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Maybe a good alternative to remaking the game would be to have more customizations or options for the gameplay at the beginning. That way people can play this game as they would enjoy it for themselves the most. I still play 7 Days to Die because of all the options to customize the game to my liking... merely my 2 cents.
It might be worth looking on forums or guides on YT for successful party/character builds.
Looking up builds in guides is possible, but not really something I want to do - it feelis like looking at a walkthrough for an adventure game: if you do it, you might as well not play it. But you're right in that I probably need to try a few more builds... What I really would like is not a complete builds, but more general guides and hints. Unfortunately, the game isn't popular enough to have much in that way, it seems.
Another problem I have with the game is the lack of full information. For example, do I REALLY need to get single weapon's skill to 8-9's for a character? It seems to make my crossbowmen hit the mark almost every time, which is cool: I can use them to do aimed shots this way. But my swordman with his 8 in swords still misses a lot, and the skill does not contribute to damage, so he feels useless. It would be cool if levelling up a weapon skill opened up new abilities/types of attacks, but since it doesn't, maybe it's OK to have a character with just 6-7? But maybe not - it's already hard to damage enemies before the Enforcer encounter, and I assume things only get harder from there, so maybe I'll need to have 10 in a weapon/dodge/block to even have a chance? This uncertainity is killing me, and leading me to put points into those expensive high levels instead of trying to get a few more levels of crafting or level up critical strike (which... does it raises the chance of CS, or only chance of bleeding on CS? If the later, then it's pretty useless, no?).
Information about the system aside, just a healthy dose of non-spoilery gameplay hints would have reduced the frustration and bad reviews dramatically.
I recommend you to check out the mechanic thread to refine your gameplay if you are still on this.
Originally, we did the resource thing for atmosphere. It's a prison mine, there should be no stores or healers, you scavenge what you can and develop skills you need to survive, which covers more than combat.
I understand the frustration, especially when it's caused by a new mechanics (not something the players expect these days), but we'd like to develop this mechanic further in future tactical games and make resources even more vital. Any thoughts and suggestions? Asking anyone reading this thread, not just Max.
What would be a good way to implement resources in a meaningful way, meaning if you ran out, you're screwed (otherwise resources are meaningless)?
While the chance to score a critical is driven by the enemies CS skill, the critical damage isn't random (attack damage x critical modifier). So if someone hits you with a two-handed axe, power attack and scores a critical, the damage will be significant, considering the non-critical damage is 12-15 plus modifier for metal and crafting, so it can easily be 20+.
It also made it too easy even on the hardest difficulty. It's subjective, of course, but good combat is unpredictable. Things should be able to go wrong and reloading in combat to execute perfect attacks by changing the sequence removes all challenge.
One of my favorite Star Wars games was Dark Forces (1995). Can't save during the mission, so one mistake, especially when fighting Dark Troopers (super soldiers), and you're dead. It was infuriating, of course, especially when you die when you're about to finish the level, but I remember this game fondly because it made me pay attention and be on guard at all time. Later SW games that offered save and reload didn't have the same impact.
But if you change the sequence you can easily get favorable rolls.
The bombs were too much, I agree. No direct damage grenades in The New World.
Never liked the auto-resurrect after fights in games. Makes death meaningless. In Dungeon Rats the idea was that you *will* lose some party members (especially the three guys near the campfire who were expendable) but as you progress you gain new allies who'd better and more skilled.
Well, he had to be presented as a guy who gets things done when they get out of hand. Anyway, if you have a save game before this fight, I'd like to take a look.
Not if you're doing well, but I assume you aren't. Basically, your performance in combat is your feedback.
It increases your THC and the passive effect, which is bleeding (for swords).
It raises the CS chance but the actual chance is your skill vs armor's vsCS stat.
The way I see it, there are two basic approach to combats, and they are exclusive.
1) You make resources important _in a single combat_ but restore them completely between combats, making each one independent from the others. This is the approach taken by most recent games, like Divinity: Original Sin. It's a great approach, because it allows you to make *very* difficult combats, and yet if the player manages to pass it - if only barely - he can go on with the game without worring about replaying that combat more optimally. This is "tactical" approach, in that it doesn't require the player to think about the bigger picture.
2) You make resources important globally, but less so in a single combat. This path is often taken by JRPGs: each fight is pretty easy by itself, but they slowly grind the player down, making him waste health and mana, until even the simples enemy might become deadly, because you're on your last health point and have no magic. To play well this type of games, you don't just have to "solve" a combat (or get lucky) - you need to learn to do it in the most optimal way. For this reasons, combats themselves are often relatively simple and repeptitive, to give the player time and chances to learn how to optimize his actions. Personally, I dislike this approach, because it provides a different type of challenge: it wants me to be a perfectionist, and I'n usually "good enough" kind of guy.
The second approachalso has the problem that you just DON'T know how much resources you're going to need, and which combats you should save them for. Unless you do: this can be somewhat fixed by having a "map of the game" where the coming combats are marked, so you know, for example, that you have 3 simple combats and 1 boss fight before the next resupply point.
