Cocytus Succeeder
Posts: 2184
Joined: Tuesday, 3rd February 2015, 22:05
Remove the id game (new reason)
As you can see from my plots in this thread, the early game is very hard (relatively speaking). This proposition is not seriously contested by anyone who plays Crawl, but perhaps my plots will give some perspective on how hard it is.
Why is the early game hard? There are many reasons, a major one being: there are very few options in the early game. On D:1, you don't even have upstairs.
A special case of the above statement is that there are very few consumables in the early game. More importantly, there are very few identified consumables. For instance, I looked at a few of the deaths on D:1-4 (the hardest floors). In virtually all cases, the player who died had some combination of might/agility and heal wounds potions, blink/teleport/fear scrolls in their inventory which could have prevented their deaths. In almost all cases, these escape options/buffs were unidentified. Indeed, the vast majority of the potions/scrolls in the inventory were unidentified at the time of death.
Now, one could argue that people underuse consumables anyway, people play badly, etc. and I will agree with you. But the point is that if people could see some viable options in their quaff/read menu, they might just try the options before dying. Ideally, we want people to have options which they could use, not just try to mindlessly bash an adder, a gnoll or an ogre and die a futile death.
The early game is also a part where consumable use really matters, because the gain from their use is very high (relatively speaking). And you typically don't have the glut of consumables which you have in the later game.
Finally, if you believe that the early game difficulty is pretty good, and it should stay that way -- that is completely fine. This preference can be accommodated by simply reducing consumable generation. The point is to have options; the difficulty level can be tweaked.
- For this message the author bel has received thanks: 3
- PseudoLoneWolf, quik, TheMeInTeam