Vaults Vanquisher
Posts: 463
Joined: Monday, 20th July 2015, 04:01
Remove item identification
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.
- For this message the author PowerOfKaishin has received thanks: 2
- nagdon, yesno