Originally Posted by
Taederias
You can ruin your game in a myriad of ways by "forgetting to do something" or "accidentally doing something" and so on. If you forget you didn't pick up the crumpled scroll, and when you return for it an acid vortex destroys it, you'll lose your chance at an ultra ending, possibly even more frustratingly. Or if you lose it in a trap. Or polymorph it by mistake. There are lots of foolish things one can do.
Yes, but an ultra is an extra, a bonus. It should not be expected. The game is still winnable if the crumpled scroll is destroyed. Here, we are talking about making the game unwinnable.
Originally Posted by
Taederias
The reason this is different is because a new player might not even have much reason to suspect that what they're doing is a bad idea, hence the suggestions of hinting at that fact in more or less subtle ways. But if a player knows full well that leaving the orb makes "winning" impossible, then they bear full responsibility. Yes, they might do it by mistake but they can also die by mistake in many ways, or do many other stupid things, as I've already said. They are still responsible for paying attention to these things.
As I said earlier, I don't want to handhold anyone or absolve players from responsability. I have a sizable bunch of wins under my belt, I'm not a wimp. But the correct way to punish players in a roguelike is death, not making them play for hours only to find that their game was unwinnable in the first place. That has always been seen as bad game design, even in the wild 80's, when Sierra adventures sometimes had dead ends like that, but were heavily criticized for it. Why? Because dying in games is fun, but losing hours (or even days, if you use savegames) without even realizing that the game has become unwninnable isn't.
Originally Posted by
Taederias
Furthermore, even if the orbs are lost, they can leave the Drakalor Chain and end the game that way. Yes, they will have failed the main quest, but they still will have done lots of other stuff, and still get a scoreboard entry. That's why I don't think handholding veteran players is necessary, but helping newbies a little would be okay.
That is true, and I'm a bit more in agreement with it. But still, for most players the goal of a game is to try to win, not to get a better loss. And also, the problem is not that much the fact that you cannot win (when you die, you don't win either) but the fact that you can spend hours of days without knowing. So I still stand by the opinion that this shouldn't happen.
By the way, this gives me the idea that something nice to do would be giving the player a small chance of still winning, but with great work and suffering... for example, if an orb is left in an inaccessible place, make it apear in a very deep level of the ID (99 or something like that?), maybe guarded by a powerful boss. They're chaos orbs after all.