T w e n t y S i d e d

I’ve been pretty positive on Depths of Peril. However, I will now enumerate some flaws, according to the ancient traditions and customs we’ve long observed on this site. Affection must not stand in the way of ceremony, or we’ll end up with chaos. Here are my gripes, in ascending order, from the trivial to the slightly-less trivial.

The tutorial is a bit rough. It’s mostly a series of popups to read to tell you where things are and what’s what. It’s better than letting the player fend for themselves, but a more gradual introduction would have been welcome.

It’s hard to tell the various tiers of foods (restore health) and beverages (restore energy) from each other. In other games, you can look at two blue bottles and see one is bigger than the other, and therefore restores more energy. But how would you compare a glass of milk to a mug of ale? Is roast duck better than pheasant? Erm. You can use the tooltips to figure out which is the superior item, but that sort of deprives them of their iconic nature.

There are some single-file passages in the dungeons. This is fine unless you have a covenant mate adventuring with you, because they block your movement. They’re smart enough to back away if you move next to them. They don’t trap you, but they do make it hard for you to beat a hasty retreat if you get overwhelmed. Diablo II had the same problem when it was first released. (Getting down into the Maggot Lair as a Necromancer – with a half dozen skeletons in tow – was maddeningly difficult.) The solution there was to simply allow teammates to walk through each other. (Not stand in the same spot, but just pass.) That could work here.

I have to give Depths of Peril credit for at last giving me a “demand” button on the diplomacy screen. In GalCiv I was often frustrated by the fact that you couldn’t threaten anyone. You could only ask, and the AI always reacted as though I was coming to him as a beggar, even if I had an armada of terrifying potency sitting just outside his homeworld. In Depths of Peril I press the demand button often, and each time I am filled with insidious joy, regardless of the answer I get in return.

Having said that, the diplomacy system is… well, it’s about as good as a lot of other diplomacy systems I’ve experienced, which is to say, somewhat lacking in cunning. Example: A foe will make a demand of me, and I’ll tell him to get stuffed. Then I’ll turn around and demand tribute from him, and he’ll relent. If he had the nerve to threaten war, then he ought to also have the nerve to say no.

The storage system is convoluted. You can’t put things into your box directly. No, you have to put a container – a sack or a bag of some sort – into the box, and then put stuff into the sack. If you want to take the sack out again, you have to empty it first. Your inventory works this way as well. You don’t have a single pack, but instead you can have up to four bags which contain items. The interface can get pretty confusing when you’ve got your four sacks open as well as the sacks inside of the box. You get used to it, but it does seem like more complexity than is called for.

Now, I see the intent here. As you play, you collect larger and larger sacks. The idea is to reward the player with larger storage space as they level up. A reasonable goal, but I think it might have saved everyone (the coder and the players) a lot of hassle if the space just got magically bigger as they leveled up.

Now, all of these complaints are trivial. I’m ashamed to even mention them. (The preceding sentence was an outrageous lie, although I’d appreciate if you would believe it anyway. Thank you for your cooperation.) But this last complaint stands apart from the others. It is not a whine against some irrelevant gameplay minutia or esoteric design commentary, this is a protest against the grievous harm visited on me by Soldak, the Depths of Peril interface, and my fellow covenant members. In that order. My grievance is as follows:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Depths of Peril:
Final Thoughts”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Before I get started with the gameplay: Someone asked about the DRM in this game. Let’s answer that question first…

Fenix suggested this genre of game ought to be called a “third person looter”, which is pretty catchy. Grinding is usually looked down on in RPG’s, but in a third person looter the game begins and ends with grinding. That’s pretty much the whole game. In the most primitive hack-n-slash knockoffs, you have only two goals:

1. Go up in level.
2. Get better equipment.

That’s not a bad start. Fate built an entire game around those two concepts. But most games will add at least one more:

3. Advance the story. (Dialog, cutscenes, new characters, etc.)

That’s where Diablo II stops, with the added complexity that “get better equipment” means not just finding stuff, but also gambling and combining items.

The story in Depths of Peril is not a rich tale told through cutscenes as with Diablo. It mostly consists of a chain of specific quests, which I assume leads to a big battle at the end. (I haven’t completed the game yet.) I would have enjoyed a deeper story, although I’m not even sure that’s possible without cutscenes and voice acting. What’s here is serviceable enough, and a step up from the randomly-generated pseudo-plot of Fate.

But the more things you can add to the list of activities, the more you can mitigate the tedium and create a richer experience. To this end, Depths of Peril offers:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Depths of Peril:
Gameplay”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.