PLEASE stop hiding the player's death scene upon death
Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2017 12:44 am
When you die in a way that surprises or confuses you, the on-death dialog box prevents you from fully working out what actually happened. It is so irritating. This just happened to me again, so I am irritated. Death is often the most important and dramatic moment in a character's life. Permanently hiding the field as soon as it occurs is not appropriate. Usually it's no big deal, but in cases where the player is taken off-guard and wants to look at what happened, it's cruel. I put several hours into my character, and I want to see how it died!
The message log and the character's stats screen are available at this time; that tells you most of what you might need to know. But these don't say where on the field each enemy is, and if you don't happen to exactly remember that, then you might be stuck without full understanding of what happened. For instance, you might not understand how the killer was able to hit you from where it had been standing. Maybe you thought you were protected by walls. Seeing the field would help clear this up.
If the dialog box would just appear to one side, the problem would be mostly (though not completely) solved. That, at least, has got to be a trivial change.
A better solution would be to allow the player to dismiss the dialog box and then maybe bring it back up again by pressing Escape, or something vaguely like that. It'd be ideal if you could inspect creatures on the map exactly as you would be able to do if you character were still alive and still standing on the site of death. I don't need the whole map revealed or anything; just seeing what the character was seeing would be fine. If the character was blind at death, okay THEN I'd be satisfied to see no enemies. That would intuitively feel appropriate. But being arbitrarily blinded by a UI element feels like a slap in the face, when a highly unexpected death occurs.
Allowing click-and-drag movement of the dialog box would help a lot, but I suppose you wouldn't be able to inspect enemies then, though you could at least see their sprites on the map. I want to be able to inspect them. (I know the message log allows this, but sometimes enemies on the map look the same and it isn't obvious which is which, so I want to be able to inspect them via the map too.)
The message log and the character's stats screen are available at this time; that tells you most of what you might need to know. But these don't say where on the field each enemy is, and if you don't happen to exactly remember that, then you might be stuck without full understanding of what happened. For instance, you might not understand how the killer was able to hit you from where it had been standing. Maybe you thought you were protected by walls. Seeing the field would help clear this up.
If the dialog box would just appear to one side, the problem would be mostly (though not completely) solved. That, at least, has got to be a trivial change.
A better solution would be to allow the player to dismiss the dialog box and then maybe bring it back up again by pressing Escape, or something vaguely like that. It'd be ideal if you could inspect creatures on the map exactly as you would be able to do if you character were still alive and still standing on the site of death. I don't need the whole map revealed or anything; just seeing what the character was seeing would be fine. If the character was blind at death, okay THEN I'd be satisfied to see no enemies. That would intuitively feel appropriate. But being arbitrarily blinded by a UI element feels like a slap in the face, when a highly unexpected death occurs.
Allowing click-and-drag movement of the dialog box would help a lot, but I suppose you wouldn't be able to inspect enemies then, though you could at least see their sprites on the map. I want to be able to inspect them. (I know the message log allows this, but sometimes enemies on the map look the same and it isn't obvious which is which, so I want to be able to inspect them via the map too.)
