ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Darkgod et al. I've recently been playing around with tome4 as part of my yearly "let's get some ideas" spree. I would like to offer some feedback. For reference my character (dwarf berserker) has made it to the east and has cleared two of the orc bases. She's still alive, but who knows for how long that will be. This was my first character attempt, although I did play around a little with the game about a year ago.

First the positive:

The game is absolutely beautiful. This is a testament to the amazing collaboration between DarkGod and Shockbolt (who I'm guessing did most of the graphics). Fantastic job.

For the most part, the user interface is very friendly. Although, I will have some small critiques below.

The attention to detail to the plot and the lore is pretty cool.

I love the different styles in the various dungeons. Besides the visual elegance, this is probably my most favorite part.

I found both the performance (game speed) and the difficulty level have been much improved over the past year.

Escorted characters behave much nicer. That was probably the most frustrating part of last year.

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I'm going to limit myself to one major critique of something that I don't like, and the rest will be relatively minor stylistic changes or bugs.

Major critique:

There's too much stuff. It's pretty bewildering. Comparing equipment is near impossible in the midgame, even with the ctrl option. The stuff doesn't even fit on the screen! It's extremely difficult to guess what resistances or abilities are important. Similarly, I feel there are way too many options for talent trees, but I admit this comes from a personal dislike of talent trees, and is unlikely a shared opinion. However, where it is problematic is in trying to judge danger levels of unique or rare enemies. There are tons of effects to try and learn, to tell how dangerous something is. In the last part of "too much" and I admit I cheated by folding lots of stuff in here. There're too many messages that it's really hard to pick out the important stuff from the battle. Color coding some messages will help a little, but I also have some more suggestions below. Y'all should probably take it as a compliment that my big critique is a mere stylistic difference for gameplay.

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Bugs/suggestions possible to fix for release:

Some dungeons have disconnected areas, not accessible without digging.

The game is not too friendly for laptop players. An option to move with hjklyubn would be very nice. I had to spend way too long in the beginning of the game messing around with the key-bindings.

I feel the game should steer players to clear out the easier zones before sending them off to old forest/sandworm/daikara/maze etc. If you're a dwarf the game doesn't tell you about rhaloren camp for example, and I feel it should.

Randarts seem weaker than normal items. I don't think I've used a single one.

Ambushes seem too powerful. They're also kind of a shitty way to die. Dying to a boss is ok. Dying to an ambush is anti-climactic. And they seem more dangerous than most bosses.

Attempting to teleport in an ambush map did nothing, but there was no message or anything. I just lost a turn. I feel if teleporting is not allowed, the game should at very least let you know why.

Moving into a wall when confused does not lose a turn. Similarly, if there's an unknown invisible monster in one of the walls, you could try hitting all the walls until you manage to attack the invisible monster, since you don't lost a turn for moving into an unknown wall. Solution: when confused any motion, even illegal ones, cost a turn. 2) You can't attack into a wall unless you see the monster, or you use ctrl+direction. ctrl+direction should always cost a turn.

I wish talents and abilities had a "check before using this ability" in the configure menu. I've mistyped and teleported too many times.

looking at rares/uniques should tell you what class they are. At the very least this would help a player learn what can do what.

It's too hard to figure out why you died. I feel this is an important aspect of roguelikes or any game where death is important. The player must be made aware exactly why they died, so they can learn from their mistakes. Allowing them to replay the last 3 turns with a movie might help. Maybe have an incarnation of the monster that killed them (or all that damaged them in the last few turns) in the exit area so the player can look at them and see what it was that damaged them. The difficulty is related somewhat to the message spam and an inability to figure out what monsters can do.

The game should warn you when you try to rest when there's a timed event or an escort quest.

The game should warn you when an area of effect spell will damage friendly characters. This includes things like death dance.

On some maps it's possible to have the player/monsters hidden under the ability bar thing.

The player is told who damages them even if the caster is not seen. This includes invisible monsters. In these cases, the monster name should be suppressed. Similarly, when a monster casts a damaging effect on the player, the damage is referred to by the monster name, when it should be the effect that's causing damage. Examining the effect on the upper right should indicate how the player got it, if they know.

