your score should be a screenshot of your massive treasure hoard
i yearn for gold coins and corpses
for i am smaug
OP: Making a bald statement of fact that the game is âtoo complicated for permadeathâ put people on the defensive from the start, that was a really bad way to start your argument.
Following up with, âin order to lower the barrier to entryâ wasnât any better. An appeal to populism in one of the most niche gaming genres isnât going to get you far.
âsatisfy their masochistic desires.â was a masterstroke of self-sabotage.
Bad rhetoric aside, your requests:
Quick Save: sure, this was removed for performance reasons that have since been addressed.
Quick Load: no.
Hardcore mode: unnecessary since itâs the default.
Load last save on death: not just no but hell no.
No autosave on death: sure-ish.
In my opinion quicksave and auto-load are a blight on modern gaming, they neuter risk and make intelligent decision making pointless since itâs far easier and just as effective to just run in guns blazing and repeat until it works. Itâs a cheap gimmick that feeds power fantasies and desire for invulnerability. Itâs used to set up a tight action response feedback loop based on the highly cynical fear that the gamers have too short an attention span to handle a serious setback.
I have a rather higher opinion of my players, they can cope with setbacks, learn from what went wrong, and do better the next time. They can actually learn how the game works and beat it on its own terms rather than memorizing 5 minute chunks of the game and practicing it until they get it right. I take the players seriously, and they seem to be enjoying it so far.
/rant
On a more game-design-y note, permadeath is simply incompatible with quicksave/quickload. If the game is hard enough to be not boring with quicksave/quickload, itâs simply going to be impossible with permadeath. Itâs hard enough to make a game this complex remotely balanced for one scenario, having both is absurd.
As KA101 pointed out though, we have no desire to fight people that want to resurrect their player or manipulate their saves and I see no reason to punitively delete the player save file on default, which was how whales set it up. My plan is to move the player save file to a graveyard, where the player is free to resurect it with some light editing and copying it back to the save directory, the thing is a text file for the most part, you can put your HP back positive, remove diseases, and teleport away from the horde that just feasted on your entrails. Weâre not going to stop you, but itâs simply not supported by the game.
Scoring, Iâm not even sure how that would work.
Iâm all for achievements as far as neutrally observing accomplishments, and Iâd like to tack one on, recording how âdifficultâ your starting options were for personal or public bragging rights.
As a personal testimony, when I started playing CDDA I didnât like permadeath one bit, always maintaining a backup save and savescumming like a motherfucker. Now, after having played the game and familiarizing myself with it, I learned to enjoy it like it is and only savescum when something totally bullshit happens. I think if those of you who are calling for an end to permadeath would just accept CDDA as it is you wouldnât mind permadeath so much.
[quote=âKevin Granade, post:62, topic:5464â]Scoring, Iâm not even sure how that would work.
Iâm all for achievements as far as neutrally observing accomplishments, and Iâd like to tack one on, recording how âdifficultâ your starting options were for personal or public bragging rights.[/quote]
Umm⌠I kinda just explained how scoring could work before, but basically different scoring boards for different goals or aims, i.e. one for kills, one for time you lasted for, and maybe one which counts the worth of a particular map tile you put effort into, that last one might be hard and kinda useless but the others are just for kicks, just so we can have a bit of a community score board which we can strive for first place on maybe. You would probably have to use a default world generation setting thing so it would be fair, but anyways, could be fun.
But bragging rights?.. I donât like the sound of that.
[quote=âturtleagldragon, post:64, topic:5464â][quote=âKevin Granade, post:62, topic:5464â]Scoring, Iâm not even sure how that would work.
Iâm all for achievements as far as neutrally observing accomplishments, and Iâd like to tack one on, recording how âdifficultâ your starting options were for personal or public bragging rights.[/quote]
Umm⌠I kinda just explained how scoring could work before, but basically different scoring boards for different goals or aims, i.e. one for kills, one for time you lasted for, and maybe one which counts the worth of a particular map tile you put effort into, that last one might be hard and kinda useless but the others are just for kicks, just so we can have a bit of a community score board which we can strive for first place on maybe. You would probably have to use a default world generation setting thing so it would be fair, but anyways, could be fun.
But bragging rights?.. I donât like the sound of that.[/quote]Bragging rights is all a scoreboard is good for, anyway. Why do we need a score at all, when all the relevant data is already plainly seen? Look at the memorial and youâll see how long your character survived, how many monsters he killed, what his stats were, etc. The only things it doesnât show is the initial starting conditions, and adding that into the memorial information could make the memorial file an easy way to show off all your achievements. The characterâs important event timeline could even be used to store any other achievements, like killing a hundred zombies in the span of an hour or something - more of a way to denote major battles than any sort of actual named âthresholdâ achievements. Record amount of distance traveled on foot, by car, and swimming, like GTA does. The âachievementsâ donât need to be big bright medals to show off to somebody, they can be but a line in your history a-la âOn day 14 of the first Spring, Urist McMuffinson killed the last zombie in the town of Oldsmouth.â And that should really be enough.
