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Programming / Why Auto-Explore is Missing the Point
« on: December 04, 2012, 07:52:00 PM »
There's something that really bugs me about most Roguelikes, and I'd like to take a moment to air the complaint: Auto-Explore.
Why do we provide an auto-explore feature? Because exploring the dungeon is tedious, repetitive and uninteresting. Auto-explore is a means to get the player to the interesting bits of the game quickly and efficiently. But isn't that missing the point? Rather than giving players a way to skip past the uninteresting portions of the game, shouldn't we strive to make every portion of the game interesting?
This phenomenon isn't constrained to exploration. This is just the most common case. In Angband combat is also quite uninteresting in most cases, leading to "hold left to continue" syndrome. In Frozen Depths most items are quite uninteresting.
When I think back on the games I have played, the only one in which I can honestly say I enjoyed the exploration was DoomRL. I think it's because there is a small map size (like Rogue / NetHack), but with very complex layouts (like Crawl) and widely varied level generators.
On a side note, I think the more confined spaces of DoomRL also help the pacing of the game and the combat.
Why do we provide an auto-explore feature? Because exploring the dungeon is tedious, repetitive and uninteresting. Auto-explore is a means to get the player to the interesting bits of the game quickly and efficiently. But isn't that missing the point? Rather than giving players a way to skip past the uninteresting portions of the game, shouldn't we strive to make every portion of the game interesting?
This phenomenon isn't constrained to exploration. This is just the most common case. In Angband combat is also quite uninteresting in most cases, leading to "hold left to continue" syndrome. In Frozen Depths most items are quite uninteresting.
When I think back on the games I have played, the only one in which I can honestly say I enjoyed the exploration was DoomRL. I think it's because there is a small map size (like Rogue / NetHack), but with very complex layouts (like Crawl) and widely varied level generators.
On a side note, I think the more confined spaces of DoomRL also help the pacing of the game and the combat.