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Development => Design => Topic started by: Rickton on April 06, 2014, 01:42:49 PM
Title: Permanent consequences for failure that aren't death
Post by: Rickton on April 06, 2014, 01:42:49 PM
The permadeath thread got me thinking about other ways to provide meaningful consequences for death besides simply ending the game.
One of the game ideas I have (who knows if I'll ever end up making it) is a roguelike where your only method of character improvement (aside from equipment upgrades) is mutation. Mutations to make you stronger, let you shoot lasers out your eyes, grow extra arms to hold extra weapons, etc.
When you die, you would come back to life at a nearby cloning facility, but the technology is imperfect, so when you come back you'd end up with a bad mutation. The bad mutations could possibly be cured, or maybe the game could eventually end if your bad mutations just get so out of hand you're nothing but a blob or something, but I think it'd be more interesting than just simple "You die, game over."
I've seen some games where when you die, you go to some kind of underworld and have to get back out, either by fighting your way out, or solving puzzles, or whatever.
What are some other possibilites? And are there any games (roguelike or not) that do things like that?
Title: Re: Permanent consequences for failure that aren't death
Post by: Endorya on April 06, 2014, 02:14:52 PM
But you seek ideas around your mutation concept or general ideas for any kind of concept?
General ideas, that was just an example of one I've thought of.
Post by: rust on April 06, 2014, 02:34:47 PM
If it's meant to replace permadeath completely, then the penalty has to be meaningful.
In Dungeon Siege 2 when you die, your party respawns back in town, but without equipment, which you can retrieve for a price. Perhaps this concept could be expanded to include some serious damage/curse to equipment. Character could also suffer permanent loss of attributes and abilities.
Post by: reaver on April 06, 2014, 02:48:41 PM
If you lose and start with *significantly less* than what you had when you lost, it's highly likely that you're gonna lose again.
If you lose and you end up playing some other metagame for a bit, you don't improve on your loss, you just take the focus away from it temporarily.
I'm really not sure about permanent consequences being applied to the character to escape permadeath. Really, if my char gets somehow permanently castrated like having his attributes lowered or something, I really don't think I would continue to play with it. I think I would rather start all over than continuing playing with a crippled character which as a consequence would increase the game's difficulty even more.
I can only think of temporarily consequences being applied to the character instead of permanent ones. The idea of respawning in a city with basic equipment and then needing to recover your old body and equipment seems a reasonable way to go. For permanent punishment I would go with loosing the character's gear forever or having the player needing to pay a toll for his rebirth. A toll that could go nastier and nastier as the character keeps dying or having a price tied to the character's level or disabling rebirth completely after having the character reaching a certain level or goal.
Post by: malignatius on April 06, 2014, 06:13:58 PM
Hmm.. Here's an idea. A "punishment" for dying could be to minimize future rewards. (temporary). So instead of loosing XP, money or equipment, the player would receive less XP, money and stuff from future kills/loot. I call it, the "Curse".
Quote from: malignatius on April 06, 2014, 06:13:58 PM
That's also a good idea. But wouldn't such "Curse" also discourage the player from tackling with strong opponents or visiting dangerous lands since he would now receive less rewards at the cost of risking his life yet again and possibly get even higher death penalties? Assuming of course we are talking about a free roaming game.
Post by: Vanguard on April 06, 2014, 10:38:25 PM
Story consequences for death. Like, your character survives but the town he was supposed to defend gets destroyed.
Your character takes a permanent injury when you run out of health. For the rest of the game you have to live with a stat penalty or something.
You start the game with a certain number of live saving items. There is no way to get more. Every time your health runs out, one is consumed and you are sent to a safe area. You permanently die if you run out of health with no life saving items.
After you die, a new hero eventually steps up to save the world and you play as that person. In the meantime, the forces of evil have conquered part of the world. You lose if they conquer the entire world.
PrincessRL doesn't end when you run out of health, but you lose valuable time and there's no way to get it back.
If you die in You Only Live Once then the game gives you a stronger character to play as next time. The later characters are extremely powerful, so beating the final boss is easy. What's hard is winning the game with minimal deaths.
Post by: LazyCat on April 06, 2014, 11:10:52 PM
I see proposals how to punish, but I see no any explanation why.
What are we trying to achieve, or avoid? What is the problem with letting player save in the first place? What is this punishment good for, how is it better?
Quote from: LazyCat on April 06, 2014, 11:10:52 PM
What is this punishment good for, how is it better?
Permadeath and similar punishments increase tension and force you to play better. You don't need to be cautious if you can't be hurt. You don't need to plan ahead if you can turn back time.
There's nothing exciting about winning a game when there was no possibility of losing.
Post by: Endorya on April 07, 2014, 11:20:53 AM
The best approach for the whole problem in my humble view would be simply having a system with (optional) controlled saved points as I'm not a fan of free saving and definitely not a fan of permadeath tied with everything being procedural generated. A well designed game with controlled saved points and with the right amount of difficulty would still mimic the tension and excitement found in permadeth. It is exactly the same crap whether you loose one hour of gameplay by starting everything from scratch or from a saved point, only the smell might be different. However, loosing 5 hours of game play and needing to start all over due to an unfortunate event that you had no control over whatsoever is simply pointless to me.
Roguelikes only have permadeath or harsh punishments because they suck pretty hard at telling a story. They don't have deep characters with interesting motives nor they possess plots you may feel emotionally attached to. There are no story twists or any sense of responsibility towards any character you may find throughout its playing time; characters are dull, filled with robotic and superficial dialog and all this due to roguelikes relying heavily on dynamic generated content. Roguelike mechanics consists mostly of exploration and survival, meaning that whatever you usually do doesn't really add nothing towards the game's goal but to your own sense of accomplishment. This is why in roguelikes the player's character can be killed just like that, because this type of game doesn't give us enough room to bounds ourselves with the world our controllable characters stride in; worlds are procedural generated anyway, so its really hard to get involved with them even if you want to. Roguelikes are simply about challenge and there is nothing wrong with this.
@Everyone
Having death punishments with restoration points or the good old fashioned permadeath with decreased difficulty may at the end turn out to be exactly the same thing. I would in fact prefer it to have permadeath but with all its unfair and dirtiness content removed as I'm not the masochist type.
Post by: LazyCat on April 09, 2014, 02:24:56 AM
Quote from: Vanguard on April 06, 2014, 11:15:27 PM
Permadeath and similar punishments increase tension and force you to play better. You don't need to be cautious if you can't be hurt.
Tension is maybe better for you, not everyone. And you are likely in minority there, people prefer to relax. But you are forced to play better either way. If a game requires skill and has progressive difficulty you will not advance until you get better. The only difference is you don't rewind as much, it's not easier, just faster.
You don't need to be cautions if you don't mind re-playing the same thing over and over, but if you want to advance you will need to, just the same. Save-scumming doesn't make you invincible, and rewinding back to the beginning of the level is punishing as well, it's punishing enough.
You don't need to plan ahead if you can turn back time.
If planing ahead is necessary than it is necessary either way. Save-scumming doesn't make you invincible, if you failed to prepare you will get stuck unable to advance. Also, you can not plan ahead if you never completed the game before, it's like trying to do a speed run on your first play-through.
Losing what? The only thing there is to lose is time. Save-scumming doesn't make you invincible, you fail and try again just the same. You lose in either case, you loose time, just not as much.
Excitement is not the only thing that makes games enjoyable. Experimenting with different tactics and trying to push a character as far as it can go is fun as well, if not more fun. I also prefer to complete a game first and then decide if I really want to be attempting to beat it with only one life, or is it worth playing at all.
Different people like different things. You go ahead and play with only one life or sit on a cactus if that makes it more tense for you. You don't see anyone complaining other types of games have easy difficulty or save option, if not for you those options are for other people, and then it does not concern you.
Post by: Vanguard on April 09, 2014, 03:00:30 AM
You've repeatedly shown yourself to be an irrational thinker in the other thread. You won't even admit that a perfect round of bowling takes more skill than landing a dozen strikes over as many games. I'm not interested in any more discussions with you.
Quote from: Vanguard on April 09, 2014, 03:00:30 AM
You've repeatedly shown yourself to be an irrational thinker in the other thread. You won't even admit that a perfect round of bowling takes more skill than landing a dozen strikes over as many games.
What part do you not understand? As I said, each strike is equally difficult to pull of, that's what bowling difficulty is. Making consecutive strikes is not a matter of inherent bowling difficulty any more, but complex external factors, like variations in air density and moisture, variation in bowler's physical and mental condition, and such. It's a complex random factor, it does not define bowling difficulty, it defines relative probability. When you are bowling drunk it's not bowling that changes difficulty, it's your condition that makes you more likely to fail. -- You are being vague, and thus unable to differentiate probability from difficulty, just like you are mistaking difficult with tedious.
I'm not interested in any more discussions with you.
You never put forward any arguments in the first place. You were just asking me questions, some of which you refused to answer yourself. I mean in another thread, here we haven't even started discussing this.
Quote from: LazyCat on April 09, 2014, 04:15:11 AM
Making consecutive strikes is not a matter of inherent bowling difficulty any more, but complex external factors, like variations in air density and moisture, variation in bowler's physical and mental condition, and such. It's a complex random factor, it does not define bowling difficulty, it defines relative probability.
Haahaahahahaha get a load of this guy!
Yes, the difference between world-class bowlers who have played perfect games and small children who can score a strike occasionally isn't a difference of skill. Everyone who has ever scored a single strike in their lives is equally good at bowling, and differences in performance after that point can be explained by complex random factors such as air density and moisture.
Post by: mushroom patch on April 09, 2014, 04:50:33 AM
Youtube commenters diaspora represent!
You failed to understand. You are now talking about skill and not directly replaying to anything I said. Game difficulty and personal skill are two different things.
People are not failing to understand the claims you make in your posts. Stop saying that.
Post by: Jaxian on April 09, 2014, 05:20:14 AM
Quote from: Rickton on April 06, 2014, 01:42:49 PM
I don't believe that a player needs to fear deep consequences of failure in order to enjoy playing a game. While some players may thrive on that fear, quite a few successful games incorporate saving and checkpoints. With saving, players can be presented with a series of very difficult challenges and feel accomplished at each stage of progress. I would question claims that none of those games are fun.
But for a roguelike, if you remove death then your game is changed so that the player doesn't need to replay any of it. For a roguelike, this is a problem. Instead of hand-crafting and perfecting a single playthrough of the game, a roguelike attempts to make multiple plays of the same content interesting using randomly-generated content. If players complete the game without replaying any of it and have no incentive to replay it, then why even make a roguelike? Why not just build each level by hand? Any alternative to permanent death should address this, and should also focus on making failure feel less punishing to the player (which I'm guessing is the reason you're considering alternatives in the first place).
I don't have a flawless answer, but here's two random ideas. Maybe something here will get ideas flowing for you:
1) The simplest way to avoid death is to not create a game where you can die. If player death is not a feature of the game, then every action in the game can be permanent, and the player can continue to play until the game is finished. Vanguard suggested something along these lines when he said, "your character survives but the town he was supposed to defend gets destroyed." That comment might mean that the game plays like any other roguelike, except when you "die" you get a red mark on your final grade. Or it could describe a gameplay mechanic in which controlling or preserving towns progresses the player toward success in some way.
