Challenge/achievement tracker and a related change to the Personalized mode
issueid=5471 10-20-2017 03:26 PM
Junior Member
Number of reported issues by moozooh: 17
Challenge/achievement tracker and a related change to the Personalized mode
Give player the ability to choose and track challenge status in-game

This is a little wordy, but please bear with me—I think this would be cool to have. Right now there are several identifiable problems with major (i.e. some of the hardest and most interesting) challenges. They can be summarized as the game not tracking them enough, and also not communicating well with the player in that regard.

1. Challenges like Plant hater and Plutonium man are an utter pain to keep track of. Being able to pinpoint the current status and the action that invalidates the former (there doesn't seem to be any sure-fire logic behind it, and you won't know until you win, which takes time and effort) and to know what is missing for the latter would make it more user-friendly (in the spirit of the recent UI changes) without making the respective challenges themselves easier. Additionally, the Steam achievement is only awarded once; to my knowledge, this information is not reflected in the final character information.

2. You can scum your way to e.g. Eternium man by leveling up to 49.9x in the wilderness and go into the small cave for those last few bits of exp, making it infinitely more achievable. This is because the game only checks for the validity of the challenge at your 50th level-up instead of e.g. every level-up.

3. Some of the self-inflicted/community challenges currently not implemented as achievements require willfully abstaining from some of the items or actions that is impossible to confirm using the game's own means since it doesn't keep track of it. For instance, a true Atheist challenge should denounce holy water, but just proclaiming this doesn't magically remove holy water and its effects from the game. Had there been a way to specify tracking a challenge before starting a new game, it would've been feasible to disable relevant items completely (thus, for instance, create all potions of water in the game plain for atheist games, making them actually unable to use holy water) or implement even more complex conditions that would otherwise be infeasible in normal games. (I also opened another feature request focused on adding more challenges as Steam achievements, btw.)

Implementing a "choose your challenges" screen at character creation would solve the #3, but it is probably too cumbersome for the Easy and Classic modes. Thankfully, we have just the right mode for experienced players' shenanigans like that—the Personalized mode. The ability to customize game rules is a great addition to the game, most importantly for those who would like to make the game harder. Adding a step where one could check marks next to the major challenges of choice in order to actively track them seems right at home there, considering you can save the custom rule sets which is super useful for this purpose.

However, Steam achievements are currently disabled for Personalized mode, with the rationale being, as I assume, so that players don't make it easier. This is right in principle, but there's a great solution that could satisfy everyone: disable achievements only if any of the settings lower the difficulty; don't disable achievements otherwise. Since all of this is done at character creation and can't be changed midways, keep track of this should be essentially free.

Similarly, when starting a new personalized game with specified challenges, the effect of said challenges should be briefly explained in the pop-up at the beginning (similarly to how weekly challenge rules are explained), and most of the actions that would invalidate said challenges should request player confirmation; e.g. asking "Doing this will invalidate one or more of your challenges, would you like to proceed?" if you attempt entering an optional location on one of the Metal Man achievements, or praying in an Atheist game. Obviously, not every such action would be prompted—only those that openly defy a challenge's rules and not require specific in-game knowledge.

Lastly, there could be a character sheet (e.g. there is some space available to the right of History that could be used for it) that lists all trackable achievements and their validity status, something like this:

* Atheist: untracked
* Magic hater: tracked, valid
* Plutonium Man: tracked, 80%
* Plant hater: forfeited
* Speed Demon: invalid

(Where "untracked" means a challenge wasn't specified so its special conditions do not apply; "tracked" means the challenge was specified at character creation, its special conditions (if any) apply, and the game will prompt the player if they attempt to do something that will instantly invalidate it and alert the player if something happened that led to said invalidation; "valid" means all binary conditions so far have been met, except for winning the game; "80%" is the progress towards the goal of the quantifiable (non-binary) challenge; "forfeited" means the player has confirmed the invalidation of a tracked challenge via the prompt; and "invalid" refers to any other irreversible failure to meet conditions for a given challenge.)

All the valid challenges for a winning game should be represented in the flg and the highscore screen as well.

TL;DR
If this is implemented, challenges will be more convenient to keep track of, and the game will communicate them and their conditions better.
Issue Details
Issue Number 5471
Issue Type Feature
Project ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery)
Category All Steam Versions
Status Suggested
Priority 9
Suggested Version Unknown
Implemented Version (none)
Milestone (none)
Votes for this feature 2
Votes against this feature 0
Assigned Users (none)
Tags (none)




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