I'd like to be careful to ensure this is taken in proper context. This is feedback on a game I greatly enjoy, a worthwhile thing. I don't want to be perceived as being overly critical, it's intended to be constructive.
This game is destined to be compared against Dungeon Master at every turn, it's unavoidable...
Dungeon Master, 25 years ago had a better levelling system than this game has - with flaws.
This game fixes DM's flaws, however it introduces it's own flaws.
I'd best explain the DM system, as I understand it. I'm sure I'm broadly accurate but I may be slightly wrong - it's not relevant if I'm a touch off.
In the DM system certain actions you could perform would grant you experience. The experience was modified by two factors - 1) are you in combat and 2) what level are you on.
The deeper you went down the more you gained from an action, and like a binary switch if you were in combat you gained experience faster.
So on level two, hacking at a door would grant you very little experience, while on level 10 hacking at a giant rat would grant you a considerable amount more.
Once you had gained enough experience in a certain area you would gain a level in one of 4 categories - fighter, thief, priest, wizard. The skills were split down further, as I understand but I'm not sure exactly how.
This meant that in DM experience was entirely unlimited, and while it was most productive to do it deep down while fighting, you could practice at any point. This had the effect that you could break the game, and remove the challenge. You could hole up on the worm level in the screamer room and gain the experience you should have gained in the next 3 levels, so that when you did go down a level you were significantly more powerful than you should have been. That in itself was a double edged sword. On the one hand you could really see progress in your characters, on the other hand it quite simply removed a great deal of the challenge. They partially fixed that in CSB by making it far more difficult to hole up and gain experience.
In Legend of Grimrock the developers have seen the flaws in the DM system and created their game to ensure it doesn't carry those flaws. There's two things that you can do in DM which 'break the game' and that's training your guys up, and having infinite food. By having xp granted only on monster death you can't train. And by the restriction on inventories and weight, plus the relative lack of places to farm food you don't really have infinite food. This is good.
However the levelling system in Grimrock has it's own problems, sadly.
It lends very easily to min/maxing - this is made worse by perks. When you look at one of the skill trees in Grimrock you immediately start looking at the perks and trying to decide which ones you want. There is a big difference for some characters between achieving and not achieving a specific perk. This means that getting your character build right will lead to a significantly more powerful character than getting it wrong, or even just shoving the points anywhere. This leads to frustration, and poor results which are not the fault of poor decisions. It's also a little unrealistic (if this type of game could ever suffer such a criticism!) in that you can be doing all sorts of other stuff, yet advancing in skill in other areas. You could be using a sword yet becoming no better at swords while you progress in leaps and bounds on maces.
I prefer a more evolutionary process. One where using a sword will gain you experience in swords, one where using fire magic will gain you fire magic experience....
So here's how I would have preferred to see experience - and how perhaps you might consider it for Grimrock 2. It would appear Grimrock has been a great success, deservedly, and I would hope this will encourage the team here to consider a sequel.
I'd like to have no choice at all where to place skillpoints, other than perhaps at character creation. Skillpoints should be allocated to the areas where I use them. Enough skillpoints gained means I move up a level and get the appropriate stat increaases. The game can monitor what skills I am using by flags. If a fighter takes a hit then that's armour, if he swings a sword it's swords, if a mage casts a fire spell it's fire. Those flags are tripped and stay tripped for a very long time (perhaps 5 minutes) and when a monster is killed the experience is divided between any skills that are flagged on a character.
This means if a character is allocated 200 exp points and has flagged swords and armour then they'll get 100 in each.
I'd also like to see certain skill trees removed from the experience system and set to progress in a linear way as characters gain levels. Each of the three classes seems to have one core skill tree - assassination, spellcraft and athletics. I'd suggest that these skills are permanently flagged, so that no matter what is done a character continues to advance in those areas.
I think removing player choice on skills will greatly improve the enjoyment of the game, and additionally will remove the drive to min/max.