This concept is similar to restarting a level when you die. You don't lose all your progress, but you fail to progress toward victory. The difference is only in permanence. The town the player was meant to defend is now burning embers on the map, or maybe it's an enemy-controlled fort. In this example, the player might then be forced to find a new town to serve his purpose, encouraging exploration of more randomly-generated content without requiring a restart from the very beginning of the game.
2) There is a children's game called Telephone. In this game the first player whispers a phrase into the ear of the second, who whispers the phrase into the ear of the third, and so on. The last player hears the whisper and announces the phrase. Invariably people will mishear the phrase and whisper something wrong to the next person, and by the end, the phrase is completely different. What makes this game interesting is that failure creates fun. If everyone always succeeded, and the last player always repeated the phrase exactly as it started, then the game would be terrible. Instead of punishing those who fail, the game's enjoyment comes from seeing how the players' actions caused the outcome.
This principle might lead us down countless paths of roguelike design. How can player failures create fun in the game? Many existing roguelikes allow the death of a player to affect the player's next playthrough. But what more can we do? What if failing resulted in your character's items being randomly switched around? Or what if failing altered the player's path through the world itself? We might imagine a game whose path to victory appears straightforward, but upon failure that path is closed, and the player is redirected through corridors that they never knew existed.
I've occasionally thought about a game which uses some of these ideas. In this game, the player would control a diety-like character who moves throughout a randomly-generated world, attempting to accomplish a randomly-generated goal. The player would have no fear of death, but their actions would affect the various NPCs throughout the world. When the player's goal is finally accomplished or failed, the final state of the various NPCs could be inspected to see how your actions have affected the populace. I don't know whether this vague idea could become a fun game, but I will like give it a shot at some point.
Anyhow, maybe I've been rambling about nonsense, but maybe something I wrote here will give you an idea.
Quote from: Jaxian on April 09, 2014, 05:20:14 AM
Fun is subjective, but if your goal is to make challenging game then you can't let your player save at will. Checkpoints work, permadeath works better, but both are inherently punishing to some degree.
Post by: rust on April 09, 2014, 06:14:46 AM
Tension is maybe better for you, not everyone. And you are likely in minority there, people prefer to relax.
Majority is stupid. If you want a game that aims at the biggest possible audience, then go play Candy Crush or Farmville.
Fun may be a bit subjective, but there are certain things that most people find fun, and things that most don't. Accomplishing a challenge can be fun, but so too can immersing oneself in a game's story, or building a character to see how well it performs, or exploring a world, or setting things in motion to see what happens.
And a challenging task isn't always fun. It depends on the specifics. This is what LazyCat is trying to say, but bowling is a bad example because you could spend your entire life bowling without truly mastering it. The same can't be said of most turn-based tactical roguelikes. If I play a permadeath roguelike many times, I actually might figure out all I need to know about early game tactics. Even knowing the tactics, when I replay the game again I could still get careless and die. You could say that makes the game more challenging. But that challenge is just tedious. It's not fun. The fun part is learning the tactics of each individual fight, and implementing permadeath doesn't add to that part of the challenge.
Permadeath has its benefits. It can allow the player to experience the wide array of randomly-generated content that a roguelike provides. It can also create a sense of importance surrounding each move the player makes, and it can turn what would have been an easy game into an accomplishment to complete. But sometimes, especially for games without random content, the tedium that comes with permadeath isn't worth those benefits. In a game where you solve puzzles, it probably makes sense to allow saving at any point. In a game with static content, well-placed checkpoints often make sense, and in a game with randomly-generated content, perma-death often makes sense. But these are only guidelines, not necessarily the only way to create your game. This thread is a good exercise to see if we can come up with new ideas that work in randomly-generated games.
This thread is a good exercise to see if we can come up with new ideas that work in randomly-generated games.
Randomness doesn't really justify wasting of time. I already invested five hours building my character, I want to see how far it can go. A roguelike should aim to be enjoyable role playing game, not torturing simulator of tedium and repetition.
Insisting on permadeath is quite pointless really, it's not like these people would actually refuse to play a game just because it has checkpoints or option to save. It's just emotional reaction, but they don't really mind. We could simply ignore them.
Quote from: rot13 on April 09, 2014, 06:14:46 AM
It really goes like this: if you want no more than 100 people to ever play your game, then go ahead and make classic roguelike. And if you want no more than 10 people to ever complete your game, then go ahead and also enforce permadeath. The dilemma is primarily for developers, people don't really care, they simply will not bother.
Why should I bother about player base? If I'd charge money for a game, then it would be my priority to make it as accessible and straightforward as possible, but this is hardly a problem as most roguelikes are free. Also, I'd rather have 100 people playing my game regularly than 10000 people to complete it once and never come back, which would be the case in a game without permadeath.
Post by: Rickton on April 09, 2014, 11:59:06 AM
If the point of permadeath is getting players to go through new randomly-generated levels each time, what about restarting the "level" when you die, but it's randomly generated again, so you're not playing the exact same level. That also prevents the player from just endlessly trying the same situation until they luck into a solution, or scoping out the level before they die to know where the tough monsters are or the good loot is.
That seems like it could work as an "easy" mode that still lets some of the strengths of the roguelike shine through without being too frustrating, or without making it too easy.
Fully agreed. I actually have changed my view a little bit on permadeth being bound with full randomized content. Though I don't appreciate this combination I think I understand why it feels appealing for some people.
Post by: Jaxian on April 09, 2014, 01:34:06 PM
I don't believe that roguelikes should be lumped into the category of role playing games. There is something great about random content generation a regular RPG cannot provide. Where an RPG unfolds a pre-defined story to the player, a roguelike puts the player into a world where anything can happen. Though permadeath can cause tedious re-playing of the same levels, it doesn't always. The goal of a roguelike is to create enough variation that replaying parts doesn't feel tedious at all, that maybe the player is even thinking about the next run before the current one is complete. But it is the job of designers to figure out where their game falls and to ask themselves which mechanics make sense for their game.
Quote from: Rickton on April 09, 2014, 11:59:06 AM
Sure, this would be a more roguelike version of checkpoints. However, there would be less repetition of the levels compared to permadeath, meaning less chance to experience the game's random content. Compared to a standard roguelike, maybe this solution would make sense for a game that has less to learn from repeated playthroughs, and either doesn't have as much random content or is long enough that the breadth of the content can be experienced through completing the game once. There are many roguelikes that would be made extremely easy by allowing for restarting at the beginning of a level. But instead of thinking of this as an "easy mode," I would try to make completing a level difficult so that the game presents a reasonable challenge (assuming you're creating a game where overcoming challenges is important to the fun). It may also be important to verify that a level is never randomly super easy compared to the norm.
Post by: mushroom patch on April 09, 2014, 06:23:01 PM
I don't know when people started thinking video games are supposed/have to be "fun," but let me just say it: Fun sucks.
Video games should be exciting and maybe present interesting challenges or things to think about. Excitement is not the same as fun.
Feeding ducks at the pond is fun. Playing jacks is fun. Fear of death is not fun, but games where you run around with swords or guns blowing things up are not supposed to be fun. They are supposed to be exciting.
Quote from: mushroom patch on April 09, 2014, 06:23:01 PM
Most would probably consider that to be a different kind of fun, but yeah, I'm with you. I'm real tired of timekiller games where none of your actions matter and nothing exciting ever happens because they wanted to prevent people from feeling frustrated or overwhelmed.
Certainly it's worthwhile to at least draw a distinction between the tension and fear a roguelike or shmups creates and the zoned out, relaxed feeling you get from playing Skyrim or whatever.
Yeah, I mean, people who have high pitched voices and like to talk about games the way that dork from the video in the other thread does (the guy who thinks the original Castlevania is "punishingly difficult" -- lol) like to talk about "fun" and if you ask them, they'll say, "Oh yeah, excitement is just another part of 'fun.'" But in reality, what they mean by "fun" is the chilled out state of idleness you're talking about with Skyrim.
In particular, fun to this type of gamer is not frustrating or overwhelming. It's not stressful or suspenseful. Fun is like youth soccer. It's not competitive. It's not important whether you play well or win. If it is important to play well or it's hard to win, it's less fun. Finger painting is fun.
As you say, it's a useful distinction, what I'm calling "fun" vs. "excitement." I'm sure there's a more precise word for this notion of "fun," but "fun" is the word they use. Maybe there's a better word than "excitement" for what I'm talking about that sets up the contrast more starkly. I'd be interested in suggestions.
Post by: jim on April 09, 2014, 10:29:21 PM
It's funny - you can kind of tell with the recent "procedural death labyrinth" / FTL / Dungeons of Dredmore / Binding if Issac type games making their way more prominently to the scene, people are slowly tracing their way back to the motherland. But they don't like the motherland; they want the motherland to conform to their expectations.
Don't most classic RLs come with a wizard mode anymore? If you don't like permadeath, turn on wizard mode and set your own penalties for dying. Maybe you're a great cook or a great dancer; not grokking permadeath doesn't make you any less of a person and permadeath doesn't need to be removed in order to validate your experience.
I'm reminded of the documentary Rivers and Tides - it follows an artist who builds these elaborate structures out of the natural environment. For instance, a giant, beautiful wreath out of driftwood. It takes him hours and hours to build one, and you know what? Most of the time, they fall apart before he's finished them, and he has to start over. And he groans, and he curses, and he returns to his craft. The delicacy of his work and the constant risk of loss is an integral part of his craft. This is part of why he is a renowned artist. Same thing with them Buddhist fellas who make them sand paintings, I imagine.
Point is: there's no need for this big rhetorical case for removing a feature that many, including me, consider to be integral to the genre. It smacks of sour grapes. Just play on wizard mode and make yourself run a lap every time you die or something.
I dunno, maybe I'm being uncharitable. Maybe I'm repeating myself. It's just surprising that so many (relative) newcomers to RLs find permadeath unpalatable, whereas for me, it opened my eyes to how thrilling and high-stakes a game could feel. For some reason this disparity bums me out.
Post by: pat on April 09, 2014, 11:35:40 PM
yeah, the high-stakes game is exactly why I like the genre. I am a grown man who literally experienced an intense raised heart rate and fear of death on my first nethack ascension run and it happened again the first time I beat dungeon crawl. Maybe the games will never have mass appeal but I don't really care, IMO there's no other gaming experience like that and I kinda pity the people who don't get it.
I hate to be that guy, but there's already a thread on the exact same page as this one all about calling people wrong and dumb for liking/disliking permadeath.
I like the tension of permadeath. I think it really is a strong factor that contributes to what's enjoyable about roguelikes. And I think it would be interesting to talk about other ways to carry similar tension into a game without having the start the game over entirely. Come up with new ways to do things. Maybe none of them will be work as well as plain old permadeath, but it'd at least be interesting to think about, and maybe someone'll come up with a cool idea that'll make a cool game.
I mean, I know you can't dictate how a thread you start is gonna go, and things always derail, but it is just ridiculous how almost every thread on this damn forum eventually devolves into one of a small selection of stupid arguments that never get anywhere because people can't accept that other people like different things. There's room in this world for Angband, Skyrim, Candy Crush, Halo, Mario, Street Fighter and Madden. There's sure as hell room for games with permadeath and games without, doesn't mean everyone has to like both or either, doesn't mean people who don't like what you like are to be "pitied," who gives a shit. Care about something that matters.
