Remove item identification


Although the central place for design discussion is ##crawl-dev on freenode, some may find it helpful to discuss requests and suggestions here first.

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Post Friday, 5th May 2017, 19:51

Remove item identification

Item identification has quite a few problems as it is.

1. Item identification takes away a lot of options in the earlier levels.

If you see a pack of jackals, an adder, an OoD monster, or a unique, and you decide that the situation is too risky, then you basically have one of two options: use-ID something or run. This problem can extend all the way to lair sometimes.

Think of how much more interesting it would be if you knew what your scrolls and potions were? There would be way more choices for the player character. Identification dumbs down the player's options. Since scrolls and potions are picked up one at a time, removing identification wouldn't cause cognitive overload for new players.


2. Item identification encourages bad habits.

The lack of identification means that many newer players will not look to these items for answers in tense situations as all they see is a whole bunch of blue.

I am trying to break this habit by checking my scrolls in safe situations (ie no monsters around) to see if I can find identify without using up a bunch of others first, but it is a difficult habit to break because it is being reinforced constantly. Removing identification would help new players see that items aren't just something to be stockpiled because they can't be identified yet.


3. If a player chooses to read-ID or quaff-ID, item identification makes that player waste resources.

I find it very stressful seeing my bundle of resources shrink rapidly as I try to find something that would help. I don't really have a way to play around this. Heal Wounds and Curing are useless at the very beginning of an encounter, yet proper play would dictate that this is the best time to analyze the situation and see if quaffing an unknown potion is necessary. A byproduct of this would be wasting Heal Wounds and Curing.

I do not think that randomly taking away player resources as they try to luck their way into a good potion or scroll to be a good or fun gameplay mechanic. Resource limitations are already taken care of by how many of these items spawn in the first place.


4. Item identification is spoilery.

Scrolls of identify, remove curse, and I believe teleportation are the most common. If you have a single stack of 12 scrolls, it's almost always going to be identify. 7 or 8, any of the three aforementioned scrolls.

This affects dangerous situations as well, as you can use the info on the spawn rates of scrolls to figure out what stack of scrolls is most likely to be Teleportation (and to continuously lesser extents, Fear, Fog, and Blinking).

This is the same for potions, where the most notable example is Curing.


I don't think item identification adds much to crawl and that its removal would only improve the game.

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Post Friday, 5th May 2017, 20:19

Re: Remove item identification

I've said it so often, so I'll be brief.

1. Item identification *increases* choices: if everything is pre-identified from the start, then you'll follow the exactly same decision process from the start. Whereas with unknown items you have to figure out how to obtain the information.

2. This at a stage of the game where there are few other decisions outside of the very tactical ones (that you have throughout the game).

3. Ideally, identification methods depend on circumstances. I am always interested in hearing how this can be strengthened.

4. Spoilery: no. What you mention is a level of knowledge that's easily gained by just playing the game and being slightly observant. It's similar to saying "spoiler fact: ogres with weapons are very dangerous". You'll figure it out.

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Post Friday, 5th May 2017, 20:40

Re: Remove item identification

Identification removal is crucial for crawl going forward.

Hellcrawl has been identification and curse free for about five months now. (You really can't talk about curses and identification separately as things currently stand.) Food was removed very early in the hellcrawl development process and this was a huge improvement over DCSS. Once the constant interruptions to eat are removed from crawl, the interruptions due to identification are the next most glaring flaw. Curse/ID removal was similar in magnitude of improvement. It is no exaggeration to say that DCSS is unplayable to someone who has experienced crawl without these things.

One thing that has to be admitted, though: No identification does make the early game easier. Overall hellcrawl is far more difficult than DCSS, so this doesn't pose a real balance problem and you get a more conventional difficulty curve this way. The hellcrawl approach was to reduce the incidence of consumable items, especially early in the game, as has been discussed here in the past. The same would work for DCSS, I think.

re: dpeg comment 1: Having a number of a priori indistinguishable items does not present a choice. Three kinds of unknown items essentially offer one choice, whereas three kinds of identified items present three choices. You're not really figuring anything out if odds are you're wrong. To the extent that three unknown kinds of items can be distinguished, this involves a lot of bookkeeping and code diving knowledge that is not easy to figure out, as has been explained here before I believe.
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Post Friday, 5th May 2017, 20:44

Re: Remove item identification

crawl has been moving toward a more arcadey, streamlined dungeon hack experience and item identification requires the player to recognize good times to stop and identify their scrolls. dpeg might be right in his arguments about identification introducing choices and strategies but but i don't think the choices introduced by identification make the game better.

