Let me try to respond to all the above comments in one shot.
First, the idea of Deathlord Relorded is to make Deathlord the way I want to play it, while keeping what I think is the spirit of Deathlord. Anything that I thought was either a bug or needed instant reboots was changed.
Searching is now guaranteed to work. This is by FAR the most significant change and arguably the most transformative in the Deathlord experience. It doesn’t seem that way at first glance, but trust me. It is a far bigger change than the rear rank using ranged weapons. Imagine playing a dungeon crawler (without maps) where it is entirely possible that you miss a hidden door twenty times and are therefore certain it doesn’t exist.
The second most impactful change is the dramatic increase in the map’s viewport size. And the third (that I may tweak depending on my own experience playing) is the special bonuses of certain races and classes. Especially the gnome that can see very far in the dark in dungeons. But here it’s tricky because not making the race bonuses very good will make you revert to playing an all-human party which was what everyone did since humans are far better by default.
Speaking of rear rank ranged weapons, IMO it is a big bug. Having that in DLRL opens a whole range of tactical party considerations, including using the priest as a very effective front rank fighter when you’re overleveled compared to the regular mobs.
Also regarding the rear rank, the original was extremely frustrating for those guys in another way: they got less XP than the front rank for 2 reasons. One, if you didn’t cast spells they wouldn’t get xp allocated to them, so everyone turned to cast-cancel. And second, any extra remainder xp would get allocated starting at char 1, and over time that would add up to a lot and your back line would be very slow at leveling up. This has all been fixed in DLRL. Everyone gets xp, and the extra is randomly allocated.
Regarding typing spells in battle like “TODO” et. al., I haven’t improved that. The game is still keyboard driven except for the new inventory interface. But you can type ?-enter to get a list of spells and navigate it via the arrow keys. So it’s not as bad as typing the whole spell. And arguably it’s faster than clicking and mixing reagants and whatnots.
Battles in DLRL are as fast if not faster than any other 80s-90s RPG except for Nox Archaist when I speedrun at full speed. Note that I disabled any kind of speed acceleration in DLRL’s emulation layer because you’d run out of food almost instantly, and the game is frankly extremely fast as it is.
As for the above-mentioned inventory screen, it uses the mouse for simplicity. And I added a temporary party stash of 2 items per slot (melee, ranged, chest…) so you can move items into the stash when getting loot and trying the new stuff without losing the old stuff.
In DLRL there’s also auto-mapping. Anything you identified on the map stays identified. Tiles are remembered, and so are traps and teleporters. One of my goals was not to need an additional tool or millimetric paper to play the game.
Oh one last thing… No more level drain. Level drain is evil and you just rebooted if it happened. So it’s gone. But vampires are still deadly with the death spell.