Anyway, back on topic:
Interesting. This made me think of Crawl's rune system. You only need a few to win, but getting more is seen as a "better" victory (I've never actually gotten even one, so I have no idea if it increases your "score"). Maybe if you die in an area leading to one of the runes, you could be permanently locked out. You don't lose the game, but you lose the ability to "win" that area and get a "perfect" win.
That would be pretty interesting. But it'd probably be a pretty huge project, either to make all the different outcomes by hand, or to make a random generator good enough to make the outcomes interesting. It definitely sounds like it'd be a good game if done right, though.
The thing is, you're talking about this in a forum that is at least nominally about developing roguelike games, so you better expect some push back on the idea of finding replacements. I'm first to say there should be more freedom of interpretation re: permadeath and its role in the genre, but even I don't say there shouldn't be absolute lose conditions, as seems to be the notion here. It's a bridge too far.
(Also, that other thread was derailed by complete nonsense, but people still want to talk about it.)
Yeah, but there isn't room for roguelike games without permadeath or something a lot like it (and the proposals I'm seeing here are not a lot like it). There's a lot of justice in the view that agitation against permadeath threatens to infect roguelike development with the same upworthy, mass market, lowest common denominator perspective you see in the "difficult vs. punishing" video in the other thread. (Although, really, there are worse things that already have their claws sunk pretty deep and the fear may be overblown...)
I can't speak for the guy who made the "I pity the fool" remark, but I think what he's talking about is not "I like this, but you like that, and what you like sucks and you suck too." He's saying that there's value in working at a game, being able to delay gratification and face repeated, abject failure. The suspense and thrill of having fragile, glorious victory in your grasp at last is unlike anything in the more trick-turning commercial offerings of today. There's something to be said for that and there's also something to be said for thinking it's "tedious" or too much of a waste of time to be worth anything.
Quote from: pat on April 09, 2014, 11:35:40 PM
no joke, one of my favorite things is when i have to catch my breath after sitting in a chair playing video games for several hours
Quote from: jim on April 09, 2014, 10:29:21 PM
No one wants to exclude permadeath, only include the option to save. You could always not save and not continue, it does not concern you. You would not refuse to play a game just because it has check points, would you?
Yes, as exciting as board games, almost as exciting as chess. It's all in your head. In reality turn-based gameplay by itself makes it all pretty casual.
Maybe the games will never have mass appeal but I don't really care, IMO there's no other gaming experience like that and I kinda pity the people who don't get it.
A guy who plays action games to perfection and then makes speed runs with only one life would call us all sissies and pity us for never experiencing such joy after tensely torturous training and preparation. If he insisted then all action games should have only hard difficulty and only one life you would tell him he's intolerant masochistic lunatic with too much free time and that is none of his business how will you enjoy your games. But aren't you doing the same thing?
Oh look, it's the thread derailer again.
Post by: pat on April 10, 2014, 05:29:15 AM
yeah but I'm not posting on a speed run forum, I'm posting on a forum to do with exactly the thing I was talking about. Literally one of the few places on the internet where that specific topic is discussed exclusively. I think you just need to accept that you don't like roguelikes and that's fine and all, but arguing incessantly about their definition isn't going to make that square peg fit into the round hole any easier.
Exactly my point.
Quote from: Endorya on April 10, 2014, 08:04:19 AM
Actually, yes, I do refuse to play such games. I have plenty of opportunity to play them, I just don't. If I want to have "fun," "exploring" or whatever it is you think would be better/easier in a pseudo-roguelike with save file reloading (wow), I do things in real life. Fun is easy to find.
Thrill and to a much lesser extent challenge are not as easy to find, which is why I value them more highly in video games. It's why I like playing PvP in first person shooters, but not the stupid-ass story modes they sometimes come with. It's why I got tired of the Final Fantasy series in my teens but kept playing roguelikes now and then.
I understand that some people find roguelikes too hard or frustrating to be "fun." I think that's too bad and that it's probably possible to nibble around the edges (e.g. what I suggested upthread: allowing players to replay deadly encounters just for practice/to see what they did wrong, but leaving them dead when they're satisfied with the replays) to make things more "discoverable" and less "punishing." But if anything, suggestions of unrestricted save file reloading are getting more of a hearing here than they warrant, not less.
Quote from: mushroom patch on April 10, 2014, 11:33:36 AM
There simply isn't a plausible excuse a human being could through at me that could justify that having a game with a controlled and optional save-game feature would be a bad thing. The only side effect that could happen would be having some people loosing interest on the game after finishing it. But then again, roguelike purists really don't care how big their fans database is right? Not to mention that only the "common lot" would in fact use the controlled saving game feature, so the audience would basically remain the same anyways (only the game would be more famous this way).
Rattling about how having this optional feature would be a bad thing just reminds me of a dog barking at a cat which is two floors above it. The barking is simply instinctive and really doesn't do anything except annoying the neighbors and cats themselves.
It really doesn't fortify your justifications either by describing what you prefer or not or how do you view or experience the fun factor when it is something totally subjective to each one of us. Your justifications would make sense if the optional saving feature was intended to replace permadeath.
And for the record, I'm a dog person.
No one wants to exclude permadeath. Why would you avoid those games if you could play them the way you want to?
It is funny because my wife asked the same question when I exercised this issue with her.
I believe there is another thread about "permadeath or not", could you please go back to design suggestions as the thread title says? This whole thing doesn't do the forum any good...
Quote from: reaver on April 10, 2014, 12:43:45 PM
I believe there is another thread about "permadeath or not", could you please go back to design suggestions as the thread title says? This whole thing doesn't do the forums any good...
You are right. This is kinda off topic but some comments are simply too "addicting" to deny. :(
What we are talking about is design suggestion, which is to simply have an option. Whatever you come up with that is not pure permadeath you will still have these same people making the same objections. If you want to make them happy it will need to be optional whatever the case. The only problem is they don't seem to be happy with having an option, for some strange and unknown reason.
The only problem is they don't seem to be happy with having an option, for some strange and unknown reason.
That's because we don't need an option. Haven't you realized it already?
Quote from: rot13 on April 10, 2014, 03:44:11 PM
Let me see if I got this straight. You are against having roguelikes containing optional restore points because you don't need them? So, can I say you are against anything you don't use?! Or this only applies to roguelikes? (which I still find it to be quite disturbing) Did you just disabled your common sense on purpose or did I fail to understand your reasoning?
One more question. Will you play a roguelike with permadeath which also has optional checkpoints? If not, could you explain to me the reason behind it? Like, in which way having optional checkpoints affects you as a permadeath player?
Its incredible how you flag people who prefer relaxing games as being stupid and then the best response you have to games presenting multiple solutions regarding game play modes is: "That's because we don't need an option. Haven't you realized it already?". Is this some kind of roguelike syndrome after playing them for too long? Are you frakking kidding me?
More like against the thing LazyCat is talking about, which is free saving and loading, though checkpoints don't quite fit my taste either. That said, I'd still play a roguelike with checkpoints if it's any good.
Also, as long as you don't enforce the choice, (eg. you pick a mode at the start of a game and can't change it later) then the word "optional" makes no sense, as you can delete your save after death in any game, effectively making it permadeath.
Having the ability of choosing checkpoints, free-saving or whatever escapes permadeath at the beginning of the game IS STILL an option you have! But even if you can do it during mid play I still don't see a problem with it as you are NOT FORCED to use it. Yes you can delete a save-game of any game! Fraks you can play ANY game in the world as permadeath if you want to. What are you trying to say here?
Honestly man, what are we exactly discussing here? Me and lazyCat are presenting additional options not removing existing ones! Sure you are not forced to implement them if you don't want to, but come on! Being against optional choices simply because you don't want to use them completely baffles me.
Post by: awake on April 10, 2014, 05:55:10 PM
It's stupid that you can "die" in an RPG in the first place. You could spare players the tedium of having to reload from a save if the game just allowed the character's HP to decrease to negative numbers with no averse gameplay consequences. Of course if you're a "Hardcore Gamer"(tm) you can just go to the menu and choose quit when your HP drops below 1, but it's unjustifiable to force that on the player.
Quote from: Endorya on April 10, 2014, 05:39:36 PM
Having the ability of choosing checkpoints or not at the beginning of the game IS STILL an option you have! But even if you can do it during mid play I still don't see a problem with it as you are NOT FORCED to use it. Yes you can delete a save-game of any game! Fraks you can play ANY game in the world as permadeath if you want to. What are you trying to say here?
I'm trying to say that it's pointless to say that a game has "optional" checkpoints or saving, because the same can be said about any game. Exagerrating a bit, it's like saying that a game has optional graphics, because you can always turn off the screen or play with your eyes closed if you want.
Kinda didn't get my point here, I enjoy relaxing games as well. I was referring to LazyCat's argument that saving is good for roguelikes just because most people don't like permadeath. Drawing another analogy, that would be like voting for a president just because polls show that he will win, not because of what he's promising to do.
Its pointless to go philosophical when the issue itself is made of solid evidence. Having multiple choices for game play is always better than having just one. Call this having choices, call it an illusion or call it pancakes, I leave that to your own discretion.
Quote from: awake on April 10, 2014, 05:55:10 PM
Sure, having no averse game play consequences seems the ideal way to go. Just make the player invulnerable to damage and let it go from start to end in a smooth ride to hell just in name of relaxation. Heck! Let the character's movement be controlled by the computer itself so you can skip the tedious key pressing. The whole thing would be even better if near a pool during a hot summer day while smoking a Cuban and drinking a margarita.
Anyway, welcome to the roguelike forum 8)
Not if the choice most players will make sucks. Think about it: They make the choice you think they want (and I absolutely agree that most will make that choice). They play through the game and they're like: "Hey, this was just a standard RPG with mediocre map design and very little structure in terms of monster placement etc. I could still do the same saving and reloading crap I always do, but it seemed like everything was pretty much the same. A lot of time, all I had to do was keep reloading and doing the same thing and I could get past the hard parts. There was no story, no plot, nothing. This game sucks and I'm telling all my friends."
Sorry for the double post, but
I realized what you're not getting about the objectors here. You say it's okay to have the option not to die (or more generally, not to do whatever happens in the course of playing that they don't like between now and their previous save). It gives players options and options are good.
The problem with what you're suggesting is that it's not okay. Reloading your save file is cheating. If you give players the option to reload their save file through official, game-sanctioned channels, you're saying it's okay to do that. But it's not.
You can argue all day about how you feel, from a systems design perspective or whatever, a situation where you can circumvent the game's design and save scum anyway is equivalent to offering an in-game mechanism to do so, since, you believe, everyone's doing it anyway (or everyone should be free to, whatever). Well, good luck convincing roguelike fans of that.
And, by the way, it's not equivalent. Roguelikes should be played on third party systems that you don't own, not downloaded to your iPod or whatever. In this situation, you can't circumvent the game's design and there is an essential difference between providing in-game save file reloading and not doing so, as is the roguelike tradition.
Not if the choice most players will make sucks.
It does not concern you. You are not other people, you are just you. Wake up!
Think about it: They make the choice you think they want (and I absolutely agree that most will make that choice). They play through the game and they're like: "Hey, this was just a standard RPG with mediocre map design and very little structure in terms of monster placement etc.
