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Chasm |OT| Sword Gully
- Thread starter Cornbread78
- Start date
The sad thing it's quite likely you wouldn't have even noticed the map is procedurally generated.
Seriously. If someone doesn't know the game uses procedural generation, they'd never be able to tell. It's that good.
The sad thing it's quite likely you wouldn't have even noticed the map is procedurally generated.
I'm perpetually surprised at the unending stream of people that must make a point to tell everyone else how much they dislike procedural generation, as if that marked them as profound connoisseurs of game design as opposed to prejudiced and ignorant.
finished, 100% exploration, but I missed one of the villagers (the dog) no idea where it was, oh well.
solid game, but in the end, very...I dunno, unremarkable? I dont really have anything bad to say about it really, and tis well worth playing if you like the genre, but I also wouldnt tell anyone to rush out and buy it I guess.
10 hours according to steam for those curious, sounds about right since the save was 8 hours and it doesnt track deaths / restarts.
solid game, but in the end, very...I dunno, unremarkable? I dont really have anything bad to say about it really, and tis well worth playing if you like the genre, but I also wouldnt tell anyone to rush out and buy it I guess.
10 hours according to steam for those curious, sounds about right since the save was 8 hours and it doesnt track deaths / restarts.
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I've only seen a few reviews, and they all pointed out how the procedural stuff drags it down and loses a hand crafted feel
Thanks, those must be it! Totally mistook the Temple Guard for the Royal Guard, and the Ladori Priestess for the Priest lol. And since one said 1 more kill to unlock I thought it was a mini boss or something.
I played about two hours last night and I didn't get that impression.
You can actually set markers on your map. It took me while to fully understand the map as it is kind of vague but now I am at the point where I can tell what area I haven't accessed yet.
II said the same thing, discover my first "secret" 2 hours in, i'm mad because now i want to recheck every room i did before...
Finished the game last night but this was where I was stuck. Thank you for helping.
I understand why they wanted to do a procedurally generated game, but I don't think the desired result is realized. While the rooms may be handcrafted, the layout definitely has a computer-generated vibe to it. I can't imagine playing through it again and I can't imagine that the experience will stick with me in the coming months.
This is about where I land as well. Backed it on kickstarter and have been looking forward to it a great deal but I can't say I'd recommend it to anyone that isn't already a fan of the genre. I enjoyed my time with it well enough but to me it feels like the effort put in to the randomization doesn't feel like much of a benefit. I think it feels like each biome is too disconnected from one another which probably comes down to the randomization again.
Dev has confirmed that they hit a snag(their words) in a couple of EU countries, working on making it available asap.
Damn it. Gonna have to miss this one. Dead Cells comes out next week, I had hoped to play Chasm before it comes out.
Thanks, this work like a charm
Regarding the procedural generated aspect of the game it's obviously a minus if you don't plan on playing it twice. All the time wasted on making tha game able to generate an infinite number of mostly OK maps could've been used in making a really exceptional one
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I kind of agree with this but I can understand why they went this route as they were trying to set themselves apart from other games in this genre and I am fine with them taking the risk.
Actually I think on the blog post from the author it says that the procedural part of the code was inherited from another game, or from a game that they scrapped, or something similar, so they were probabky married to that
INT gives your spells more damage. CON as a stat is usually to help stymie status effects, but I haven't noticed any difference in the game.
Hmm. I could have sworn I already tried that. Maybe there's one I'm missing but I went up to the circular thing with a slot in the middle while wearing it, and nothing happened.
I get the sense that a lot of "critics" of procedural generation don't understand that most of the good games that use it have hand crafted rooms, it's just that they're stitched together procedurally. It's a lot of work to make a good system for procedural generation, and there are a lot of games that do it well. Just look at Into the Breach. Those randomized stages are so good that they feel entirely hand crafted. I wanna know what games they played that soured them on roguelite/like gameplay (if they ever gave them a chance to begin with).
Rogue Legacy has hand crafted rooms too, but there's a lot less care that went into each one, and there are rarely secondary goals that lead into each other, and there's no accounting for rising difficulty of rooms the further into an area you go. So if that's your metric I can understand being wary of it, even though I actually like RL. But Chasm handles this so much more cleverly, it's a shame people are missing that.
Yeah, frankly I'm a bit confused at how RL got so popular. It's a pretty mediocre roguelite IMO and lots of games do everything it did better.
