Lair Larrikin
Posts: 27
Joined: Monday, 23rd May 2011, 02:56
The Scaling Problem
'Scaling' describes how the mechanics of the game change as a PC progresses and the numbers get bigger. It is closely related to the difficulty curve of the game and plays a large part in how challenging the decision making of a game is and what the consequences for bad decision making are. Scaling can be dealt with in a variety of ways and in a lot of cases, it's done poorly or lazily. The games where scaling is done well is usually games with few variables and a very controlled, predictable environment. DC:SS is a case where scaling is somewhat broken; the formulas that govern the mechanics of the game more or less fall apart as the numbers inflate to a certain degree. It is very possible to hit a 'critical mass' where decision making becomes considerably less meaningful and the consequences of poor decisions may as well not exist. Before I talk specifically about what problems Crawl has and how to address them, I'd like to talk briefly about the difficulty curve.
Difficulty is usually expressed in a couple ways: The severity of the consequence for making poor decisions, and the difficulty of making a correct decision. Examples of games with relatively smooth difficulty curves include Final Fantasy (Higher Stakes), The Legend of Zelda (Execution) and Devil May Cry (Both). It is worth noting that the 'execution' portion of the difficulty manifestation can present itself in different forms, but because it's not really that important, I'm going to get very abstract and simply call it Execution. Crawl is a game that also exhibits both of these qualities as difficulty rises. Poor decisions that could have cost you a portion of your HP bar can cost you your life later in the game, and the number of 'correct' decisions is reduced as you specialize and the game moves forward...until a point.
That point as mentioned previously is what I will call 'critical mass'. It's the point at which the game is effectively won; the point at which the game is no longer yours to win through clever decision making, but instead, it's yours to lose through poor decision making. It's the point at which even a lot of the end game NPCs are largely non-threatening and you could do victory laps for fun around every NPC that isn't named Cerebov without much of a care. This point exists in pretty much every Roguelike of length I can think of. Even in ADOM, with the right set of gear, you can become a nigh-indestructible god who's real threats you can probably count on one hand. The problem with Crawl it's easy to hit and you can get there relatively quickly.
After you clear the first 3-5 normal rune branches, the game becomes gradually easier, depending on the type of character you are running. A lot of the ending branches can prove to be quite difficult, but as the game goes on, runes become significantly easier to get given a moderately decent set of equipment. Eventually, you get to the point where the only threatening, reliable damage left in the game is torment and hellfire, both of which are impossible or difficult to mitigate and un-dodgeable; it's lazy fixes for the scaling problem and I would like to think that if scaling were to be fixed, both these types of mechanics wouldn't be needed as much to present challenge and they could be meaningful in different contexts. As it is, you can pretty much tab through the 95% of the game and not suffer a scratch if it wasn't for these two mechanics and that is a serious problem.
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I have become quite tired and am actually going to go to sleep. Some time tomorrow, I'll finish up this post and restructure it for readability. I do want to talk about the bizarre difficulty curve in the game and I'll also talk about specific examples where the game pretty much falls apart (Looking at you level 9 spells), examples where there are inflated numbers, but the mechanics remain interesting for different reasons (OoD) and some methods one could use to possibly fix the issue, allowing for what would hopefully be a significantly more interesting post-end game.
In the mean time, I'm curious as to whether or not the community and developers would entertain the idea that the scaling behind the game is potentially broken and of course, whether they would be willing to discuss it. If so, then hopefully we have some meaningful discussion. If not, then I suppose we can lock this thread and let it be...