You just said roguelikes suck and made no other point. Supposedly then it's permadeath which turns this otherwise awfully dull crap into tense and exciting games. Are you drunk?
I could still do the same saving and reloading crap I always do, but it seemed like everything was pretty much the same. A lot of time, all I had to do was keep reloading and doing the same thing and I could get past the hard parts. There was no story, no plot, nothing. This game sucks and I'm telling all my friends."
Your logic circuit seem to be broken. You would be reloading and doing the same thing whether you reload to a previous floor or all the way back. You will not be doing the same thing that killed you last time, unless you're stupid. If a game requires skill you will not advance until you start doing something different, until you get better. Rewinding all the way back only wastes more time.
It concerns whoever writes the game.
I said what many people say about the role of save files in roguelikes: If you're going to let players replay content over and over to get it right, you should just design the content carefully, not leave its generation to chance.
I could still do the same saving and reloading crap I always do, but it seemed like everything was pretty much the same. A lot of time, all I had to do was keep reloading and doing the same thing and I could get past the hard parts. There was no story, no plot, nothing. This game sucks and I'm telling all my friends."1
In your proposal, pseudo-roguelikes with arbitrary save file reloading, of course, you would expect to encounter the same situations every time you reload. Since there is a substantial degree of chance in combat and other mechanics, you could reasonably expect to get through a lot of those situations by using the same tactics repeatedly until they work -- by chance.
In fact, many RPGs are like that. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people replay losing Final Fantasy boss fights with no significant change in tactics -- and win. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. (And by the way, this was not stupidity on their part. They were correct to believe they might win giving the same tactics another try.) In the roguelike genre, you must survive every encounter or lose. It's a totally different and great paradigm, which would be ruined by what you suggest. If your tactics lose 1 in 10 tough fights (or even 1 in 100), you will never win the game. You see, consistency in the face of chance is a "skill" -- although I realize this might be lost on someone who doesn't see the difference between bowling 12 consecutive strikes and bowling 12 strikes out of 200 rolls.
If you're going to let players replay content over and over...
You consider rewinding back a little to be replaying content over and over. As if going all the way back is not that much worse.
In your proposal, pseudo-roguelikes with arbitrary save file reloading, of course, you would expect to encounter the same situations every time you reload. Since there is a substantial degree of chance in combat and other mechanics, you could reasonably expect to get through a lot of situations by using the same tactics repeatedly until they work -- by chance.
You are playing wrong roguelikes. For those that require skill, luck will not get you far.
In fact, many RPGs are like that. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people replay losing Final Fantasy boss fights with no significant change in tactics -- and win. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. (And by the way, this was not stupidity on their part. They were correct to believe they might win giving the same tactics another try.) In the roguelike genre, you must survive every encounter or lose. It's a totally different and great paradigm, which would be ruined by what you suggest.
You must survive every encounter or lose. Lose what? The only thing there is to lose is time.
If your tactics lose 1 in 10 tough fights (or even 1 in 100), you will never win the game. You see, consistency in the face of chance is a "skill" -- although I realize this might be lost on someone who doesn't see the difference between bowling 12 consecutive strikes and bowling 12 strikes out of 200 rolls.
Consistency in the face of chance is indeed a measure of skill. In the case of permadeath that skill is masochistic patience.
You consider rewinding back a little to be replaying content over and over.
Yes, that's right. If you can "rewind," you can and most likely will do it over and over.
Your attitude toward games you don't seem to be good at and your frequent, vapid use of the terms "skill" and "luck" suggest you might be what Sirlin calls a scrub. A link for you:
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win-part-1.html
I'm sure everyone's already read this article at some point. Obviously, it deals with slightly different issues, but I think the general notions there are relevant.
You must survive every encounter or lose. Lose what?
Your character, your attempt to win is lost.
The only thing there is to lose is time.
The implicit assertion here, I guess, is that you would win any roguelike if given enough time (as long as it's one based on skill, natch). Everyone has their beliefs. I would feel a little self-conscious inviting the natural comparison between myself and a monkey at a typewriter this way, but whatever.
You have a tendency to argue from ignorance and tire people out with demands for explanation. Your line of argument here strongly suggests that you're a mediocre player who dies a lot, learns little, and is easily frustrated, but locates the blame in the games he is playing, rather than his own shortcomings.
My suggestion is the following: either 1) go get good and come back when you have ideas about something other than how cheap/sadistic/tedious/whatever roguelike games are or 2) stop playing roguelike games (if indeed you do) and stop regaling everyone with your sour grapes commentary about them. No one is going to write your pseudo-roguelike for you based on your insights as revealed on this forum.
Roguelikes should be...
As if it was written in some roguelike Bible. Roguelikes should... and if they don't, to roguelike hell they go. But there is no such thing as "roguelike", that word doesn't exist. It's just nonsensical mumble of some drunk nerd on LSD. You should not be trying to make your game like anything, especially not like Rogue. Instead, try to make it better.
Wow, food for thought. Thanks, bro.
You should not be trying to make your game like anything, especially not like Rogue. Instead, try to make it better.
Better as in "this thing I like is better than this thing you like"? You can't objectively measure whether the game is good or not.
By going all the way back you are playing over and over much more, and will need to star all over again just as likely depending on how good you play either way.
You can not lose "attempt", it's a verb. You only lose time, there is nothing else to lose.
Comparison is between you and you, not any other monkey. If you can complete a game with save scumming you should have enough skill to eventually do it with only one life too. But to actually succeed you will also need one other skill, different type of skill -- a masochistic patience -- because the only difference is just in the amount of wasted time. Deep down you know this is true. It's just that you have already wasted so much time, and to justify your own torture somehow you now want everyone to suffer. Admit it!
But to actually succeed you will also need one other skill, different type of skill -- a masochistic patience -- because the only difference is just in the amount of wasted time. Deep down you know this is true. It's just that you have already wasted so much time, and to justify your own torture somehow you now want everyone to suffer. Admit it!
Tell that to world class bowlers.
You can.
I hope you won't let me and other people like me force you into further suffering at the hands of roguelike games. Only you can emancipate yourself.
Yo serious question here: which roguelikes have you beaten? Without using saves, obviously.
Don't list ones you know you could beat because you've won them with saves or because you weren't willing to spend enough time or whatever. Just the ones you've already ascended as of right now with no-save permadeath play.
Yes, as always. The only opinion that can be considered "objective" is the opinion of majority, which you don't accept. And that's fine, but any other opinion can be only less objective.
Anyway, the point of what I said is in the fact that what's the same can not be better. Better implies different. "Rougelike" is just a set of arbitrary restrictions, to make it better you ought to change some. Variety and evolution should be encouraged, instead of praising constriction to old dogma, which servers no purpose and has no actual reason.
Pixel Dungeon with all four characters. I wish I could have saved. Only once I knew all the enemies from all the depths was I truly enjoying the game and was playing to beat it. Until then it was tedious and repetitive struggle just to learn the rules and how it actually works.
I've also beaten Brogue once, after I did it with save-scumming. It took me three days, I will never again torture myself like that. But I kept playing it and completed it with save scumming many more times after that. For me that's not only much more fun, but playing it with permadeath is just plain torture.
Where are you going with this question?
Sorry to say this but this comment of yours is simply too damn flawed. You are, yet again, viewing the whole issue based on your personal preferences and you are assuming from start that it will be something bad because it seems you always base your comments regarding this issue with the inflexible roguelike player perspective. You put the shoes of a casual player to have an argument but you still face the whole thing with a mind of a pure roguelike player.
Two of my good friends started to play ADOM because I introduced them this game. They would never end up being hooked on it if it wasn't for save scumming. Later 3 other friends of theirs actually started to play ADOM with save scumming also. 1 month after 2 of these persons started to play it with permadeath, they were in fact hardcore roguelike players, they just didn't know it. The truth is, if it wasn't for save scumming, easy mode, cheating, dishonoring yourself or whatever you want to call it, ADOM wouldn't have gained 5 more players turning 2 of them into permadeath players. Can you all frakking understand now the consequences of having multiple game play modes?
Having someone saying: "Hey, this was just a standard RPG with mediocre map design and very little structure in terms of monster placement etc." without even trying other game play modes would be a completely idiot. But instead that opinion you could in fact hear something like: "Hey, this was a great experience way above a standard RPG, with good map design and very rich in terms on content." - You should really think out of the box once in a while, unless of course you somehow believe to be the true holder of what is right or wrong. Me on the other hand, I just adding more options so people can freely choose what they enjoy most. I'm not forcing anyone to play under specific terms they might not be fond of and I'm definitely not against having the permadeath option even though I don't personally enjoy it.
Even if a game somehow fails to deliver any excitement (I'm using excitement here as it seems you have an issue with the word fun) to most players (permadeath players or not) then the problem is located in the game on not with the options presented in it in terms of having permadeath only or checkpoints or saving. Bad designed games will always suck, despising how many awesome / appealing features they may have, unlike good designed games which have their features properly implemented. But even good implemented games won't appeal to everyone, though games with more game playing options have greater chances of succeed.
Do you understand what I'm saying in this post of mine? Will you continue to say how wrong it is to have multiple choices for game play? If so, just tell me in your next post so I can ignore this whole discussion onwards.
@LazyCat
I could wish you good luck with your further posts regarding this subject but unfortunately luck won't do you any good as these type of inflexible opinions simply remind me of religious people whose disposition to acknowledge alternatives is simply non existent.
You were talking a lot about the importance of skill. I wanted to gauge good you are at roguelikes so I could use that as a barometer of what you really know about roguelike skill. The answer I got is "unimpressive but better than expected."
But your answer came with another benefit. The methods you used to approach permadeath play and how you felt about it made something really clear, and it lies at the heart of this whole stupid argument: you do not like to be challenged.
The truth is, if it wasn't for save scumming, easy mode, cheating, dishonoring yourself or whatever you want to call it, ADOM wouldn't have gained 5 more players turning 2 of them into permadeath players.
I don't think they have much more to say. They have realized by now they were wrong all along, it will just take a few years for them to actually admit it. Cheer up, we're winning!
(https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSBSw7NwMYKNgezmPqGFf4wxn4PfNyj32dz4Ls4oDBs5A8eFwFp2A)
Will you continue to say how wrong it is to have multiple choices for game play?
The option to play either a good or a bad version of a game is worse than being only permitted to play the good version.
And do you realize that both options can be either good and bad. Good for ones and bad for others. This makes the "good version" you mention to be entirely subjective, which only fortifies my position that having multiples options is always better than just one. I honestly don't know how can I make this any more clear.
Again, another pure, inflexible rogueliker comment was thrown at me.
Never underestimate the inflexible minds. The only thing they can do now is repeating themselves over and over. Anyway I'm done with this. I have a massive game project to develop and I'm loosing precious time with this leading-nowhere-discussion.
I don't like to challenge my patience. Just as you don't like to challenge your reflexes and play action games with only one life. But it's ok, because it's optional. What is your objection about if you could still play the way you want to?
Says who? Hitler?
Yes, The Enlightened One, by babbling nonsense in a few threads you have actually proved that the road roguelikes are following for many years is completely wrong. Thank you for opening my eyes.
