Playability

[Crisses]

A thread for UI & playability Issues.

(from Skill Balancing thread)

Originally Posted by Crisses

There's already so many health/mana potions + food combinations that I find 1/3rd my inventory taken up with that nonsense. I've taken up a hand-me-down food pantry in my shared stash because it's not worth turning in old food/drinks/pots at the merchants. Adding in "quality" versions of food doubled the ridiculousness of this.

Originally Posted by Pyro

I would rather have the "quality" food versions cover levels 75-150+ (assuming we can have dungeon levels over 100 later).

That idea sounds good to me. The reason I gathered from the changelog for the "quality" versions was to gentle the big leap between foodstuff -- but what it's done is clutter the game with more items. It's also hard to tell the items apart -- the dot in the corner is not quite enough. Maybe this needs to be in an "item balancing" thread or a "playability" thread. [Also to be cute maybe we should change "Quality Fresh Fruit" to "Organic Fresh Fruit" hahah I wonder if I can find where to change that in the game. Anything for a giggle while I play.]

If anyone truly finds the additional food levels crucial, please let us know! I wasn't having a problem with the foodstuff before. Is there a forum thread where the change was discussed?

[Bluddy]

I agree. I find the extra foods unnecessary as well as cumbersome. And you can find the descriptions in assets003.zip in the \Loc\English\items.trn file.

[alstein]

I am not a fan of the extra foods myself, though I am semi-indifferent to it.


As for playability- I think armor is a much bigger concern, especially for heavy armor classes. There's little point to using heavier armor, unless you luck out for better stats, as you level up.

I love this game level 1-25, it becomes a lot less fun past that.

[Chumpy]

I'd willingly downgrade all my quality food to regular just to free up some inventory slots.

[Crisses]

Originally Posted by alstein

I love this game level 1-25, it becomes a lot less fun past that.

I'm a fan of low levels because I'm not into high-stress (I just published a book coaching people about stress -- and here I am playing computer role-playing-games. How's that for funny?), and because I enjoy watching a character concept build. I get bored easily. I have one level 45ish, 1 at level 23, 1 level 20, 1 level 17.... the list goes on from there. The one I took to level 45 (without cheating on xp) is my covert-ops character because it's much more fun to me to see how long i can get away with being directly under the noses of monsters doing my tomfoolery than it is for me to bash their skulls in. That's one reason I'd like to see a bit more experience for more than just personally creating a mess on the floor; rewarding crafty play as well as hack-n-slash. I liked the "discovery" XP in Depths of Peril for simply finding a new area for example. I love the "scout Level 5" quests because it rewards me just for making it that far. Figuring out where the secret rooms are. Clearing a room without shooting a single critter (whether I explode barrels or take out a support beam or get creative with slight-of-hand....)

To me the game is a puzzle, not a way to let off steam. I like having a strategy beyond "get monsters out of the way quickly so I can move on". If I think of a new character concept/combo that might involve MORE strategy, I stop what I'm doing and make a new character to see if my idea pans out. Occasionally I have to delete characters that aren't as much fun to play, or my play screen gets too crowded.

I often play low stress because of that -- so I can either take my time and screw around with world dynamics or so I can speed past the monsters and delve deeper quickly to cash in quests. I'm not into first person shooters etc. because they simply reward people for being able to kill quickly. That's not my schtick.

*Cough* Talking about "Low stress" -- our first Demon War game together my son decided to try a 100-Wave-Invasion-Quest. At first the waves were almost 10 minutes apart. I griped that the game would take 13 hours. Then they were 4 minutes apart. That started hurting. They moved to less than 1 minute apart way too soon. Thankfully he chose a game level at half our current level, and he was playing a necromancer/defender so he had a mob. I was setting up lures at all the edges of town, just to hold them off while we ran up -- but they started pouring in from a side without any letting up -- you couldn't tell one wave from the next any more. He took a stand in the town, I ran into the dungeons to cure plagues and poisons etc. that were going on, and we made it just past the 50th wave by some miracle. It was so stressful when I walked away to make lunch my hands were shaking. Obviously not a feature really meant for a 2-person game.

I think the escalation should be more smooth. Just a thought. We made it through quite a number of waves that were on top of each other. I'd say it became very stressful around the 20th wave, and the only reason we made it to the 50s is because my son was bright enough to talk to the Warmaster which kept him from running off into combat. He slipped up, stopped talking to the warmaster who ran off into combat and perished. Dumb Warmaster. Before then everyone else had died. I tried defending the warmaster, but with a rogue/hunter, crowd control is not my forte.

I'm probably getting too old for that type of stress. I think I was too old for that type of stress in my 20s.

[Caal]

Originally Posted by Crisses

[Also to be cute maybe we should change "Quality Fresh Fruit" to "Organic Fresh Fruit" hahah I wonder if I can find where to change that in the game. Anything for a giggle while I play.]

It's in the Loc\English folder path. Depending on what you want to change, you will want to look at items.trn, quests.trn npcchat.trn and global.trn in the original DC, and demonwar.trn in DW. These should be in the assets3.zip.

Create the folder structure above, then open an empty text file, copy in the lines that you want to change, then change the text. You can add colors with the color codes from the SDK. Then zip it up. If you change DW stuff, add the mod to the DW assets folder, otherwise the DC asset folder is ok.

I'm attaching a text mod that adds index numbers to the foods and drinks and changes the names of the pots (for easier comparison), and adds some color to the quest items.

[Crisses]

Yeah, I've modded the names of dungeons for my games actually. For same abovementioned amusement factor. Rather than something like "Dangerous Caverns" I'd rename it to "Bawdy Taverns" etc. I could see renaming the food. Recoloring things is smart, as is giving things names for easier comparison. I'm obsessive about organizing my characters, but I don't need this much fodder to have something to organize