Thank you.
Making savescumming slightly easier than before, but still arbitrarily restricted, does not seem consistent to me with DDAâs otherwise inclusive stance. All playstyles are supported, except for this popular one we really hate; that one deserves discrimination.
[quote=âted, post:67, topic:5464â]Making savescumming slightly easier than before, but still arbitrarily restricted, does not seem consistent to me with DDAâs otherwise inclusive stance. All playstyles are supported, except for this popular one we really hate; that one deserves discrimination.[/quote]Savescumming is not a playstyle. Even if it were, excluding it would still comply with the gameâs design document - since there isnât supposed to be a âbestâ way to succeed in Cataclysm, savescumming cannot exist - because any playstyle based on permadeath is an objectively worse way to succeed than one that accounts for the characterâs effective quantum immortality.
Hehe, actually that is a fun thing to consider. Have a âQuantum Immortalâ or âTime Lordâ profession, which is costly (4-5 points) but enables the function to automatically reload to the last automatic save. Autosave would be forced on with this trait, saving every ingame hour.
That way, a character can sacrifice some of his early potential for the savescumming feature, and any memorial post with the character would show the profession.
Thatâs because itâs a roguelike.
Saying âwe need to get rid of permadeath in this roguelikeâ is like saying âwe need to get rid of the ghosts in Pacmanâ.
This discussion has been pointless since before it started.
If you want to savescum, do so. Nobodyâs stopping you. But nobodyâs going to pay any mind to you going around so arrogantly trying to change the very core of this game.
This is a post-apocalyptic, survival, horror, permadeath roguelike. And itâs not going to change.
Savescumming may not be a âplaystyleâ, but if you stop arguing about terms and compare it to players who alter the data files to their liking, it is similar except that one is supported and the other is arbitrarily restricted.
Cataclysm isnât supposed to have a âbestâ way to succeed in the sense that no one is going to judge your play as long as youâre having fun. Character death is only relevant in that itâs likely to affect your fun, and thus you should have control over it. Your argument appears to be based in some comparison of a nonscumming playstyle to that of a scummer, which is contrary to the intent of the document; the aim is that both have fun, not that they compete with each other.
[quote=âRivet, post:69, topic:5464â]Thatâs because itâs a roguelike.
Saying âwe need to get rid of permadeath in this roguelikeâ is like saying âwe need to get rid of the ghosts in Pacmanâ.[/quote]
Saying âwe need to keep this feature because otherwise weâll lose a genre labelâ does little to support the feature, especially since the argument is not over whether the feature should exist, but whether it should be mandatory in a highly customizable game.
âSavescumming may not be a âplaystyleâ, but if you stop arguing about terms and compare it to players who alter the data files to their liking, it is similar except that one is supported and the other is arbitrarily restricted.â
- not arbitrary.
- theyâre restricted to a similar degree, in that you can easily muck around with your save file just like you can edit the data files, but when you do so itâs clear that youâre messing with the game.
i would not play this game, if not permadeath/hardcore was forced
If you didnât want permadeath or hardcore games then donât come to roguelikes. That is how I see it at least.
ah, here we go, took me a while to find it
http://www.roguetemple.com/roguelike-definition/
Roguelike Definition 2.0:
High Value Factor
[table][tr]
[td]
[table][tr]
[td]Permafailure (including Permadeath)[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]The character must pay for your mistakes and choices, sometimes at the cost of his life. Restoring games is discouraged and only provided to allow continuing split games.[/td]
[/tr][/table]
[/td][/tr][/table]
[quote=âEnderCrypt, post:75, topic:5464â]ah, here we go, took me a while to find it
http://www.roguetemple.com/roguelike-definition/
Roguelike Definition 2.0:
High Value Factor
[table][tr]
[td]
[table][tr]
[td]Permafailure (including Permadeath)[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]The character must pay for your mistakes and choices, sometimes at the cost of his life. Restoring games is discouraged and only provided to allow continuing split games.[/td]
[/tr][/table]
[/td][/tr][/table][/quote]
http://www.gamesofgrey.com/blog/?p=403
http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Berlin_Interpretation#Controversy
FYI. Don;t get stuck in silly definitions. Donât make changes to cataclysm because that is what a roguelike should be. That is backwards thinking. changing the land to fit the map.