You only want to fight enemies when they can never beat you (through save abuse) or when you already know in advance how to beat them (Pixel Dungeon was tedious and repetitive before you knew how to beat all of the enemies, but you truly enjoyed it afterwards).
You describe Brogue as "torture" because of its difficulty. You must have liked the rest of the game well enough since you bothered to make your own modified version with a difficulty-trivializing save feature. You want that same difficulty-trivializing feature to be in every game, even ones that are explicitly designed to exclude it.
These things all point to one conclusion: you hate being challenged.
Also, my favorite genre is shmups i.e. permadeath action games.
Ok lets chill out a bit guys. I'm actually starting to feel bad for this whole thing as this discussion bears roots from my previous thread. I think we all have said enough and we all have made our points quite clear. I ask each one of you to just let it go now. I'm not coming back here as this is a closed subject to me.
I am astonished you two continue to make this mendacious argument. It's not merely my personal opinion. It's the opinion held by roguelike gamers and designers for over thirty years, before games that gave you these wonderful options you talk about even existed.
Your friends, because of the design of ADOM, must have known they were breaking the rules of the game. In your pseudo-roguelike proposal, they would not be breaking any rules. This is a fundamental difference.
I refer to the previous statement. Your friends knew that they were not supposed to replay the same losing situations to throw out the bad outcomes. As a result, their appreciation of the game is influenced by knowing the rules and values behind it, which is what you're against.
Your belief in the power of options is mistaken. People do not always make good decisions. The belief that your player will make good decisions or even the decisions that are best for him is naive.
By the way, I'm not saying permadeath or close analogues are the MSG of video games that turn bad games into good games. I can see why you're so upset with me if you really think that's what I'm saying, though. I'm saying that it's a fixture of the genre and with good, defensible reason. I completely agree that there could be and indeed are lots of crappy rogulikes with permadeath. The point is that the good ones wouldn't be as good without it.
Yes, of course, you've made yourself very clear. I do not say multiple choices for game play are wrong, only that one particular choice is wrong for roguelike games. I repeat, the save file reloading conventions of roguelike games and permadeath in particular are great and it's important that save scumming be delegitimized by game rules against it, even if it's possible to do it anyway by tampering with data files.
I wish LazyCat luck too. He's doing God's work in these threads.
Well, I guess one option would be to introduce a simple score system that resets when you die. A number of early arcade games followed that basic formula. I'd certainly be interested in playing a great roguelike that either allowed you to continue with a score of zero, or to end the game with a good score. Would that satisfy everyone? Along those lines: the ability to save a limited number of times, with each save reducing your score, etc.
I think the only option I'm opposed to is the one where the basic game design allows players to get the high score (or the best ending, or the tastiest cookie) while repeatedly saving and/or dying. There should be a reward for being hardcore, even if it's a rather meaningless one -- like a high score.
Obviously I have nothing against anyone here - I didn't really scan the entire thread for vitriol before posting the first time.
Patience. It is my patience that I don't like to challenge. As long as you are generalising you will not be able to differentiate different kinds of difficulty and understand they challenge different types of skill. You are confusing tedious with difficult.
Rules should say that when you die you have to throw your computer out of the window. That would make it even more difficult and exciting. So much better. Who disagrees should of course be put in jail until they understand it's all for their own good.
There's little difficulty if you can just reload after dying, as others have pointed out earlier. Of course there are some exceptions, but none of them are RPGs.
Man, just stop wasting your time. You are talking to a person too dishonest to admit that earning a bowling score of 300 takes more skill than a score of 10 because they don't like the conclusion it leads to.
You are confusing game difficulty with personal skill. Originally we were talking about difficulty and consecutive strikes. I said each strike is equally difficult to pull off, and probability for 12 consecutive strikes is proportional to skill and vary according to complex external random factors (luck). What part do you not understand?
As for permadeath, starting a new game and replaying again through all the easy levels is not difficult, it's tedious. That's the truth, I never lie. What's so hard to believe, isn't that how most people feel about it?
You are confusing game difficulty with personal skill.
The two concepts are obviously related! A person's skill is a measurement of what level of difficulty they can overcome. A task's difficulty level is a description of how much skill a person needs in order to succeed. Difficult things (like 12 consecutive strikes) require a high level of skill. Easy things (like save scumming through a video game) do not require very much skill. How could you possibly not understand this? Why do you need such thorough explanations for such basic concepts?
As for permadeath, starting a new game and replaying again through all the easy levels is not difficult, it's tedious.
If it was equally easy to win a game with permadeath and a game with save scumming, then (given a large enough sample size) a player would win the same percentage of games in both ways. That's obviously not the case, so we can safely say that playing with permadeath is more difficult. Don't blame it on your impatience and accept it as a fact.
What's so hard to believe, isn't that how most people feel about it?
Most people don't play roguelikes.
What skill? You again fail to be specific. Starting a new game and replaying again through all the easy levels is not difficult, it's just tedious. The skill required is masochistic patience. Congratulations, you have too much free time.
Tedium is type of difficulty too, it challenges your concentration and patience. You should try counting grains of sand, it's both difficult and tedious in the same time, you'll love it.
I mean people who play roguelikes. There is only 14 of you permadeath fanatics in the whole world. And 11 of you are save-scumming like everyone else, including you. Admit it!
Well, at least you admitted that save scumming makes the game easier.
Yes, yes, everyone likes what you like and everyone plays like you play. I guess that's why all these popular roguelikes have a built-in save scum feature.
Man, this thread really challenges my patience. It's not difficult giving extremely verbose and careful explanations of things everyone knows perfectly well, it's just tedious.
What skill? You again fail to be specific.
It's true for any kind of skill you idiot.
Little retard, patience is not the same skill as intelligence. A difficulty that challenges patience has its own name, it's called tedium.
A truck is a type of vehicle. You are trying to prove a truck is not truck by insisting it's actually a vehicle. Yes, playing all over from the beginning makes it more difficult, but to be more precise it only makes it more tedious.
It's only a test of your patience if you play like a moron and do the same thing over and over until the RNG finally works in your favor. If you pay attention and learn from your mistakes you can start winning consistently. Some Crawl players have been known to win multiple consecutive games.
Post by: guest509 on April 13, 2014, 08:16:35 AM
Lol. I come back in and it's a flame war. Of course.
As for the skill/luck dynamic, a solid player of any of the major RLs can win consistently. What's the record on Nethack runs? Like 27 in a row?
It's only a test of your patience if you play like a moron and do the same thing over and over until the RNG finally works in your favor.
If a game requires skill, luck will not get you far. The joy of save scumming is exactly the opposite of what you are suggesting, it gives you a chance to play the same situation differently. A chance to experiment, to just play with it and have fun trying out different possibilities. It's a game, let yourself enjoy it.
I'm not interested to test my real life skills because I already know that I'm amazing, so when playing roguelikes I'm interested to test the skills of my game character, test certain character build and see how far it can go. I don't want to be punished in my real life for what happens on my computer screen, it's a role playing game, not torturing simulator.
If you pay attention and learn from your mistakes you can start winning consistently. Some Crawl players have been known to win multiple consecutive games.
You will learn from your mistakes much faster if you let yourself replay and analyse the actual situation that killed you, analyse it straight away, instead of playing for another 27 hours until you get into only similar situation hoping to learn something from it that time around.
You see, thanks to save scumming I know things you don't, things you can't afford to experiment with, and if we were competing, I would have most certainly won.
I don't know why you insist that save scumming serves only to learn, while in reality you use it only not to lose every game you start. Do you hope we're too stupid to realize that?
The only thing save scumming teaches you is not to be careful, because you can always retry when something goes wrong and then your mistake never happened.
Ah yes, your savescum training regimen is what made you the great player you are. Except you're terrible. You struggled for days to win in Brogue even after stacking the odds massively in your own favor. I am a much better roguelike player than you are, so obviously you are wrong.
It's cool how you even after your claims are shown to be inarguably false, you still don't reconsider any of your beliefs. You aren't interested in evidence. You can't grasp concepts so simple that they border on tautological. You don't put effort into understanding foreign ideas. You don't care that you're talking to people far more experienced and knowledgeable than yourself. You must not even like roguelikes since you go out of your way to circumvent their central features, so I don't know why you post here.
If you were the slightest bit interested in learning the truth you'd have taken my suggestion and played Battletoads on an emulator with and then without save states. That's all you'd have to do and then there'd never be any doubt about whether saving affects difficulty. But instead of taking an hour to see how blatantly wrong you are, you chose to spend several days bending the words "skill" and "difficulty" beyond all recognition. Why are you even here? What made you think that the roguelike forums was a good place to complain about how bad permadeath games are?
What made you think that the roguelike forums was a good place to complain about how bad permadeath games are?
Bringing the light to those who struggle in darkness.
:roll eyes: I bet you are save scumming just like everyone else.
You are talking about me, for some reason.
You don't care that you're talking to people far more experienced and knowledgeable than yourself.
More likely I was making games before you were even born.
A difficulty that challenges patience has its own name, it's called tedium.
Here's something for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_%28psychology%29
Also perhaps:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Post by: Krice on April 15, 2014, 06:44:35 AM
Checkpoints could work. Something like if you die you'll return to the stairs you came from and the level is re-generated so you have to play it again. When you load the game more than once it should return to the checkpoint.
Quote from: Krice on April 15, 2014, 06:44:35 AM
Absolutely agreed. /me cuts his finger and signs this with his own blood. That was always my idea with controlled saved points. However, instead checkpoints, I envision it similar to resident evil where the player has a very limited amount of ink bottles he can use to save his progress. If the player uses them all early on, he risks himself being unable to save his progress later on, because finding more of them is always an uncertainty.
Post by: AgingMinotaur on April 15, 2014, 09:53:38 AM
Legerdemain uses checkpoints, something that fits the game well, as it's trying to throw in some elements of Interactive Fiction by using lots of fixed content. PrincessRL has also been mentioned somewhere in here, I think? Regarding this whole sad flamewar[1], it strikes me as difficult to design a game that works equally well with and without permadeath. Instead of whining about how traditional RLs should include an option to turn off the feature, it would be more productive to think about what would constitute good design of a RL without permadeath.
I've been thinking that some of the upcoming, epic RLs might fit the bill for a kind of game that could work well without permadeath. I'm thinking about something like URR here – not URR specifically, but games based around the idea that a truly huge world is regenerated for every time you restart. A big-scale RL like that could probably be designed around the player controlling a family or other community. Dieing would lose your current hero with all the associated loot and experience, and might advance the game world a few months in time, to the disadvantage of your family, before starting you out with a new character in the same world. Eg. if you were out on a mission to assassinate the king, that opportunity may be lost forever as he consolidates his position before your family has time to regroup. The new character should obviously be scaled to fit the current danger level of the world, but it would still feel painful to lose nice equipment and to fail at a particular mission. In a game like this, there might be a final win/lose condition (eg. if your community is wiped out, or some major goal is achieved). Compare it to a game of Go, where you've got a board with lots of local conflicts that connect to a whole towards the end of the game. You can lose a battle and still go on to win the game.
Minotauros
[1] The popularization and dilution of the RL term is coming to bite us in the butt, it seems, when posters appear who assume that the community who's been RL-ing for years actually secretly prefers their games without permadeah. Lol. Yeah, we've just been slaves of the order of discourse, and so have been playing with permadeath all this time :) Seriously, though, just savescum, or not, whatever makes the game better for you.
