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Do you want head-banging to be retained?


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In the old Exile / Avernums, hidden doors were the main things you had to look for after clearing out a dungeon in order to get your hands on the real treats.

Do you want hidden doors (aka head-banging into walls, rocks, etc, to discover them) to return?

 

I kinda liked it at the time. Made it interesting to try and figure out where the hidden entrances/doors could be. It was a bit of a thrill to suddenly burst through into the middle of a rock on the way to the goods; let alone suddenly confronting some nasties.

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I liked it.

 

Also, it didn't usually require actual head-banging. Other options that would almost always work included

 

1) Map the level, then look for suspiciously empty areas of the map and headbang there only

 

2) Use Magic Map to see where the secrets were. I tended to use Magic Map, check the map, then reload; this way, I could still use the automap to keep track of where I was exploring, plus I only had to carry 1 Sapphire.

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Hmm, that's a good point. In Exile and the first Avernum trilogy, keyboard was probably the easiest way to move -- I know some people liked to click in a direction, but keyboard was used by most. In A4-6, keyboard was useful for some detailed movement but click-to-move-here was overwhelmingly popular. And since Jeff wants to be iPad compatible, that makes keyboard style movement very bad. Which means headbanging is bad. Doh frown

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I think secret doors were actually an area where Exile was in a sense better than its successors. The graphics of Exile made it possible to depict little hidden doorways in the walls, discovered by pushing on them (quite logical). In the first Avernum trilogy they are move like illusionary walls than hidden doors. The second Avernum trilogy has hidden doors, of a sort, but with oddly placed, unrealistic (to me, at least) switches scattered around.

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Originally Posted By: Ociporus

Do you want hidden doors (aka head-banging into walls, rocks, etc, to discover them) to return?



In a word; YES.

I hate (and I do mean loathe) the fact that I have to look for switches to open every single hidden door. It really doesn't work for me. I loved being able to wander aimlessly along the walls of a dungeon or outside area in search of hidden things, and have missed it since. . . what, exile 3/a1-2?
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There's two things needing to be considered before answering that question, imo. The first is how whether keyboard movement will return, and the second is how frequent I want secret passages to be and what significance they should have. Headbanging was so frequent in Avernum because secret doors were. They could be anything from highly rewarding and essential to the storyline to completely empty. They were friggen everywhere.

I don't think it's that bad that the switches are so hard to find in Avadon, because those few that are there are either placed where you know there must be one or really aren't very significant otherwise.

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NO.

 

Keep the switches, or get rid of secret doors entirely. Or anything. But don't make me waste time bashing into every inch of empty wall on a map. That is not my idea of entertaining gameplay. If you have to create a door finding spell, that means the doors are too hard to find.

 

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

 

Absolutely not.

 

There are things from the older games that I don't like -- such as indoors/outdoors -- that I can nonetheless appreciate the arguments for. But having to creep along walls to find secret doors? No way. I want more entertainment value per minute than that.

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I can't think of a good reason to just remove all secret rooms because some people don't want to look for them, they never contained anything plot vital anyway.

 

Head banging was never the only option to find them. There was always far sight/magic map.

 

Quote:
appreciate the arguments for. But having to creep along walls to find secret doors? No way

 

One of the arguments for is you don't have to do that at all...

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I liked in the older versions where initially you had a mixture of 'head banging' and switches.

 

Later on about half way through you used to be able to learn a spell, but I can't remember the name. True Sight? I don't know. But in any case it would clear 'fog of war' around the casters location.

 

I loved going back later on and finding all the secrets I missed with that spell.

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One option, sort of a cross between headbanging and switches, would be to keep the headbang-style switchless walk-through-walls, BUT give them a slightly different icon, just like switches have currently. This was actually the system used in most Exile-style games before Exile: Ultima had stone blocks that were a few (fairly easy to see) pixels different from the regular pattern, for example.

