03-25-2007, 07:11 PM
aquaMat wrote:
There you certainly have a point.... I'll admit that in DoD the player can have the impression that things are a bit differently or pretty much anything is possible....so normalreasoningprobably can't be counted upon.
However..... I still don't understand the logic ofskippingthe red section, or why you believed it could be less important than the blue side.
At that point, I didn't know I was skipping anything. My choice was between going back to an old save point so I could do the red section first, or forging ahead and hoping that the road would eventually lead back to the part I missed. I never load up an old save on my first time through a mansion, unless I lose all my my lives. That first time, I'm just there to play around and explore a new mansion, not to gut the thing looking for every secret. For all I knew, the red section was just as optional as the blue section.
Again you have a point... BUT: I made clear in the introductory text for DoD, that in this mansion players should be alert at all times...and especially go looking for things even where they least expect them. And that OF COURSE includes that it's not very advisable to skip an entire section... although I understand how it happened and why you did it.
Don't misunderstand me. Most of the time in this mansion, things work out pretty well. I'll reach a dead end, realize I need to hunt around for some secret key of lever or passageway, and find it nearby. It's just this one case, really, where the keys were hidden so far from the door that it became a problem.
Apart from that I don't quite understand why you'renot looking forward to going back to look for those keys... is it really so terrible, after you realized you missed an entire section in a mansion, to go back and be able to explore a whole series of new rooms you haven't seen before ?
Yes, because I know I'll have to do a bunch of rooms again that I've already done. And that's not a problem in some mansions, but it is in others. The difference is subtle, and I have trouble explaining it, but there's something that kept me coming back over and over to get all the secrets in Nightmare Mansion and Spider Palace, (Although it didn't take many tries to get all the secrets in Spider Palace, I still kept coming back to it to get all the treasure again.) and kept me from ever wanting to explore Cathedral Towers again. Or Knight Mansion, although I liked that one the first time through.
The best mansions, in my opinion, let me get better at them. The massive tower that seemed so daunting at the beginning seems weak and kittenish once I've conquered it. And once I've gotten to that point, I can zip around the mansion fairly easily, ferreting out all its secrets, solving the occasional challenging bit, looking for every last bit of treasure. But if the mansion is asking me to pull a bunch of levers or make precise jumps in pretty much every room, it's not fun any more to look for the secrets, because I'm spending all my time solving puzzles that I've already solved.
If I'm replaying DoD, I'm going to have to go behind a whole bunch of walls to get keys. And I know where they are now, but I have to go get them anyway. I don't need them for a secret. I just need them to continue in the mansion. But despite the fact that I know where they are and I need them to get back to the part where I already was before I restarted my game, those keys are still hidden, and I have to go behind that wall to get them. It feels silly and weird to me, like the mansion is being coy or taunting me or something.
Um...long answer to a short question. But it has to do with the replayability of the mansion, too, so I hope it's helpful.