Wednesday, 10th June 2015, 03:05
DCSS Review
I've been doing more detailed, serious reviews of games recently. Crawl is particularly hard to do an overall of, because of the sheer size of the game, but I think I'll manage. So much of the stuff I'd applied to other games I'd looked at will just come across as 'not applicable' to crawl and will have to also rate on adherence to own design principles as well as accepted ones, because crawls principles are completely different than what the rest of the world operates on these days. My reviews come across as negative even for games I like and crawl is very much a game I have mixed feelings for, so expect some pretty scathing negativity here. I'll add a few additional areas since it does have things that most things do not. Reviewing (primarily) the tiles version, since I don't play console.
UI Design:
Negatives:
Positive:
Art:
I'm not going to dwell on this one; since it's 'not a priority' of main design as they still consider the console as the core and intended way to play. A lot of the individual pieces are strong, but artstyles don't match up and many of the background tiles have irrelevant details, which may be distracting to a new player (the gratings and torches in the main dungeon, for example). It could use a lot of improvement, but it's acceptable and doesn't hinder gameplay.
Gameplay Design:
Negatives:
Positives:
Conflicted:
Food System: I'm unsure how I feel about the food system. On one hand; it's really cool that it's literally tied into every part of crawl; gods and races affect what you can eat, using Invocations, Evocations, Spells and Melee all effect hunger levels. It's probably the most complicated thing in crawl in that it's simply tied into everything; on the other hand, I'm unsure if this is really good design, as it may be more needlessly complex and less actually good. The only good effect that's actually noticeable from the food system is how it puts powerful effects like spells and berserk usage in check, so they cannot be spammed.
Phew. I started this back in February, when I was doing studies on a bunch of different games to see what I could learn from them; but I never finished it, because crawl has too much content to review; it's even quite a bit without looking at every monster, etc. (which would be insane, given the scale).
UI Design:
Negatives:
- Very Long, Very Dense Reading.The First Monster I See in a New Game wrote:A giant cockroach.
It is clinging to the wall.
It is mindless.
A brown insect that makes a nasty hissing noise. Contrary to popular belief, they are in fact quite susceptible to mutagenic energies.
It looks easy.
It is susceptible to poison.
It is fast.
It is very small.
I've played enough to not even bother reading the bulk of these texts; but they are, largely unnecessarily long and full of information that is useless to the player.
"Clinging to the Wall" is completely irrelevant in most situations unless the player understands how clinging is different than flying or walking, which is unlikely without reading outside of game material or watching monsters extensively in Spider. It's a cool mechanic; but it's not something that the player needs to know, especially on a new game.
Mindless is similarly irrelevant to all but a small subset of players (worshipers of Elyvilon) and there's no explanation here as to what that even means.
The flavour text is not clearly just flavour. A new player wouldn't necessarily know that 'hissing noise' isn't an attack or that relevant to the game [about as relevant as any other monster's shout and not a noteworthy difference]. The part about mutagenic energies seems like a context clue that the player may get access to such power and, no, you don't. Enemies use it against you, but you don't get to use it.
"Easy". Seriously, a guess as to how powerful/weak it is compared to you based on your level, right? Seems odd that the design is so against giving technical information about a monster that it gives weird guesses like this.
"susceptible to poison". This is clearly relevant, if you have a source of poison.
"fast". Meaning is non-specific, but can be assumed by new players to mean faster than you.
"very small". This isn't clearly relevant to the player. I THINK small monsters primarily have high evasion; but am uncertain of that even now. On player characters there's a clear meaning to this; related to how easy it is to become evasive (though I believe I only know that from reading outside of the game and it's never clearly stated in game either.
The primary issue I'm stating here though is that it's far too much UNNECESSARY reading. I could clearly know all the necessary information from the kind of shorthand the Cheibriados bot displays in a much shorter and clearer format. The telegraphing does give somewhat complete information, but it's way too much. I'd prefer to actually know the technical info (as would likely the majority of the players) as the actual AC of the target and it's HP gives a much clearer idea than it is easy/hard/nasty, etc. are 'mildly wounded'. There is also a 'guide-dangit' quality to a lot of the messages because without reading from the wiki or the learnbot; there is no resource in game that says what mindless is. In a more polished title I'd expect the same information as:Giant Cockroach: "A brown insect that makes a nasty hissing noise. Contrary to popular belief, they are in fact quite susceptible to mutagenic energies."
Clinging. Mindless. Easy. Fast. Very Small.
