Hate it when I'm playing a roguelike and I have to exit the game to google how an NPC or a vendor works. Like, yes, dataminers are gonna have that info on a wiki immediately, but that's not a good excuse to design it like that.

Like, I get it, you wanna have a mechanic in your game that's vague for a sense of mystery. But that mystery lasts maybe one week and then it's just hard data on a wiki page.

This is something that pretty much all roguelikes do, have purposefully vague mechanics that serve no purpose other than to drive players to google things and learn it on a wiki. Survival games with big crafting systems do this a lot too.

It is my personal firm Game Design Belief that if the average player needs to stop the game and consult a wiki regularly, you've done something wrong. It is a pet peeve of mine. It will never go away no matter how commonly accepted it is now.

You can probably guess what game inspired this thread by looking at tweets of me praising the game a few minutes ago. I still maintain that praise. This is criticism of a broader thing that's just kinda been accepted by the whole video game scene at large.