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Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S
Hmm, that's a good point. In Exile and the first Avernum trilogy, keyboard was probably the easiest way to move -- I know some people liked to click in a direction, but keyboard was used by most. In A4-6, keyboard was useful for some detailed movement but click-to-move-here was overwhelmingly popular. And since Jeff wants to be iPad compatible, that makes keyboard style movement very bad. Which means headbanging is bad. Doh frown


On the other hand, Jeff could go down the road of having players pressing and holding their finger on the iPad's screen in order to move in that direction. It'd allow more control than just the click-to-move-here, and would make headbanging possible.
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Originally Posted By: madrigan
NO.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

[...]having to creep along walls to find secret doors? No way. I want more entertainment value per minute than that.


I can compromise. What would you think about a mixture of both? I just hate the fact that every secret door is connected to a switch. I wouldn't mind buttons/levers if there were some headbangers in the mix. In other words I am all for one, and one for all!
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Originally Posted By: ProperPseudonym
Originally Posted By: madrigan
NO.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

[...]having to creep along walls to find secret doors? No way. I want more entertainment value per minute than that.


I can compromise. What would you think about a mixture of both? I just hate the fact that every secret door is connected to a switch. I wouldn't mind buttons/levers if there were some headbangers in the mix. In other words I am all for one, and one for all!

What I do not want is to have my game held up for an hour while I wander around trying to find a door. I can visualize my characters searching tenaciously for the passage without actually spending the RL time. If Jeff has a way to keep some headbanging without causing long, boring delays in my game, then fine.

I know we are talking about an A1 rewrite, but when when I tried to play through A3 I know there was some point where to kill the boss on a map you had to find a secret door. It was the source of the first plague, I think. That was one of the many reasons I never tried to finish that game, I was walking around and around in circles and it was very frustrating.
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I don't mind looking around for switches, except when the walls are already so complex in pattern that the switch disappears. I gave up on the iPad version of Avadon because of this. I don't mind head-banging when there are only a few logical places for a hidden room to be, but in my experience, this is often not the case. Early access to a mapping spell might make this OK but it would need to be EARLY. In general, I don't really like hidden doors as it adds little to the game play for me. Could we have some kind of cheat code for this to make such doors obvious. Normally I avoid cheat codes, but I would make an exception for this.

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Is it really that hard to explore the map and then look at the map to see where the secrets would logically be? All it requires of you is something you're doing anyway--exploring the dungeon--and to exercise a slight amount of thought.

 

If you're headbanging into every single wall everywhere in an Avernum game, you're doing it wrong.

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I personally liked the effect of the hidden passage where the graphic changed from solid to one with the outline of a door once you found it. Sure this meant a lot of searching to find them, but a good look at the map would show the most likely places to go looking. Sometimes in places that were critical to the game, Jeff would have a message pop up in the journal box hinting that a secret passage was nearby. In a pinch you could always use the spells Magic Map or True Sight to locate them. (Slarty, I also used your technique of save, map, restore.) There were also specials marked with the white dot that would cause the terrain to change, opening up a special area.

 

How about crumbling walls or stalagmites? Move Mountains and Shatter were needed to penetrate those.

 

Having the buttons indicating that there is a secret door nearby seemed kind of cheesy when I first encountered them. They can only be placed on walls that face east or south, since graphic projection hides the north and west facing walls. But every so often I happen across those buttons that don't do anything. This could add to the uncertainty of where the secret doors are.

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I agree, Harehunter. As if a guy would be 'hiding' something valuable, and then advertise it with a switch on a wall. As if some of his own greedy minions wouldn't want to check it out. And advertising for any greedy adventurers "Here's where the loot is!".

It is cheesy!

 

/quote

Having the buttons indicating that there is a secret door nearby seemed kind of cheesy when I first encountered them. /unquote

 

Hey, how do I turn on HTML? In my replies, it says "HTML is disabled". I can't find a pref to fix that. Never used to have this issue.

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