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Other Announcements / Difficulty
« on: August 03, 2009, 01:19:23 AM »
Where exactly is the line between "difficult and challenging" and "unbeatable"?
I was having a pretty good run in POWDER 111 today and met my demise in what I would call a "perfect storm" by the CPU. It's not an isolated incident, either. I would chalk it up to just having bad luck, but jeez, I must have broken more mirrors in NetHack than I remember, to get this kind of bad luck. So many times now I have fled down a darkened corridor from a mob of very angry kobolds/what have you only to trip over a much deadlier monster that quickly deals a killing blow. It's uncanny.
Also, water elementals and cockatrices are quite possibly the two biggest menaces in the game, because of certain EXTREMELY deadly special attacks they have (strangle and petrify, respectively) that a player has NO defense against unless he has had the good fortune of acquiring certain items, or in the case of the cockatrice, has accumulated sufficient items to counter the attack. To constantly keep up one's defenses to the task at hand one FREQUENTLY has to quite literally juggle protective baubles of various natures, removing a counter-petrification one to wear a no-breathing one, and again to wear a poison warding one. And this is assuming you have had the good fortune to find these critical items.
And so I started thinking to myself... at what point does difficulty turn into absurdity?
Don't get me wrong, POWDER 111 is great. I waste lots of time on it on a daily basis. But something seems fishy... after having ascended with two roles in NetHack and having been brutalized by IVAN, I would like to think I know what the difference between challenging and absurd is in a roguelike.
I was having a pretty good run in POWDER 111 today and met my demise in what I would call a "perfect storm" by the CPU. It's not an isolated incident, either. I would chalk it up to just having bad luck, but jeez, I must have broken more mirrors in NetHack than I remember, to get this kind of bad luck. So many times now I have fled down a darkened corridor from a mob of very angry kobolds/what have you only to trip over a much deadlier monster that quickly deals a killing blow. It's uncanny.
Also, water elementals and cockatrices are quite possibly the two biggest menaces in the game, because of certain EXTREMELY deadly special attacks they have (strangle and petrify, respectively) that a player has NO defense against unless he has had the good fortune of acquiring certain items, or in the case of the cockatrice, has accumulated sufficient items to counter the attack. To constantly keep up one's defenses to the task at hand one FREQUENTLY has to quite literally juggle protective baubles of various natures, removing a counter-petrification one to wear a no-breathing one, and again to wear a poison warding one. And this is assuming you have had the good fortune to find these critical items.
And so I started thinking to myself... at what point does difficulty turn into absurdity?
Don't get me wrong, POWDER 111 is great. I waste lots of time on it on a daily basis. But something seems fishy... after having ascended with two roles in NetHack and having been brutalized by IVAN, I would like to think I know what the difference between challenging and absurd is in a roguelike.