Dungeons of Dredmor Previews, Media, and Beta Thoughts
-
Category: News ArchiveHits: 1779
The first preview is up at Rampant Games:
Part of the appeal of roguelikes for me is the ability to find opportunity in complexity. Those games don't tend to reward the brute-force approach of many mainstream RPGs, but rather a cautious approach, sometimes employing the kind of cheap tactics that might have gotten your account banned on some MMORPGs. Dredmor has this, and goes a step further with a deep crafting system. The game is littered with crafting materials and crafting stations for adventurers to build their own gear.
To give the money earned ((zorkmids) that sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it?) some use, shops can be found throughout the dungeon offering a very limited trading options. Those with the archeologist skill line also gain the ability to send artifacts back to a museum (or shadowy government warehouse, according to the skill description) to directly gain experience from the value of the item.
While the other is up at TIGSource:
The first thing I noticed was the interface at the bottom of the screen, which will be instantly familiar to anyone who has played Diablo or similar games (derived from traditional roguelikes, what would you know). Entirely clickable or assignable to hot-key and filled with helpful mouse-over info, it also has a trait seemingly borrowed straight from Doom: directly in between my health and my mana bars is my character's face, scowling and glancing from side to side and, as I would soon find out, acting as a display of my current health.
I open the door to my left, and see a small creature that I am informed is a (diggle.) Well, this is kind of cute, I thought as I saw other diggles enter the screen from further into the room, shouldn't be too difficult. And that was the death of my first character.
Finally, there are some beta thoughts on the official blog:
I ought to share a bit of insight that Nicholas mentioned about testers; paraphrased: (Hardcore players help us fix mechanics, newbies help us fix UI.)
So true. If anything we probably need more newbie/casual testing getting the UI feeling right and intuitive is a bigger problem than fixing mechanics (which is easy) because they set the first impression of the game. Hardcore roguelike players are used to dealing with interface quirks, but players new to the genre don't have that set of experience/madness that allows them to negotiate obtuse interfaces.
If Dredmor is to be about introducing new players to the roguelike experience then we need to win on the accessibility front. (And to the hardcore who might worry: good accessibility is not (dumbed down) design; it is elegant design.)
