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It's not that slow. Especially considering that your character auto-walks to any given spot, provided he doesn't see an enemy on the way or you won't interrupt him yourself. This makes moving around feel smooth, without turning it into an annoyance (ignoring enemies when auto-moving would have been very bad).
It's strictly worse than roguelikes with actual auto-explore, and slower than moving manually tile at a time. In fact that's a trend about the game all over. It's just plain worse than playing Brogue or whatever. It even replicates picking up single items from Diablo and right clicking menus to do a single action is fucking retarded.
The interface is Dungeons of Dredmor jank all over again.
It's also picked the worst compromise for permadeath ever. No saving on game exit means you can just quit if it's gone badly since last save and scum the levels.
It's a matter of personal taste then, I think. Because to have to move manually tile-by-tile would kill the game for me, since it'd require constant input while not speeding things by all that much. As it is right now I can move a large distance by doing only a few clicks and I don't feel like it's taking me forever.
It's also picked the worst compromise for permadeath ever. No saving on game exit means you can just quit if it's gone badly since last save and scum the levels.
I'd rather be able to quit at any time I want. This save system is fucking retarded and I don't buy the "it's the engine's limitation" for even one moment because that would be a sign of monumental incompetence. This isn't a SNES we're playing on.
Game reminds me of nethack but very slow paced. Also reminds me of jagged alliance kind of with travelling between sectors. I hate the map system at least let us edit it to put a dot where we are. Why can't my guy buy paper and mark where he is if he can wrap bandages around his ass and apply herbs and bandages to his swollen anus.
Idk it seems promising. I thought nethack sucked. I like the immersion stoneshard has going for it.
After playing 4h I'm tired of the hopping animation, a fast traveling mode that skips the walking animations would be good. Also, the interface elements gets constantly in the way of the character range of vision, but you can scroll the screen by holding MMB. Mouse movement is retarded and walks over traps that the character has already discovered. I think going with a keyboard-centric interface would be much better, with a (l)ook command that automatically hides interface elements and snaps to PoI like hostiles and destructibles, a (g)et command that spawns a list of items to pick up and a functional autoexplore command.
Why do people keep asking for games to play themselves in this thread? You can use the arrow keys by the way if you are tired of the simple pathfinding (needs to be repositioned for us right handers for sure).
Why do people keep asking for games to play themselves in this thread? You can use the arrow keys by the way if you are tired of the simple pathfinding (needs to be repositioned for us right handers for sure).
Because roguelikes shine in the moments where the right or wrong decision means your character dies or survives and the autoexplore function is a staple of the genre. I derive no pleasure from walking from forest tile to forest tile. Yes, I realize this isn't a roguelike anymore, but it has roguelike sensibilities.
People have been trained to loath any effort, they just wanna lay on bed, be dorrito fed by their argonian slave and get constant endorphin injections (cooldown: 5 sec) from Dr. JEW
Some of the biggest supporters of Decline live on this forum. They're middle aged, bored, short on time, short on attention, short on patience, short on hair and just wanna eazy victories in all vidya gaemz, cause in their daily lives all they experience are hard defeats. Go, rate me edgy cause you know deep down itz true
Game looks & plays awesome! If you have 15 minutes of patience, you figure out pretty much all so far implemented systems. Never before have I travelled more of the map with less clicks than in Stoneshard. P.S. 1) Kill all wolves on roads and sell them on Chinese food market 2) Buy better mace
Survival elements are really annoying. Game plays more like a hardcore version of the Sims then a rougelike. I feel like I'm managing the worlds biggest baby. Constantly needs to eat food and drink alchohol and take drugs cause he got a booboo on the head. oh oh watch out im down 10 hitpoints and my guy sad from the booboo on his head, should really rest the extra 30 turns and eat a meal of chicken breast to cheer up the little guy. Don't worry only 1 bandit with a mace and shield i took out 6 just a while ago. oops waah fumble "more baby noises" DEAD.
