View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0004651 | Valley 1 | Gameplay Issue | Oct 7, 2011 1:22 am | Oct 24, 2011 10:34 pm | |
| Reporter | JamesMowery | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | resolved | Resolution | fixed | ||
| Product Version | 0.519 | ||||
| Fixed in Version | 0.530 | ||||
| Summary | 0004651: Remove Mazes From The Game (Or Significantly Reduce Their Size) — Their Purpose Is Not Clear | ||||
| Description | Mazes were never interesting to me, and they still aren't interesting. I don't think any crazy modification to the mazes themselves are going to make them even slightly enjoyable. Maybe if you reduced their size by a factor of two or three, but I just don't see the point any longer. It's one of those things that is in the game for reasons that I can't explain. Any time I come to a maze, I immediately sigh. Most of the time I skip it unless I absolutely have to search through it. As they stand right now — and with the lack of loot/reward to be earned from exploring mazes — it's just a waste of time that is preventing the player from enjoying fun stuff. Also, the amount of mazes for large buildings is far too much. A maze, in my opinion, should be extremely rare occurrence, and the payoff should be very much worth it. I really do believe that mazes should be removed until there is a good reason for having them. I have no doubt there could be a reason for having them, but I just don't understand what that reason is at this point in time. If not, I would hope that, at the very least, the sizes of mazes could be reduced significantly and their appearance in buildings could be restricted to one or two max. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | Fix Before Major Release | ||||
| related to | 0004869 | resolved | Chris_McElligottPark | Not all that happy with 'maze' type rooms |
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Mazes are in the game because mazes are... fun. To me, anyway. Most of the time. Where is it that you're seeing so many maze rooms that are unpleasant? The overlord/lieutenant towers, or are there other places you're also going and finding a ton of them? There are other places that have them, but not many, so that's why I ask. At any rate, there's no way I'd remove them from the game in general, but it's possible I might need to put more of the small mazes rather than the large ones in the overlord/lieutenant rooms if that's where they're bugging you. We also have plans for more rewards in the mazes, too. I've always loved mazes, and found them to be a key part of my favorite dungeon crawlers like 1989's Demon Stalkers. But it's quite possible that the really large mazes mostly need to be removed from the primary game progression of the overlord and lieutenant keeps. Thoughts? |
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Making the mazes smaller in general is good, but also, have more things in the mazes. If I know there might be something good in the maze room, I have a reason to search it. But, right now, I'll pop my head in, if there isn't something right near the door (or a resource like a memory crystal), I don't feel like going through the entire thing just to find maybe a couple shards or just one potion. |
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There's nothing wrong with the mazes themselves, in my view, they just need to be more intelligently populated with more sought-after goals. If I knew that by weaving through a maze I might come upon a door into a room with a nice shiny something, I'd spend a lot more time in mazes! But it's still early beta, so I figure "all good things..." and that. |
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I like the idea of having doors to rooms you don't know are there, that lead to nice loot. What I mean is, knowing that there was a chance that in this maze somewhere, there was a door that led to a room that doesn't show up on the dungeon map, and in said room was some nice loot, like, something I could take back to the crystals in my village and get some EXP for. |
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I agree with the anti-maze vibe. The signal to noise ratio in the game is very very low IMO. There may be ways to reduce that by using the map judiciously, but mazes are a big chunk of the problem. |
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As I mentioned in another ticket, the thing I don't like about the mazes is all the backtracking. Having to run back over territory I've already covered to find the next branch is far less interesting than exploring the passages for the first time. Adding some loops would definitely help here, along with better rewards for exploring. |
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I think mazes should be a rare thing (perhaps even highlighted a special color) and they should serve a very unique and special purpose. Everyone seems to agree that as it stands, the mazes are, at the very least, not as effective as they could be in making the game fun. I just think mazes should occur in specific scenarios and they should be designed to provide great rewards. If they are going to be a more common occurrence like they are, I believe they should, at the very least, be reduced in size. Also, I never really understood how you could enter a small room and move a few feet and then you could enter a maze and have such a huge area in this supposedly small room. It just doesn't make sense to me at all. It's a game... but it isn't even marginally realistic, which also throws things off. I just believe they should be a rare occurrence and they should have a purpose. Because, like I said, I have no interest in exploring mazes as they are; I don't have many issues exploring regular rooms though. As they stand, they just are something that you go in, switch to bat form, and go through very quickly to find the door that you need to get to. Not fun. Furthermore, I don't think the mazes shouldn't be so narrow. It's like I'm racing around a track trying to avoid bumping into things instead of exploring. I never go through a maze without being in bat form. So, even if you decreased the overall size of mazes but made the maze itself a bit thicker with more stuff in them with less wasted space, while still keeping some sort of maze-like quality, I believe that could help make them feel a bit more organic/realistic. Hopefully that gives some idea of what kind of changes could improve the mazes. TL;DR: Reduce the size significantly, make them appear far less frequently, make the maze a bit chunkier, make them have a purpose, make us want to explore them. Or possibly just make the maze room a very rare occurrence (even a special highlighted room type like the library) and make them hold special items. |
