Comments on: Crawl 0.21 “Gnoll Country for Old Jian”

By: DoubleByte

DoubleByte — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 20:49:50 +0000

The Good: new god, wand changes
The Bad: removing mutating chunks
The ugly: food change is weird, removing wands makes some sense given the new charge system, but confusion particularly was super handy for certain melee classes

By: snelelg

snelelg — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 19:36:18 +0000

I dislike the changes to mutations, every game you get an insane amount of bad mutations and it is very hard to get rid of them. The only way to do it seems to be to save potions of mutation to “cure” the bad mutations by rolling the dice. Way too many “trash” monsters use malmutate in my opinion which is insane because it is irresistible.

By: Sar

Sar — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 11:17:42 +0000

People don’t play those forks because they don’t put your wins in a nice online table, so when you’re feeling down about having wasted thousands of hours on a dumb video game you can’t open the link in your browser, look at all the games from those years and think “yeah, those were the times”.

Also, sometimes you want the new stuff too. Not all of it is bad!

(I don’t care about mutagenic chunks, personally.)

By: mps

mps — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 04:38:38 +0000

But seriously folks, this mutagenic chunks business… Mutation roulette exists and is practically a required part of the game now. You won, guys.

As far as I can tell, the “eat the purple” thing is a meme precisely because it was so goofy and unbalanced. You got hundreds of single serving mutations that were biased toward the good ones, giving you a very high probability of getting a lot of free bonuses. “Haha, I’m spending a lot of time on an obviously broken minigame, this is my idea of fun.” Currently you still get a lot of mutations via potions except with fewer servings, i.e. less player control and therefore better game balance, and with potential strategic implications for poor resource management. Seems pretty obvious that if you’re interested in the game as a whole this is a better situation.

What I come back to with these arguments about content removals — like purple chunks, high elves, sludge elves, evaporate, mountain dwarves, hill dwarves, grey elves, elves, gnomes, and tons of other clunky junk that that didn’t work or played no unique role in the game at all — is that if this is where you are as a player, I wonder if you really play the game. Over and over again, people make crawl forks that are focused on re-adding this kind of cruft to the game and over and over again no one plays these forks. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Right now there’s a new crawl fork like this in development and people talking about it don’t seem to be aware of another fork with the same ethos from just last year. (By the way, no one played it though the dev did some good work mechanically.)

By: spm

spm — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 04:03:30 +0000

Also want to disagree with mps. There should be more food and all chunks should be mutagenic. Eating is fun, mutations are fun, and games are SUPPOSED to be fun. Don’t see why people can’t understand that fun is good.

Also, if you can’t understand the interface you should play a dumb game like Candy Crush. The worst change in crawl history was removing the old practice-to-train system. Theoretically, if I ever won a game of crawl version > .8, the victory would be empty because the game just let me win without putting up a fight.

By: Tegga21

Tegga21 — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 01:53:53 +0000

I disagree mps, food should always be kept and the amount you need increased.

By: Luke

Luke — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 16:59:35 +0000

This seems to be the first step in fully removing one of the most fun and unique features of dcss, which initially attracted me to play it in the first place five or six years ago, that of mutations. I simply do not understand the need to lessen the impact of a game dynamic that almost everybody seems to enjoy. I think you may be beginning to lose the crowd here guys. Luke.

By: mps

mps — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 01:00:13 +0000

This is clearly the best release since .17. The skill target mechanism has been a much needed feature for a long time. The game plays much smoother with less need to micromanage skills to obtain best results. The wand and food changes were good too, though the food simplification is a half-measure where full removal is what is really needed.

While the mechanism of skill targeting is good, the interface could be improved a lot. For one, the existence of two kinds of automatic skill mechanisms, autoskill and skill targets, is clunky. It’s time for autoskill to go with default skill targets taking its place. The modal nature of the interface is also unnecessarily fiddly. If you have a special key, =, to set targets, why do you also need a special display mode? The other display modes tell the player nothing of interest. Getting rid of these extra modes would save a lot of entrance vault button mashing and improve the interface overall. Without them you just go straight to setting targets and toggling skills rather than turning off autoskill, then switching to display mode #3.

Some of the content additions are questionable, particularly the zombie singularity thing, but every release has stuff like that. Kudos to those doing the unglamorous, but important, work on the mechanical and interface side.