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Post Friday, 5th May 2017, 20:46

Re: Remove item identification

What gives you the right to state what's the One True Path to roguelike enlightenment?

If you're unhappy with some feature, then removal is always an option. This is not revolutionary for Crawl, we've been doing that since ever. Yes, the curse system is clumsy. You can remove it, but you could also think about injecting some genuinely new idea into it. Where to draw the line is a very subjective matter, something I expected to be clear.
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Post Friday, 5th May 2017, 20:59

Re: Remove item identification

dpeg wrote:4. Spoilery: no. What you mention is a level of knowledge that's easily gained by just playing the game and being slightly observant. It's similar to saying "spoiler fact: ogres with weapons are very dangerous". You'll figure it out.

Well, it's a *little* spoilery, unless I'm mistaken. I believe =item generation is different in the early dungeon (no D:1 ?acquirement, for example) and in monster inventories (monsters will only spawn with certain potions / scrolls in inventory). So there's an advantage to keeping track of where unidentified consumables come from.

TBH I'd just remove those special cases for unidentified item generation. There's no harm in an orc carrying around !mutation and very little balance change in it being possible to find ?acquirement early.
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Post Friday, 5th May 2017, 21:18

Re: Remove item identification

What right do I have not to?
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Post Friday, 5th May 2017, 21:28

Re: Remove item identification

Re:spawn distribution rate, portal loot spawn is INCREDIBLY spoilery.

Some portals and even vaults(!) (the orc mine entrance with swamp drake) will ID certain potions, while others will not. The bailey thats fully behind water will ID !flight. The Elyvilon sewer still spawns a lot of !flight (not IDed) even though the behind-the-water part of it got removed ages ago. One of the sewers with "secret" area spawns a lot of flight, but doesnt ID it. Ossuaries have a high rate of bad potions (degeneration, mutation). Certain baileys (electric halberd one, some others) have a really high chance of ?acq and !XP, some !berserk mixed in etc.

The linear bailey with increasingly bigger rooms of halberd monsters has scroll loot thats ?summoning and ?EW.

Volcanos: !resistance, !might, !berserk

Ice cave: no special pattern. I think.

Its a huuuuuuge clusterfuck, and I fail to see any rhmye reason or rythm in it.

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Post Friday, 5th May 2017, 21:39

Re: Remove item identification

dpeg wrote:What gives you the right to state what's the One True Path to roguelike enlightenment?


whaaaat

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Post Friday, 5th May 2017, 21:39

Re: Remove item identification

Tbh I think the best design commentary I can give on identification is my identification strategy post:
duvessa wrote:I don't use-id consumables outside of combat much. Generally I will read from a stack big enough that I know it's almost certainly identify, remove curse, or teleportation, since reading identify is good and remove curse and teleportation aren't rare enough or good enough to really be valuable. (To be really optimal about this you should inscribe any scrolls/potions that you found in stacks on the ground.) Keep track of which scrolls you found before D:4 outside of vaults, since those can't be vulnerability/summoning/acquirement/silence/brand weapon/torment/holy word.
Recharging, fear, summoning, and blinking are as valuable as any potion. The cool thing about fear, blinking, and fog is that each one makes up on average 4.056% of scrolls before item level 4 (D:4 and * or | vault items) and 3.524% of scrolls after that. So your chances of knowing which stack to identify get pretty good as the game goes on.
I consider amnesia, immolation, noise, random uselessness, vulnerability (on most characters), silence, torment, and holy word (sucks ever since losing the stun) to be pretty much irrelevant. So if I only have acquirement and some subset of those left unidentified, I'll go ahead and use-id remaining scrolls.
If I'm in combat and things are going to go badly then I'll go ahead and start use-iding scrolls, specifically looking for one of: blinking or fear, teleportation, summoning. Since I didn't wait until the last possible turn to do it, losing a few turns to reading the wrong scrolls is not a problem and I would have lost those scrolls anyway if I use-ided them in advance.

All of the above applies to potions too, except the specific items are different obviously. I don't think potions are more valuable than scrolls as a whole. I will identify a sufficiently good wand if I find it.

Identify scrolls will never get spent on equipment unless all my consumables are already identified. The chance of use-iding equipment doing something meaningfully bad is really, really, really low; it has to be a distortion weapon that I don't want (and why would I bother wielding a weapon I don't want at all?) or a randart with Contam that gives me a bad mutation.

