Just started playing Tome4 - feedback , comments, questions

[Strannik]

Hi guys.

After hearing buzz about TOME4 for a year or so, I finally gave in and decided to give it a try. About myself - I love roguelikes in general, have played a lot of them over the years. And for the records - for the last year or so my favorite RL by far was Dungeon Crawl:Stone Soup. I still like it a lot but I was looking for something different.


So far - awesome experience! I only managed to get the 13 level, so of course I am still just learning the ropes. (Don't want to use spoilers much) Overall feeeling - the TOME4 in its current state is certainly a little rough around the edges, but nevertheless it's great fun.

Few comments/questions, in no particular order:

1. From what I understand from reading this forum, items in dungeons dissapear from the floor, including items that were generated when player entered the dungeon, but that he haven't found before he left the floor. Is it so? If this is correct, IMHO it might be a good idea to change this mechanics, because it strongly discourages new player exploration. For example, as a new player I dib into some dungeon, I have no idea how easy or difficult it would be. But after reading helpful text ("you crap your pants in terror", or something like that ), and perhaps after surviving encounter or too with dungeon trash monsters, if it is clear for me that proceeding forward is suicide because I am too low level for the dungeon - I leave to come back later. (I don't really have a choice if I want to survive) If items (all or some of them) will dissaper from the floor while I am raising my char level elsewhere, it strongly discourages exploration.

2. When and how stores inventories are generated? I've read conflicting info about it here on the forum. Some seem to think that store inventory is generated when player enters the town for the first time, some think that it when player visits the store. Most seems to agree that it is tied to players level at the moment of visit. Is it so? Should I avoid visiting the store until I am higher level, to get better item selection? And also - do stores ever restock their inventory?

3. Not a big deal but I love flavour text for monsters and such. Considering that the game has a lot of lore, some of which is very verbal (and BTW I enjoy the lore so for, it really adds character to the game!) But for a quite a few of monsters and items the description text is missing, while it exists for others. Also the description could be longer.

4. Hundreds of achievenemts - love it.

5. Unlockable stuff - very unusual idea for roguelikes. It can be frustrating sometimes (specifically - not being able to play real mage, which is my favorite type of char in RL and RPGs), but overall - I like it.

6. Ability to get 2nd life on roguelike difficulty, by drinking rare artifact and likely by some other rare means - love it.

7. Excellent class/races diversity and talent trees, as well as deep tactical combat - this is one of the best and strongest features of the game, IMO.

8. Question asbou UI - is there any way for me to make the end of the message log to stay on the screen indefinetely, or at least to make it stay longer? By default it dissapers very quickly. Hitting SHIFT-M every time you want to read what the heck just happened gets old fast... ;(

9. Overall - very good UI, could use some improvements. Like being able to see what's under your feet, seeing your most important stats on the main UI layer, et cetera.

10. Game world - love it. Could use more NPCs and more lore I think, as well as more branching choices.

11. Is there any way to store items in the game? Other then getting house in one of the quests (don't spoil me with specifics of that quest please - I am trying to stay mostly unspoiled )

12. Are there vampiric-style weapons in the game? I got some artifact weapon once which said something like 10 drain life damage (or something like that), but I don't think the damage on successeful strikes added to my health. I didn't have much time to experiment - I've died shortly after.

13. Category talent mechanics is sligthly broken/unbalanced atm I think - everybody seems to agree that at lvl 10 player should get 4th infusion. Based upon my limited 10+ lvl experience so far it seems to be true - getting 4th rune slot beats opening new talent tree by far.

14. Possibly the same is the case with runes - the selection is large, but most player seems to use much more limited subset of it - like 2 health/regeneration runes + wild + one more, often an escape rune. The system could use more diversity and balance IMHO, to give player more meaningful choices.

15. The game could greatly benefit from more detailed wiki and FAQ, like the ones in DC:SS. ATM finding more detailed info about some game mechnics is quite difficult.


Still, overall - the game is fantastic, I love playing it. My deep thanks to darkgod for creating the game. And I am going to send donation.


