Starting a game is fun - Every piece of equipment is an improvement, skills improve quickly, and chances to survive start to look better and better. And if you die, it’s not a big deal because you were just starting out anyway.
The problem I have with every roguelike with permadeath is that when you’ve gotten what you need to get started, progressing in the game requires you to risk everything by wandering against unknown dangers. Losing a skilled-in-everything character means doing the whole starting scenario all over, PLUS grinding extra for what killed you last time. I’ve seen the starts of a dozen roguelikes thousands of times, and I’ve got bored of them because of spending majority of my time repeating the same part over and over again.
Savescumming is a slippery slope, but some kind of ingame savepoint before dangerous ventures would help immensely. What are your thoughts on the matter?
I’m sorry but you’ve got the wrong attitude when it comes to roguelikes.
You should probably play one that has an actual end first.
The difficulty of playing a roguelike is that you die by not knowing what you could have done or going into a situation you were under prepared for.
Which is why each time you die you should learn from it and take your experiences and eventually overcome and beat the game.
I think having any kind of save point defeats the point of the end game challenge. You’re not meant to be able to accomplish everything, and being able to just go back and try again later without losing anything ruins any real sense of accomplishment in the game.
Unlike other roguelikes, such as crawl, there’s no set endgame for Cataclysm. The world generates endlessly and there’s no big bad to fight or orb to retrieve, so the fun in cata comes from the journey rather than the destination. If you can accomplish everything without risk then there’s no real point in bothering, you already know the outcome. Plus if you die and reload, then you’ve already seen what’s going to happen so any sense of surprise or exploration is lost.
If you’re getting bored with the start of the game, perhaps try a different route. Make a martial artist who eats human corpses or an alcoholic hermit living in a cabin in the woods, who needs to make dangerous trips to town to try and find the ever dwindling alcohol supplies fuelling his addiction.
Alternatively, if you’re dying later on in the game on a regular basis, perhaps try going slower, you don’t need to rush into everything you see, you can drive down the road and clear the next town to try and find better loot before taking on a lab with nothing but a machete and a trenchcoat.
In the end, the great stories aren’t the ones of people breezing through a mine after already knowing what’s going to happen, they’re the stories of a guy with two broken arms shooting up on cocaine and adderall trying to escape a horde, only to get cornered in a petrol station and dying a blaze of glory. If everyone can just reload and try it all again you lose the excitement of these situations.
When I come across this problem I wish I could save at a certain point upon my development, where I’m not a total squishy, but not completely fleshed out yet. The only problem is that once a character dies I also want to be able to make a new character (even if it just a different name with all the same traits xD ).
I think that was what professions were meant to do. (I could be completely wrong, but adding a “Police Officer” profession with a gun and bullets and training already would be pretty sick) The would give a character a running start so the player doesn’t have to grind as much in order to get to the end game content.
On the other hand, end game content is aptly named that… end game. When everything else has been done this is the last of it. Now seeing as there really isn’t as much non-combat based end game as people want (I’m talking about making and influencing factions and setting up infrastructure… not bionics and mutations) there runs the risk of dying should you attempt to go for the treasures of the deep.
There is probably a good middle ground, where you are able to use professions to your advantage but take problems you don’t really want in order to not have to go through the tedium of the “Squishy Stage”. Anyone else think that’s what professions have been made for?
[quote=“Zireael, post:5, topic:2172”]Squishy stage. Yeah. I’d love to skip it too.
If the game saved my char setup and allowed me to restart as Destiny Gonzalez II, I’d be very happy.[/quote]
I’ve never messed with the in-game autosave feature, but it’s pretty easy to save-scum in this game.
i would be ok if someone made some kind of in game savepoint mod, that people can optionally use. if you dont like it dont use it. if we get an achievemnt point system out and get a way to post scores online, people who save should get alot less points.