This game is roleplaying a world stongest man athlete in medieval world who needs 10k calories a day but also happens to be the worlds biggest degenerate baby that needs constant baby formula and alchohol to get by.
Survival elements are really annoying. Game plays more like a hardcore version of the Sims then a rougelike. I feel like I'm managing the worlds biggest baby. Constantly needs to eat food and drink alchohol and take drugs cause he got a booboo on the head. oh oh watch out im down 10 hitpoints and my guy sad from the booboo on his head, should really rest the extra 30 turns and eat a meal of chicken breast to cheer up the little guy. Don't worry only 1 bandit with a mace and shield i took out 6 just a while ago. oops waah fumble "more baby noises" DEAD.
This game is roleplaying a world stongest man athlete in medieval world who needs 10k calories a day but also happens to be the worlds biggest degenerate baby that needs constant baby formula and alchohol to get by.
LOL i just managed to clear a cemetary in Stoneshard by dumb luck and on my way home i get bit by a forest viper and die to poison since i had no choice then to run home with the loot in the darkness.
why arent there any camping equipment in this game so i can sleep til dawn?
Just found out that enemies actually do follow you from screen to screen. When I hunt I can follow the prey to the edge of the screen and kill them off pretty easily there. Not so much with a dungeon boss. Running away to another floor to recharge and finding out the guy actually follows was quite a surprise.
Anyway, having heaps of fun with this. Going to play through some contracts and then put it in the fridge for awhile. Don't want to burn out on it before release.
LOL i just managed to clear a cemetary in Stoneshard by dumb luck and on my way home i get bit by a forest viper and die to poison since i had no choice then to run home with the loot in the darkness.
why arent there any camping equipment in this game so i can sleep til dawn?
LOL i just managed to clear a cemetary in Stoneshard by dumb luck and on my way home i get bit by a forest viper and die to poison since i had no choice then to run home with the loot in the darkness.
why arent there any camping equipment in this game so i can sleep til dawn?
LOL i just managed to clear a cemetary in Stoneshard by dumb luck and on my way home i get bit by a forest viper and die to poison since i had no choice then to run home with the loot in the darkness.
why arent there any camping equipment in this game so i can sleep til dawn?
To begin with, we’d like to thank everyone who believed in us and decided to support the development by purchasing the game over these last two days. The amount of players was completely beyond our wildest expectations, and we consider it a great success for our team – we will continue to diligently work on the game to repay your trust. We fully understand that the game still has a long way to go. We plan to gradually fix the shortcomings which were pointed out as well as add new content. Thank you all once more -- we are set on doing everything in our power to implement everything we’ve planned.
After receiving the feedback it became clear to us that the biggest flaw of the game is the lack of the save system. We’d like to assure you, it was not a conceptual decision, designed to make players suffer by losing time and progress. Saving on exit is a fairly obvious QoL feature, which we would implement if we had the opportunity. Unfortunately, due to a combination of multiple factors – procedural world generation, huge number of objects in every location, as well as parameters which require saving, this task is impossible to perform from the technical standpoint.
The reason is not GMS2, as it could be misunderstood from the message about “engine limitations”, the reason is our procedural generation engine. The saves currently used by the game technically differ from saving in any part of the game world – they save the seed of visited locations, regenerating the world on each loading, they don’t save the state of the world, as it was left by the player. Otherwise, the saves would end up weighting a few gigabytes and take minutes to load. That’s why the saving is done in designated locations which don’t contain objects requiring their state to be saved – tavern rooms, the archive in the Prologue, the location with Archon etc.
With the addition of a mobile caravan which would serve as a save spot, this problem would disappear on its own, since the player would have a place to save their progress at just a short walk away. However it will take a long time to implement it, and there’s already a need for a solution – that’s why we’ve decided to add extra save spots to the existing world by reworking the current camp system.
Now the brigand camps, initially marked with a question mark on the map, can be cleared out and then used as a save spot by clicking on bed. We’ve changed the algorithm for their generation to spread them more evenly across the map, placing them closer to roads and dungeons. We hope that this measure will make your game experience more pleasant. In the future, as it was already mentioned, there’ll be even more save spots. Other than the caravan, some random locations, roadside inns, etc. will also be used as save spots.