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Post Friday, 5th May 2017, 21:42

Re: Remove item identification

watertreatmentRL wrote:Hellcrawl has been identification and curse free for about five months now.

Well, isn't it great that Hellcrawl and DCSS are different games? Everyone can choose what they want to play!
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Post Friday, 5th May 2017, 21:46

Re: Remove item identification

It seems like people are pretty keen to remove features, but it tends to take flavor out of the game - like with the rods, for example. I think an alternative to taking out identification is to simply provide more item IDs. How? Well, one way is to throw yet more identify scrolls, but that's uninspired. You could let training Evocations give you identifications the moment it goes up a level (or when you start if it is nonzero to begin with). But I think a good way to do it is to have the monsters use more stuff. Let one of those umpteen hobgoblins on level 1 have a healing potion and quaff it, frustratingly, before your little dagger can kill him. Or even read a teleport scroll - why not? You might have a *chance* for more items that way ... possibly also a chance for less if the little buggers get clever enough about grabbing stuff and using it ... but mostly it will not affect that because you only have to see the item used *once* to identify it.

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Post Friday, 5th May 2017, 21:52

Re: Remove item identification

Sprucery wrote:Well, isn't it great that Hellcrawl and DCSS are different games? Everyone can choose what they want to play!

To be fair, it isn't unreasonable to state that Hellcrawl's design impetus comes from a desire to correct several serious pacing issues in Stone Soup. In that effort, it has largely been successful.

Arguments to pull Hellcrawl's pacing improvements upstream are not without merit. If they were, it's unlikely those pacing changes would have been implemented in Hellcrawl to begin with!
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Post Friday, 5th May 2017, 22:06

Re: Remove item identification

Another INCREDIBLY stupid thing about item identification: antique shops. Goes for all consumables, but especially wands.

If you want to buy an unID'd-item for cheap from the shop, you need to check each consumable you want to use before using it, lest your price might jump up by a couple hundred gold. Not too bad, still annoying. However, for wands you need to NOT STEP ON THE WAND to avoid accidendally IDing it. There is currently no easy way to do that, so you either dont use auto travel anymore or just live with it.

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Post Friday, 5th May 2017, 23:13

Re: Remove item identification

Choice without information is meaningless.

If early power is a concern just reduces early drops a bit.

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Post Saturday, 6th May 2017, 01:08

Re: Remove item identification

Sprucery wrote:
watertreatmentRL wrote:Hellcrawl has been identification and curse free for about five months now.

Well, isn't it great that Hellcrawl and DCSS are different games? Everyone can choose what they want to play!


this id minigame is tearing us apart!!!!

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Post Saturday, 6th May 2017, 03:49

Re: Remove item identification

le_nerd wrote:Another INCREDIBLY stupid thing about item identification: antique shops. Goes for all consumables, but especially wands. If you want to buy an unID'd-item for cheap from the shop, you need to check each consumable you want to use before using it, lest your price might jump up by a couple hundred gold. Not too bad, still annoying. However, for wands you need to NOT STEP ON THE WAND to avoid accidendally IDing it. There is currently no easy way to do that, so you either dont use auto travel anymore or just live with it.


Jam today: I'd rather have one free wand now and an expensive one later than two cheap wands later. As far as I can see that's true for as long as an unknown wand is likely to be really useful, and when that isn't the case, I probably don't want to buy the second wand at all.

Besides the way identification flavours the early game, there is nothing as satisfying as being saved by a potion of desperation. I'd be sorry to see it go. (Of course, like ghosts, this may be another division between bad players like me and very good players who aim never to have to quaff a potion of desperation to begin with...)
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Post Saturday, 6th May 2017, 09:40

Re: Remove item identification

Item identification adds a different kind of choice to the game [you have to determine that when and how do you want to identify your items] but disallows other kinds of choices in the early game [you cannot choose between different scrolls/potions]. Although removing it would remove one kind of choice, it would increase the overall frequency of interesting decisions in the early game.

Choosing between items would be even more interesting in the early game because with high probability you don't have the optimal one and you have to improvise with other choices.

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Post Saturday, 6th May 2017, 10:26

Re: Remove item identification

nagdon wrote:Item identification adds a different kind of choice to the game [you have to determine that when and how do you want to identify your items] but disallows other kinds of choices in the early game [you cannot choose between different scrolls/potions].