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I'm sure the maze-hate right now is simply down to the fact that you can spend 10 minutes fully exploring one and come out with nothing to show for it but one more health potion (after having lost two to kill off everything in the maze). I know there are plans to make them more interesting. I look forward to the day when I can say 'hooray a maze room!' and know that I'll get something good out of it. Right now, though, just avoid them. 'Modern Ruins' building types are especially full of mazes, so I almost never enter those. |
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I love the mazes and would be sad to see them even be cut back a little. I've genuinely been eagerly just waiting for them to start to be seeded with stuff properly so I have a reason to explore them. At the moment, I'm ignoring them as much as the next guy - but I'm waiting for that to change; not for them to go away (even a little). |
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One thing that I would think make the battles in maze rooms more fun is to permit all walking enemies to fall down from edges. In the current state, all enemies will be at the bottom of the map, which is pretty boring. And the loot from them is dull, but I think that will be changed :) |
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I love mazes, but I agree there should be more of a reward to them. Perhaps some tension could be added. A combination of a great reward, but an extremely deadly, slow-moving enemy stalks the player through. |
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I am definitely pro-maze. I'm a little puzzled by why people are so annoyed with them --- if you don't like them, they're pretty easy to avoid. If anything, I wish the evil outpost mazes were a bit bigger and more complicated --- it seems like they could be closer to a Zelda dungeon, if all the boss rooms were around one big maze rather than up stairs. Anyway, that said, mazes are very clearly pointless now and I avoid them like everyone else --- but surely that's because we're playing a fairly early beta and they're a challenge that hasn't got its accompanying goal yet? |
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Yea, I think once the seeding of "stuff" in rooms is made more intelligent, and mazes in particular, mazes (and long treks through long passageways in general) will feel more rewarding. That said, due to the nature of mazes, there should be a cap on the number of them per building. Maybe something like 3 small mazes, or 1 large maze + 1 small maze, at MOST. (Small mazes in this case being quite small) |
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* Added in new "Experience Points Containers." ** These are the first major source of EXP beyond just killing bosses, and they essentially reward those who want to explore rather than fight. ** At the moment, at same-level chunk to the civ level, it takes just about 100 of these containers to get from one civ level to the next. At +10 levels it takes about 75 of them, and in between is a gradient between 100 and 75. ** At -10 levels it takes more than 10,000 of them to level up, so there's really no sense in farming low-level regions. Playing one region down will only make it take 125, and two regions down makes it take about 167 containers. And it goes up exponentially from there. * Inside buildings is the only place to find Experience Point Containers at the moment. ** These seed far away from doors, switches, and other experience point containers. They are denser in maze-type rooms, and in fact a single large maze can contain dozens of them. Most interior rooms contain none at all, but when a hallway or similar has a dead end or other long passage that would otherwise be pointless, you'll find these there. ** Note that vents and the normal interior goodie drops don't impact where these containers can show up. ** Anyway, at long last this gives a suitable reward for the maze rooms; it's something we've been planning since before beta, but we'd just never gotten around to it yet. |
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Definitely a welcome improvement. I'm excited to try it out! |
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Thanks! Will be out tonight. And the big maze rooms are a lot less frequent in recent releases anyhow, I don't know if I mentioned. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 7, 2011 1:22 am | JamesMowery | New Issue | |
| Oct 7, 2011 8:17 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0016041 | |
| Oct 7, 2011 8:17 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Oct 7, 2011 8:17 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => feedback |
| Oct 7, 2011 8:30 am | tigersfan | Note Added: 0016043 | |
| Oct 7, 2011 8:58 am | zebramatt | Note Added: 0016052 | |
| Oct 7, 2011 8:58 am | zebramatt | Note Edited: 0016052 | |
| Oct 7, 2011 9:01 am | tigersfan | Note Added: 0016053 | |
| Oct 7, 2011 9:05 am | Bluddy | Note Added: 0016055 | |
| Oct 7, 2011 9:27 am | jerith | Note Added: 0016064 | |
| Oct 7, 2011 10:29 am | JamesMowery | Note Added: 0016069 | |
| Oct 7, 2011 10:29 am | JamesMowery | Status | feedback => assigned |
| Oct 7, 2011 10:41 am | BobTheJanitor | Note Added: 0016071 | |
| Oct 7, 2011 11:13 am | zebramatt | Note Added: 0016073 | |
| Oct 7, 2011 1:04 pm | tigersfan | Internal Weight | => Fix Before Major Release |
| Oct 8, 2011 7:14 am | Spork | Note Added: 0016203 | |
| Oct 8, 2011 10:40 am | Sherlock | Note Added: 0016221 | |
| Oct 10, 2011 10:28 pm | martyn_van_buren | Note Added: 0016385 | |
| Oct 20, 2011 1:15 pm | wyvern83 | Relationship added | related to 0004869 |
| Oct 20, 2011 1:42 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0016905 | |
| Oct 24, 2011 10:30 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0017090 | |
| Oct 24, 2011 10:30 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | assigned => resolved |
| Oct 24, 2011 10:30 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Fixed in Version | => 0.530 |
| Oct 24, 2011 10:30 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => fixed |
| Oct 24, 2011 10:33 pm | JamesMowery | Note Added: 0017092 | |
| Oct 24, 2011 10:34 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0017094 | |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:28 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Gameplay - General Complaint => Gameplay Issue |