Considering Cataclysm is a full ON procedural/sandbox/open world game, nerfing the first and perhaps the only goal of NOT dying is not only counter-definitional but counter-intuitiveâŚ
just venting,
eai
Games are built around their defaults.
Game design is about creating a framework of rules within which the players operate.
Cataclysm is not, and does not, in the eyes of most of itâs devs, claim to or want to be a âsandboxâ game in the way that it implied here - the core gameplay conceits are built around concepts that quick load and quick save would render meaningless.
The suggestion that anything other than perma-death be the default is a suggestion that the core of what Cataclysm is should be dramatically altered. this is a suggestion not that Cataclysm be a different genre, but that Cataclysm become an entirely different game.
Cataclysm as a game is built towards a certain framework of rules, one that includes permadeath, and is designed to that end. It is also a game that goes out of itâs way to allow people to define their own rules and their own games on top of the core Cataclysm provides, if they wish, but it needs to be immediately clear that the game they will be playing that results is a different game than the one intended by the developers. It is vitally important from a design perspective, especially with the limited resources available to us on the development front, to focus our design on a single game, and youâre going to have a long, difficult argument to make if you want to convince the developers that they should be working on a different game than the one they signed up for, and the game they signed up for should be an âoptional side gameâ that is not the one being designed for.
We do not have the manpower to design two entirely different games, which is what the OP suggests we do, and there is (unsrurprisingly) not much will among the developers to build a different game with the same name.
If the answer to this OP is âBECAUSE ROGUELIKESâ then I think people are failing to see the absurdity of the argument.
Roguelikes as a genre are dumb. It is one of the least cogent genres in existence. Its defining features do not really convey any meaning whatsoever. It is a mere nostalgia for a different era of games, with a few ârulesâ tacked on. One of those rules is permadeath. They harken back to old arcade style games, when graphics were simpler, content was more freeform, and inevitably you would die.
Roguelikes are almost literally the hipsters of game genres.
I donât have a problem with permadeath. Or roguelikes. I like Cataclysm. But the mere suggestion that allowing people to save their game and reload it upon death would GO AGAINST ROGUELIKES OMG, and if Cata were to in any shape or form deviate from the divine roguelike creed, that it would somehow distort and ruin the game entirely - actually had me laughing. Out loud, in real life. It is like watching someone scream up and down that putting anything but red, green, or white on their christmas tree would destroy the entire meaning of christmas.
Seriously, if your notion of Cataclysm is so wrapped up in a meaningless set of guidelines set up by a series largely simplistic anachronistic games that bear only surface similarity with Cataclysm, then I canât help but feel like youâre getting lost in the details. It is okay for games to diverge from their genres. I would call it innovation, except that saving/loading has been the standard in games for two decades. It is also okay to recognize the benefits of a design that promotes continued playing and progression. It is okay to allow players who prefer continuity in their game to play that way. It is okay. Everything will be okay.
Glyph, pretending that adding a feature that allows people to not permadeath would somehow involve massive sweeping changes and multiple branches of development is ludicrous and does nothing to help your argument against it. The difference between automatically saving a dead playerâs file and not doing that is hardly rocket science. Just make it an option. Iâm not sure why weâre enforcing some silly genre guidelines on players who may not give two craps about genre guidelines.
Anyway, seems to me that it was expressly stated that nobody was suggesting making the game save/load by default. It was pointedly said. Someone asked for the option.
I think it would do a lot to help the game to have this option available. I would use it, sometimes.
The first poster in the thread was explicitly stating that permadeath should be moved into an alternate mode.
If you think that wouldnât have an impact on game design, I⌠honestly donât know what to tell.
A game is defined by itâs rules. The rules are what MAKE the game! Permadeath is a pretty core rule in Cataclysm, with a lot of what has gone into the game resting on it.
Imagine taking Gunpoint and having the âoptionâ to disable different circuits, instead making every circuit red. You will have fundamentally altered the game, in a meaningful way, even with something that might seem to be a âsmallâ change, a matter of âplayer preferenceâ, because almost every level of the game was designed with that separation in mind. Imagine Rogue Legacy with a quick save and quick load, and think about whether you would be playing the same game if that were implemented and accepted as a normal part of the core rules that players were expected to abide by. In both cases, the result would be a different game.
I donât mind making it easier for players to save scum, or generally making it easy for players to alter the rules and play the game they want. I donât pretend that Cataclysm has a cohesive design as tight as either of the options above, but what design there is is based on perma-death being a thing.
But thinking that we should make it easy for players to create alternate rules doesnât mean we should change the basic rules the game ships with and what itâs designed around.