Options for Frustration Reduction and Age/Ability Fairness

[Halk]

The very fact you can use Ultima Underworld in a sentence implying some negativity, invalidates everything you may ever have to say about games. I am sorry

*shrug* You can have your sacred cows if you like...

I don't think UU was at fault, but I think the games that tried to copy UU and went over the top with sword movements and special moves were at fault. UU had the most atmosphere, by far, of any of the dungeon crawling games... in fact after UU I think it went overground and lost some of the appeal.

[seebs]

I find this offensive in a stats-based CRPG, because the entire point of that is that I want to play a character who is an archer, not that I want to be an archer.

This is why I consider DM, and now LoG, to be in a very different genre from Might & Magic, Wizardry, and such. They're fundamentally dungeon sims which are more about your choices than about your stats.

This is exactly right. We're telling our characters what to do, and they do it. That's the enjoyment.

Well, that's the thing. Some games are about how well I can execute choices; others are more about how well characters can execute my choices.

These are both fun kinds of games, but they are very different from each other. I tend to enjoy them for different reasons. In general, if a game is primarily about my execution, I get frustrated if it imposes a lot of stats and character traits on that execution. If it's primarily about the character skills, I get frustrated if it imposes player skill checks.

DM was amazing because you could beat it with a single character and never take damage (assuming you picked the guy with the rope). Grimrock is not quite that focused on player skill, but it's still basically about that.

And that's why I think it's no more ridiculous to ask for a speed control than to have easy/normal/hard difficulty settings...

[Loktofeit]

I find this offensive in a stats-based CRPG, because the entire point of that is that I want to play a character who is an archer, not that I want to be an archer.

This is why I consider DM, and now LoG, to be in a very different genre from Might & Magic, Wizardry, and such. They're fundamentally dungeon sims which are more about your choices than about your stats.

This is exactly right. We're telling our characters what to do, and they do it. That's the enjoyment. Skyrim is a fantastic game, it's massive and deep etc, but there are some flaws. Around the time of Ultima Underworld first person RPGs acquired, from seemingly nowhere, a desire to become fighting simulators. The mouse had then to be used to simulate combat moves. That sucked and added nothing to the game in my opinion.

Around the early 90's, US audiences were shifting more toward arcade style gameplay, and Europe was still mostly Amiga (very Amiga, actually), but in Japan that style of RPG caught on and became popular over there even to this day. The list of Wizardry releases shows that off exceptionally. Turn-based combat, prediction gameplay and several of the other elements of RPGs went by the wayside in the United States as 16-bit color, soundcards and CD-Roms led to more flashy games and more spectacular game design.

Stat-based outcomes in RPG combat is still in a lot of JRPG titles, unfortunately few ever get translated over to our side of this lil blue and green ball.

[seebs]

Just a side note:

The debug stuff I put up in the "temporary modding thread" has, among other things, an option to adjust the game's speed.

See.

There's a variable "gameMode.timeMultiplier". It is 1 by default. And it does EXACTLY what it sounds like. At .05, it's pretty much ludicrously, painfully, slow.

EDIT: Note that if you rest, the speed gets reset to 1 (from 5) after your rest is over.