As a new player, dungeon feels too long
Posted: Tuesday, 21st May 2019, 07:46
So back when I started playing crawl, I was learning controls, and learning to play the game. I did the tutorial etc to learn controls and then I actually got around to playing the game.
For a while it was really overwhelming because there were so many buttons to press. However eventually I did get over that problem. As I got over this problem though, I ended up getting deeper into the dungeon. D:4, D:5, etc... each new floor felt like a milestone. But once I reached d:6, d:7, it really felt like I wasn't going anywhere. Nothing interesting or new was happening, it was just a large expanse of dungeon. Now, initially I had come to play crawl because I had heard of the many branches, etc... that the game had and it had mirrored an idea for a game that I had a while back. However as I played I didn't encounter any of these new and interesting places. I kept dying over and over and all I got to see was the same stuff, over and over again.
I ended up quitting playing due to this for about a year. Repeatedly going from d:1 to d:7 within the course of 50 or so games was really, really, really boring.
Later on I found the roguelikes discord and joined it because I figured I could talk about the game I was working on. I saw it had a DCSS channel, so I went and started playing the game again as the conversations about the different branches got me interested once again.
After another 40 games or so I've started to be able to reach lair, and go a little deeper, with my record being dying on d:15 and clearing lair. This is where the game was fun and interesting. It was fun to be able to see the lair branches. While they were absolutely waaaaay too much for my character at the time, it still felt rewarding to be able to even see these branches at all.
However every time I day I really have a hard time wanting to go start another game as I know it's going to be another 8-11 floors of dungeon, equivalent to a whole hour of grinding in the dungeon to get to lair.
I know that part of the design goal for this game is to eliminate grinding. As a result, I think that something should be done. A couple suggestions from me:
1. Just overall reduce the size of the dungeon. Cut out 2-5 floors. In order to balance this, make earlier monsters provide more experience. This way we can get to the interesting parts of DCSS faster.
2. Take some of these floors, and make branches out of them, You could for example take 6 floors and make some early branches for the player to explore earlier on. If you need ideas for what they could be, we already have the sewer and the ossuary, maybe instead of just having those be portals, you could just turn them into branches for the player to explore.
3. If you still want to keep dungeon length, then you can do 2 without removing floors, adjusting EXP gains as necessary.
I know that more experienced players can probably just blaze through the dungeon super easily due to being really familiar with it. However as a new player, it's getting rather tiring to only see the lair one in every 10 games = 1 in every 10 hours of play time on average right now.
Let me know what you think.
For a while it was really overwhelming because there were so many buttons to press. However eventually I did get over that problem. As I got over this problem though, I ended up getting deeper into the dungeon. D:4, D:5, etc... each new floor felt like a milestone. But once I reached d:6, d:7, it really felt like I wasn't going anywhere. Nothing interesting or new was happening, it was just a large expanse of dungeon. Now, initially I had come to play crawl because I had heard of the many branches, etc... that the game had and it had mirrored an idea for a game that I had a while back. However as I played I didn't encounter any of these new and interesting places. I kept dying over and over and all I got to see was the same stuff, over and over again.
I ended up quitting playing due to this for about a year. Repeatedly going from d:1 to d:7 within the course of 50 or so games was really, really, really boring.
Later on I found the roguelikes discord and joined it because I figured I could talk about the game I was working on. I saw it had a DCSS channel, so I went and started playing the game again as the conversations about the different branches got me interested once again.
After another 40 games or so I've started to be able to reach lair, and go a little deeper, with my record being dying on d:15 and clearing lair. This is where the game was fun and interesting. It was fun to be able to see the lair branches. While they were absolutely waaaaay too much for my character at the time, it still felt rewarding to be able to even see these branches at all.
However every time I day I really have a hard time wanting to go start another game as I know it's going to be another 8-11 floors of dungeon, equivalent to a whole hour of grinding in the dungeon to get to lair.
I know that part of the design goal for this game is to eliminate grinding. As a result, I think that something should be done. A couple suggestions from me:
1. Just overall reduce the size of the dungeon. Cut out 2-5 floors. In order to balance this, make earlier monsters provide more experience. This way we can get to the interesting parts of DCSS faster.
2. Take some of these floors, and make branches out of them, You could for example take 6 floors and make some early branches for the player to explore earlier on. If you need ideas for what they could be, we already have the sewer and the ossuary, maybe instead of just having those be portals, you could just turn them into branches for the player to explore.
3. If you still want to keep dungeon length, then you can do 2 without removing floors, adjusting EXP gains as necessary.
I know that more experienced players can probably just blaze through the dungeon super easily due to being really familiar with it. However as a new player, it's getting rather tiring to only see the lair one in every 10 games = 1 in every 10 hours of play time on average right now.
Let me know what you think.