Slime Squisher
Posts: 386
Joined: Thursday, 26th March 2015, 01:22
Sunday, 2nd July 2017, 12:37
Labyrinth Idea
Having spent the better part of my adolescence in a particularly terrible labyrinth, I came up with a pretty ingenious idea (if I say so myself) to make labyrinths a nicer fit in the game. For those who aren't aware, many players (such as the venerable crate) have voiced dislike for these mislabeled mazes, arguing that they 'are unrelated flow-breaking minigames in the middle of crawl' and that they 'aren't even good mazes' [paraphrase]. However, other players (I don't remember them right now) insist that labyrinths are as old as crawl itself and offer a nice break from the tedium of stairdancing. I myself remember being intrigued by labyrinths when I was a new player.
So, how do we keep labyrinths in the game for the fans while removing their objective gameplay flaws? When I think of crawl's labyrinth, constantly contorting with a dangerous monster in the elusive center, I think of an internal mental struggle. It is as if your character is faced with an inevitable truth that must somehow be reconciled with a preexisting value system.
I think labyrinth's should explore this flavor further: (here is my idea now) labyrinths should scale in difficulty with intelligence, so that the more intelligent your character is, the more complex the maze. For a modest 3 int troll berserker, there really isn't much 'cognitive dissonance' to deal with. You like killing and eating, and the dungeon allows you to do just that, so a labyrinth might be a direct ten tile path to the minotaur. But for a 42 int deep elf of chei, the quest for the orb poses all sorts of existential difficulty. Why do you need the orb, anyways? Is your murderous dishevelment of the dungeon's ecosystem really a net good for the world? What if you are only a piece in a game, controlled by the whims of a greater entity who is likewise being controlled by fates far beyond their perception? For this deep elf, the labyrinth would be a nightmare, constantly changing and directing the player away from the center with long-winded pathways to nowhere.
This proposed fix would solve all the major problems with labyrinths and in fact make them more strategically interesting. If you don't like labyrinths, that's fine: just play melee characters. If you do like solving mazes, you are encouraged to build characters with as much int as possible, possibly by adapting to dungeon drops in an unconventional way. Because the labyrinth's flavor would be enhanced, the 'flow-breaking minigame complaint' would no longer be an issue: the puzzle would in fact enhance the realism of the overall crawl experience. Discuss.
So, how do we keep labyrinths in the game for the fans while removing their objective gameplay flaws? When I think of crawl's labyrinth, constantly contorting with a dangerous monster in the elusive center, I think of an internal mental struggle. It is as if your character is faced with an inevitable truth that must somehow be reconciled with a preexisting value system.
I think labyrinth's should explore this flavor further: (here is my idea now) labyrinths should scale in difficulty with intelligence, so that the more intelligent your character is, the more complex the maze. For a modest 3 int troll berserker, there really isn't much 'cognitive dissonance' to deal with. You like killing and eating, and the dungeon allows you to do just that, so a labyrinth might be a direct ten tile path to the minotaur. But for a 42 int deep elf of chei, the quest for the orb poses all sorts of existential difficulty. Why do you need the orb, anyways? Is your murderous dishevelment of the dungeon's ecosystem really a net good for the world? What if you are only a piece in a game, controlled by the whims of a greater entity who is likewise being controlled by fates far beyond their perception? For this deep elf, the labyrinth would be a nightmare, constantly changing and directing the player away from the center with long-winded pathways to nowhere.
This proposed fix would solve all the major problems with labyrinths and in fact make them more strategically interesting. If you don't like labyrinths, that's fine: just play melee characters. If you do like solving mazes, you are encouraged to build characters with as much int as possible, possibly by adapting to dungeon drops in an unconventional way. Because the labyrinth's flavor would be enhanced, the 'flow-breaking minigame complaint' would no longer be an issue: the puzzle would in fact enhance the realism of the overall crawl experience. Discuss.
Just kidding!)
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