1581

I was starting level 4 (Going Rogue + Permadeath). I had saved and scrounged because there was an Orb of Nothing in a store on level 2 (Magic Power 10, Mana Points 30, Mana Regeneration Bonus 2). I finally got the 18k+ zorkmids together.

I went back to level 2. I was one room away from the store when I didn’t heal myself before tangling with a Pumpkinn. I had 21 HP. Bam, the Pumpkinn hits me for 21 HP.

I was stunned for a bit and cursing my idiocy. Three-four nights of playing down the drain. After a few minutes I started a new game with an even better build. Now I’m on level 1, one pear and a level-up away from a Fruitful Staff. Life is good.

1582

Roguelikes in a nutshell, right there. Hah!

1583

Jape, my current build is close to that. I have Staves, Burglary, Alchemy, Blood Mage, Golemancy, Promethean Magic and Ley Walker.

Staves gives mana-free killing power for the early game and helps with using the Fruitful Staff. Golemancy provides the very useful Mustache Golem early tank, Unliving Wall for life-saving walling-off and getting the artifacts on islands (the wall knocks them off) and the crowd-killing Thaumite Swarm. Throw a few of those into a room, close it off and then just wait.

My last build (RIP) had Psionics instead of Alchemy. Psychokinetic Shove and Crystal Healing were useful but I don’t think they will hold a candle to the potion and fruit bonanza about to happen. Also, the shove didn’t seem to affect enemies that were already next to me which limited its usefulness severely. Maybe I was clicking in the wrong place.

1584

Yeah and for further frisson compare and contrast that with my earlier outburst.

1585

From Dungeons of Dredmor I soon learned that a roguelike is not like other single player games. The point is not to get linearly once through the game and then set it aside for another similar experience. The point is enjoying your time in the dungeon and if you finish it as a byproduct, more power to you!

It’s more akin to watching General Hospital than Band of Brothers. There is no end, just an ongoing, soothing experience. Or enraging, as the case may be.

1586

Nerve Staple is useful though for the guaranteed stun in Psionics.

1587

Sounds good! I didn’t get that far in that skill tree due to an untimely death. Is it ever resisted by the higher level monsters? Narcosomatic Induction was OK but the monster often woke up almost immediately if there was stuff happening around it.

1588

Dredmor taken down with a dozen Obvious Fireballs to the face. Going Rogue + Permadeath, 344,984 points, global rank: #399. This was my second GR+PD character who survived beyond the first two rooms. There were about half a dozen that didn’t.

Build: Staves, Burglary, Alchemy, Blood Mage, Golemancy, Promethean Magic and Ley Walker. Stats in the end (at level 16) with awesome found and bought gear: 85 HP, 173 mana, 11 mana regeneration, 44 magic power.

I cleared levels 1-3 and then started taking the first stairs down. Level 10 was the only one I ended up clearing almost entirely as I only found Dredmor in the last corner. Levels 4-9 I just touched briefly.

Time for Bastion!

1589

I never saw it resisted. It does less damage if you spam it, and can even start healing the monsters if you spam it too much though.

Psionics skills are generally pretty useful, but nothing overpowered. Lacking AOE doesn’t help.

1590

I saw Lockup from Burglary resisted quite a bit on later levels in my latest run. It stopped me using it. If you’re trying to stop a mob one square away getting next to you with Lockup and fail, the mob is now next to you. Too much risk to be consistently useful.

1591

Hmmm. I’ve read all these positive feedback posts in this thread. And since I love rogulelikes RPG in general the decision to buy this game was no-brainer to me.

So I’ve purchased it last week, played it on and off for a week or so.

And frankly… I am pretty disappointed.

The game is quite rough around the edges and it feels very unfinished. But more important - the gameplay itself (after the initial interesting period of learning the ropes and discovery) - it’s simply not fun. And it’s extremely repetitive.

Here are some bullet points, in no particular order:

To be fair, I’ll start with game’s strong points.