This is from someone who has gotten careless more times than I can count in ADOM and blown a really good start… I have what appears to be a loaded Gnome Wizard over there who is getting to the mid-game. I have touched it in 3 weeks in part because Im at the dreaded… I put hours into this guy and never made it this far before Im worried Ill die stage. Took me 50 tries with a gnome/wizard just to get through a very early phase of the game 1 time.
atleast in cataclyms you get the ‘warning bad guy near’ pause… which has saved me MANY times.
some things you can do to reduce risk
absolutely do not be a melee only. range is necessary to keep distance and run away.
get a working vehicle and get an extra cannister of gas. keep alot of extra guns and ammo in the vehicle. keep it near you so you can get away.
The game already has auto save , just enable it in the options. And if you do get killed , you can still create a new character and play in the same map.
“Squishy Stage” describes the start perfectly. Losing is fun when its about survival, but when your character is “ready”, dying becomes merely punishing as in old Nintendo games. Starting the game again would mean grinding the same skills, collecting the same gear and reading the same books all over again, which isn’t what’s challenging you anymore.
I remember someone planning a single-write save point, maybe with ability to write another save only with rare artifacts. That would limit savescumming and avoid doing the low-level busywork from the start.
I kinda grow to my successful characters, and when they die, it’s hard for me to start again… Not to mention that my successful guy’s corpse and his ultimate death mobile 2000 are like… on the other side of the world
I’d say definitely the hardest part in Cataclysm is the first few days, but if you can make it to summer (usually past the first disease, and you have plenty of survival and hopefully a non-limited weapon), I find survival rather easy. That’s usually my goal actually, to have survival, tailoring, and archery enough to where I’m basically set on surviving, then I can “take my time” and explore, though most times “taking my time” usually means trying to balance clothes so I don’t get a disease that makes it so I have to wait a week or two before really doing anything (Influenza lowers strength by FOUR, I’m glad I started high)
For the record: the challenge in having a savegame slot is knowing when to X out of the program. Since it doesn’t force-save on quitting, save & reload when you’re feeling protective, then go forth. If you get into trouble, bail.
And I concur with the OP: the wrong way to play a roguelike…is the way that you don’t find fun. I don’t bother with NetHack because I’ve seen levels 1-5 far too often.
[quote=“Renofox, post:1, topic:2172”]Starting a game is fun - Every piece of equipment is an improvement, skills improve quickly, and chances to survive start to look better and better. And if you die, it’s not a big deal because you were just starting out anyway.
The problem I have with every roguelike with permadeath is that when you’ve gotten what you need to get started, progressing in the game requires you to risk everything by wandering against unknown dangers. Losing a skilled-in-everything character means doing the whole starting scenario all over, PLUS grinding extra for what killed you last time. I’ve seen the starts of a dozen roguelikes thousands of times, and I’ve got bored of them because of spending majority of my time repeating the same part over and over again.
Savescumming is a slippery slope, but some kind of ingame savepoint before dangerous ventures would help immensely. What are your thoughts on the matter?[/quote]
Half the fun is trying to survive with a new character in a world that is becoming increasingly more and more ruined, looted, and less prestine than it once was. Basically recovering from disaster.
Also, try taking the road less traveled, i.e. ditch the more overpowered stuff like manga krav, archery, handguns, random vehicles and the like for more unconventional stratagies and such.
However, I will point out that losing a character to a glitch is not fun. I will admit that I save scum in those cases because I hate bullshit deaths involving NPC’s that somehow shatter reality when they try to teach me toad style karate.
[quote=“Renofox, post:1, topic:2172”]Starting a game is fun - Every piece of equipment is an improvement, skills improve quickly, and chances to survive start to look better and better. And if you die, it’s not a big deal because you were just starting out anyway.
The problem I have with every roguelike with permadeath is that when you’ve gotten what you need to get started, progressing in the game requires you to risk everything by wandering against unknown dangers. Losing a skilled-in-everything character means doing the whole starting scenario all over, PLUS grinding extra for what killed you last time. I’ve seen the starts of a dozen roguelikes thousands of times, and I’ve got bored of them because of spending majority of my time repeating the same part over and over again.
Savescumming is a slippery slope, but some kind of ingame savepoint before dangerous ventures would help immensely. What are your thoughts on the matter?[/quote]
thats the whole point of a roguelike, you get so fed up with dying that eventually you are FORCED to think OUTSIDE the BOX.