View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0006060 | Valley 1 | Suggestion - Balancing Issues | Feb 21, 2012 6:18 pm | Feb 21, 2012 6:40 pm | |
| Reporter | Bluddy | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | won't fix | ||
| Product Version | 0.579 | ||||
| Summary | 0006060: Too many unlockables from low caves | ||||
| Description | Looking at the unlockables at the start of the game, too many of them are from going deep into caves. Caves tend to be monotonous as is, and being forced to go into so many of them and to confront bosses to get to the deeper levels is... probably not the greatest idea. The other day I went into a cave in the desert hoping to unlock the level 2 unlockable. Eventually I found out after exploring the whole cave complex that there was no 2nd level! My feeling was that that was a huge waste of time. That's not a good response. In general also, I'm not crazy about the idea of unlocking things intentionally. Unlocking monsters by killing other monsters is fine because it happens automatically. You did something cool, and the game anticipated that and something happened. That's neat. Having more options in my 2nd continent makes sense too. But to have to unlock stuff by doing something really tough... Playing today, I searched again for a cave in the desert, and I had to go through many whole regions to find a cave. I'm still not sure if there's a 2nd level in this cave. The good thing is that I got distracted on the way by a secret mission that I loved -- the assassination mission. That was great -- for some reason, going through caves without knowing what they'll be in advance, looking for the boss, and finding tunnels connecting far away rooms -- all of that felt much more fun than the usual cave exploration. Not sure why though. Anyway, at the very least the unlockables should be different rather than so many cave things. Some could have you visit a tower of some sort; perhaps killing 60 espers can unlock the next monster AND a resource etc. But I think some consumables should be randomly unlocked at the start of the game -- it's very discouraging to be forced to do unlockables right away. Ideally, unlockables would be built so that they come from doing natural actions during the game. I know that doesn't seem strategic, but I think the strategy should be at the resource gathering level rather than the unlockable level. Binding of Isaac did this brilliantly -- as you play and find stuff, more and more stuff gets unlocked, assuring you that the next games you play will have more stuff. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | Feature Suggestion | ||||
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Right now it's 7 out of the 18 materials that can be unlocked which are unlocked via going into caves. Out of those 7, fully 3 of them only require getting to depth 2, which is hardly a challenge. Then our of the remaining 4, 1 of them is in the ocean shallows, which is a REALLY different sort of cave experience given it's filled with water. Then out of the remaining 3, yet another 1 cannot even be completed until continent 3 (the deciduous forest one), which means that in your first 20ish hours of the game there are really only 6 that require cave diving. Then if you look at the last two, iron ingot and copper ingot, those just require going deeper in the same cave systems that you already started exploring to get the copper and iron ores in the first place. In short: there's a good amount of variety here already, and the ones that require cave spelunking are actually outnumbered by the ones that require something else. And as we add more materials that have to be unlocked (we have 10+ waiting, art done and coded in and everything, just not yet spells to use them yet), I don't plan for any of those to involve more cave diving. Because you're right -- too much would not be a good thing. But I think what is there is just about the right amount. What may be making you weary about caves is: 1. The lack of variety of bosses there. This is a known issue, and will be corrected prior to 1.0. It's just a we've-not-had-time thing. 2. The lack of variety in the caves themselves. This is something I plan on addressing in the coming weeks also (for surfaces as well). 3. You may be finding caves hard to find if you're not looking at the dungeon map -- the lighter green nodes tell you which ones have caves, so they are easy to spot if you know to look for it. Every region has many cave systems, although that's not true if you're on an older world file. Hope that helps explain things, at least. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 21, 2012 6:18 pm | Bluddy | New Issue | |
| Feb 21, 2012 6:31 pm | tigersfan | Internal Weight | => Feature Suggestion |
| Feb 21, 2012 6:31 pm | tigersfan | Status | new => considering |
| Feb 21, 2012 6:40 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0019526 | |
| Feb 21, 2012 6:40 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | considering => closed |
| Feb 21, 2012 6:40 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Feb 21, 2012 6:40 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => won't fix |