Positive:

  1. Graphics is nice for roguelike.

  2. The atmosphere of the game is fun and upbeat, it has quirky sense of humor which I dig.

  3. The skills are interesting and quite diverse.

  4. The game is hard (in the beginning at least), on the Rogue/PermaDeath difficulty settings. I count it as positive. >:)

  5. Multiple types of crafting implemented, wide variety of recipes.

So far so good, right? But unfortunately, IMO the negative factors clearly overwhelm the positive. :(((

Negative:

  1. Once you learn the ropes, the gameplay is extremely repetitive and slow. I’ve been playing mostly mage character. Which supposed to be very versatile char in RPGs. In reality - not really. If you want to be most efficient, the whole game is about grinding mobs by using 1-2 most efficient spells, sometimes finishing them with melee attack. That’s all it takes to wipe any level, once you get past lvl 4-5 and get reasonably strong spells.

  2. Enemy selection is very limited and boring. 3-5 mob types per level, vast majority of them are melee type controlled by dumb and predictable AI.

  3. Spells selection is very limited for RPG.

  4. Char progression is extremely limited (after your initial skill selection) You get 1 skill pints per level to distribute among your 7 skills. That’s all. For rogue-type RPG that’s extremely weak. Hell, it’s very weak even for regular RPG.

  5. Dungeons are very boring and repetitive. There are 3-4 special features in the dungeon, plus possibility of zoo. That rest of the dungeon level is just endless carbon copied rooms with 2-4 mobs in each (out of 4-5 possible mob per level). Not only the level itself is the same, each of the game’s 10 levels is exactly the same as another, with only different set of sprites for walls, floors and chests. The repetitive factor is made even worse by the fact that the dungeon levels are huge.

  6. No auto-rest button.(!!!) I mean - seriously, what the fuck?!? >:( Since when forcing player to hit space bar 200 times every few minutes (on high difficulty level) became the idea of good game design?!? Out of all weaknesses of this game this is not the worst but it is the most inexcusable, because it would be so simple to implement from both game design and programming points of view.

  7. No item discovery mini-game.

  8. Potion/Wand names and descriptions are often funny but meaningless. You are forced to remember or write down what each wand/potion does or look at spoilers. Same for mushrooms. Bad game design.

  9. The automap is abysmal. It doesn’t reflect any of the dungeon special features (like quest locations, to which you often need to return, lever-locked “uber” chests, et cetera). It doesn’t allow you to add notations either. Which forces you to either draw map by hand, or spend huge amount of time locating quest statues/shrines/whatever, every time you need to return to them. Coupled with the fact that levels are very large, it is very frustrating. This is 2011, not 1985. At least semi-decent automap is expected in any game.

  10. Inventory management is very bad. The game is choke full with items while inventory size is very limited. You’ll end up spending a lot of time running back and forth between shops to sell you crap, to do you crafting, to get to your stash, et cetera. Either the game should have some automatic stash location (Bank? Baggage Train? Whatever), or inventory should be at least twice as large as it is. It is especially bad if god forbid you select some crafting skills for your char.

  11. The game is strongly unbalanced. Quest rewards are usually crap, fish God’s shrines rewards are almost always crap, crafted items are also mostly crap comparable to the stuff you can find in the dungeon by the time you are capable of making these items. Some skills are overpowered while other are useless. Recepies are way too rare.

  12. No mobs loot. Nada. Each mob leaves the same 5 coins, regardless of the mob’s type or difficulty. Very weak.

  13. Did I mention that char development is extremely limited? It gets worse. Even this very limited diversity in how you develop your char will disappear as you advance in the game, because at the end you’ll end up with exactly the same high level char (assuming the same initial skills) The path you will take to get there may be somewhat different, but the end result will be the same, since you can only invest 3 to 7 points in each skill.

I could go on and on, but I think you got the idea… ;(

Overall the game is not horrible by any means. It’s can be fun on occasions. With 3-6 months of additional development it could be much better. But personally I think at the present it is mediocre at best. Frankly I am quite surprised by the praise some people here have poured on it. But of course everybody is entitled to his own opinion. I am just sharing with you mine.

Do I regret buying the game? I do, but only because of the time I’ve spend playing game (hoping for it to become fun), not because of the money spent. 5$ is nothing, I am happy to support a promising indep rogue-like developer - they are almost unheard off these days. I also wish devs a lot of luck with their next project, should they decide to make another RPG. They certainly have both talent and guts, as well as good sense of humor. I just hope that they will learn from the game’s shortcomings and their next project will be more fun to play.

