What was your favorite puzzle type in Dungeon Siege?
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| Submitted by ghastley on Tue, 2009-01-13 13:26 | ||
poll description: Just trying to design more puzzles for a new map, and it's easiest to use existing pieces, so I'd like to know your preferences, and what you found easiest or hardest. Since some of these involved combat as well as the puzzle, please rate the puzzle alone.
The "Others" category covers a lot of ground, and includes any type you think would be possible, but haven't seen yet in the game or mods. Light channel - e.g. Kevarre's quest for the Jewels of Soranith in DS2
5% (1 vote)
Turning mirrors - two instances in DS2 Acts 1 and 3, with the second having two solutions!
24% (5 votes)
Door maze - e.g. Agallan trial. Buttons open and close doors
14% (3 votes)
Light beams - Vault of Therayne in Broken World. Buttons switch light beams on and off
5% (1 vote)
Plain Maze - e.g. the Pit of Despair in DS1 - branching paths with dead ends and you can't see the whole map
14% (3 votes)
Cube/Socket - A variation of the Door maze used several times in DS2 e.g. Lost Sapphire quest, Temple of Xeria,...
10% (2 votes)
Others - e.g. Riddles in Mageworld by Xaa, secret keys in Kaishun, Hallowen by Charietto.
29% (6 votes)
Total votes: 21
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Comments
The light channel puzzles mentioned were Eulerian circuit problems, where you won by lighting up all the channels in one continuous line, and were allowed to use the same button more than once.
There's another variation that can be made, where the objective is to use each button once, but you don't have to light all the channels in doing so. If you add returning to the first button to create a closed path, then you have a Hamiltonian Circuit. I could add that kind of puzzle using the same components as the Eulerian one, but would that be too confusing?
(Edit:) One option is to use the cube sockets as the nodes. It's obvious that you can only fill a socket once, and I can connect them via floor channels to make it clear you're defining a path. The opening covers reinforce the availability of the adjacent nodes. This could make the socket puzzle more challenging than those in the existing games. This only needs one type/color of cube, too.
I like the door maze for the Agallan trial best. The turning mirrors are OK (medium difficulty), light beams too, and the cubes / sockets are super easy. The light channel type can be good too, but not if they're so big you have to work it out with pencil & paper (too frustrating IMO). A smaller Pit of Dispair would be good, but something taking as long as the original would be a bit too much (again IMO). A big hedge-maze (or something similar) where you can see the terrain, but with a small fog radius and no mini-map... I would probably prefer that to another PoD.
Xaa's combination type switches were OK (perhaps with a riddle hint), but the riddles are not really puzzles... either you get the answer or you don't (in which case where does that leave the player?).
If you want something simple, the pressure plate / switch thing like where the fury eye is hidden in DS1 could work too.
If you wanted to make a different type of light channel puzzle, all you'd really need to do, to avoid confusion, is put in an instruction sheet with the rules.
I rather liked the light mirrors, they had nice visuals
but Xaa's riddles were most entertaining..
For the builder, rather than the solver, there's a lot of difference of difficulty between the various types. How hard they are to solve is not matched by how hard they are to construct.
Plain mazes are probably easiest, if you can draw one, it's quite a simple task to connect equivalent nodes to make it. You can make things harder for yourself with a third dimension, where paths cross at different levels, but they're still node-only work.
Xaa's riddles were at the opposite extreme, as he had to mod the UI just to allow you to type in the responses.
The others fall somewhere in between, with the moving walls of the Agallan trial being the most laborious to set up - there are a lot of triggers, levers, elevators, node enable/disable commands and stuff that all has to be connected together. The Siege Editor becomes a tougher maze than the resulting one you play! They're also tricky to plan out in the first place.
The various light puzzles aren't too hard if you can find the theoretical logic you need to create the puzzles. GPG have done the work setting up the pieces to build them, and construction is straightforward, if tedious. Most of the hard work is in Flick code, rather than the SE work placing things.
I'm finding the mirrors have extra challenges with their alignment, but at least the logic isn't too hard.