Halls Hopper
Posts: 55
Joined: Monday, 9th July 2012, 22:24
Personally, I found Hell to be very anticlimactic
A more organized list of complaints:
1: Hell levels 1-6 are way too easy. Packs of Wights? Really? Is that even supposed to be a threat? I could probably just ignore these guys altogether and let them wail on me and it wouldn't impact me in the slightest.
2: There's - quite literally - nothing there. No loot, no portals to places, no vaults, nothing. Now, I understand that at this point loot is a moot point, but shouldn't there at least be SOMETHING interesting to expect? Vaults are one of my favorite aspects of the game - stuff like the steam baths in Zot or the disco room in Pandemonium, little touches like that are really what make this game great. They don't necessarily have to be silly like that, but at least interesting: perhaps something like the shrine to Elvylion in TSO's fortress could be done, but dedicated to an evil god instead.
2a: This also makes their visual design really unappealing. There really is no layout to the Hell levels, just absolutely chaotic and cluttered maps, and it doesn't even have the benefit of being claustrophobically chaotic like The Abyss. Hell, even Pandemonium has geometric shapes.
2b: Even the level 7 areas aren't that interesting. Again, no vaults (other than the Lord's chambers), mediocre stashes...
3: Absolutely no incentive to clear out Hell 1-6 anyways, since you can just come back straight down to the level you left off at. Now, this is actually nice because Hells 1-6 are incredibly tedious and pointless, but when it's preferable to just skip past a chunk of a game, imo that's just bad design.
3a: This also makes the various Hell levels incredibly short (and, by extension, anticlimactic): in Gehenna I rushed down to level 7 in about a minute real time. I probably cleared out Dis and Gehenna in about as much time as I took on TSO's fortress alone.
4: I understand this will probably be an unpopular opinion (well, relative to the rest of this post, which I'm certain will receive a lot of flak), but I found Hell's Mystical Force to just be a source of constant tedium. All it really did was slow down my regeneration downtime, and was never that threatening. I'm certain it would be brutal if it hit me with a nasty effect while I was fighting a lord of hell, or maybe a pack of hell sentinels, but it didn't; the ratio of excitement to tedium there is very low. Perhaps it should kick in much more rarely, but only at high tension?
My suggestion to how this could be improved: now, first of all, I understand that randomness is a big part of this game. However, there ARE maps like the Tombs or TSO's fortress that are very consistent, and I think Hell should be one of those. We already have the abject chaos of the Abyss, and the semi-chaos of Pandemonium; why not consistency in Hell? From a flavor standpoint, I think this makes sense; I know this game takes some inspiration from D&D, and in D&D the Abyss is the Chaotic Evil plane, Pandemonium makes sense in Crawl as the Neutral Evil plane, and in D&D Hell is the Lawful Evil plane. So why not make it more orderly, structured and predictable, as a Lawful plane should be? Having a unique, structured, but brutal layout ala the Tombs would make Hell worthy of its place as (arguably) the toughest sets of branches in the game, and honestly make it much, much, much cooler.
Just my two cents. The only reason I haven't cleared all of Hell at this point is because it's just so dull, tedious and generally not that exciting, and as the place I was looking forward to most in the game, that was really, really disappointing.
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