1592

I actually agree with a number of your negatives, in particular the mini-map and I would very much like to see some loot dropped by the peeps you kill.

But the difference is that, even with the negatives (and again, I think those are pretty good points) I still really enjoy the game.

1593

I agree with the negatives as well. I enjoyed the time I put into the game, but I’m not going to bother continuing. Once I got to floor 6 or so I was bored to tears. Also there are lots of really inexcusable bugs.

I would recommend it to others who enjoy the genre, simply because it can be fun for a few hours which is worth the money. If you have some insane compulsion to beat games though, I’d warn that this one gets boring quickly.

1594

I think the main fault is that playing a mage character is very boring once you get past the initial levels, because it’s just too easy to kite the mobs that come close with teleport/knightly leap and there is only a very limited amount of dangerous spellcasters.

Seems to me the game was designed for melee characters or even better hybrids, where the game shines with the nice counter/dodge/block/crit combat system.

1595

@David Erikson: Hell, I agree with most of the negatives. And on the whole it’s a very interesting post. I also appreciate the civility of your criticism.

  1. Gameplay repetition and slowness is a bit of an issue, yeah.
    Ideally you’d burn through your mana and have to find other solutions to problems rather than using the same one again and again. Plus, some monsters are more resistant to certain things (which is played up a bit more in the next patch). The problem is holistic and it’s something we want to refine, of course. This also connects with your point 6.

  2. Monster spellcasting had some big problems. We upped it, added more, and it ought to happen more. Egregious, admittedly.

More monsters will appear sooner or later, but to offer a poor explanation: At one point we had a tiny budget and it was blown on sprite art in 2006. Since then, nothing. And the sprite format is archaic and horrible. We’re hiring another animator to do new sprites in png format (and Nicholas needs to write the png animation system for monsters).

  1. Hmm, are the spells limited? I mean, compared to the wonderful and absurd spells of those old D&D games, yeah, we’ve got a brittle and limited system that’s largely about assigning various types of damage in various ways.

It’s rather far from ideal on the whole in my mind, and if (when?) I get a chance to take really part in the core gameplay design this is going to be different. I tried to make it interesting with things like Deathly Hex, Nerve Staple, Golden Ratio, Dragon’s Breath all doing something different. Problem is, no one uses Deathly Hex and Golden Ratio is overpowered. Many changes to these (and others) in the next patch.

Compared to some contemporary games that are about crunching DPS, are the spells so weakly designed?

  1. I disagree on this point.
    My goal with the skill/archetype system was the boil down the player choices to exactly what is important with no extra fluff (eg. useless stat upgrades like in Everquest or … did WoW do this? I barely remember).

It’s like that Bruce Geryk article on wargaming [somewhere in here]: a choice that is optimally made in only one way is not a choice. A false choice just gives the player a place to screw up and get confused so it should be removed.

As it is, with one click you make a stat archetype choice (which is admittedly a bit broken - fixed in next patch) and a skill line choice which gives either an ability or a stat upgrade. The basic stat upgrade is more boring than I’d hope, but one can’t overload a player on active skills and have them care to use them.

  1. Yeah, I’d like to do dungeon rooms way, way, way better; the dungeons make me unhappy with what they could be. The content patches should emphasize differences far more, and there ought to be new dungeon features coming down the line.

  2. As a design decision, I badly don’t want to give the player an “auto-heal/mana” button. Nor do I want players to bore themselves with an optimal spacebar-mash-fest gameplay experience, but see Soren Johnson’s “Water finds a crack”.

Some new mechanics should be introduced to help fight spacebar-mashing if our coder doesn’t ‘forget’ to implement them… (we fight about these things).

  1. Item discovery is intentionally not in the game. Maybe we would have done it if we magically had a budget, but from what Dredmor is trying to do I’m really unsure that it’d ever be a good idea.

It could be a tedious Diablo-like thing, but: tedious.

