Stitch on 23/5/2012 at 15:16

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So, my four champions descended to level two, the level well-worn in my mind form the constant replaying that I did as a kid instead of the whole actually-making-progress-in-the-game thing.

For the most part the level was a breeze. I was a little apprehensive about the lack of an automap because there's no way in hell I'm cranking out the graph paper and mechanical pencils, but I more or less found things straightforward.

The good news is gameplay generally hasn't aged a day, and once I got comfortable with the controls I was impressed with how much the game sucked me in. Playing the game quickly stopped being a nostalgia exercise and turned instead into an addicting, fun experience in and of itself.

Well, except for the aspects that haven't aged well. The graphics are quite impressive in their own right and easily hold their own--at least as far as this sort of thing goes--but there are certain aspects of presentation and user interface that have rightly been excised from games since. Inventory management is unnecessarily complicated, although its quirks aren't too bad once you get used to them.

Not so forgivable is the fact that the game doesn't actually ever give you the stats (beyond weight) of any gear you find, so deciding what armor to wear or weapons to use is largely guesswork based on trial and error. I know some of the DMcore will defend this as a more realistic system that doesn't coddle players, but I found it to be a needlessly complicated design choice that gets in the way of fun. And so I look the items stats up online while being thankful that games have since abandoned this bullshit.

Other than that, though, the game plays well and the passing of 25 years hasn't rendered it any less compelling. My party of four knocked out level two in less than an hour and I descended down to three, the first branching level of the dungeon and the one on which the younger me met his match.

It was also the level on which the fuses were lit in such a way that the current me almost met my match as well, but I'll save that story for a subsequent post.

Stitch on 23/5/2012 at 15:49

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can't stop won't stop :cool:

Obviously I wasn't referring to the size and layout of the squares, which is (as you pointed out) borderline too simple.

As a modern man expecting good design I found the following aspects of inventory management clumsy:

* Examining the details of an item involves dragging it up to the eye. Why not just display the item's details when you click on it? What value does this dragging process add?
* To give an item to a character, you have to open that character's inventory and place the item on an available inventory square. Why not just implement a system where you can drag an item to the character's icon from the main screen and the item will automatically be added to an available inventory square? RTC has implemented this, I think, but vanilla DM didn't.
* Adding or removing an item from a container requires dragging the container to an empty hand and then dragging things in and out of the container. Why not just make the interior of the container available when you click on it? Working this into the interface would be incredibly easy. I understand the roleplaying concept of needing to have the container in one's hand to open it, but from a gamplay aspect it adds nothing.

These are all examples of user interface issues that render the game just that much less intuitive. Overcoming them is easy enough when the game is as good as it is, but they add nothing to the experience and I can see why subsequent games in the genre have worked them out.

ERH+ on 23/5/2012 at 16:47

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Seriously, You ask too much. I'm not sure if DM was the first game of that type where You could pick up an object from "3D" screen (or pull lever). Earlier games like Wizardry was more text based. Game makers had to invent things that You assume as obvious nowadays.

Koki on 23/5/2012 at 18:12

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DM and Grimrock and you play the latter?

You have chosen... poorly

Stitch on 24/5/2012 at 15:57

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So, this thread may be turning into a diary of my descent into the depths of Dungeon Master, which really wasn't my intent, but hey.

I approached level three--my previous breaking point--slightly different than I had as a kid. Instead of doing the monster-light bits and then abandoning the game out of apprehension over the words "Creature Cavern," I knocked out the latter first and then proceeded to make my way around the remaining challenges. While fun, this is where the game started to seem slightly broken.

To be fair, I don't know if the problem is with Dungeon Master itself or a setting that the port had, or even if I possibly was just making head-smackingly poor decisions, but this is where my party started to feel incredibly underpowered. The mummies and blue drippy guys were fine, but each rockpile battle turned into an extended war of attrition. As a kid I'd just drop them in pits or close doors on them, but as an adult I was determined to beat them with my actual party so that I wasn't passing up opportunities for XP.

