This doesn’t fix people’s problems with this thread. Talking about a fan hack here detracts from attention that thread could get and makes it less likely the creator will see it. More reasons have been stated in this thread before too.
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I hate fliers with silver lances in mid to late game, specially if they can fricking one shot your casters.
Yes. It is hard; because it is difficult to successfully clear the dungeon. That’s the point, in the case of the Tomb of Horrors.
It is, in fact, intrinsic to the dungeon that it is hard – the permanent destruction, the lack of retreat, and so on are just more things to make challenging the tomb more risky, which in turn makes it more difficult since you will not want to go there with anything that’s good for fear of losing it.
However, also consider that the point of Tomb of Horrors is to be a frustrating and stupid experience, that is incredibly difficult and painful … Because it’s a GM’s answer to players that min-max and over-optimize everything, removing all possibility of being impeded by anything approaching a reasonable dungeon.
There’s a lot of people who would argue that those are unfun because they’re so difficult.
Designs where the player, in a realistic or normal playthrough, cannot even begin to see the answer on a first pass are not “player-hostile” designs, or something that we can even take much of a lesson from.
They’re just bad. And obviously so. The only time they’re particularly excusable is when the point is to be a secret that you don’t encounter the first time through, that you have to explore around to find - look at Super Mario 2 (the SNES/GBA one). Plenty of levels are built with both ideas in mind - The Forest of Illusion has the normal exits that lead nowhere and the secret exits that must be found to proceed; plenty of other times there’s a secret exit that you don’t see buried under a level or in a block formation.
I thought of another way I could explain Player-Hostile Design.
Celeste is a tough platformer. Deaths are frequent, and unpunished. Die and you quickly restart from the same room. No lengthy death animation. No insults from the game, no lives counter, no death melody, no waiting 10+ seconds from “Oh no, I hit the spikes again!” to “Let’s try this again!”.
There are many Mario Maker levels that are very challenging to overcome. They demand perfection from the player in a way that’s tough, but fair.
Some Mario Maker levels are designed so that they can only be beaten with external knowledge like the knowledge that you needed to find something in a hidden block, and the knowledge of where that key is. Some of these Mario Maker levels will softlock you. Some will then give you Mercy Spikes to throw yourself on so you can die and restart from an earlier checkpoint. Some will make a minigame out of accessing your chance to die and restart from a checkpoint. Because the game lacks a “Restart from checkpoint” button, your option is to wait about 500 seconds and perish, or try to die sooner by doing whatever it takes. Some troll levels will intentionally waste a lot of your time at the start, and then challenge you, knowing each death will mean -30 seconds or more taken from your lifespan.
Quickly retrying from a checkpoint after failure is a nice thing to let the player access quickly. Timewasting as a consequence for failure doesn’t make the challenge itself harder, it just makes things take longer, and damages the experience players get from it.
Could you imagine a Fog Of War map you can only beat with external knowledge of where the Lethality+ Luna+ enemies and instakill traps are? But because of a sandstorm modified to be worse, all your units have 3 move at most, and it will take at least 10 minutes to beat this level? And every time you die and retry, an unskippable cutscene that lasts 50 seconds must be watched? That’s hostile to the player, not challenging to the player’s abilities and natural game knowledge and situational awareness. This is an extreme example here but the Fog of War isn’t used to challenge the player’s ability to adapt to bad situations and exercise a due level of caution with limited information while weighing that against whatever optional objective is on the table if you’re fast enough. It’s used to create a bad time.
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