Re: Tentative Entombed 2 Design Decisions
@JaybirdI believe the generation of the dungeon previously is floor by floor, though don't quote me. I'm not sure if I like the idea of player decisions influencing the dungeon, sinse it removes that element of having to deal with chance, eg, if you can bank on finding a certain item in a certain encounter it curtails what you do, ---- I already did this in Entombed 1 when I used to level up fighter's with sword skill since I could always guarantee to get the goblin king's swords which would serve me for several levels (it didn't hurt that swords were most common in random drops too).
I always like the idea of literally not knowing what you will run across even when you've played the game multiple times, indeed that's one aspect I do hope will be increased in entombed ii with more chances to rescue companions, more environmental hazards like traps, treasure etc. Also, sinse I believe the mechanic Jason is going for with the cir cle design is a risk reward stratogy, where the more fights you go without resting and the more you explore the more chance you have of finding better stuff and more unique monsters, having a compensation factor, ie, making the next floor easier if you don't! bother exploring and just head streight to the stairs down and carry on would seem to go against that.
The different length game is a nice idea however, although if the dungeon has set bosses or encounters at specific points it might be a little harder unless each length game had it's own unique bos. However one idea talked about on the Entombed list was having expantion packs for the game which might provide the function of different length games, plus ones with their own unique monsters. For example you could choose to enter the 30 floor high skeleton tower, the 15 floor deep pit of trials, or the five floor deep tomb of the desert king.
@Sevrior regarding names, well it is true there are a lot around, although I think perhaps in entombed's case it might be necessary to consider existing classes rather than simply cribbing from other fantasy sources, for example you mention above assassin/necromancers as shadow dancers, yet in Entombed 1 at least Assassins weren't particularly ninja like or shaddowey, they were more like tough dirty fighters who kille dfor money, (remember they had no dodge skill unlike the thief but did get skills like double attack), and Necromancers didn't really have any shadowy or dark associations either they were just magicians who experimented with death and corpse raising, (no cones of decay or spells like spectral hand, or even demon summoning). However, naming multiclasses could be a lot of fun, indeed it could be a competition on the Entombed list, sinse i'm pretty sure the Entombed fans could think up 289 names between them, heck, I'd have a stab at it on my own, ---- if boh jobs worked the same as Entombed 1, I'd call A ssassin/necromancers slayers and Necromancer/assassins corpse makers.
Regarding job advancement, the funny thing is what you say about having a game where even the same race/jobs combo progresses differently each time was largely already the case in Entombed, sinse as Jason said earlier you never got to max out all skills of both classes and usually what distinguished the entombed master was the ability to choose to advance the skills of her/his party that most bennifited their existing party makeup.
For example, the Assassinate skill was pretty useless in most situations sinse to activate the target had to be in a helpless state, ie asleep or grappled. Yet, if you had a bard in the party with their soothing song, or a brawler with their grapple ability, it suddenly became crucially important. Similarly, grow and shrink never struck me as useful abilities, but could be awsome if you had a brawler or monk with their takedown and grapple abilities which were based on phy sical size.
Of course, not all jobs were that customizable, and not all had that many abilities to play with, but the majority did, and with the rank system and the environmental need for exploring, disarming traps and detecting things playing a part in Entombed ii, I can just see this aspect of the game increasing, even more so with the balance problems of Entombed 1 being ironed out.
As I said, I'm not against the idea and I certainly do take your point about increasing randomness in the game by giving you something extra to play with later on, I'm just not exactly certain that lack of variety is really a major concern in a game that has so much randomness going on, after all it's not as if Entombed is your standard rpg where you just wander into a dungeon that has the same monsters, encounters and broardly the same treasure each time you play.
Now, I have had an idea. In Entombed one, one of the problems you had with putting points into we apon skill is you were always on a gamble that you'd find reasonably good examples of that given weapon throughout the dungeon. Furthermore, I kept running into very cruddy weapons with very awsome qualities, for example an accurate icy poor copper great axe of swiftness.
One possible solution, albeit one that would likely need the player to find a lot of gold might be to have an enchant shop in the town. Lets say for a certain (and probably very high), fee I could hand in something like my accurate icy poor copper great axe of swiftness, together with a basic great steel gladius, and get back an accurate icy great steel gladius of swiftness.
This way it wouldn't be quite so risky putting skill points into a given weapon type sinse you could always give your less good weapons better qualities, provided you could pony up the dough. Of course, you'd still need to find the awsome style weapon first (and a plane unenchanted weapon too), so it wouldn't n egate exploring, particularly sinse I don't imagine this sort of thing would come cheap.
I am very much in favour of having more shops in the town generally, maybe separating out shops for things like weapons, armour, potions and magical items rather than having one general store, and of also having some less usual shops that add to the experience, such as a black market similar to that in Angband where you had the chance of finding something way awsomer than your current dungeon level but at ten times the price.
An Enchant shop would definitely fall into the line of unusual and good services, and would also be a nice thing to have if crafting is to be in the game as indicated earlier, provided of course the programming behind item generation would allow this sort of transfer.
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