[coldpie]

Hmm. The way I've heard it expressed is they want every decision the player makes to matter. In other words, the ideal to work towards is that there is never a "no-brainer" choice to make, you always have to think about every action. To me, that always seemed like a great design goal, but I never thought about it from the new player perspective. Maybe the act of learning that a choice is a no-brainer is itself a valuable process for a newer player? That's interesting to chew on.

[adamrezich]

it's not even just from the new player perspective. I've played DCSS reasonably casually on and off for like a decade and the more recent years' changes have been a bit too much for me, in terms of stripping everything down. I completely agree with the comment before yours. I liked the food "minigame", it was fun to play KoBe and chop corpses into chunks to eat, before they go bad.

it's not that it's a bad game now, or anything like that, but it does feel like some edges may have been sanded down that should have been left intact.