wizard mode on, you fight, you die, you resurrect with full health, you fight, you die etc. No, not at all as lots of people play Elona too.īecause there's a difference : save scumming does not remove the challenge posed by a situation, while wizard mode does remove the challenge.Ī simple example, you have a low level character, 3 Orcs and 2 Ogres comes for you. That's a good way to leave to the player choice if he wants to keep playing with a character he may have got to like, or just start anew with another character.ĭoes this lack of forced perma death remove all the interest of the Elona rogue like ? Perma death is a gameplay design, but that's not perma death that makes me continuing to play several games in this genre, it is their replayability, their randomness that usually allow many games never going the same way, their gameplay mechanisms.Įlona has an interesting way to manage this specific gameplay design : you can or not leave your player to die after he gets killed.īut not accepting death is completely different from what Crawl wizard mode does : your character and his equipment are very impacted by this in their stats and more. Maybe because that someone appreciate a lot nearly every other features of this genre and the several gameplay changes the randomisation will do, and getting over perma death does not make any of the other game feature uninteresting ? There are several easy combos to choose from, and if you lose past the first few levels it's your fault. Wizard mode gives you unlimited lives without the inconvenience of manually having to create backup files.īoth Crawl and Nethack effectively have "easy mode" in the form of character combos. Save scumming eliminates all tension and the need for strategy/tactics in a roguelike, since you can just use a backup save file whenever you die. There's barely any difference between save scumming and using wizard mode. If you don't like starting over every time you lose, then play something else. What's the point of playing a roguelike if you're just going to remove it's defining features? The whole point of roguelikes is the permanency of death and challenging gameplay. Crawl is not the kinda game that encourages role playing. If you feel like you've lost something important every time your character dies, then you'll never be clear-minded enough to progress.
Getting attached to your characters will make you a worse player. This way you'll keep the game fun for every kind of players and will not remove the challenge like Wizard mode does, as even with save scumming you'll have to face often horrible odds I wish Crawl had difficulty modes with the classic "ironman" difficulty, that is the current Crawl game system, and an "easy" mode that would allow reloading a save instead of deleting it when your character die, with the counter effect of not counting for the score of course. I believe that's why save scumming is so used, to avoid losing your fun with a frustrating end once you get attached to a character, because the main point of Crawl is having fun and save scumming does not remove the challenge and so the fun like wizard mode does (wizard mode giving you full health when you die, while in save scumming you will need to face the same difficulty that killed you) Losing in the beginning is not a problem, as it is difficult to care about your own low level character with no good items and no good spells/powers or no good fighting capacity, getting a kobold poisonning your level 3 character to death does not annoy me at all, because at that point i don't care yet.īut once you get nice items, good decent spells or faith abilities and can fight in interesting way, losing become frustrating because you begin to like playing with this character. Quote from: Robsoie on September 26, 2010, 12:03:50 pm The main problem with Crawl is losing when you are attached to a character.