The way I see it, Dungeon Rats tries to combine both approaches: to have very difficult combats AND permanently (and quickly) draining resources, and the problems lies squarely in that. The only way to learn to optimize the outcome of combats is to restart the game repeatedly (or read guides, but no game should ever rely on players reading guides, IMO). You don't get some easy fights agains a new type of enemy, and then some hard fights: (almost) every combat here is more difficuly than the one before (this is another problem that needs to be solved - this kind of pacing is very tiring; though it's more or less tolerable in a short game, which DR is).
Without trying to innovate, I'd say your best bet if you want to make resources even more critical, but make the game more accessible at the same time is to have easier combats, but have more of them. Move closer to JRPGs. This is not what I would like - I'm a big fan of tactics-only approach as I said before - but it's your game, so if you want to convery the atmosphere of desperation this might be a way to do it.
Telegraphing the difficulty of upcoming fights and the pacing of resource points like I described before can make this approach more accessible. Yes, it kinda breaks the immersion, but personally, I'll take convenience over immersion any time. Works better if you style your game like a book story, with chapters or story points.
Also, you need to teach players better. Tutorials suck (and I say it both as a player and a developer), but there are other way to convey the critical information. One I find very compelling is to have explicit "additional goals" during the combats, which actually teach the player how to fight properly (at least during the early encounters - layer they might work as a stimulation for Achievers kind of players). To give an abstract example, if you want to teach the players that ice monsters are vulnerable against fire, place a goal for the mission "use fire spells against ice monsters 5 times". Check out tactical RPGs like Hellenica and Chroma Squad to see how this stuff works. This additional goals give the player the feel about what they *should* be doing, and what they should optimize for. I can't provide an example for Dungeon Rats, though, because I'll be damned if I know how to play properly :)
Another possible way is one we've toyed with my collegaues when we were discussing making our own RPG (never got around to it properly, unfortunately). Have 2 types of resources: some that are restored fully after each combat, and some that are restored only at "checkpoints", or never. In our vision, we were thinking about having MP/HP restore after every combat, but only give the player a limited amount of potions that he can use *in* combat. This would allow to make each combat more difficult: after all, you always enter it with the full HP/MP! But at the same time, if you make too much mistakes during the early combats, and correct them with expendables, you will find yourself pressed to play more optimally during the later combats, before the next checkpoint. Yet, you will probably never really find yourself in a "walking dead" scenario, because, even if you've spent evertyhing else, you still have all your health and magic at the beginning of the combat: you just need to play it very well. Compare it with the usual approach, where you might find yourself nearing the last combat with no potions and barelty 1HP remaining: no matter how good you play that combat, you probably won't be able to pass it, unless you cheese it all the way to hell and back. You don't need to play *good* - you need to break the game to win, and it seems like a bad thing to me.
So, to summarize: expendable resources are there to let the player correct his mistakes, and if he doesn't make mistakes, he should be able to win the combat even if he don't have any more resources.
N.B.: Since random plays a role, you can't just say "you can win a combat even with 1HP if you play right!". You usually can't, because sooner or later some mob will manage to randomly hurt you, unless we're talking chess-like determinism. The starting amount of per-combat resources should be enough to compensate for bad luck if you play well. Any kind of random one-shotting from AI is bad, bad, bad. And yes, that means that a critical strike from enemy's heavest hitter shouldn't be enough to kill any of your front-line characters at their full HP.
Ah, but here lies a problem. Those first characters are really expendable - but you probably will only use them during the early, easiest fights. Later, when you get to the really hard parts, you already picked up highly skilled characters, and you're not gointg to be able to replace them. So losing any one is an automatic combat restart.
I get your attitude toward auto-resurrect, though I don't share it. At the very least, then, make all characters gain Skill Points even when they are not in combat. Then, if your main characters die, you can replace them with worse, but not enirely worthless characters! Now, you may point me in the directions on 80's dungeon crawlers like Wizardry. If you lost a character there and could not resurrect him, you went and hired a 1st-level newbie. BUT. Those games had ample opportunities for grinding: you could bring that 1st-level characters to your current party level in a few hours of grinding. It made death hurtful, but bearable: it cost you time. In DR, you'd be stuck with a pretty useless warrior, facing a combat that is harder than the one before it. Which pretty much puts you into a death spiral: you lose one skilled character, and your chances of losing another one in the next combat go up, because he doesn't have a skilled companion to cover his back.
A better compromise could be found in The Banner Saga: there, characters who received critical wounds on the battlefirls, must spend a few game days recovering - the days when you have to fight! So, you're forced to use less-loved, less powerful characters - but only temporarily, and if you levelled up and equipped those second-liners wisely, you might not enter the death spiral. This requires the game to have a bigger pool of characters, and some kind of "time progression". But since DR (and the next tactical game, I assume) is fairly linear, I would say it's OK to say "the character would be with you again after 2 combats", or something like that.
