Siegurt wrote:Don't forget Mountain dwarfs and victory dancing, brown chunks don't even make you nauseated any longer. OH NOES!
Actually though, I do feel like the current trend is to make crawl a simpler game with less to think about, Personally I don't think that's a good thing (Not that those things that were removed were definitely good parts of the game, but I feel like the more we de-complicate the game, the less interesting it gets for me, and I'd certainly like to see attempts to re-complicate it in fun (rather than tedious) ways.)
I dunno, to me "things to think about" kind of blurs the line between two things. There's category A, things which one must be conscious of, but the "optimal" thing is always the same, so they lead to having to hold something in your head while not truly thinking about it, if that makes sense. Things like brown chunks causing nausea fell into this category - nausea added tactical decisions to eating which would almost never change the result of a fight, but still required one to think about nausea and chunks more often, leaving less, uhh, "brain space" to think about other things. To me this manifests as tedium and I am happy it is gone - I rarely found myself satisfied at making the right decision about whether to eat a brown chunk. My heuristic is that if I could easily program the entirety of my decision making process for a given game element, I'd rather that element be automated or removed. Taking up space in my working memory isn't the same thing as thinking, if that makes any sense.
Then there's category B, decisions which one must truly weigh the tradeoffs of, based on incomplete information about what one has found in the dungeon so far. These are the sort of "things to think about" which I value when playing, and why I play this game in the first place. Questions like "Should I start running now, or stay and try and take out the really dangerous monster who might kill me while I run first", and "would it benefit me more if I started training up charms now, or tried to get an AOE spell online" are interesting and definitely worth keeping around. I definitely am happy to have more of these, not that I find it lacking.
In general the things removed by the devs have been from category A and so I am pleased that our views seems to be aligned on this matter, even if they are more conservative than I would be with the reigns.
Tuesday, 21st January 2014, 00:44 
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