Had a bit of an annoying experience with the first boss, as I managed to beat it after several tries and some grinding for mana. Went to the next area, got the wall climb/jump gloves, and ran into the bee hive enemy that I died trying to figure out how to take it down. The last save point was before the boss, so I naturally had to start over with the boss fight again. Got past it after several more attempts and immediately went back to the save point above the boss fight area to prevent that from happening again. Eventually found the cave in that next area and the teleport to the cave shortcuts from the first area so I could go back to the town, but a new item, refill health/mana, and get a fresh save. At least I know now that I shouldn't trust the game to be even a little bit better than Symphony of the Night with regards to save.
Yeah, some games just randomly catch zeitgeist. It can be hard to predict. I think the charming art style and some of its more progressive character design elements carried it a lot further than it would have gone otherwise.
Yeah, I guess they thought having a save right before and right after the boss fight was a bit redundant. But the reason there's not a portal right away is because they're trying to encourage players to go out and explore instead of retreating back to safety.
For whatever reason was very satisfying to play. I liked it .lot.
Regarding Chasm my main gripe would be magic; he best spell hands dowm is thr first one, so there's no sense of progression there
Nope that one is a later area. The temple will be a door with teeth like bars blocking entry next to a plaque you can't read until you have the pendant and trigger that scene.
Has anyone compared the town buding/villager saving in this game to Soul Blazer? Watching a little bit of footage I kind of got that feeling but I'm not sure what the full game is really like
Oh come on, that's such a ridiculous statement. If procedurally generated level design was even remotely capable of replicating tailored level design, games wouldn't need level designers.
The sad thing it's quite likely you wouldn't have even noticed the map is procedurally generated.
Dwarf Fortress and Unexplored do a pretty good job. And this game too supposedly
Also, the rooms here aren't procedurally generated. They're all hand-made
They're both roguelikes, so the procedural generation plays a very different role, where you're going through levels multiple times within a single "playthrough" of the game.
Procedurally generated level design has a time and a place. It doesn't mean it's always a good replacement for tailored level design. Like I said, there's a reason level designers are still a thing.
I mean, the rooms themselves were made by hand, it's just the arrangement of rooms that changes. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. As a Metroidvania, I would definitely say a game like Hollow Knight has far better level design then what I've played of Chasm. That said, Chasm can give you a much different experience each time you play it, which Hollow Knight doesnt offer. Hollow Knight is also a fairly long game, whereas Chasm is fairly short, in part to encourage multiple playthroughs. So there are tradeoffs for either method, just like any design decision.
I added it after, the rooms are hand-made in this, not generated
I'd have appreciated a quick autosave in the boss room as a reward for beating them, but now I'll probably just yoyo from the save point making slow progress until I find a weapon I like.
I think the upgrade mechanics in RL tickle people's brains in the right way to make it addictive. I could never get past the ugly run animation of your avatar.
When you have the map screen up, there's a button that puts a little white dot exactly where you're standing. Command is on the bottom lower left of the screen.
So after beating the game just under 7 hours at 99.7% complete, I never completely fell in love with it. It's very serviceable, but it's so cookie cutter that I was just kind of going through the motions. Also, level 3 magic dagger is way too overpowered. The fact you can out range even the toughest enemies aggro means they sit there till they die without even noticing you.
I feel you. But later on a lot of the tougher enemies blocked the dagger too frequently to use it I found. The dagger was definitely the best spell. Which is weird.
I ended up still tossing it at them despite a few blocks here and there . Since it only cost 1 Mana it's ridiculously good. I think the only enemies that completely negated it were the small spear holders which were easy to kill anyway. I powered up the other weapons by save scumming to test them all out, but that triple dagger is just too beastly.
The first area was virtually identical for me on a restart with a different seed. I assume the later ones use procedural generation more heavily, since I did start to get some repeating layouts (most noticeably in the garden area).
Same. This is a huge flaw in the game, IMO. And it's only really at the final boss that the game is like okay no more of that now!
If you get the mana ring from one of the villagers then you basically never run out of mana. It's not an exciting way to play the game, so I'll probably choose a different spell next time.
Haha I had that Mana ring equipped immediately as soon as I found it as well. On my second playthrough I'll definitely abstain from using it. I just hope the games random generation really switches things up, but I'm kinda doubting it. Even if rooms are in a different order it's not necessarily going to feel different enough to me .
Yeah. I went overboard in preparing for things because I didn't know how bad things were going to get. Turns out... not very. So if I run through again I'm going to try to have more fun with it and not waste hours scrounging every corner for extra weapons and loot.
I was talking to a friend about this earlier... the lore of the game makes out the fourth and fifth bosses to be these forces of nature that have been wrecking everyone's shit. So to have them not even present a challenge... I was playing on the wrong difficulty.