Thank you!
CHANGELOG
THIS UPDATE MAY WORK WITH AN OLD SAVE BUT IT'S ADVISED TO START A NEW RUN
QOL
It’s now possible to save in brigand camps
Map can now be opened by clicking on corresponding Journal tab or with M hotkey. Initially this was planned for the upcoming global map, but many people were left confused and thinking that map navigation isn’t yet available.
Journal and Map hotkeys now can be redefined.
Maps were added to Elders stock. You can now purchase the map if you somehow lose your starting one.
Many text fixes in all localizations
We’ve temporarily added small stock of leather/cloth items to Smith’s Apprentice in Mannshire. Initially we wanted settlements to have different distinctive features and craftsmen, but since there’re only two settlements and no caravan yet, the lack of tailor in Mannshire ended up being a nuisance.
Added a hint regarding moving the camera around with MMB to the tutorial sequence.
ART & VISUALS
Added new brigand camp’s variation for temperate biomes
Added new brigand camp’s variation for Steppes
Many visual fixes of brigand camps
Visual fixes of Witch’s Hut
Many visual fixes of equipment
Fixed missing on-character sprite for Magistrate Gambeson
Fixed playable characters having wrong corpse spites
BUGFIXES & STABILITY
Fixed rare crash upon starting the game
Fixed Vampiric Rune-related crash
Fixed unique items droplist resetting on load, allowing them to drop more than once
Fixed crash on enemy examination
Fixed Proselyte Apostate attacking from 2 tiles away instead of 1
Fixed carts generation on locations’ edges
BALANCE
Brigand Camps spawns now depend on player level
Reduced damage of Jorgrim’s starting weapons
Reduced damage taken by body parts by 8%
Proselytes, mid-tier and high-tier brigands were buffed by ~5-10%, as they didn’t present much danger to 4+ lvl characters.
At launch wolves were especially deadly because of their bugged “Rend Flesh” ability causing two attacks instead of one. Now this issue is fixed, so their health and damage values were reverted to pre-Hotfix values.
Because of Pain Limit formula changes, passive pain reduction was increased. (-0.1 > -0.13) on >75% Health and additional (-0.15>-0.2) on >90% Health.
Dungeons don’t generate 4th floor anymore. Deep 4-5-floored dungeons will return once we revamp dungeon generation to make their exploration less monotonous.
Reduced durability of equipment found in Luxurious Tombs.
Reduced Jewelry drop rates from Crypt urns.
Increased Golden Teeth drop rates from wooden coffins.
Antitoxin is now more effective (-20% Toxicity > -25%)
Reduced Toxicity of Stardust (+30% > +25%). Now it’s time to reduce toxicity of our Steam discussions.
Antivenom now provides +75% Poison Resistance x30t.
Food spoilage rates were increased by 50-100% depending on type.
Rebalanced secondary attributes of most daggers to make their stats less clogged and more varied.
ECONOMY
Many changes to default price modifier when selling items to NPCs:
Increased base price modifier for Alcohol (+30% > +50%) – it's assumed alcohol should be a valuable trade good to find and sell
Increased base price modifier for Medicine (0% > +20%) – during war times people are more willing to pay for medical supplies
Increased base price modifier for Beverages (0% > +10%)
Increased base price modifier for Drugs (0% > +10%) – they say drugs are a hot commodity… for some people.
Decreased base price modifier for Scrolls (0% > -10%)
Decreased base price modifier for Treatises (0% > -10%) – no one reads them anyway
LOL i just managed to clear a cemetary in Stoneshard by dumb luck and on my way home i get bit by a forest viper and die to poison since i had no choice then to run home with the loot in the darkness.
why arent there any camping equipment in this game so i can sleep til dawn?
thing is, i only had salve, water, bandages and meat on me and the loot, i have yet to find a anti-venom thing (are there no potions at all for that?).