I don't think that's very true. There is a very early point where you cannot choose, but it passes rapidly; it won't be long before you have more than one option available.
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Post Saturday, 6th May 2017, 16:52

Re: Remove item identification

damerell wrote:
nagdon wrote:Item identification adds a different kind of choice to the game [you have to determine that when and how do you want to identify your items] but disallows other kinds of choices in the early game [you cannot choose between different scrolls/potions].


I don't think that's very true. There is a very early point where you cannot choose, but it passes rapidly; it won't be long before you have more than one option available.


My phrasing was sloppy. You will be able to "choose between different scrolls/potions", but as long as you have at least two unknown types you have fewer choices than in the identificationless variant.

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Post Saturday, 6th May 2017, 17:27

Re: Remove item identification

nagdon wrote:My phrasing was sloppy. You will be able to "choose between different scrolls/potions", but as long as you have at least two unknown types you have fewer choices than in the identificationless variant.


That's certainly true, but I'm not convinced having a limited choice that varies more from game to game is less interesting.
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Post Sunday, 7th May 2017, 06:53

Re: Remove item identification

damerell wrote:
nagdon wrote:My phrasing was sloppy. You will be able to "choose between different scrolls/potions", but as long as you have at least two unknown types you have fewer choices than in the identificationless variant.


That's certainly true, but I'm not convinced having a limited choice that varies more from game to game is less interesting.


Yes, I agree that removing the identification minigame without reducing the number of scrolls and potions generated could lead to an oversaturated game where the optimal consumable is almost always available and thus the choice can be "precalculated".

On the other hand, if we remove the identification minigame and reduce scroll/potion generation then the "limited choice" aspect (when you don't have the optimal consumable and you have to choose a substitute) can be kept (for example, if in the current system you would have 3 identified potion stacks and 4 unidentified stacks then in the proposed variant you would have e.g. 4-5 identified stacks). In my opinion this enhances the "limited choice" aspect: In the current system if the optimal solution is not yet identified, then you are encouraged to do use-identification instead of choosing the best solution among the identified items. (For example if you are badly poisoned in the early game, you will probably try to find the unidentified !curing, instead of relying on e.g. a !ambrosia for healing or a !lignification for the 150% hp increase.)

The situation when you have only a few available consumable types and have to solve problems with them is interesting, but (in my opinion) the identification minigame is not the simplest and best way to create this situation (simply hand out fewer items). The difference between handing out less items and handing out unidentified items is that with unidentified items you almost always have large quantities of "potion of XOM" and "scroll of XOM" in your inventory. I think that this is a bad thing: in a vacuum items with this degree of unpredictability (choose randomly from 10-20 wildly different effects) would not be added to the game (especially not in these overwhelming quantities).

If neccessary, ?identify could be kept as a scroll of activation: choose one: get a pile of 1-3 scrolls (of a random type), get a pile of 1-3 potions (of a random type), activate a wand and make it use less charges, activate and make usable a randart (randarts are useless without this), maybe activate and make usable an amulet (in this case, amulets are useless withot this). This preserves the current tradeoff that ?identify is used to identify either consumables, wands, amulets or artifacts.

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Post Sunday, 7th May 2017, 11:16

Re: Remove item identification

Removing the ID minigame does make crawls gameplay more streamlined by moving early item management to a tactical level rather than the curent semi-rng strategic setup we have now. It's a real gameplay improvement.

But I like the tabletop flavor.
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Post Sunday, 7th May 2017, 16:17

Re: Remove item identification

Item identification has a role in making games more varied. At least, it would have, if it weren't for the problems which have already been explained by others.

I think that there are some parts of item identification that should be cut away. Two step identification is the most important one. Once you have identified a ring of strength +4, you should be able to tell the +/- value of all other rings of strength. Wands should need no pick up identification, and all of them should spawn as already identified concerning type, with only charges still subjected to identification. Stuff the gods gift to you, unless it's Xom, should already spawn as identified.

However, there is a question to be asked. Early game Crawl plays different from middle and late game. Is it also a better game? And, if it is (or, if it's worse), is it also because of the identification minigame?
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Post Monday, 8th May 2017, 14:50

Re: Remove item identification

I think it would be more interesting to have vague item id categories, maybe based on inventory color, this way you are less likely to make a useless call (random instead of tele), but you might get agility instead of the might you were hoping for
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Post Monday, 8th May 2017, 18:29

Re: Remove item identification

TeshiAlair wrote:I think it would be more interesting to have vague item id categories, maybe based on inventory color, this way you are less likely to make a useless call (random instead of tele), but you might get agility instead of the might you were hoping for


This adds a lot of needless complexity to the game instead of reducing it, not to mention that potions/scrolls vary in usefulness depending on character/situation/class.
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Post Monday, 8th May 2017, 23:32

Re: Remove item identification

dpeg wrote:3. Ideally, identification methods depend on circumstances. I am always interested in hearing how this can be strengthened.