Why can't I close doors?

An option to suppress all player generated sound effects would be awesome. Basically, I care a lot more that I'm getting hit by lightning than the fact that my weapon just cast a lightning bolt for 10 additional damage.

If you go back to reknor is lost dungeon after clearing it. Norgim is still standing there. If you exit back to the iron council you get the quest cleared message again.

Monthly is misspelled as montly in the donation page.

When referring to Urkis the anguilwen mage person uses the phrase "going rogue" which seems way out of place given the style of the rest of that person's dialogue.

I'll let you know if I come up with more. Overall a great job by everyone who's contributed!

I think those are reasonable and fairly common criticisms. A few thoughts:

What you are calling "randarts" are probably the class of items known as "rares," which are generally pretty crappy. Real randarts can be incredible.

Confusion, invisibility, and monsters-in-walls: I agree, there isn't much logic (or feedback) here. Instead of adding a special move-attack-wall button for a single monster type, I think it would be better to make invisibility and wall-walking mutually exclusive.

A "require confirmation for untargeted talents" option actually sounds really nice. I've hit the wrong key more than a few times.

The inability to close doors is odd, but very few monsters "wander".

I kind of agree about having too many options. Unfortunately it would take a complete rework of the game to address that problem. It's probably valuable input for future development/modules.

bricks wrote: Confusion, invisibility, and monsters-in-walls: I agree, there isn't much logic (or feedback) here. Instead of adding a special move-attack-wall button for a single monster type, I think it would be better to make invisibility and wall-walking mutually exclusive.

It's already there. Ctrl+direction attacks in the direction without attempting to move if nothing is there. I guess I knew to look for it because it works that way in angband too. As with anything else, the important point is making the intended behavior obvious to the player, along with keeping some semblance of consistency.

bricks wrote: The inability to close doors is odd, but very few monsters "wander".

Closing doors gives ability to modify line of sight. It also may allow you to block off monsters that can't open doors, like giant ants. It's not a big deal, I just found it strange.

bricks wrote: I kind of agree about having too many options. Unfortunately it would take a complete rework of the game to address that problem. It's probably valuable input for future development/modules.

It's probably entirely a matter of personal preference. I'm certainly not expecting or even advocating any sort of change in this area!

re: ambush map teleporting: the reason that your teleport failed is because it has a minimum range of 15, and the map is 14x14. IIRC, the maps got expanded to 18x18 in SVN, which (mostly) fixes it. If it was expanded to 20x20, then teleports could never fail.

I like the idea of "check before using talent", it could work as basically the opposite of auto-use.

I also like listing rare/unique/adventurer classes on their tooltip. Checking their character sheets is better, but takes too long.

For things hiding under the UI elements, my personal workaround is to (temporarily) hide the UI, which I bound to [keypad +]. The ability to define a "safe area" for the display, that would let the map edge scroll to there instead of the edge of the screen would be good.

Iirc regarding the door thing, it was done that way because of vaults, which are basically designed to be a sort of "genie in the bottle" type situation where you don't get take-backs, so to speak Opening those doors are a bit of a final decision, and intended to be so, so far as I can remember the devs commenting on it.

Could probably special case those vault doors so they can't be closed and let the rest be able to be closed, but... I'unno. Right now, not very much can open doors besides the player, and being able to close them would trivialize quite a few encounters. Could counter that by letting more stuff open doors, or changing how the AI reacts to a door being slammed in their face, but m'not sure if it's worth really bothering with. It'd be a fairly minor thing that'd take a fair amount of effort to adjust for without terribly much overall gain. But maybe, ha. S'not like there hasn't been plenty of things like that done over the versions.

Taking the rest from the top, where I've got a $0.02 to throw in.

It'd probably be nice to have a couple extra "default" keybinding setups included, thinking on it. hjklyubn would be a good start, but I think there's a couple other major ones.

Bricks covered the rares pretty well. They occasionally have something useful (they've got a tendency to get a nice chunk of resistance penetration on odd slots, like tools), but they're generally junk. Randarts are something rather entirely different (they're orange, versus pink-ish), and can get ridiculously powerful, easily competing and often surpassing even the best set artifacts in the game.