Edit to footnote: I'm actually not trying to diss any recent members of this forum, sorry if I come off that way. But please respect and adapt to the existing community a little bit :) Prolonged flame wars about stuff like this only decreases the signal/noise ratio (or increases, whichever way ratios are calculated, you know what I mean, you crunchers of words and numbers).
Post by: Zireael on April 15, 2014, 01:49:43 PM
These are very good ideas!
Quote from: Zireael on April 15, 2014, 01:49:43 PM
Seriously, that was nice to read. My humble thanks.
Post by: Krice on April 15, 2014, 03:54:16 PM
Quote from: AgingMinotaur on April 15, 2014, 09:53:38 AM
it strikes me as difficult to design a game that works equally well with and without permadeath.
True. When you have permadeath it's difficult to think how the game works without it.
I've been thinking that some of the upcoming, epic RLs might fit the bill for a kind of game that could work well without permadeath. I'm thinking about something like URR here – not URR specifically, but games based around the idea that a truly huge world
When I saw URR the first thing that concerned me was how it could have permadeath, because the game world is huge. It's interesting to see what happens to it, but luckily the developer seems to be quite clever one.
Yes - this can be very effective and I like the idea. One non-RL that did this very well was State of Decay. You controlled a small group of survivors. If one died, they stayed dead, but the game could go on.
Post by: AgingMinotaur on April 15, 2014, 09:36:00 PM
If done well, I guess sure. But does it "overcome the problem" of permadeath, though? Isn't it more just postpoing the inevitable? It sounds to me like playing ADOM starting out with a couple of amulets of life preserving, which is still basically playing ADOM.
Mintauros
Quote from: AgingMinotaur on April 15, 2014, 09:36:00 PM
Actually it's different. Both checkpoints and limited saving options presents themselves as a more "aggressive" solution because most of the time it means you, the player, going back to a particular progress moment, unlike ADOM's life preserving amulets which simply avoids the character's death, without affecting the character's progress whatsoever. But this doesn't mean that ADOM's approach would not work. Having disposable items to cheat death could also be another way to go but I prefer having controlled saved points.
I don't really know how ADOM's amulets work, but if they're something that just resurrects you without losing any progress, yeah, it wouldn't really encourage me to play as carefully as I would with permadeath, or even with a checkpoint that would cause me to lose progress.
It's a one-time resurrection from a super rare item. You still need to be careful.
I think he means you can save a finite number of times and load those saves an infinite number of times. So yes, it solves the problem of being able to lose the game.
Resident Evil-style limited saves encourage self-torture (to me), replaying segments until you get the run through a section and then saving.
If limited saves encourage self-torture, then permadeath and no saving at all is the ultimate torture. Correct? So what alternative are you suggesting?
Yep. We always end up replaying events until we get them right, in one way or another. This is actually an universal law that applies to everything we do in life. The things we don't feel compelled replaying are the things we don't enjoy doing.
Yeah, along those lines, that's why I could never get into the Fire Emblem series. I wanted to keep all of my characters alive. Knowing that all I had to do was reload from 30 minutes ago and give it another shot... I would end up doing the same thing with minor variations again and again until all pleasure was drained from what had become a compulsive experience (reminds me of when I was 13! right guys? ha! oh man.)
Yep. We always end up replaying events until we get them right, in one way or another. This is actually an universal law that applies to everything we do in life.
Not roguelikes.
I'm not going to argue this behavior doesn't exist, but does it feel healthy to you? I mean, you can pay people a lot of money to tell you not do this, you know?
Right, in order to enjoy the game, you needed to be able to cope with your loss, but the game told you you didn't have to.
I'm not going to argue this behavior doesn't exist, but does it feel healthy to you?
What exactly does (or not) feel healthy to me?
Replaying events, of course.
I see. Still, there's the possibility of a (typically inexperienced) player spending all save points to reach the mid-game, and then failing to progress to the late end-game from there. So one would probably still have scenarios of having to give up certain characters and restarting, and being less round-handed with save slots this time, ie. "extended permadeath". That'd still entail a less harsh game than your typical RL, I suppose. But in the most ironic of situations, one could imagine a developer adding this feature to "appease the masses" and then balancing the game to be that much harder, so that you'll definitely need all your save slots to win, even if you play near perfect. The extra saves would only become yet another strategic element in a game that's still near-impossible to win :) The devil is in the details, of course, and I'd be very interested to see a game that's explicitly designed to be "RL without permadeath".
He is obviously very unaware his definition of "replaying events" is vague and inconsistent. I suppose that time he was referring to reloading a game even if you don't die, but rather in an attempt to play a "perfect game".
Somehow he doesn't realise that permadeath is exactly like what he is complaining about, only even worse.
The devil is in the details, of course, and I'd be very interested to see a game that's explicitly designed to be "RL without permadeath".
Whether you want to challenge yourself by completing any given game with only one life is not a matter of genre but personal preference. Number of lives is external difficulty, it's different and independent of game's internal difficulty. It's only imposed difficulty modifier where different settings appeal to different people. You don't design a game around it, it works equally for any game, it's just a difficulty setting.
Somehow you still haven't learned what procedural generation is.
Regards, a person who doesn't see the difference between Zelda and roguelikes.
I really don't have a problem with replaying events as long there is room for improvement and I really don't want to discuss what people might classify as healthy or not as it is pointless, so feel free to classify it as unhealthy for as long as you like.
Stating that replaying an event is unhealthy is as valid as having me saying that permadeath is for psycho-masochists only (I hope everyone one sees this as just a comparison). Anyway, replaying an event is not doing the exactly the same thing over and over but trying different approaches against it, until you eventually succeed to overcome it. Just imagine you having sex with the same old partner but trying different sex positions each time you do it. Eventually you will find out that a particular position is the best method to achieve "victory".
Post by: reaver on April 17, 2014, 08:05:53 AM
Go on derailing yet another thread, bravo guys
\popcorn
Even with procedural generated worlds you will face similar situations. I mean, the learning process of a game is to understand how it works and you can only know how it works if you replay its events. Sure the land type might be different and sure you will not find foes in the order you last did (though even non-permadeath games can have procedural content) but you will know from your last game that the Minotaur that killed you was still too powerful to be dealt with even with your character at level 10 and you will carry this knowledge to your next attempt. And you shall replay the event of facing the Minotaur again in future.
Quote from: reaver on April 17, 2014, 08:05:53 AM
This thread has derailed long ago. Anyway, got any soda? Popcorns go so well with coke.
I really don't have a problem with replaying events as long there is room for improvement and I really don't want to discuss what people might prefer or not as it is pointless, so feel free to classify it as unhealthy for as long as you like.
Oh, that's right. Your opinions are not up for debate. (Or is that the other thread? This seems to be turning into the thread where we remind ourselves of how non-roguelike games work -- I guess I have to admit, between competitive PvP and roguelikes, I kinda forgot how Final Fantasy saving mechanics work. Thanks for the refresher.)
I guess I should be suggesting constructive alternatives and/or explicating my position. Here's an alternative: You play a cast of characters, like in Fire Emblem, each of which can die, but the absolute lose condition is that all of them die. You play one at a time, in true roguelike style, you can switch between them (this might require some extra rules to avoid silliness), and each has an independent existence (e.g. no late Castlevania-style morphing from one into the other), but they live in the same world and although they can't meet each other directly, they can exchange items and revive each other by recovering remains and paying some nontrivial price.
I think this is a reasonable alternative model for roguelike games. Of course, it doesn't solve the problem of neurotic players who can't deal with losing a game ("it's torture!") and people will still want to save scum, but at least the game will be telling them that's not what they're supposed to do and they should really try playing a straight game.
Mordor: Depths of Dejenol had a nice mechanic imo:
If you died, you could be found by adventurers after some time and sent back to the city's morgue (starting point of the game, dungeon level 0).
The deeper the dungeon level you would die in, the longer it could take adventurers to find you: from weeks to years
Aging had an effect on the game, so die too many times and the age clocks starts being against you.
Also, every time you got resurrected by the morgue, there was a chance to lose a point of constitution.
Just to make it crystal clear (even clearer than Breaking Bad's meth developed by Walter). Opinions are open for debate, unlike preferences which are not. I even gave "the blond versus brunette" as well as the "Remstein's" virtual dialog as example in the thread you mention so people could realize that my opinion was completely based on my personal preferences and not based on belief, unless of course you want to go philosophical just to state that one still needs to believe in his preferences (yawns).
So arguing about one preferring oranges over apples its pointless. We can go on and post hundreds and hundreds of additional comments of you and me defending our own preferences which in the end will result into nothing. Maybe you enjoy this but then again it goes against your "unhealthy" designation of repetitiveness you seem to dislike (in theory).
I think this is a reasonable alternative model for roguelike games. Of course, it doesn't solve the problem of neurotic players who can't deal with losing a game ("it's torture!")
Calling people neurotic because they refuse to be harshly punished but enduring through a "stress free" gaming experience completely baffles me and this is not even my view on permadeath but theirs as I actually enjoy having moderated harsh consequences present.
(...) but at least the game will be telling them that's not what they're supposed to do and they should really try playing a straight game.
If they are already save scumming it means they don't like the way the game was originally intended to be played in first place (they are not that dumb as you seem to imply). You keep telling people what they should do imposing what you prefer to others. Stop doing that; it's not cool.
I guess that applies only for roguelikes. I'd understand speaking about torture if roguelikes were a strictly "relaxing" genre (like match-3 games, for example), but permadeath is one of the things that define the genre. You don't play an FPS and then complain that there's shooting in it.
People like that can do what they want but their opinions are dumb and bad. Some things really are better than others.
What opinions are you referring about? Please don't tell me you are also mixing opinions with preferences. Some things that are really better for ones can also be really bad for others. I never thought I would actually need to explain this to roguelike players as they always brag of how smart they are, how they know everything about game play mechanics, while at the same time pointing out how dumb the rest of the human race is.
ss that applies only for roguelikes. I'd understand speaking about torture if roguelikes were a strictly "relaxing" genre (like match-3 games, for example), but permadeath is one of the things that define the genre. You don't play an FPS and then complain that there's shooting in it.
Yes, permadeath is one of the things, not the ONE thing that defines a roguelike, because if permadeath was exculsive to roguelikes chess would play differently or would also be called a roguelike. Furthermore I'm not here discussing whether permadeath should be discarded from a roguelike or not, actually I vote for having it as well as having controlled saved points. I have a feeling that I'm somehow repeating myself; I think I will just copy & paste my old posts as future responses from now on.
I consider this whole discussing closed. I've said enough and I've repeated myself quite well. I'm not even coming back here to read future posts.
That'd be neat. If the characters all have different powers, it could also help avoid the problem of the player running into a situation that their character is completely unequipped to handle. They could retreat (or, worst case scenario, one character would die), and then they could come back with a character who's better suited for handling that challenge.
Although if that happens too much, it could be annoying, constantly running away, switching characters, running back. I'd think that the game itself would probably have to be a lot harder than normal to make sure there'd still be challenge, since the player would have access to a much larger range of abilities and tools than a single character.
Expressing intolerantly narrow-minded ignorance is not convincing argument. Talking with you about permadeath is like talking to Hitler about genocide, or talking to Krice about women, the extent of your confusion is not even funny. It's just a bloody difficulty setting, why are you getting emotional?