Because of this, each rockpile I encountered elicited the groan of disgust that comes with recognizing that before me was another long-ass, non-fun marathon of slowly chipping away at their health. I don't mind tough monsters, of course, but fireballs seemed to barely dent them and my fighters weren't doing much more than a point or two of damage with each hit. Something felt wrong and unbalanced.

I eventually looked up the rockpile's technical details online and discovered that they're more vulnerable to poison than fire, so I changed up my spells accordingly, and I eventually got tired enough of fighting them that I just starting slamming doors on their asses. But due to this resource-intensive series of extended battles, I found myself descending to level four without any food.

Yeah, I completely somehow completely burned through my food supply on level three. That didn't feel right.

Let's backtrack a bit: years of gaming have taught me many things, but at the center of it all is the fact that I just don't enjoy games that feature some sort of long-term resource limit that must be managed. This is a strictly personal thing, of course, but I'm far too paranoid about reaching a point in the game in which I can no longer continue. Place a fire under my ass and I can't help but focus on the fire instead of just playing. I know this pressure is sort of the point, but there's just something about it that doesn't mix well with me.

Because of this, the food-and-water management mechanic of Dungeon Master doesn't exactly jibe well with my brain, despite it being a perfectly valid gameplay mechanic. I didn't handle it well as a kid trying to play Dungeon Master, and I still don't handle it well as an adult. And so it was a monstrous personal anxiety come true when I found myself four levels deep in the dungeon and starving to death.

I decided to soldier on, as level four is known as the worm level, and worms drop food when they die. But each worm fight was again an extended war in which I used up far more resources than the dead worms replenished. I quickly found myself in the gaming equivalent of a dead end, as all four of my characters were low on stats and starving. If I proceeded on they would be ill-equipped in their low-stat state and die from combat. If I slept to top off their stats they would die from hunger.

I knew restarting the game wasn't really an option, as I wasn't going to invest another couple hours just to starve to death again on level four. Something felt off, with my party an underpowered mess that operated mostly as an ever-consuming furnace for food, but I didn't know where the problem was or how to fix it.

In other words, this was it. If I was ever going to beat Dungeon Master, it had to be now.

And so I cheated and looked online. I knew there was a room on this level with a screamer generator, which amounts to a constantly replenishing supply of food. I knew there was a way of unlocking a teleportation shortcut that enabled skipping a decent portion of the level. Finally, I knew I could use what meager magical resources I had remaining to brew stamina potions, which could possibly help me stave off hunger damage just long enough.

Possibly.

What ensued was a mad dash in which I avoided anything and everything not critical to reaching the screamer room, to the degree that I'd dance around monsters or lure them out of hallways into larger rooms where I could then close the door on them and race on. It was a tense experience, one in which I was quite literally fighting for my character's lives with no safety net to speak of. If I failed I failed Dungeon Master.

To wrap this story up: I managed to reach the screamer room and secure the surroundings, at which point I killed screamers and consumed their bodies. I filled my food bars out of the red, gloriously past yellow, and full on through green until they couldn't be filled any further. It was honestly one of the most satisfying gaming experiences of my life. The thrill of beating the endboss of most games didn't hold a candle to the feeling of finally reaching that screamer room and snatching my characters back from the precipice of starvation.

As rewarding as it all was, I wondered, again, if the game was fundamentally broken or if I was doing something wrong. The DMcore might smugly grin and say that Dungeon Master is just from a bygone era where games refused to hold your hand, but I can't help but think that the developers of the game probably didn't intend a cheat-map-checking mad dash to avoid starvation on the third real level of their video game.

I did wonder, again, if there was a setting on the port that was ramping up the difficulty. I found a "DM mode" option that I enabled, although I don't know if this changed anything beyond the rules for character reincarnation, way back at the beginning of the game.

Whatever the case, my characters had carved out their first home base within the dungeon, a place where they could eat, rest, and--perhaps most importantly due to how underpowered my party felt--a place where they could train.

My dudes were back in business.

tl;dr: almost perma-died on level three, didn't die