Doctor, tell me, how bad it is? :)
Hmm, actually here's another interesting theme for a meditation: if the game has a "walking dead" scenario, how can a player tell if he is in one, or he is just bad at solving the current problem/misses something? Games that don't have critical lack of resources don't face it: you know that the game is winnable from any state, and the problem lies in you (well, actually, most RPGs allow you to create a COMPLETELY unplayable build, which might get you throught a fight or two, but become unusable soon enough - that's a kind of "walking dead" scenario, too).
now why all the rants all of a sudden? why now did the approval rating drop?
is it due to the rations being nerfed? resources being less? I don't know? but it seems like a logical question, why did it get universal acclaim in the beginning and now later people are ranting?
My educated guess, is that the OP would have had a more "fun" time with more rations/resources.
OP, did u ever ask yourself how 90% of players (overwhelming majority) enjoyed the masochistic yet rewarding nature of this game. Maybe you are just part of the 10% which is fine.
But maybe if the fact that trial and error is the essence of the game is missed on some people
As for me, honestly, I put off buying DR even though I played and liked AoD was because I wasn't in love with AoD combat system, and so I surmised that the game based solely around it wouldn't be very fun for me, so while I had other games to play, I played them instead of this one. But now, I'm waiting for BattleTech to come out, so I decided "why not?".
Actually, I think this would be a simplistic solution. Sure, if I had a few more bombs, I could probably breeze through the Enforcer fight by throwing them around, but it wouldn't be a very enjoyable victory. And as for rations, on my second run, I already learned to conserve them and use Healing Salves. And rations don't help you to win a fight: they just give you a chance of winning one, or, rather, prevent you from losing one 100% of time just because you can't restore HP before you begin.
I didn't know about 90%, but I *know* I'm not fully in the game's target audience. Yet, I'm partially in it, and this is what is so infuriating. It's not like this game is a multi-player FPS: I know I'm bad at those, and I don't enjoy them at all. But this game - it gives almost all the right signals, challenges and reward, and then suddenly socks me in the face. I'm enjoing it, until suddenly I don't.
You know what? Maybe I just should restart it at the lowest difficulty. I always try to play all games on Normal (but rarely challenge myself above it, unless the game is too easy, or I like it very much), but maybe in this game, the easiest difficulty would provide just the right amount of challenge for me... It wouldn't make things I don't like go away, of course, but it would make them more bearable maybe, and allow me to enjoy elements I like. Maybe I'll try it after work.
So you and Marcus are the front line fighters, except you're a very weak front line fighter. You have the lowest defense in the group (due to wearing heavy armor that doesn't go all that well with Dodge) and the lowest CON. You should play assist instead of leading your party, which calls for another front line fighter instead of Ardomir.
That stat point on INT is wasted and I wouldn't have gone with Dex 10 (you're very fast, but your THC is low).
after all, that's why entertainment exists. Those terms are also very subjective.
One trend I have noticed in JRPG is the prevalence of post-end game and golden endings.
Seeing the credits roll is easy in those, so players only for the story or emotional catharsis are
content with just not tackling the post-end game. Hardcore players or those who just want to
get the most out of the title, are shown the real depth of the mechanics only in the likely plot-light/ non-canon post-end game.
Imo, it is one way to tackle as many demographics as possible. No one is punished but emotional rewarded for investment in the game.
My character usualy didn't wear the heavy armor - I only donned it on because I was desperate to get him to live a bit more - his dodge wasn't helping much in this fight. And he usually don't have troubles _hitting_ enemy - he has troubles dealing damage. He usually just manages to get a 4-5 points of gamage, with the rest blocked by enemy's armor. But I guess that goes with the relatively low Strength, which I had to sacrifice to get DEX and CHA.
My first attempt at the game was more STR-focused, but I found that I wanted to have 4 characters instead of 3, so the second time around I upped Charisma at the expense of other attributes. I had the idea of making him a support character, but I feel that the game pushes you into making the main character a melee fighter, because you get two very good ranged fighters if you have good charisma (unless you up the Charisma even higher and manage get Yngvar).
I fell like I should restart the game - I can't win this fight with the current party.
Here are some tips:
1.High Charisma run would make MC either a good for nothing or a punchbag or a glass cannon. It is better to be the later two rather the the first you picked. Punchbag can hold a flank while the rest kill the other. Glass cannon can launch a devstating alpha, pick a reach weapon for this.
2.Use Ismael and Hieron as skillbot.
3.Exploit waiting and positioning to get the most out of consumables. Hammers can knockdown as a special attack.
The game does offer many ropes to hang oneself and expect players to know about it from the beginning, instead of let them learn. It is more of an elimination course for AoD veteran, weeding out the incompetent as it progress, only giving a victory dance at the very end. Very silly for a standalone game as the whole problem can be solved by better documentation, an actually useful tutorial, and some gameplay hints..
This first time I got as far as the fight with the fellow in the read cloak, what-his-name, the one before the crossbowmen ambush. I was able to take him out, but I had no HP or rations, and the next combat was impossible, even though it's not very hard if you're at full HP and have some consumables. I certainly did better the second time, though not by VERY much...