Why I will not be finishing Grimrock

[BuzzJ]

Sidestepping is inherent to any dungeon master-like game. The only possible way to avoid it is to either a) swarm the party with monsters, or at least never allow a 1v1 confrontation in any 2x2 or larger room, or b) dont have any room accessible at the time of combat that is 2x2 or larger, or c) make monsters attack from the side [like ogres and wardens] faster than the party can move sideways.

All of those options are available to modders within the context of LoG1. LoG2 may make it easier and less hackish to do so, particularly in re monsters.

edit: You could also eliminate sidestepping and make it turn to move forward/back only; but that would actually compromise playability to some extent as well as inducing player rage. I don't consider it a viable fix.

[Sol_HSA]

..or you can make monsters able to attack diagonally..

[Dr.Disaster]

..or you can make monsters able to attack diagonally..

that won't make any difference as long as i can play like a rogue and get into their backs .. stab stab dead next

[BuzzJ]

..or you can make monsters able to attack diagonally..

Is that even possible? Can a spell be set up to allow the party to do it too? BURST FIRE! SPRAY AND PRAY!

[thimble]

Sidestepping is inherent to any dungeon master-like game. The only possible way to avoid it is to either a) swarm the party with monsters, or at least never allow a 1v1 confrontation in any 2x2 or larger room, or b) dont have any room accessible at the time of combat that is 2x2 or larger, or c) make monsters attack from the side [like ogres and wardens] faster than the party can move sideways.

And Dungeon Master used all of these in parts.

The key is that original work switched it up, keeping things interesting.

Sometimes sidestepping was necessary and easy. Sometimes it was necessary and harder to do. Sometimes the monsters split up and surrounded you, sometimes they didn't. Some monsters had fast charges followed by slow recovery, others were always slow, some were always fast.

However, I can't remember a single case where i had to do it constantly for a long period of time. Grimrock leans on it far too heavily.

[Kurt]

I can agree with the original poster on many points. The puzzles do get old pretty fast. I'm on level six right now, and I freely admit I had to AutoHotKey script the traversal of the level five pit array in order to get the secret item. Memorizing and timing the whole sequence and getting it with the mouse click at just the right spot, that's not fun. I had way more fun figuring out hot to make an AutoHotKey script do it. Which opens up a whole new idea for games like this - incorporate a built in script for those that like to think their way out of a puzzle, or let the click-speed folks manually do it for those that find that fun.

The puzzles get repetitive and old very fast. Some of them show fiendish imagination, like the dragon-gaze one. Bud, sadly, the further I go in the game, the less imagination and more purely random they seem to get. It's like the designers gave up on thinking up clever things to do, and just resorted to making it annoying. A case in point is the conjurer's cap puzzle, again, on level 5. There is no thought, no clues, all you can do is randomly push buttons and pull the damn lever. I freely admit I resorted to walkthroughs to get this one, because I have better things to do than essentially pick a combination lock every fifty steps. This just isn't fun for anyone.

As far as combat ability and the combat engine goes, I'm playing on normal and so far I can stand toe-to-toe with most anything. I did have to resort to the ole bullfighting techniques for the ogre, but that was actually pretty fun. My party build with a dodge/unarmed rogue and minotaur fighter in the front row, plus elf (I put an elf picture on an insect) mage and ranged rogue in the back row seems to have done the trick. The game's combat mechanics... that's something else entirely. The mechanics and UI is absolutely the worst design I've ever played. I can't tell you how many times I accidentally picked up the weapon out of a character's hand rather than use it. And if you get me started on the mechanics of spellcasting you will get an angry rant that would make the original poster seem like he was outright kind to the game. Rune combinations, ok, that's clever, at least that's what I thought at first. It had soooo much potential (more on what they could have done with that below). As it is, though, let's all admit it, it's an intentional annoyance. It is put in to slow down the player, and make the game artificially difficult, and that is not a way to design a game. Again I freely admit that I wrote AutoHotKey scripts to cast all my combat spells (albeit imperfectly because the game is soooo sluggish).

So what could they have done? Well, let me start with the spellcasting. When I first read about the runes in the manual, I envisioned a system with almost endless spell customizations. Each rune could add some subtly different effect, some of which are complimentary, some of which not. The elemental runes as per normal. Spirit as an armor-penetration-aid to get past physical resistance. Life for healing, or creation, or maybe undead damage a la D&D. Death for augmented damage against living creatures. And so forth. And then let me build my spell the way I want, and the damage it does depends on my choices and the skill level I have in each rune's associated school of magic. You could even have made the effects subtly different depending on the order you chose them. You could have had essentially 9 factorial (362880) spell choices that way. Spell energy costs could depend on the number of runes (complexity), how skilled I was in the schools of magic for each rune, etc. Leading to truly open-ended mage builds. And think of what this could have done for puzzles. To open a door you need to get fire past a physical barrier and so you have to come up with a spell with jsut the right amount of spirit in it to get past a physical barrier, but not so much that the fire becomes insubstantial. This is just something off the top of my head. The possibilities could have been endless.

