Grimrock

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.

Halk wrote:I think removing player choice on skills will greatly improve the enjoyment of the game, and additionally will remove the drive to min/max.

The quoted sentence above makes no sense to me. You would enjoy the game more with less choice? You do know you don't HAVE to min/max right? I mean, there's nothing pushing you to have to do it. If you want, put 50% of each of your points in the "core" skill you mention above, and then put the rest in what you think it should "automatically" have been put in. Why make it so people who want to pick the path of their character can't? You can CHOOSE to follow a set rule of where you put the points, you don't have to have an automatic system.

I see what you're looking for, I just don't get how having a choice changes your play. YOU be the automatic system. Why remove someone else's fun when you can fix what you perceive as a problem yourself?

I think the fact that people complain for and against easier/harder min-maxing proves that the devs did something right

Point08 wrote:

Halk wrote:I think removing player choice on skills will greatly improve the enjoyment of the game, and additionally will remove the drive to min/max.

The quoted sentence above makes no sense to me. You would enjoy the game more with less choice? You do know you don't HAVE to min/max right? I mean, there's nothing pushing you to have to do it. If you want, put 50% of each of your points in the "core" skill you mention above, and then put the rest in what you think it should "automatically" have been put in. Why make it so people who want to pick the path of their character can't? You can CHOOSE to follow a set rule of where you put the points, you don't have to have an automatic system.

I see what you're looking for, I just don't get how having a choice changes your play. YOU be the automatic system. Why remove someone else's fun when you can fix what you perceive as a problem yourself?

I did wonder if I should answer this question in the original post...

I do feel that I have to min/max. I play the game to the absolute maximum of my abilities. If I can do something better I will. My goal is to complete the game in the strongest way possible using the least resources, turning out the strongest characters. It's completely alien to me to not try my hardest.

Copy Stone Soup's skill system. Also their magic system, while we're at it. With a few tweaks, it would really lend itself well to this genre.

Halk wrote: I do feel that I have to min/max. I play the game to the absolute maximum of my abilities. If I can do something better I will. My goal is to complete the game in the strongest way possible using the least resources, turning out the strongest characters. It's completely alien to me to not try my hardest.

I concur. I believe the leveling system in the game should be hardcoded to meet a single player's preference. Because Halk can't control his impulse to min/max, no one should be able to

On a side note, for those of you who are interested in min/maxing, I restarted after the first few levels because I noticed that HP/Energy gains per level are not retroactively adjusted for Vitality / Willpower. Ergo, the earlier you pump willpower and vitality, the more Energy/HP you'll have at end game.
Since this is the case, I think the "Vital" (+2 Vit) trait at the beginning may just be flat out better than the "Health" trait (+15 HP). Sure, you'll start with fewer HP, but by the end +2 vitality (since stat gains are so hard to come by) will probably net you way more than 15 health.

Sol_HSA:
"I think the fact that people complain for and against easier/harder min-maxing proves that the devs did something right "

exactly hehe


um what's up with the quote function?
it completely borked when i used it

Hmm.

I am not trying to make the game harder - I think they've got the difficulty right.

I'm trying to avoid the pitfall of D&D games, having to plan out in advance exactly what you're going to take, when you're going to take it and working out how many skill points or feats etc you're going to get and planning a min/max character based on that.

I'm trying to remove a frustration because unless you know what's coming later in the dungeon you're guessing what's best to do with your character. This was one of the fantastic strengths of DM, for example. A poor levelling system adversely affects a game, look at Morrowind for example. Or look at what you ended up down in the NWN expansions with high level characters.

I agree with you.

I am not sure if EXP is a completely limited resource or if I just haven't made it to that point yet, but this is always one of the most annoying parts of games like this.

Not only do you have puzzles, but you need to make sure you "collect" all of the EXP from the monsters and spend it on the right things.



The big problem I have with that is that there are obvious choices to spend your points on early, yes having more attack damage is great but if you go with more VIT, you have the unique addition of more HP which you will not have later. Whereas, getting STR later, gives you the same attack damage. Having a warrior that doesn't hit like a truck, but takes punishment, makes it a lot easier to get hits in on the rest of your characters.

Am I the only one who has a problem with half EXP for not dealing damage? Could this be changed to half/no XP if the character is dead or something?

My main problem with the leveling system is that I can't see any reason for not simply maxing out one skill and leaving the others untouched. This is especially true for weapon skills. Weapon skill gives special attacks, stats and attack power, and the higher sometimes even give bigger bonuses than the earlier level of the skill. It therefore seems like you gain a bigger bonus from putting points into your weapon skill which is already at a high level than to give a few points into defence. This seems like a serious flaw to me; skills should give diminishing returns or there should be synergy between skill so that people can spread out their skill point between more than one skill. There exist some synergy, for example between a weapon skill and the Assassination skill, but it doesn't seem to provide enough to actually make you want to not max out one of them.

Might and Magic 6-9 has solved this by increasing the cost for raising skills. To raise a skill from level 10 to 11 you have to spend 11 skill points while it only costs 2 points to raise a skill from level 1 to 2. This means you will want to keep your primary skill (such as the weapon skill) at max level, but also raise the others a bit simply because they give you a lot more for each point spent. I am not saying this is the perfect system, but it's one possibility and would be an improvement. On the other hand, we also want some specialization and not a system where you simply put equal amount of points into every skill.

When it comes to the experience needed to level, I don't think it's a major problem because of how the experience requirements grows exponentially. It seems to me that later in the game you will only be two levels ahead even if you have twice as much experience. Two levels is definitely an advantage, but it doesn't exactly break the game, and it takes a major effort to get that much experience. I also feel like the way combatants gain extra experience seems a bit flawed (every member should do some damage to each monster for max XP) but doesn't have much of an impact on the overall gameplay.