I'm not totally sure what methods of "strengthening" the ID game you haven't already heard, dpeg. Players have suggested IDing all items after reaching some point in the game, they've discussed reducing the various ways in which the game requires you to know detailed spoilers to make optimal ID decisions, and they've brought up various ways in which one could complicate the ID game in order to add more "interesting" choices. None of these suggestions have been taken up by the dev team, and I'm struggling to come up with different ways you could accomplish that goal; I think the countless threads on this topic have pretty much given you the entire menu, and if you don't see anything you like, I doubt anything new is forthcoming.

chicken wrote:It seems like people are pretty keen to remove features, but it tends to take flavor out of the game

While I don't agree with this assertion, I do think that flavor is the main reason we still have the ID minigame, just like food and curses. They're a part of the "roguelike flavor" the dev team is unwilling to dispense with. For that reason, I've come to believe that there's no argument that will succeed in convincing the devs to substantially remove any of these mechanics. They're simply a definitional aspect of the genre for enough devs that they'll never get removed from DCSS no matter how much people argue that ID/food/curses conflict with the rest of the game's design goals.

I don't say that to be insulting; this is as subjective a topic as dpeg makes it out to be. But I think it'd save us a lot of trouble if the devs just added "removing food, ID, and curses" to the "Won't Do" list. I'd disagree with that, but it would at least encourage people not to tilt at these particular windmills any longer and take their ideas to forks and projects that are more receptive.

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Post Monday, 8th May 2017, 23:49

Re: Remove item identification

archaeo wrote:While I don't agree with this assertion, I do think that flavor is the main reason we still have the ID minigame, just like food and curses. They're a part of the "roguelike flavor" the dev team is unwilling to dispense with. For that reason, I've come to believe that there's no argument that will succeed in convincing the devs to substantially remove any of these mechanics. They're simply a definitional aspect of the genre for enough devs that they'll never get removed from DCSS no matter how much people argue that ID/food/curses conflict with the rest of the game's design goals.


I don't think any of these is sacred (and of course there are plenty of roguelikes without them) but surely food is more under threat? I can well imagine a Crawl where food serves some specialised function but routine eating to survive is gone.
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Post Monday, 8th May 2017, 23:57

Re: Remove item identification

damerell wrote:I don't think any of these is sacred (and of course there are plenty of roguelikes without them) but surely food is more under threat? I can well imagine a Crawl where food serves some specialised function but routine eating to survive is gone.

I don't think they're sacred, just that they're foundational elements of what makes a roguelike a roguelike for some folks. Assuming it's being treated as "sacred" makes it sound a lot more unreasonable than the dev team's position is, at least as I understand it. e: to put that another way, I think it's clear that dpeg et al. want to save things like food, ID, and curses instead of outright removing them because they think Crawl wouldn't really be Crawl without them. I don't mean to imply they're all participating in some kind of "roguelike essentialism" or something.

As for food being under threat, I'll believe it when I see it at this point. :D
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Post Tuesday, 9th May 2017, 02:19

Re: Remove item identification

All saying ID is good amounts to is saying that acquainting yourself with how to soft-id scrolls and potions via stack size is an intrinsic good that outweighs the gameflow interruption that IDing causes. obviously you can't safely ID jewelery without a scroll of remove curse because you can get something crippling...

even if you don't remove IDing altogether, at least make all items auto ID after the first rune or something...
remove food

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Post Tuesday, 9th May 2017, 06:12

Re: Remove item identification

tabstorm wrote:All saying ID is good amounts to is saying that acquainting yourself with how to soft-id scrolls and potions via stack size is an intrinsic good that outweighs the gameflow interruption that IDing causes.


I don't think that's remotely true, and I say ID is no bad thing - that doesn't mean I think the stack size thing is its only merit, or that I accept that in some sense it's a "gameflow interruption", whatever that means.
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Post Tuesday, 9th May 2017, 13:34

Re: Remove item identification

Gameflow interruption- ID Game in Zigs. What a pointless frustration.

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