Vulnerability: Poison
With mouseover text that explains the shorthand for new players. Such asClinging - Holding fast to a nearby wall. Makes monster able to transverse pools of water or lava as long as there is a wall adjacent. - Clarity
To me; it's very weird of crawl to not actually show enemy HP amounts or AC/EV amounts. We recently added Hex hit percentages because of similar problems with MR.
Even the stats on the player card aren't explained to normal players. There's some explanation in an internal guide:"Armour Class" - Abbreviated to "AC". When something injures you, your AC reduces the amount of damage your suffer.
But it doesn't clearly detail what it does. STR and DEX are particularly difficult to ascertain the effects of without usage of the (bad)wiki.
I mean there might be enough info in crawl to get a rough idea of what you need to do and win a game without use of guides. BUT, geez, this kind of vaguery means that all good players and speedrunners had to rely on external sources to learn how things actually work. A trait shared with a few RPGs. I mean common advice is to train a weapon skill until you reach minimum delay. Nothing in game indicates when that is...at all. Nothing in game even indicates what your current weapon delay is, even though a few points often mean the difference between getting hit once or twice during your attack and often can mean the difference between life and death. Getting this kind of information without using a guide would require literally days of trial and error. Trial and error learning may be normal to a Roguelike and many deaths may be expected before your first win, but Crawl is simply too long for this kind of obfuscation in late game. I'm sure many younger players have quit after discovering and dying to a gimmick on a monster 5+ hours into their game. Average 3-rune win length in 7 ± 4; it's air to assume the younger players are in the 7-11+ hour category. Giving the player access to the amount of information they need to optimize their play is preferable to the kind of vagueries crawl offers 90% of the time. It's more understandable to expect trial-and-error learning in a game which is only 15-30 minutes.
I can understand the drive to make it so the player doesn't necessarily know everything and has to react to unexpected situations, but that's what the randomness of Ancient Liches and Pandemonium Lords are for; the rest of the game is fairly predictable with trial and error. Only, using guides to get this information is much more pleasurable than relying on risking the unknown 8+ hours in. Notably, it could actually be an interesting design to have a branch in which monsters are actually randomized enough to be completely unpredictable, random melee brands, random spells on everything; impossible to know ahead of time how to prepare; it's one of the few concrete branch thoughts (from a mechanical, rather than flavour perspective) that's actually not been tried.
- Menus:
Some of the menus are insufferably underdeveloped. The worst offender:Given how many spells there are, it can be insanely annoying to scan through that list in late game to look for what you want. There are similar (but more tolerable) issues looking through a full inventory and picking a spell from a longer list of memorized spells. These menus may have a lot of information, but have organization (in the first case) or a fixed order (second case) which make it less annoying to navigateSpoiler: show
Positive:
- The Tiles Button Panel - There are a lot of buttons and it takes a bit to know what they all are; but they are nice enough to have a good rollover text that reads out what each does, which makes learning and using the panel easier than trying to remember all the shortcuts as a new player. It's complicated, but well written and quite useful. The only complaint I have about it are that the size of the buttons can lead to quick pressing the wrong spell (caused a splat once); but I recognize that this is an issue of it only having so much screen-space to perform its duties. I would like to suggest; however, that it should list the keyboard shortcuts for every button press it has to help new players in learning them.
- The Main Menu Screen and Skills-Learning Menu both also are relatively user-friendly; if not as exemplary as the Button Panel.
Art:
I'm not going to dwell on this one; since it's 'not a priority' of main design as they still consider the console as the core and intended way to play. A lot of the individual pieces are strong, but artstyles don't match up and many of the background tiles have irrelevant details, which may be distracting to a new player (the gratings and torches in the main dungeon, for example). It could use a lot of improvement, but it's acceptable and doesn't hinder gameplay.
Gameplay Design:
Negatives:
- Monster AI:
Almost every monster in the game has roughly the same AI. Some are intelligent enough to not move through clouds, most aren't; even the "High" intelligence High Elves are dumb enough to walk right into a Mephritic Cloud, become confused and fall into a pool of lava. The same stupid exploitable tricks that work on an ogre work on the 'smartest' creatures in the game, because literally only Orb Spiders are smart enough to not, follow you around a corner into melee distance. Enemies that don't move are interesting if they are guarding something, because you have to actually walk towards them, instead of using the same exploitable tricks that work on everything from Kobolds to Ancient Liches. It seems like nearly every possible combination of spells, ranged attacks, effects is tried, yet all the monsters still behave in roughly the same way. No intelligent order to spells, no chance to try to kite or use positioning to their advantage; just mob the player.
