Don’t be melodramatic. Having the option to turn off autosave on death is not going to make anyone ‘lose focus’ or ‘intended direction.’ Let’s move on to something useful.
Seriously. Go try arguing optional permadeath on the forums for [i]Don't Starve[/i]
Happy to. The same argument applies to Don’t Starve. I’m not sure why you don’t think it would. Hell, if I could’ve saved in Don’t Starve I might’ve played for more than… an hour and a half, according to Steam.
Don’t misunderstand my position; I understand the purpose of generating content that the majority of people will never see. It doesn’t matter whether that’s because it is intentionally hidden (an easter egg) or because you are enforcing permadeath and therefore only those players who stick with the game for a long time will actually ever see it.
The intention there is to reward a community of players who pour over your game. It’s self-indulgent. The difference between easter-eggs and permadeath is that the first one cannot be argued to diminish the experience for many players, while the latter can.
In any case, it’s not my personal prerogative to go on a crusade against every roguelike or permadeath game in existence. Especially ones I don’t play. However, I do play Cataclysm. And I think the OP is right.
or see if maybe Blizzard agrees to implement a turn-based grand strategy mode into [i]Starcraft 2[/i].
I think you are still struggling with the difference between ‘play-styles’ and ‘game mechanics.’ Comparing an autosave-on-death feature to what would amount to an entire rebuilding of an entire game from the ground-up, pretty much puts a fine point on this entire issue. You have elevated this one thing, this one ‘feature’ of roguelikes, to the point where you think that it is equivalent to scrapping an entire game.
It is not.
This game is [i]designed around permadeath[/i].
It was designed with it in mind. However, it would not cease to be if you had an option for autosave-on-death. It would be the exact same game.
Here’s an analogy; It would be like if you were to build a bridge for the city with the intention of putting a bunch of statues up along the sides. You like it, the statues are nice and symbolic of some event that you and other people think is important, people drive by them and seem to like them also. Except over time the stonework starts to pit and decay, the features of the statues get lost. The city owns the bridge, and they don’t want to put money into restoring the statues, so they have them removed and replaced with lamps or some such thing. You built the bridge, you feel very attached to the statues, it was the WHOLE REASON you designed the damn thing. They may as well TEAR THE WHOLE THING DOWN. Except they don’t. Because even without the statues, the bridge is still a way to get across water. And people still cross that bridge to get to work, or to visit family or friends. Kids still hang out on the bridge, and under it, tossing rocks into the water. People still walk across it holding hands. The bridge has more meaning than this one big important sentimental thing that you built into it. It is no less functional for having lost it.
Ultimately, it was just a bridge. And Cataclysm is ultimately just a game. People are going to cross that bridge for their own reasons, and people are going to play that game for their own reasons.
You just feel it would lose some ephemeral ‘something.’ A particular intangible quality that you are going to address here in a minute;
[i]There is no such thing as a serious game of survival with quicksave and quickload/[/i].
Of course there is. You can’t simply take an opinion and present it as fact. I used to play Skyrim as a survival game all the time. I made it miles more involved than the vanilla ever was, with mods. Made the game much harder, added in dozens of survival mechanics, turned off a lot of ‘easy’ features from the main game. I used a mod that would start you off in the middle of nowhere, had no compass or pointer on a map to tell me where to go, had no food or warm clothing or water and a potential to die of the cold or hunger or thirst. And you bet your ass I saved and loaded if I died.
Who are you to tell me what you can and can’t do in a survival game? That’s not for you to decide. You don’t get to tell me how to play my games, that’s your own problem to deal with.</feigned indignance> We each take different things out of games, that’s my point. We each enjoy different experiences. What we do all have in common here is that we all play Cataclysm.
The game has a right to its niche. Appealing to everyone is the prerogative of casual games and financial analysts.
‘Roguelike’ is not what makes Cataclysm ‘niche.’ Neither is permadeath.
It’s a game built in ASCII. It’s a post-apocalyptic survival game with procedurally generated content and in-game building and crafting. It is an open-source project.
It has the right to be anything that the developers and the community leads it to be. It has the right to be a pony-princess-pancake-simulation if it wants to. But not a single thing you’ve said is an argument for permadeath. It is just an assertion that it MUST.
It’s ‘woven into the fabric of the game’ and one tug on that thread would unravel EVERYTHING.
Here’s an idea, let’s try adding in an option to not autosave on death. Let’s see if the world comes crashing down. Let’s see if people en masse cannot help themselves and save scum their way to boredom and never play again. Let’s see if that ephemeral ‘something’ fades. Let’s see if that happens. Then we’ll talk about the sky falling.
As for the graveyard, if it allows you to go back and pick up from an old save(I’m not convinced that is actually what will happen), but we’re still stubbornly refusing to simply make it an in-game option (on pain of world-descructing game-failure aaargh), then I’ve lost all hope for reason here.
It would be the exact same thing. It is literally semantics. And yet this one semantic issue (of whether it is an in-game option or a copy/paste in the save files) is apparently the difference between ruining the game and staying true to its driven-snow purity. An argument over semantics.
[quote=“pulsefrequency, post:83, topic:5464”]omg
[/quote]
oh no not my golden calf
Yeah, I just said roguelikes are dumb. I’d get a ‘deal with it’ .gif but I’d really rather use the english language.
[quote=“Binky, post:84, topic:5464”]FORGET ROGUELIKES FOR A MINUTE. Forget any talk of what ‘makes an RL’ or anything like that. CataclysmDDA is defined by permadeath. This isn’t due to some misty nostalgia for RLs or because we are trying to box ourselves into a genre - it’s because the central tenant of THIS GAME is permadeath.
Although I’m usually vehemently against this, can we lock this thread? I really don’t see the point in continuing the discussion when three main devs have said we won’t be getting rid of permadeath and pretty much everyone agrees that it’s a core and essential part of the game.[/quote]
Why would you lock a thread that a) is still on topic after all this time, b) hasn’t degenerated into wild insults, and c) as you suggest, has no risk of destroying the fabric of the game?
What’s wrong with healthy discussion?
Also I still have yet to see one person even attempt to explain why they think that permadeath is ‘central’ to the idea of Cataclysm, because I don’t see it.