Talking with you about permadeath is like talking to Hitler about genocide […] why are you getting emotional?
wtf? Eat a donut and take it down a notch, human!
Let's just hope Godwin's law kicks in and puts an end to this discussion once and for all.
Expressing intolerantly narrow-minded ignorance is not convincing argument.
Top notch hypocrisy.
What is your objection about?
I accept your wickedness and unnatural desire to torture yourself with tedious repetition, I do not mind permadeath at all.
My great grandfather was a nazi, you insensitive clod!
or talking to Krice about women
I don't want to talk about women, I want to have one.
Since this topic is off anyway, I want to say about permadeath that there is something deeper in it that we don't always realize. For some people it means tedious replaying, but I think there is more to it for people with better imagination.
Post by: chooseusername on April 17, 2014, 08:43:21 PM
My interpretation of all this "give an alternative to permadeath" discussion that has been going on, is that the do-not-want-to-play-permadeath-faction couldn't provide any real alternatives that the not-anti-permadeath-faction found acceptable.
Is this a fair interpretation?
Quote from: chooseusername on April 17, 2014, 08:43:21 PM
Yeah, pretty much. Everyone wins given sufficient time does not have the universal appeal the everyone-wins faction seems to believe it has.
Everyone-wins doesn't seem to be able to conceptualize the fact that the absolute-lose-condition faction doesn't merely want other people to lose ("torture! Hitler!") but actually wants to lose too.
There can never be a "real alternative" if you dismiss each and every suggestion as "not being a real alternative" because it's not permadeath.
That's okay. When you and the others who wish to play alternative approaches make your games, you can show them all how it can be done. After all, all these threads weren't about telling other people they should stop making what interests them given that includes permadeath, and make what interests someone who doesn't like playing permadeath-based games? Was it?
Otherwise, when people don't seem to by buying what you are selling, why continue to peddle it?
The people who are actually posting on topic are providing some pretty good alternatives, or at least alternatives that would work in games designed around the mechanic.
A more accurate interpretation of the discussion would be that some people like to argue, and the ones who do will post incessantly several times a day, drowning out all other discussion.
At least *I* was not forcing my opinion down to the permadeath lot's throats, you can play what you like, I'm not your enemy ffs. When I make a game, I will use one of the alternatives, yes. Fortunately, many have been suggested thus far and I have a few extra thoughts on my own. But I think extreme/stubborn opinions and generalisation of some posts here paint everybody in a bad light; both sides appear very argumentative and aggressive-defensive and therefore the climate is not extremely healthy for civilised discussion anymore. As rickton said, good posts and suggestions have been drowned by stupid arguments.
Also, Jesus was save-scumming, so it must be ok :P Happy easter!
Post by: Quendus on April 18, 2014, 06:09:50 AM
Remember when people used to talk about more than one thing here? Remember when if one topic was an uninteresting mess you could read threads on totally unrelated topics?
couldn't provide any real alternatives
I guess some people don't like permadeath. But.. it's an essential feature of a game type called roguelike. So in a way this discussion has no meaning. There are role-playing games without permadeath, they are often called "role-playing games" or RPG. However often those games don't have random game world, but it's again one of their traditional features. I think the best way to solve this problem is start to make your own rogue(or whatever)like game with all the features you think are missing from this world. Trying to troll in a roguelike forum is more likely making roguelike developers more convinced that their roguelike will stay pure. It's like the discussion about "better" user interface back a while. It made me realize that I need to make controls in my roguelike games more complex, just to show those idiots.
You asked an unfocused question that deals in themes that were the topic of recent arguments in other threads and you want to put it on everyone else that the result is a continuation of that argument?
There's exactly one reason that this thread derailed (although it's rails were pretty rickety from the start) into a continuation of that argument and that reason has been (rather irresponsibly, in my opinion) encouraged by others who want to cut out a space for the "everyone wins" perspective in roguelikes.
Uh, yes, I want to put the blame for arguing on the people who were arguing. That's how things usually work.
You don't have to respond, especially when you know that it's futile because of the person you're dealing with.
My intention wasn't "everyone wins," but come up with new ways to lose. You're right, though, maybe I should have been more clear at the start. But while we're slinging blame around, LazyCat wasn't just encouraged by the people supporting him. People don't say "don't feed the trolls" because it's catchy.
On the other other hand, you're right, this is all my fault, because apparently even mentioning permadeath is enough to send him into a frenzy.
Heh. Your posts are always a pleasure to read.
Quote from: Quendus on April 18, 2014, 06:09:50 AM
Woah there buddy, let's not start talking crazy.
Post by: Quendus on April 18, 2014, 09:42:35 PM
Start?
Yes. It's other people being argumentative. It's the posts you do not like being inconvenient, and their stupid arguments, I assume. And the posts you do like being drowned out by these, I also assume. And should there be resistance to the concepts you agree with, they are extreme/stubborn or dealing in generalisations. It's no wonder you interpret my post overly personally, and talk in terms of me seeing you as an enemy in an upset way.
In truth, the posts which you and rickton see as good, are still there. If anyone has been reading them, and got value out of the discussion of them, then isn't that the point? And if they didn't get any value, then they have as much right to be posting the ideas and suggestions they consider good, as you do yours.
Also, please do not push your religion at me. You wouldn't like it, if I pushed mine at you. And even if you did, here is not the place.
Dude relax, I was not *pushing* anything, I was making a joke. I don't even believe in that religion. Just wow.
I guess some people don't like permadeath. But.. it's an essential feature of a game type called roguelike.
Why is it important for a game to be like Rogue?
Imagine people instead invented "pacmanlike" genre, and decided, for some strange reason, that success of any pacmanlike game will not be measured by popularity, but likeliness to the original Pac-Man. People would then argue how any good pacmalike must have three lives and four ghosts, because those are the essential features of a game type called pacmanlike.
Think about it, it's insane. Roguelike is not a genre, it's a semantic blunder, ambiguous, meaningless and non-existing word. It's a bunch of arbitrary restrictions, a measure not of any quality, but just plain similarity. And do we really need any more Rogue clones, really?
But if you already must to be remaking one and the same game for 30 years, then at least pick up a better version to imitate than ugly PC one. Macintosh and Atari ST versions from 1985 have graphic tiles, mouse support and even few sounds, they are still more advanced than most roguelikes of today, it's embarrassing.
(http://macintoshgarden.org/sites/macintoshgarden.org/files/imagecache/thumbnail/screenshots/324x216xrogue.png.pagespeed.ic.mhpnFl45p8.png)
I sometimes wonder if you're dumb or just pretending. Roguelikes are similar to Rogue in the same way as FPS games are similar to Doom or RTS games are similar to Dune II. They just evolved less due to not being a mainstream genre. The name 'roguelike' is just a convenient shortcut, because nobody would stand calling roguelikes 'turn based dungeon crawlers with procedural generation and permadeath' every time they mention them.
What you are asking is not actually a question. So there is no answer either.
But I'd like to add that today games are under a pressure from people who think everything must be equal. You know, those assholes who get media time for bashing games for being racistic, being sexist or whatever. It's great to have a traditional game genre for nerd guys. Something that's not watered down by women. Yes. Women are behind all this equality crap.
Roguelikes are similar to Rogue in the same way as FPS games are similar to Doom or RTS games are similar to Dune II. They just evolved less due to not being a mainstream genre. The name 'roguelike' is just a convenient shortcut, because nobody would stand calling roguelikes 'turn based dungeon crawlers with procedural generation and permadeath' every time they mention them.
No other genre is defined by the type of graphics, type of level design, difficulty or number of lives. It's fascinating you don't realize how ridiculous that is. Those are very general and arbitrary properties of any game. Permadeath is just a difficulty setting. Roguelikes difficulty does not concern you any more than difficulty of any other game in whatever genre. Offering different difficulty options for different people can only help your game become more popular, whatever type of game it is. And for games, popularity is the only measure of success. Is it not?
No other genre is defined by the type of graphics, type of level design, difficulty or number of lives.
Roguelikes aren't defined by graphics. Procedural generation isn't level design, it's a process. Permadeath isn't just a difficulty level, it's a mechanic that puts procedural generation to use. No other genre does that, even though you can play any game with permadeath.
Once again your incompetence stems from inability to play and enjoy roguelikes the way they are meant to be played. Instead, you break their rules by save scumming (which effectively removes procedural generation and permadeath, two features vital to the genre), making the game at best a mediocre RPG.
And for games, popularity is the only measure of success. Is it not?
It's not, unless you're a greedy developer. Compare Dwarf Fortress and the newest Call of Duty: according to you, CoD is more successful because a lot of people play it. I say that DF is a whole lot more successful, because it gathered a relatively small group of devoted fans (just like roguelikes) while Call of Duty players don't feel attached to the game. It's also more successful because of what it accomplishes in terms of gameplay, which has a lot more depth than Call of Duty.
I blame the rest of you for this, it's obvious LazyCat can't help it.
Dwarf Fortress is also on display at the MoMA. I think we can be pretty sure CoD will never have that kind of recognition or prestige.
Call it what you want, the fact stays those are general properties any game can have and many games do have. Vague or general classification is not classification at all, it's a semantic nonsense, hence all the stupid arguments about true roguelikes and false roguelike-likes. It's retarded.
....roguelikes the way they are meant to be played.
Meant to be played... says who? Who meant it, who invented that commandment and in what Bible it is written?
That's incorrect usage of the word "successful". Unless you think like majority yours is only a subjective personal opinion. Majority defines what is and what is not successful, particularly in the case of books, music, movies and games where success and popularity have the same meaning.
Don't respond to LazyCat posts.
I think the thread should be locked.
Just one more time. It's so tempting.
Developers. I sincerely don't know how dumb are you if you don't know who sets rules for a game.
Yeah, this place needs moderation in a big way.
a.) First you said all roguelikes are meant to be played the same way.
b.) Now you say everyone sets rules of their own game.
Hah! What exactly are you concerned about? Do you even know?
Post by: tuturto on April 20, 2014, 09:32:24 AM
Not sure if this has been suggested already, but what about giving player a chance to make a deal with a supernatural being when he's about to die. Instead of dying, the player would be returned where he died in full health and with his gear intact. In exchange for this, he would have to give up something valuable, like certain type of items couldn't be used anymore (they still would be generated though) or certain spells were unavailable for him after that point. Items and spellbooks would be generated normally, so the player would see what he's missing out. After he dies next time, same thing, but now he would have to give up two things. The game would get progressively harder and harder until the player figured out that he rather starts from beginning.
That's an interesting idea. It would be better to to give the game an eventual fail state than to frustrate the player to the point of quitting, though.
Taking the idea further, you could give the player the possibility of repaying the supernatural entity, or breaking free from their servitude somehow.
Post by: tuturto on April 20, 2014, 04:55:02 PM
Good point about the final fail state. It probably wouldn't be a good idea if every game ended either in victory or the player quitting in frustration.
Interesting idea about breaking free from the contract. That probably could be built into a quest or series of special levels. And if the player dies in the process, the supernatural being wouldn't be that willing to help him. So high reward would come with a high risk.
Post by: Atreides on May 02, 2014, 12:12:40 AM
Lose all your stuff and start out at the beginning.