It could be random & roguelike, but this would require somehow explaining the concept to non-roguelike players who don’t have expectations of item ID mechanics. Crossbow use is hard enough, and a couple big reviewers missed the shift-click to pick up items in the tutorials; iterating gameplay UI/interaction is … hard. And we did a lot, I daresay, and are still in trouble for how rough it is.

The last part of this is that I wasn’t interested in following Roguelike design traditions for the sake of following Roguelike design traditions. I’m not accusing you of this, but we’ve received flak from roguelike players for not following the traditions of their favoured lineage of roguelikes - all I can say is “Dredmor is not a graphical skin over a core roguelike”.

Plus, generic item art, generic descriptions don’t play to the flavour that’s (arguably) a strength of Dredmor.

All that said, we still might do something with item ID mechanics if it’s worth it.

  1. Agreed, wands and potions not saying what they do is indeed bullshit. I swear, we had a bugtracker ticket for fixing this way back …

  2. The minimap sucks, I agree. What you’ve got now is the two year old version. As you may imagine, this is all redone in the next patch.

  3. As for inventory, I’m a bit torn on this. Players obviously want more space, but they shouldn’t be able to stock every item in the game in their backpack – part of the game is choosing what to keep and what to leave. Unfortunately the infinite shop buying and lutefisk cube means that it is optimal to scour the dungeon for every single item.

We’re caught between player demands, harsh design, expectations from other games, and a lutefisk shrine.

(For the record, I wanted shop selling limited to the open pedestals in the shop. And the lutefisk cube was meant to be a joke but it turned into a major mechanics plus, see: Soren Johnson’s “Water finds a crack” again.)

  1. Lots of balance issues with everything; some are addressed soon, some are going to have to get iteration of patches.

And quests should give some XP in addition to a stupid item, shouldn’t they.

  1. No mob loot - that’s just broken. And fixed in the next patch.

Funny thing, it probably would have been a good move to spend 3-6 months more on the game and charge $5 more, but then the dev team would be on the streets and we’d all hate each other. Part of the story of the development of Dredmor is the story of launching Gaslamp Games as an utterly bootstrapped startup. It is sad but true that outside economic reasons impose upon game development. But that’s all a story for another time.

What I’ll say is that I think we can sort out most of the issues you raise over the next 3 months as we plan to do patches every two weeks now that Nicholas is moved to Vancouver and we’re finally set up in the same office as of … Wednesday, I believe. Plus, as soon as we get paid we can actually do development full-time! – Dredmor should indeed hit that 3-6 months of additional development by, oh, November or so; I hope by then it’s the game you’d like it to be.

And with Dredmor launched, the next game actually has a budget. Things will be very, very different!

1596

What is this referring to?

Your list of negatives is pretty sound, but with all the ways to regen I’ve personally never “rested” by mashing the space bar more than a few turns so I don’t feel sympathic about those complaints. I also disagree on character progression and there being too few spells, especially if Necronomiconomics ever becomes usable. Games with a hundred spells always wind up with the player base coming up with a big list of spells that suck compared to others and no one ever uses anyways.

For some reason it always makes me sad when someone calls monsters in a game mobs.

1597

You must have been sad for a couple of decades then.

1598

I have to agree, I’m still playing the game, so I got more then my value, but I’m left feeling this game as of now only accomplished 20% of what it could have been.

1599

Mobs is how mud people call monsters. Is because where called like that in the source code, and a lot of mudders moved to edit the code to have his own version of a mud, creating custom races, skills and mechanics. Is happy-sad, or unhappy-sad? some people like to watch very sad movies. LOVE it.

About David Erikson post. I think he is talking about a different genre. I have written a very long and argumentative post about his points, but I have deleted it… I absolutelly hate the word “balance”. Make me unhappy-sad. Is a word that generally is used to turn something into a bland genericness.

1600

David makes some damn good points there, and I can’t really fault any of them (although I disagree with him a little bit on one or two).

Also the auto-rest thing was a deliberate design decision, and I can certainly respect that. On one hand you complain about the game being bland, boring and easy and the other you complain about not having a full health and mana button? I mean seriously, the game isn’t designed behind you sitting and mashing space after every encounter :P