…or its “degrading system” to be exact.

As you may guess I’m receiving a lot of negative reviews these days. Nobody likes the idea of equipment, degrading over time, but actually it wasn’t designed to be liked by itself. So why then?

Pixel Dungeon was never meant to be a deep game. It’s just a “coffeebreak” roguelike, it’s nothing compared to Nethack or ADOM for example. And nevertheless in my opinion most people tend to choose a little too straightforward strategy to play it. It looks like this:

Grind till you get a good piece of equipment

Invest all your scrolls of upgrade into it

Profit!

Maybe it was indeed the best strategy or maybe it was just good enough. Either way I didn’t like it. As I said many times before, I can’t complain about how players play the game, but I can try to encourage one way and discourage another. And that’s exactly what this “degrading system” is all about.

You can still arrive to the 25th depth with a Glaive+15 if you really want to, but you need to show some devotion to this plan. You’ll have to upgrade it at right moments of time, you will need a spare weapon to fight lesser mobs etc. Though in most cases it’s reasonable to use upgrades more “evenly”, Glaive+3 and Plate armor+3 is a better combination, than Glaive+6 and Plate armor+0. Anyway, as far as I can judge, choices have to be made more often now and I think, that it’s a good thing.

These changes also have some indirect effects, but there is no need to list them here I guess, you will discover them soon enough (if you choose to keep playing the game of course).

Tonight or tomorrow I’m going to release a hotfix to make everything more… playable… without giving up the idea.