Azure Dreams is a roguelike for the PS1. You have a town where you can do dating sim and a bit of building sim stuff, along with minigames and shops. The actual roguelike stuff happens in the monster tower just outside town. Whenever you enter this tower you start out at level 1 with the exact same starting stats. You can only bring 5 items into the tower with you. You can also bring two familiars (basically pokemon) with you, who can fight alongside you or augment your attacks with their magic. These familiars gain levels just like you, but they keep their levels and stats when they reenter the tower.
If you die in the tower you end up outside it with only the familiars that went in with you. Everything else is gone.
It's possible to leave the tower at any time with one of several different items. If you leave this way, you keep all your stuff.
While you probably should keep permadeath, there's no reason you can't have a few second chance items or abilities around. These could punish the player by having the player awaken closer to the beginning of the dungeon, with less gold or missing a few random items, or several class/character levels lower (alternately, give the player negative experience, which must be worked off before you can gain a new level).
I don't think that the player should have unlimited retries, though that could be an option the player could select. Instead I think that the retry feature should be linked to another game mechanic. If your game has pets or familiars, then the familiar could have several chances to teleport you away, but at great cost to it and yourself. There could be a cap on negative experience which will cause permadeath if it moves past that cap (if you die too many times).
What mechanic you choose depends on how your game works, and on how the roguelike stuff is done. If it's in a repeatable, randomized dungeon (like in Azure Dreams), then you could punish the player as harshly as that game does, because the player can still start again with his familiars and the items he keeps in his safe at home. If the whole game is a roguelike, then you need to do something a bit more subtle especially if you intend to keep permadeath.
Negative experience is probably the most devious thing you can do, because it temporarily locks down character/class progression and forces the player to be cautious for a while until he or she can start gaining levels again. Losing gold is always good, especially if shops and consumable items are available (even more so if they are necessary or very useful). Losing random items can be horrifying, so each item should have a value rating or there should be a way to derive a value rating. This matters because powerful characters with lots of time invested in them should pay more for a second chance, while less powerful and time-invested character should be fairly cheap to save from permadeath. This in itself is a mechanic that makes the game difficultly increase over time, as you gain more powerful and useful (or one of a kind) items.
One last idea I had just now - dangerous enemies could be produced where you died. If you died on the 5th floor of a tower and your familiar drags you to the 3rd floor, then maybe the shadow of your death should be skulking around the 5th floor, waiting to embrace you. So if you want to get past it, you need to grind a bit to defeat yourself as you were before because you're fighting yourself as you were when you died.
Post by: Endorya on May 02, 2014, 08:19:21 AM
Oh oh... Someone has disturbed the dark waters...
"I have bad feeling about this! - Lydia in Skyrim
Post by: awake on May 02, 2014, 04:28:19 PM
Quote from: Endorya on May 02, 2014, 08:19:21 AM
Yeah let's not lock the thread, it's a legit discussion. Anyone who doesn't like long angry rants should just not read or write them.
There seem to be a lot of commercial Japanese roguelikes although they don't get much discussion in these parts. I get the impression that they tend to be relatively shallow if not really bad at all. I think as a general rule they kick you out of the dungeon and tax you some/all of your stuff when you lose, but you accumulate XP and loot over time so there's also progress beyond the player simply getting better.
I think amulets of life saving and Felids in DCSS (who can earn multiple lives and teleport away on respawn) point the way to a potential solution. I think some of the ill will toward permadeath isn't so much the permanence but the fact that you're punished so harshly for minor mistakes. You could argue that "that's just part of the game" but I don't think it's good when too much of the difficulty comes from "death by boredom", underestimating rare difficulty spikes, misunderstanding something etc as opposed to overall quality of play.
Basically I think that earning extra chances makes more sense, at least as a "beginner mode" option, than most other options. Save points undermine the sense of permanence and encourage abuse, infinite lives w/score penalty has too much of a "everyone's a winner!" taste and relegates permadeath to a seldom-observed challenge setting, and nobody wants to play Wizard mode.
Post by: Endorya on May 02, 2014, 05:37:16 PM
Quote from: awake on May 02, 2014, 04:28:19 PM
Anyone who doesn't like long angry rants should just not read or write them.
I really wish it was that simple. Though rants don't particularly affect me (as long I'm not the OP) the job of a moderator is in fact to moderate a forum preventing off topic, long and angry rants.
Post by: Vanguard on May 02, 2014, 07:16:36 PM
I'm down with extra lives, but what I'd really like to see is something akin to shmup bombs - an finite consumable that can absolutely save you from any situation, but only if you're attentive enough to recognize the threat before it spirals out of control. Like, you start the game with three potions of life saving, which fully heal you and stop time for three turns, but you can never obtain more of them.
Post by: Atreides on May 02, 2014, 10:14:15 PM
Well, does anyone have any feedback on my thoughts? I responded to OP's question. Didn't feel like reading 13 pages of text. Did I repeat what a lot of other people said?
I feel - probably unjustifiably - proud of the negative experience idea.
Quote from: Vimes on May 02, 2014, 10:14:15 PM
I think you did just fine, I actually enjoy reading your post.
Quote from: Vanguard on May 02, 2014, 07:16:36 PM
That makes sense although
1) Very frequently you die in a RL with something in your inventory that would have saved you, there's still that frustration
2) If you start off with three and you lose one on the first floor (for example), most people will restart rather than have to play the rest of the game with only two left.
I actually bumped into the original Felid proposal (don't have a link handy...) and that second point is why you have to earn your lives instead of starting with nine like you would expect a cat to.
Felids lose a level upon reviving, so I guess they beat you to it, if I understand you correctly. Or we could say that great minds think alike!
Post by: Vanguard on May 03, 2014, 06:35:14 AM
I view #2 as unproblematic and #1 as outright desirable.
The frustration of losing when you had a way to survive is the ideal kind of frustration. It's exactly the sort of thing you should use to push yourself towards becoming a better player. It comes with a payoff too: the frustration from failing to use your bombs will make your victory that much sweeter when you get it right. That isn't necessarily true for the frustration of an RNG cheap shot.
As for #2, if your life is worth less than a potion of life saving, you should just die. Until you've gotten far enough that your character's life is valuable to you, there's no reason to ever use one. It's perfect for bad players because they can use the potions to see more of the game than they'd otherwise be able to. It will let them make more mistakes, which means they'll have more opportunities to learn. For players who have a shot at winning it's one more element of strategy to consider, and a great way to chart their progress. Expert players who go for streaks shouldn't regularly depend on potions of life saving, but they'd be a great way to prevent extreme bad luck from ending their streaks. Everyone benefits.
Losing a level can be very icky depending on how it's implemented. If the game keeps track of what you gain at a level up, or if what you gain is predetermined, then it isn't an issue and removing a level is as easy as adding one. This is less true if removing a level means you suddenly can't hold all your gear and you need to spend 5 minutes reconfiguring your inventory, or if it means you need to, say, reorganize your passive abilities since you no longer have enough "ability points" to use them all (though I don't know of any games that have a system like this, outside of say Final Fantasy 9).
If your stat gains at level up are semi random, then level downs can benefit the player or hurt the player. Say you gained 1 strength, 1 dexterity, and 1 wisdom on reaching level 22. Then you are leveled down and you lose 1 wisdom. That's a great deal! Or you could have only gained 1 of something on level up and then lose 3 things on level down.
Even my negative experience idea can eat total shit depending on how experience is used in level gains. If the game only tracks experienced needed to next level up (and then either pulls the experience needed for the level up after that from a table or follows some kind of algorithm to determine experience needed after you reach that level) then you can apply negative experience all day with zero consequences.
But if the game tracks total experience to determine when you level up, then you need to cap the amount of experience you can lose or else you'll lose a level and weird things could happen if that isn't what you intended to happen (and weird things will probably still happen). Even then that creates something that can be abused, because it means you can take risks when your experience is very low without losing much experience.
I can only endorse negative experience when used with a system where your game tracks only experience needed to the next level up.
You could penalize the player even further by tracking total experience acquired and total negative experience acquired, and then do stuff with that even though it isn't used for level gains. You could make certain quests time out once you reach a certain total experience and not have total experience take negative experience into account, punishing the player if he or she grinds too much or dies too often (an event ranking). You could increase the difficulty of some encounters once certain milestones in total experience are reached (sort of an encounter ranking, or a battle ranking).
You - or your player's god - could reward the player with gold or random useful stuff if the player manages to reach certain events with a very low total experience and little or no negative experience. I prefer that the player not be rewarded with permanent stat boosts or otherwise-unobtainable abilities or items, because such things bring out the completionist in me and I like my social life!
Oh, I forgot to say why shmup bombs are preferable to extra lives. It's because they force the player to stay cautious and they maintain the omnipresent sense of danger that gives roguelikes so much of their character.
Let's say you're up against a dangerous enemy. You're both low on health, either one of you could die from the next hit. It's your turn and you have to choose to either attack or burn one of your lifesaving bombs. There's no other way to escape. If you have extra lives that activate when you die, then you say "sure let's roll the dice" and then you win or lose, and either way you move on.
If you have to use the item before you die, that same situation becomes incredibly tense. If you attack, you might get lucky and escape with no loss. Or you might get unlucky and die. Your other option is to drop a bomb, in which case both your survival and the loss of an irreplaceable asset are certain. The right answer isn't obvious, and depends on the specifics of situation. Decisions like that are the core of every good roguelike
Post by: wire_hall_medic on May 12, 2014, 11:55:07 PM
I'm too lazy to read 14 page of responses, so I apologize if someone suggested this previously.
You have a Reputation score, which increases with in the same manner as experience. As your reputation hits particular benchmarks, you get benefits; discounts with merchants, better quest rewards, more powerful items available for sale, free services like identification and healing.
When you die, your reputation drops significantly. Either all the way to zero, or several level's worth.
Post by: chooseusername on May 13, 2014, 04:59:21 AM
Quote from: wire_hall_medic on May 12, 2014, 11:55:07 PM
But this isn't a permanent consequence, to be fair. You would be able to rebuild the reputation.
Quote from: chooseusername on May 13, 2014, 04:59:21 AM
True. Although this would limit the total amount of reputation a character could build over the course of the game.
You could go the other way; your reputation starts at a maximal value, and loses one every time you die. There is no way, or very very limited ways, to restore your reputation. However this lends itself to the same problem as every other permanent consequence that has an impact on gameplay; if the game gets harder every time you fail, it becomes a circular loop of failure.
Perhaps you start at full reputation, it decrements when you die, and upon reaching a reputation of zero you get permadeathed. Like getting cut off by the bartender, "all right, buddy, you've had enough. I'm calling you a carriage."
Post by: chooseusername on May 14, 2014, 07:34:05 PM
At some point don't you have to wonder why reputation merits being linked to death, and consider calling it lives? ;)
Quote from: chooseusername on May 14, 2014, 07:34:05 PM
Depends on in-game fluff. Maybe you're raiding a dungeon at the behest of a fey prince, and you're assigned one of his squires. This squire hauls you out the first few times you die and he manages to bring most of your stuff, but the more you fail the less faith the squire has in you. Eventually he stops believing you'll accomplish your task and he either won't bring any of your stuff (or he'll outright steal it and offer to sell it back to you), he won't take you very far from where you died, or he just won't come when you're near death anymore.