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QCF Design Community • View topic - Rambling


Rambling

All things Desktop Dungeons

Re: Rambling

Postby Ach Wheesht on Thu Feb 07, 2013 3:31 pm

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Re: Rambling

Postby Lujo on Thu Feb 07, 2013 3:52 pm

Well, true - but that used to be much harder - Naga City had nothing but bosses and gods down below for a long while, and it was considered the easiest dungeon by anyone who could juggle the gods. I suppose it is doable in other ways now, and assasin does have unique advantages (not complaining really, you need a few "omg hax" things in the game).

The "shame bout there being a badge" is that it's actually one of the few places where you can really learn about the gods.
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Re: Rambling

Postby Galefury on Thu Feb 07, 2013 9:38 pm

I have some rambling to do, and this thread seems like an appropriate place. As someone who stopped playing this game a long time ago (will play again when it is finally released), I might be able to provide a different perspective to the recent discussions about difficulty.

I stopped playing at some point before class challenges and the allegedly crazy potion preps were added. I beat the Avatar and Namtar back then, the other vicious dungeons were added shortly after I quit. It took several attempts, I used terribly cheesy stuff (monk with huge resists and good damage, gnome warlord with nearly unlimited life protections, really old trisword that gave a huge damage but posed some inventory restrictions or something), and I beat them. But I simply couldn't have done it with most combos, no matter the preps or gods. Did the game get easier or harder since then?

Seeing how people are now talking about completing vicious dungeons with all classes, it must have gotten a lot easier, or maybe these players are just on a whole different level of skill (with the many additional months of playing this may very well be the case). Either way, to me the difficulty seemed fine back then. Vicious was a nearly insurmountable challenge, even hard dungeons felt really challenging. And yes, I needed to beat these vicious dungeons to feel like I had beaten the game. But I didn't need to beat them with all the classes. What classes you had completed a dungeon with wasn't even shown.

Back then I felt a bit sad to see that the notion of completion had changed between the freeware version and the beta. In the freeware, there were just a few dungeons, and you would try to beat them with all the classes, getting benefits for completing the dungeons, which in turn made beating them with weaker classes possible. In the beta as it was then, truly and completely winning the game meant (to me) "beat all of the very many dungeons at least once, with any class/race combo you want, and unlock all the stuff". This made class balance too important in my eyes, and would have significantly reduced the long-term appeal of DD by promoting always using the strongest combo instead of promoting using a variety of classes.

Now true completion of DD seems to mean "complete all of the very many dungeons with all of the classes". This makes me very happy, and addresses the concerns I had back then. But to me it seems like the recent discussions don't fully acknowledge the scope of this task. People seem to have done it. Maybe even done it several times. But this probably took hundreds of hours of playing to do, and certainly hundreds more to get good enough at DD to do it. I played the freeware for hundreds of hours, and then played the beta for hundreds more. And the game is much longer now. Few games have this kind of longevity, and few players are willing to invest so much time. "Completing" the vicious dungeons (by the above definition) is a task very few players are even going to attempt, and that's okay.

If people want to stop playing after a few hundred hours and move on, that's fine. People can, will, and should determine for themselves when the game stops being fun for them, and this point will be different for everyone. There is no one "correct" difficulty, there isn't even one correct difficulty ramp. I'm pretty sure DD is already in a fairly good spot. People who have been playing for years can only wildly speculate about how the game feels to an average new player. Most of these will probably like DD a lot less than the people who have been playing it for years. None of the input comes from truly new players, and none of it comes from average players. Of course DD should be the best game it can be, and no amount of fun should be considered "enough", so sure it should keep improving. But after reading the recent discussions about difficulty it seems to me like people are splitting hairs. Take a step back, look at the big picture, and enjoy.

DD was awesome when I stopped playing, and with the amount of improvements it seems to have gotten since then I cant even imagine how great it must be now. I'm looking forward to playing it again when it is released, and discovering all the new ways to beat seemingly impossible dungeons.

By the way, DD never stopped being fun for me. I just want to save some discoveries for the released version. :D
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Re: Rambling

Postby The Avatar on Thu Feb 07, 2013 9:57 pm

Smart.

Overall, DD has gotten easier, but you can't just walk into vicious with a cheap strategy. Both players and monsters aren't so inhumanly powerful. As for completing the dungeons, there are a good bit more quests with requirements such as beat this dungeon with four classes or 3 specific race class combos. As for total completion, I was the one who got 100% on the vicious four, but only because I am a perfectionist, and that was the highest possible achievement I could get. Of course, that was when Binlor alone could get me through 3 of the 5 vicious dungeons, and there were runaway strats for the other 2.
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Re: Rambling

Postby Bloggorus on Thu Feb 07, 2013 10:23 pm

If only there were some real incentive to acheive full completion aside from a little kingdom gold...
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Re: Rambling

Postby FDru on Thu Feb 07, 2013 10:50 pm

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Re: Rambling

Postby The Avatar on Thu Feb 07, 2013 11:06 pm

Agreed. That is the one loss of the beta. There was real good incentive in the alpha to beat everything with everything. The game could last for an almost endless amount of time.

I once recommended that getting 100% on the dungeon should let you access "god mode" or "sandbox mode" for that dungeon. You could spawn any 3 altars, as many shops as you want with any items. Basically, you can create the ultimate optimal run and try out any strategy within that dungeon.
We made an expansion and it is awesome. Really, you should check it out, especially if you're looking for some extra challenge.

Download over at ddmod.weebly.com!
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Re: Rambling

Postby Bloggorus on Thu Feb 07, 2013 11:16 pm

I remember requesting more rewards for completion dungeons.

The PQI came soon after, which was pretty cool, but I never understood why race was included in that, it's not tracked as far as I know.

The other solution was more gold for getting halfway and 100%. Somewhere around 200 or 500?

Call me ungrateful, but a little extra gold is not incentive to spend multiple hours completing dungeons with new classes.
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Re: Rambling

Postby Bloggorus on Thu Feb 07, 2013 11:17 pm

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Re: Rambling

Postby Sidestepper on Thu Feb 07, 2013 11:20 pm

I too have always wanted some kind of sandbox mode for dungeons that we have 100-percented. I doubt it will make it into the game, but that would be a really fun way to experiment with fringe combinations. It would also be an indulgent pleasure when you just want to get a Binlor->GG->Dracul chain, or maybe a Tikki Tooki "Dorkling." Naturally, sandbox mode shouldn't have any gold rewards for it.
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