini-quests - you decurse X when you have killed 5 orcs or something.
If someone actually collected together all the ideas that get proposed every few months on the forum, worked out which ones would make good gameplay and which wouldn't, and write a design doc, I'd probably implement it... basically, do the thinking, and I'm sure someone else (probably me) will do the coding.takkaria whispers something about options. -more-Comment
-
[QUOTE=Tyggs;85122
I'm curious how long folks have been playing. Maybe it's just that I'm just an old kook... I learned through trial by fire and the game was more enjoyable for me because of it.[/QUOTE]
I first played Angband in 1995, when I noticed the gentleman in the seat next to me playing it on a laptop and he kindly sent me a floppy disk with the game a week later. Years later, after stumbling upon Thangorodrim on the internet, I played again for awhile. Then again, recently I've come back to the game in earnest after watching Fizzix' YouTube videos of "Let's Play Angband".
Contrary to Tyggs feelings, I have loved the changes. The experience has been much improved in so many ways. Great strides have been made in the interface so that what @ would know, player knows; tedious record-keeping and calculation that could be done by hand have been most helpfully automated; tilesets; and thematic changes, especially in the current dev version with adventurer parties, thematically grouped monsters and thematically grouped uniques. All in all, I find the changes make the game more immersive and have greatly enriched the playing experience.
I haven't found the game to be easier in content, just easier because of less tedium - which is a good thing! I die a little less, not because it's any easier, but because Fizzix' videos made me a better player.
What other games survive for over twenty years, continue to attract interest and inspire people to join in and further their development? And all without the profit motive? I'm so impressed with the oook forum. It has been a thorough and pleasant surprise to ask questions or make suggestions, which I confess I worried might be lame, and instead find they inspired discussion and even implementation in the dev version.
Thank you to the developers, and participants in the forum, and the players of Angband that have kept this game alive and growing all these years!“We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are DeadComment
-
About curses - I like the way weak curses are used in FAangband. Rings and amulets and other items may have benefits and drawbacks of different levels.
For example, a ring that grants resistances to one or two elements may weaken the char against another element (FAangband uses a percentage resistance system). There can also be other effects like an item that activates for an ability may sometimes randomly make you hallucinating or attract undead monsters.
I think it's more fun than the vanilla system.
I also miss the cursed items in vanilla and I feel a bit torn between missing ID scrolls and the ease of use of items.Comment
-
So the answer to the so called "press a button to make it go away" is to remove it in the first place? And/or "make it go away" on its own? Just seems inventory management is less a part of the game for one thing. No more having to balance out how many scrolls/rods/etc of ID to pack on your way into the dungeon or decide if its worth toting around that heavy piece of armor until you can ID it to find out if its safe to wear.
And, yes, there are still some one-shot kills in Angband. But they kill you by damage unlike in Nethack where they just kill you outright. As I recall, it was possible for a high level warrior to survive quaffing a potion of detonations.
As for the curses reversing the benefit of items idea, it sounds a bit along the line of items such as a Ring of Weakness vs a Ring of Strength. Shifting that idea to them being the cursed/uncursed versions of the same item so removing the curse will turn a Ring of Weakness into a Ring of Strength sounds good. But go back to the cursed item fusing to your finger until you get it uncursed.
I haven't seen yet, but are potions of negative stat still in? Honestly if the restore potions are gone but stats restore on level up I don't really see the point of the change. It becomes neither a good or bad change overall but a straight wash. It may be a problem at high levels when you level slower, but by then, stat potions are ( or were ) fairly commonly found at the depths you'll be at and those will restore drained stats.
I miss the broken daggers and such too. Sure, they were usually junk, but I have fond memories of an early Holy Avenger Broken Dagger I found once.
I kept it in my house til the end just for the novelty.
To answer Ingwe about what other games have survived for so long: Nethack, which is MUCH harsher to new players than Angband ever was. Don't get me wrong, I find that game outright sadistic at times and could never really get into it for that reason. But, as I saw it, Angband taught you to be careful. Nethack taught you that no matter how careful you were, the game could still find ways to destroy you with no counter and no warning.
I've died in my playing of the most recent version of Angband, believe me. The monster fights aren't any easier. They're not any harder, either. I'm just a bit saddened to see other management challenges removed.Comment
-
This is turning into "let's rehash every major game design decision of the last few years"...
If there is any possibility of a bad item getting stuck to the character's body until Remove Curse is used, then the entire premise of ID-by-use for equipment is ruined. Likewise, if early consumable items have at all significant odds of being seriously bad for the character (here I'm referring to stat-loss potions), then the premise of ID-by-use for consumables is similarly ruined.
ID-by-use does a fantastic job of speeding up the early game. In the old days, the path from the beginning to around about dlvl 20 (1000') was a fairly tedious slog. You kept having to return to town to unload junk gear, and you spent ages sitting around doing nothing while you waited for pseudo-ID to kick in. Nowadays if you find something unknown, you can just use (or equip) it, and find out what it does that way. In short, you keep playing the game.
Many recent design decisions are all about keeping the player playing the game, where the game is:
* Exploring the dungeon
* Fighting monsters (and all that entails)
* Optimizing equipment
Anything that doesn't directly contribute to "playing the game" is optional; if it doesn't harm those aspects then it can be helpful for contributing flavor (c.f. potions of Slime Mold Juice are still in the game despite being borderline useless), but if it does, then it will probably be removed, or replaced by something better.