Finally broke and ended up buying the game. I was able to clear the prologue and just saved in the first tavern so far. Picked the barbarian character, so we will see how that goes. Glad to hear about the new save spots in the patch, it sounded like a lot of people were annoyed by this.
The code base is likely beyond your usual indie spaghetti, data are literally stored in raw .csv and .txt. Devs are hyper dodgy about it. On the other hand, they are responsive and dedicated. The prologue is the best part of the project, an entertaining no-frill dungeon crawl. I do not regret paying for that alone. May be they ran out of resources a good while ago and went all in polishing the demo for the fabled first impression. It works for them and steamspy shows >100k copies already.
OK, so I got the game, spent ~15h in. Got 3 characters, since normies already forced their way with saving, and devs went full anal and made previous savegames incompatible in newest patch...
The overall impression is rather good. A bit like a single character Battle Brothers questing. The story is decent (looming danger mystery) but mosty executed by dungeon crawl fetch quests, however what else would one expect in a roguelike anyway. Presentation is good, everyone saw the visuals so no point in diving in. Sound aspects are rather minimalist, footsteps, combat samples, the usual; some occasional music, adaptive at that, but so scarce and unmemorable overall I switched to music player after around 3h. Noticeably dialogues in prologue are voiced, a weird choice but I guess the thunder of the D:OS dictates; I'd rather have enemies voice sampled in combat...
No custom characters at this point, but it's quite apparent that the character system, while very granular (literally dozens of derived stats; a basic weapon will have around 5 various modifiers) is also rather shallow and unbalanced (by design, not just beta numbers). The base 5 stats are the main offenders here as they correspond to nothing but minuscule changes in above mentioned derived stats - you pour those 2 level up points into a stat and get +2% here, there and elsewhere. Underwhelming to say the least. Supposedly the strength of character building is meant to lie in skills, but I'm not so sure either. There's quite a hefty number of skill trees (only few are in beta though) for every weapon (swords, axes etc.) & magic (i.e. pyromancy; D:OS again...) kind, plus some extras. Every tree has around 15 skills, half of them passive (+1 turn, +3% stuff again, yay! right?) and quite frankly I can see it getting exhausted rather fast, similarly to DA:O. On the other hand, the system is far more complex than Eschalon games, and those were already fun, so I guess it's a matter of how good exploration will be in the final game.
As for balance mentioned earlier, you can notice already on the character screen that out of 4 characters, 3 unique skills have a flat % bonus that will scale with their stats as % do, but the magic users gets an incremental one that gives additive % for every new spell. Go figure. Next on, the combat is harsh (and rightfully so) because of a body part & injury based health system, but again it just favors ranged, especially magic. Melee fighters risk close combat injury and sink money into equipment repairs. Archers require arrows, which while cheap, occupy precious inventory space. Casters have none of the above. Typically for roguelike, characters mostly move a the same pace (there's some weirdness about diagonal move not always being possible), so kiting allows for regular hit for hit trading with ranged enemies at worst, and free DPS with melee ones at best. Mana (energy) regenerates, spells cost nothing outside of cooldowns... Effectively, I've been casting the basic triple fireball (whatever it's called) and retreating all the time, virtually killing everything. Pretty much the only issue mages face is rain, since it halves fire damage (obviously a non issue in dungeon crawl, where all quests take place). The only times I got killed was when the game cheased me into walking straight into a bunch of enemies when traversing world cells.
Which brings the technical aspects, and I'm somewhat concerned. The game has the most basic 2d square world, known since ASCII games, yet struggles with it's persistence & continuity. Reloading the game half resets the cells - containers remain looted, yet enemies, shops, FOW resets. Not sure about terrain placement in non story cells. Also the cells... I can understand dungeon levels and buildings being separate, but honestly the world should've been continuous. Enemies can occasionally traverse cells to alleviate it slightly, but again, Eschalon, Factorio. It's 2020 for fuck's sake.
All in all it's a fun game but needs conceptual polish, because as it is now it empirically pushes player down the most optimal playstyle which makes majority of character building virtually obsolete.