Adventurer parties get a lot of flak, and the later ambushes are pretty nasty, too. My constant ideal is to have them opt-in (because they can be pretty valuable in a few ways), but DG seems to prefer just slowing them down so they're less likely to catch you offguard.

Telling classes on rares and rand-uniques would be very nice. It doesn't take very long to get a feel as to what's what (sustains usually give it away, and when they don't, what powers and saves they have pumped narrows it down), but it'd be nice to have some of the guesswork gone without having to inspect the buggers.

Combat log issues have been a long time thing, and it's improved bits here and there. A postmortem breakdown (You see something similar in a number of competitive multiplayer games, actually) would probably be pretty interesting. Last ten turns and the (inspectable) profiles of whatever's damaged you during that period would be awesome.

Regarding the UI getting in the way of stuff, my eternal suggestion is dockable and resizable windows (ala good ol'angband's terminals), but I get the nasty suspicion that if I ever want to see that I'll have to code it myself ... and I'm not a coder, at all, heh. But yeah, you might give the classic UI a try. Only thing it has obscuring the playing field is the combat and chat logs, and you can sorta' see through those.

IIRC, the code for showing classes is actually already there, in the game's debug mode.

If I'm recalling this right, it should be very easy to implement, as such.

Considering that experienced players check the tooltips on rares/elites/etc. the first thing they do, it probably should just be a main game feature. It being hidden made more sense before rares.

fizzix wrote: Ambushes seem too powerful. They're also kind of a shitty way to die. Dying to a boss is ok. Dying to an ambush is anti-climactic. And they seem more dangerous than most bosses.

Amen, man. There are quite a lot of players who think like that.

You guys are right, I was confusing randarts and rares. I guess it was strange to have named items that were junk.

fizzix wrote:You guys are right, I was confusing randarts and rares. I guess it was strange to have named items that were junk.

They're not always junk, but they are very miss-and-hit. Most of them are transmog fodder, but every now and then you get one that is really useful to you.

Rares have already been buffed in RC1.

Not sure how much, mind you.

Frumple wrote:Adventurer parties get a lot of flak, and the later ambushes are pretty nasty, too. My constant ideal is to have them opt-in (because they can be pretty valuable in a few ways), but DG seems to prefer just slowing them down so they're less likely to catch you offguard.

You have inspired me, and I have written an addon implementing your idea.

Awesome

Definitely throwing that on the next time I fire up T4.

I figure I might remark my final comments now that the character met her demise.

Some more hints as to what order to do things in the east would be helpful. Not all orc prides are the same. Not all optional dungeons are equally dangerous.

The portal person should tell you to use the orb of many ways to get back to the west. As opposed to just saying "do you like my portal?"

Upon death, I couldn't do anything. There was a screen with a list of achievements, but it ran off the top and bottom of the screen, I couldn't exit out of it. No keys worked. I had to alt-tab out and shut down the game in task manager. File disappeared upon final death, so I guess I just make a new one, as opposed to starting a descendent from the same file?

Final death count was. Twice from a dreadfell vault, once from elven ruins boss + rare combo, three times from orc ambushes (not including the one after master), and twice to the fire elemental guy, didn't really have a chance in that fight. Had I known to bring fire gear with me... next time I will know.

You made it east, which is what I consider a good run.

Right now certain things are not intuitive in game. After finishing your 2 racial dungeons you are told to go to t2s even though everyone just does all the other t1 dungeons.

After getting east you get the quest for the prides, even though there is no way you're ready to take them on - the optimal course of action is doing the optional dungeons in the east (the one with spiders, underwater cave/temple of creation, shadow crypt, orc breeding pits) followed by vor armory and briagh's lair (zemmekys' quest), then the backup guardians in the west, tannen's quest, and then the prides.

When I first went East, I was able to take one look at the first rooms of the Prides and decide to put them off until later. I think we should leave the players some room to figure things out on their own. ToME is already a fairly transparent game, and by the time a player makes it past Dreadfell, it's safe to assume they know how it works.