I guess I have nothing against shops/traders in principle but I'd prefer them to be well designed into the game without breaking any aspect of it. I don't think they make a game bad - I think they make a game into something that isn't a dungeon crawler - so the idea of adding shops to DM is terrible unless you also want to fundamentally change the mood and have gameplay less concerned with the survival experience, and more concerned with loot and levelling. I thought the shops in DM2 were carelessly added and poorly balanced. For me the dungeon has to be something you can't escape until you beat the game, otherwise it's not the same sort of game as DM, EotB, or Grimrock.Raggie wrote:Uh, Might and Magic says hello. Good dungeon design and shops don't count each other out.Goffmog wrote:This is a terrible idea. Having shops in dungeon crawlers makes it too easy to replace good dungeon design and puzzle elements with grind, loot, and a sort of accountant-like fascination with equipment stats. Go and get yourself some good spreadsheet software instead.
More varied areas would be my ideal too, but I just hope there will be a sequel. Maybe Almost Human is tired of the genre and wants to do something else for a change?
Yes, the Might and Magic games are great role playing games in their own right, but they veer away from the dungeon crawler too much for me to call them dungeon crawlers. I really didn't enjoy anything about the dungeon design in the M&M games, they were annoying and got in the way and were little more than a backdrop for encounters with monsters. The design that I loved in the M&M games was the overworld, the towns and the sheer scale of the games, the grand undertaking of fitting all the puzzles/riddles/quests together to figure out your true purpose in the gameworld, and the open exploration element. Brilliant games. But none of that really felt like dungeon crawling in the same vein as DM & EotB.