So as it is I do actually enjoy the game, but if it weren't for AutoHotKey and walkthroughs I wouldn't. The game is full of almost cool ideas and almost innovation. And I have to agree with the original poster in that they took some of the most aggravating parts of many other games and, bafflingly, said this is fun let's put them together. It honestly baffles me because I truly believe they did much of it intentionally. I can't say this enough - a frustrating UI with fiddly bits for spells is not a good way to make a game hard. And puzzles that are just so pointless that they defy rational explanation. Sure, every game has that one annoying puzzle that takes hours to figure out and ends up giving you that feeling of triumph. This one has dozens, though, and after the third, I just didn't feel like brute-forcing an RSA key in my head any more in order to figure out the arbitrary sequence of switches to open that door.

[Isaac]

You could also eliminate sidestepping and make it turn to move forward/back only; but that would actually compromise playability to some extent as well as inducing player rage. I don't consider it a viable fix.

IRRC Stonekeep did this; I don't recall that you could sidestep at all in Stonekeep.

..or you can make monsters able to attack diagonally..

Indeed. That's been a suggestion here before.

Is that even possible? Can a spell be set up to allow the party to do it too? BURST FIRE! SPRAY AND PRAY!

Sure.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/soz3l64w72f9r ... turret.avi

[Dr.Disaster]

Again I freely admit that I wrote AutoHotKey scripts to cast all my combat spells (albeit imperfectly because the game is soooo sluggish).

If you would refer to huge mod's like Demiosis Domain, Price for your Freedom or sometimes even ORRR2 you might have a point because those mods push the engine really hard. But you are talking about the original dungeon behaving "sluggish". Now when this happens the cause is most likely old or weak hardware it has to run on. When running LoG on my now 12 year old WinXP P4 i naturally need to be more patient then on my regular PC but it still let's me complete all time-based puzzles without the need for tools or lowered gfx settings.

[WyredTail]

As am I. I find myself in the same boat, but not without recourse.

I have a degenerative optic nerve condition (missing septum lucidum, if you're curious), and my sight has been deteriorating steadily. If, however, you're using Windows 7/8 then there is something you can do. Turn on Aero. I know a lot of people despise it, but if you have it on, it has this incredible full screen magnifier.

Almost daily I use it with games that have small text, it's a beautiful thing. You just set your game to either windowed mode (or even better, windowed borderless, which Grimrock has) and then you press the Windows key and +. You can zoom in with Win and +, and out with Win and -. You can adjust the levels of zoom by clicking on the magnifying glass, so you can fine tune it to your needs.

I know how it is to be disabled, believe me. I have awful sight and a neurological disorder, and healthy people seem to hate disabled people. It can make you bitter. Frankly, I've seen more hate as a disabled person than I have as when aligned with both the furry fandom and homosexuality, that's how bad it can be, I know. I know it hurts. I know it's shitty. And I know that disabled people tend to be more introverted because healthy people are more... how to put this? Xenophobic? So it's not just fans, it's people in general. The more healthy and 'normal' you are, according to the current status quo, the more likely you are to be xenophobic. I'm sure there's probably some psychological term and scale for this, but I know not of it.

So, back to Windows magnifier!

Here's the cool thing about Grimrock: The buttons tend to be in roughly the same quadrant of the wall (upper middle-ish). So you can clear an area of monsters (so it's just walls and locked doors), then go back and scan around with Windows magnifier. If it opens a wall and monsters start pouring out, then just quickly hold the Windows key and tap Escape, as this turns off the magnifier. I've found this to be an absolute blessing.

Side-stepping? I say 'sod it!' and I temporarily give my characters ridiculous amounts of health. Initially I did it with the CheatEngine, but then I ended up doing it with the console. I reset the values after, once I'd beaten whatever I couldn't beat without side-stepping. And that's fine, because I prefer the puzzling, anyway. I'm not so much of a killer, more of a Myst-er.

You can enable the console by doing the following:

1. Go to your My Documents folder, then into Almost Human, then into Legend of Grimrock.
2. Open notepad and drag grimrock.cfg from that folder onto it.
3. Add a line down (press enter) at the bottom.
4. Add the following lines...

-- console options
console = true
consoleKey = 192

5. Save the file and close it.

That's that! Then in-game, note down your health when you encounter an impossible foe, hit Escape to pause and do the following.

1. Press the Tilde key.
2. Think of a health value that you think would make it easy to defeat the boss (I'll note this as ???).
3. Type... party:getChampion(1):setStat("health", ???)
4. Type... party:getChampion(2):setStat("health", ???)
5. Type... party:getChampion(3):setStat("health", ???)
6. Type... party:getChampion(4):setStat("health", ???)
7. Unpause the game.

So there you go, you can also use setStat to restore your initial health values when you're done. Hopefully this advice will help you with annoying sidestepping requirements and the difficult to see brick hunting bits.

I wish you the best of luck!

[Dandy]

I never finished Grimrock for the following reasons.

1 - No Portcullis
2 - Twitch puzzles (no option to slow them down).
2 - Illogical puzzles.
3 - Even though they may have caught the look of Dungeon master, they were miles short in capturing the spirit.
4 - Extremely unfriendly spell preparation.

It simply got too frustrating and boring.
Here's hoping they do better with Grimrock II