I am hoping you guys might be able to help me with my in-game questions, thanks a lot in advance!

[Grey]

Hello, and welcome! Glad to hear you've been having fun. I'll try ad answer a couple of your questions...

1. It doesn't make much of a difference really. I think it's a bit pointless for the items to degenerate, but you're only going to miss a small number, so it'll have a minor impact on the character, if any.

2. I don't know when they're generated, but delaying generating shops is not worth the bother. The better ones (Angolwen, Last Hope, Zigur) have a minimum level anyway. Besides, they're most useful early level to plug in equipment gaps, so it's well worth looking early to see if you can nab a bargain weapon or infusion.

Shops do restock after some major story events, but only twice in the game I believe.

3. I do intend on going through all NPCs and artifacts in the game at some point to enrich their descriptions. Feel free to submit your own.

8. Can't remember exactly, but I think there's an option in one of the menus (Game Options perhaps). There's quite a few options for fiddling with the UI.

9. You can hover the mouse over yourself to get a tooltip showing what's under your feet. I agree that having an optional stats pane would be nice.

11. Generally any vault (room with a sealed door) will let you store items on it indefinitely. However there should be very little reason for you to do this. There's also a player house of sorts to be found later on, but I'll let you discover that yourself ;)

12. There's a couple of artifacts that produce this effect, but it's very rare since as you can imagine it's quite an overpowered ability.

13. That's very race/class dependant. Personally I rarely buy an extra rune/infusion at level 10 since I like to increase my talent options as much as possible. Some talent trees are way better than runes/infusions.

14. Diversity and balance? Hard to have both ;) I agree on more balance to what's there, but I think most options are quite viable. For certain classes there is a default set-up, but that's kinda inevitable.

15. Yeah, that does require community effort though. I think partly there's not a lot of incentive to this as the game already has a lot of in-game help and information. Tooltips describe every talent and item, and you can inspect every creature and mouse over all the stats etc for details of how they work. It's not 100% transparent, but it's a lot more than most games, and in general there's little incentive to switch out to a wiki mid-game to check on some obscure detail.

If there's specific mechanics you want to know then the forums are a good place to ask. And it would be good to know what is not so transparent in the game.

[peacedog]

Does #1 apply to artifacts spawned on the floor? I noticed that artifacts stick around if I drop them in town (possibly excepting major game state changes but I haven't gotten far enough in to know if that will hold. E.g. going east). That would suck. I do wish the game would bring back level feelings with respect to artifacts/vaults (but I only care about it for artifacts).

[BasiC]

Hi,I'm also a newbie(have been playing for about a week).
It seemed to me the game could use more written text, like letters and improved dialogues..
What would be the best way to contribute these?(for examination and evaluation by the devs of course)

[Glitch]

As for not having the log fade out so quickly, I can help with that. That is a casualty of the new beta. You'll have to be in game, and save and quit a few times to pull this off, or mess with some config files in your T-Engine directory (under your Users folder on Windows) but it does work.

Ok, in game, go to your Game Options and switch from Minimalist HUD back to Classic. Save, restart, come back in game, and check the Game options again. There will be a new option called chat/Log fade time, or something similar. set that to however you like. Switch back to Minimal HUD, save, quit, restart and there you go. There is also a cfg file buried in your users directory, T-Engine-4.0-Settings directory you can change to achieve the same effect.

I have no idea why that option is unavailable under the new Minimal UI. Changes made to it persist, so I can't think of a good reason for it not to be there, but whatever.

[edge2054]

Artifacts won't despawn so you'll never miss out on a one of a kind item by letting a level despawn.

BasiC you'll want to talk to Grey and Darkgod about contributing lore. I'd send Darkgod a private message with whatever ideas you have.

Also as Grey mentioned many of the artifacts, dialogues, and monster descriptions in the game could use better writing. Any of those you feel like contributing you could just type up and toss in an ideas thread.

More Runes are in the back of my mind and probably still in the back of Darkgod's mind. I'd like to do a few unique (artifact) Runes and Infusions. I'm not sure what Darkgod still has planned.