Above all, the game ought to be about making difficult decisions. So yes, when there's an easy decision to be made, these days the game tends to make it for you. It's not like you were going to decide differently anyway.
(There's been serious discussion about how to rework traps so you don't have to, and indeed can't, mindlessly spam trap detection spells at regular intervals, just so you know...)Comment
-
Actually, I think you're wrong, and I think you've hit the nub of the problem. Management challenges do add interest to some people, and "brainless" here is opinion rather than objective fact.
Just because the Angband community is full of smart computer-savvy people, and has been around for a long time, doesn't mean the principles behind Facebook games fail to apply here. People play games for fun, and what is fun for them depends on a great many things.
So we should get used to threads like this (and Lord knows we've had plenty of chances), and not expect them to go away. I agree broadly with the design decisions that have brought Angband to where it is, but that's me. And if Angband is going to keep changing to become better by some metric, there are going to be increasing numbers of people who think it's lost its soul. You just have to hope that the changes make more people happy than they make sad.One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.Comment
-
Two points that I'm kind of struggling to put into words, so I hope you'll foregive me if I'm being too blunt.
1) "Brainless" as I meant it is not subjective, although I do regret the choice of this word for its negative connotations. My point was that it doesn't require any cognitive ability or ingenuity. It's just "do X every Y turns or have Z% chance of dying" (or similar). Any smart player does X at least every Y turns or... eventually dies and learns to behave in an OCD manner. A game should not be training people to be OC.
2) "Management challenges do add interest to some people." Sure, but I posit that that's not what makes a fun game for the rest of us who are not accountants or similarly inclined. Are you arguing that Angband should be catering for the "accountant" crowd?
Disclosure: I am very mildly OCD and I kind of understand that drive (though obviously not at the visceral level of real sufferers), but having a game which prevents me from indulging in it was actually liberating. I was actually very opposed to some of the recent Angband changes before trying them out, but... I changed my mind
.
Comment
-
Not at all. Encouraging interesting, thoughtful play is definitely the way to go. In FAangband I try not to screw the player over by demanding adherence to an arcane set of obscure rules - I try to do it by lulling them into a false sense of security and then ripping the rug from under their feet.
Another thing that's going on here is that increased transparency means less of the excitement of discovery, which will reduce the fun for some people. I think this might be responsible for- The attitude of long-time players, who clearly still enjoy playing after discovering essentially everything and
- The sense of loss from the OP (I'm guessing here, of course), who had a lot of happy memories of discovering how to play better.
This is something that Nethack relies on almost completely.One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.Comment
-
I think the problem we're running into is differing opinions on what was part of "playing the game". I found sorting through the junk to find the rare gems that will prepare me to drive deeper into the dungeon to be part of playing the game. I found making decisions on what to carry and what to leave behind and risk it having been something good to be part of playing the game. Now there's far less "junk" and the worst you'll find early on is "average". I found deciding whether to take the real risk of quaffing a potion or reading a scroll ( Summon Monster used to lead to some VERY bad situations. From what I've seen so far, not so likely anymore ) to identify it to be a part of playing the game. The game was about more than just battling the monsters, it was about being careful with all my choices. There's still some of that, but it's starting to feel more like turn-based Diablo than Angband to me.
To me, removing these things is coddling the player too much. I suppose I'll look into the variants, but I'm not happy with Vanilla going this direction.Comment
-
Well, to be honest, Nethack went overboard with it. Only about 1 in 10 deaths there for me were from actual monster fights. Less probably. Like I said, Nethack went too far with the unavoidable "Surprise! You die" situations. Angband always in the past had a nice balance there. Usually, if I died in Angband, it was because I did something wrong and not just because the RNG hated me. RNG spite did happen occasionally... But, most of my deaths were due to diving too fast, lack of resistances I should have had by then, waiting too long to heal/phase door/teleport, and other such things.Comment
-
Summon monster is still in the game as is aggravate monster.
There are also some new challenges that do pop. For example, my Dunadan Priest drank a potion of experience which raised him from level 17 to level 29 with a long way to go to get to level 30. A few turns later he started taking hits from a lost soul which drained wisdom. In the old world I could recall into town buy a restore wisdom and be all set. Now I have to dive about 6 dungeon levels to get to where I'm likely to find a potion of contemplation to restore my wisdom.
(That's another new feature which hasn't been mentioned in this thread, gain one/lose one potions where you combine a stat gain and a stat drain potion where the drain is random.)
One change which was questioned that I think made a LOT of sense was the one where the trap detection area is known. In the past, trap detection was based on what fit on the computer screen. This meant different effects based on screen size. When I visit my dad, he has a larger screen which means I can get away with detect traps 4 times and cover a full level. On the other hand, my laptop has a smaller screen and needs 9 detections to cover a level. I hope people don't want gameplay to be determined by screen size.Comment
-
Right, but I've yet to have a summon monster scroll pop out a deep monster yet. They all seem to summon from fairly close to the current level range now. Was a bit of brown trousers time to read one of those at 500' and find a Dracolich scowling at you. ^_^Comment
-
...uh. If Summon Monster ever behaved like that, it hasn't for a very, very long time. I'm talking like before the 2.7 days. At the very least, I can't remember the last time I pulled a monster that was more than 300' OOD with Summon Monster, and basically every character I've ever played has ID'd scrolls by use in the early game (when Summon Monster shows up).
That said, I wouldn't especially mind if Polymorph Monster could pull any random non-unique monster, like it used to. These days you just get monsters of similar depth to the original monster; boring!Comment
Comment