Grimrock

Hello, if this is not the right place to post "annoyances" or "things I would love to see improved", then please kick me in a better direction Otherwise, here goes:

SUGGESTION 1: I'd really rather have the damage blob appear on the PORTRAITS, instead of the bars, of characters.
RATIONALE: Whenever one of my chars is hit, a " >27< " appears on their health bars... completely obscuring them, and for like a full second I have no idea how much life my character has - it is completely hidden by the damage blob. Worse yet, if the character is getting "thousand-cutted" (butchering the irregular verb here), receiving small hits in rapid succession (esp. when surrounded), I can't see the health bar, ever. Hit, hit, hit, hit, AARGH dead, what?

SUGGESTION 2: Add some sort of damage gauge to magic spells.
RATIONALE: Weapons have their damage shown, why not spells? I can't easily choose between, say, Fireburst and Shock; neither the energy cost nor the potential damage is shown anywhere.
EXAMPLE: Add a brief description in the skills list, where they change from "Spell: ???" to the actual spell name. Show it as "Spell: Shock (damage: 27, energy: 10)"

SUGGESTION 3: Have magic runes remember their last setup.
RATIONALE: Picking runes one by one is fun the first few times; later on it's just tedious: when I fire off melee or ranged attacks with one click, and have to click 5 times to cast a spell, I often end up not using magic at all, other than for a big-damage starter. If the runes were all there the next time I'm casting, I'd just hit the cast button and the spell would fly off, without re-entering everything.

SUGGESTION 4: Add a "spellbook", storing known spells.
RATIONALE: hey, I have bad memory. The game draws a map (in non-oldschool mode), so why wouldn't it store spells, once learned? I wouldn't have to carry all those accursed spell scrolls, just to jog my memory. Again what's fun the first time is tedious the next. If I ever happen to lose a scroll (hey, that happens), I'll have to... what, Google for how to cast a spell I already cast like 30 times, and just forgot the rune layout..?
EXAMPLE: The spells could be shown in the "skills list", where they change from "Spell: ???" to the actual spell name. It could show up as "Spell: Shock (&)" with the rune in there, or something to that effect.

SUGGESTION 5: Make repeatable attacks less tedious again...
RATIONALE: accuracy in right-clicking shouldn't become the main goal in the game, done over and over again. Manually right-clicking the weapons, very repeatedly, makes me wonder, every time I play, if I shouldn't just AutoHotkey it, to press a key combo and have it click my two fighters' weapons, my rogue's bow and my mage's wand, perhaps even recasting some favourite spell of mine (see sugg. 3 or 4 above).
EXAMPLE: Can't we have an "ALL ATTACK" button, automatically attempting to re-use the last action each of the characters performed? Even if it were "slowed down" so as not to allow massive all-characters-together blows, it'd still help a lot.
(I see it was already suggested, but derailed here)


Anyway, thanks a lot for reviving a "golden age" game genre, and here's hoping for an editor so that Grimrock could become a platform for much more dungeon crawling goodness :]

Suggestion 1 has been discussed many times, you shouldn't be getting hit that much to make a difference. You should be constantly moving not standing toe to toe.
Suggestion 2 not bad idea
Suggestion 3 & 5 no, no, no
Suggestion 4 has been discussed but not needed at all

Brodie301 wrote:Suggestion 1 has been discussed many times, you shouldn't be getting hit that much to make a difference. You should be constantly moving not standing toe to toe.

In that vein, why show health bars at all? If I'm not supposed to be losing health...

Suggestion 3 & 5 no, no, no

Do you consider repeatability a pro, not a con? Dungeon crawlers have had such features since their dawn, and no-one claimed they're useless.

Suggestion 4 has been discussed but not needed at all

Pretty much nothing is "needed"; Automapping, autopickup, quicksave, autosave, ESC-to-close-inventory... And yet, convenience features were implemented.

Now that no health bar suggestion is a good hopefully someone mods it.

If I'm not mistaken I don't remember an "all attack" until EOB 3, which was the worse of the series, if it was in any earlier games then that I must have not used it. It wouldn't work in this game because of the different cool downs.
The repeat spell is just a cop out for people wanting to dumb a game down. What if I want to cast a different spell, then I have to unclick the runes then reclick new. NOT very logical.

This board is actually more for problems with getting the game to run and all. Your posts would fit better in General Discussion. You'd notice that all of your suggestions have been suggested several times.

You won't see as many stat results in LoG as you would in EoB. EoB used the D&D ruleset in an attempt to be attractive to D&D pen and paper players. Therefor it needed most of the stats and values to be visible to actually be a D&D game.

LoG is not a D&D game, or based on any existing system. Therefor, it's not a requirement for them to make the stats very visible. The game is not very stat driven, and you can complete the game with severe suboptimal stats, so therefor most of the stats and numbers aren't made visible on the screen.

PS. EoB1 and EoB2 didn't have the attack-all button. That really was the only positive thing about EoB3 for me.

Moved to General Game Discussion.

Daniel.

Thanks for the move.

Damage numbers... Still, if a game displays damage for a weapon (allowing a very simple comparison which is faster/stronger, though "more accurate" becomes a problem as "-3" isn't in any way a percentage), then why not for a spell? I ended up specializing my mage in only one area, because I could not find out whether Fireburst trumps Shock or Poison Cloud beats the Ice basic spell. Or, do differently-enchanted arrows do different amounts of damage? Most of those became either "trust" things ("Okay, I'm assuming that if I got Fireball on a high level, then it must be stronger than my Fireburst, even though I wouldn't be surprised if Fireburst gained power through my mage's leveling, and usually ranged spells are weaker than touch spells, so I don't know...") or random, uninformed actions ("oh hell, let's play with ice for a change").