It's hard to come up with a new monster design that doesn't fill some existing niche by any means other than using a state machine instead of just random decisions and A*. This isn't a sign that the monsters are badly designed as it is; but it is a sign that by some measures they are quite monotonous. The extreme difficulty of coming up with something that isn't roughly analogous to something that already exists explains the complete bizarre levels that were necessary to come up with anything actually new for the Abyss revision.
- Exploration:
I know, auto-explore prevents us masses from having to actually explore for ourselves, but that's circumventing the issue, rather than addressing it. Very little in crawl makes the action of just exploring the area interesting at all, occasionally you get interest vaults, but by-and-large, the exploration portion of the game is so dull that there's actively what's basically an approved general use bot that's sole purpose is to avoid it. The only cases where exploration is actually interesting enough to warrant manually exploration are (1) Wizlabs with special things and flavour texts that surprise the player on the first playthrough (really cool, interesting flavour, but only interesting once) and (2) hell, the diving and accelerated real danger make cautious exploration to find the downstairs more efficiently than the auto-explore bot would interesting.
Another issue with exploration is in 'optimal' play, as opposed to 'speedrunning' it's 'optimal' to completely explore every floor on the chance that a rare item happened to be placed somewhere. This is often boring even -with- the autoexplore bot; especially when going through a branch that is currently easy to the player (second lair branch, for example) or around the baffled edges of lair. Except for 'score' there's no incentive other than not wanting to be bored to avoid these behaviors.
- Elemental Roshambo:
Enemy resistances often seem to exist for pointless flavour reasons drawing from the RPG tradition for Roshambo. Bolt spells and multiplicative weapons brands are particularly at issue for having the same exact mechanics, except which creatures are most affected. This does incentivize taking up multiple spell schools, which is a positive effect, but it also is a predictable and rather old-fashioned RPG mainstay that doesn't add much gameplay-wise. It kind of seems cool, but in most situations bolts will do the same thing and exist only to not punish the player for choosing a spellschool without such a major damaging spell.
Positives:
- Many Paths:
This is less true than it once was; but it's possible to wint he game with all sorts of different self-imposed challenges and different combinations of race and god mechanics buffed with different combinations of mechanics. Elyvilon reform removed pacifist clause compliance (ability to win without killing anything); but overall despite there being MANY ways of playing the game most still remain on roughly similar difficult and ease of playstyle. Being able to focus on whatever-you-like and still have a way of making it to the end of an RPG using that skill is a great design goal. Crawl is pretty good at it; not as great as the original Fallout Series (perhaps the best ever at that), but quite good.
- Specific Spells:
I'd like to call out the following spells as interesting and unique designs: Lee's Rapid Deconstruction, Petrify, Passwall, Tukima's Dance Alistair's Intoxication, Discord, Death Channel.
- The God System:
I admit I love this unique design system in general. It's probably the strongest bit of cool uniqueness that crawl has. I prefer the more unique gods to the easy-to-use ones; mostly because they result in more interesting and unique playstyles and since their themes don't clearly spell-out what they are for. [Fedhas Madash, Cheibriados, Ru, etc. are better from a design perspective than the more basic, but clearly helpful gods like Okawaru and Sif Muna.]
Conflicted:
Food System: I'm unsure how I feel about the food system. On one hand; it's really cool that it's literally tied into every part of crawl; gods and races affect what you can eat, using Invocations, Evocations, Spells and Melee all effect hunger levels. It's probably the most complicated thing in crawl in that it's simply tied into everything; on the other hand, I'm unsure if this is really good design, as it may be more needlessly complex and less actually good. The only good effect that's actually noticeable from the food system is how it puts powerful effects like spells and berserk usage in check, so they cannot be spammed.
Phew. I started this back in February, when I was doing studies on a bunch of different games to see what I could learn from them; but I never finished it, because crawl has too much content to review; it's even quite a bit without looking at every monster, etc. (which would be insane, given the scale).
I'm beginning to feel like a Cat God! Felid streaks: {FeVM^Sif Muna, FeWn^Dithmenos, FeAr^Pakellas}, {FeEE^Ashenzari, FeEn^Gozag, FeNe^Sif Muna, FeAE^Vehumet...(ongoing)}
- For this message the author bcadren has received thanks: 5
- Pollen_Golem, quik, Rast, rockygargoyle, Sandman25
