Tuesday, 6th September 2011, 08:39 by explosionburger
I feel like there are two issues with the early game.
The first is not that it is difficult, but that it is arbitrary. Luck plays an enormous role early - there is a long list of things that will kill you for which there is no right play, even in hindsight. Examples being very early poison, goblins with distortion daggers, high power wands, an invisible Sigmund with a wand is death for almost all characters in most cases. I'm not arguing you should remove randomness entirely, or that characters just shouldn't die early on, or that some classes shouldn't have an easier early game than others, rather that the numbers here are off. I'm genuinely shocked to hear that a flat mortality curve is a goal for the dev team, because it feels anything but.
Personally I'm not a good player, but I've never taken a rune and not gone on to win; yet I doubt I hit lair in 10% of my games. People who streak are the wrong examples to use, they'd be the pros if crawl could support it, people who play on CAO are probably, what, the top ten or fifteen percent of players? Would the game suffer if casual players made it to temple more often? What attracted me to the game in the first place is that unlike nethack/adom/every other roguelike it wasn't like you relied upon spoilers to progress (ok so it's not 100% but its a big improvement), and that whenever you died you could see the thing you did (or didn't do) that led to it. The early game is a major exception to this.
The second problem I have is that the optimal strategy is pretty much mandatory in the early game. Good players know to run away and avoid the randomness as much as possible, dive every unique, play the ID minigame correctly, never wear-ID jewelry, etc, etc. A big part of the issue here for me is that it requires a lot of knowledge, either by playing a huge amount to get not very far, or by reading the wiki/learndb. This would be fine if that's just how the game was, but once you actually have some resources to manage everything changes. I disagree that it's teaching players who "plow recklessly through the early game" anything, because the one time the dice all fall the right way and they make it to mid game they don't need that play style. It's fine for there to be an optimal way to play, streakers gonna streak, just like its fine that stair scumming is the "best" strategy in angband, but forcing it on the player is a legitimate design flaw (even if you can avoid it mostly with TrHu).
Don't get me wrong, I really like the game - it's just for me that game really starts at the temple.