I like your old stuff..
Having read a lot of the comments about Chronicles on various sites, it’s clear that there’s a group that still prefers Book of Dread. The reasons given are often very vague. This makes it difficult for me to understand, but it’s also important for me to understand as the series moves forward. So, please, enlighten me!
What did Book of Dread do better than Chronicles? What was lost in translation, or moved in the wrong direction?
Comment below, but please don’t argue with others about their opinions.
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about 9 months ago
Graphics wise Chronicles blows Book of Dread out of the water, but content wise Book of Dread surpasses Chronicles. If I remember correctly Book of Dread had truly unique weapons/armors, bosses which Chronicles doesn’t have. Anyways that’s just my opinion, I still prefer Chronicles any day of the week simply because its very well-made game and I loved the artwork.
about 9 months ago
Agreed on the uniqueness of the legendary items and the rare bosses! And I forgot to put it in my post but glad that you covered it! Hope these actually get read!
about 9 months ago
I genuinely enjoyed both. Chronicles was a vast improvement over Book of Dread in terms of game complexity, mechanics, graphics, and the ability to save.
The most jaunting difference to me was the change of perspective. Moving from top-down “portrait battles” to isometric characters changed the user experience dramatically. At its core, Chronicles is the same game as Book of Dread, but the aesthetic changes were likely poorly received because change in general is poorly received.
Chronicles had more characters and abilities than Book of Dread, but I think it missed an opportunity to expand character types beyond four archetypes (and their respective variations). The greater diversity in items was also a boon, but inventories tended to clutter fast and the AI had a hard time filtering viable upgrades for my characters. I enjoyed the addition of hidden rooms but found they had little to offer.
Either way, they really were both excellent games. I’m a sucker for nostalgia and Book of Dread hit that sweet spot perfectly for me. Objectively, I’d have to say Chronicles is the superior game – in the same way that Super Mario 64 was a superior game to Super Mario Bros 3, but SMB3 still strikes a very different emotional resonance with its fans than SM64.
about 9 months ago
I love both chronicles and book of dread. I liked the unique characteristics of characters and abilities in chronicles, as well as the clear fact that there is more in it and that it is more advanced. However, I honestly prefered the artwork portraits for book of dread, especially the monsters. And while chronicles is more complex in many ways, that may actually be a reason for complaints. Book of dread’s simpler design can be wonderful, and ensures that it doesn’t seem overstuffed.
Another issue might be the fact that there is more variety to monsters in book of dread right now. I personally missed the orcs, beasts, and dwarves. But, since you are working on chronicles 2.0, this shouldn’t be a problem for too long.
Really, it all depends on what you’re looking for in the games. They’re both great for similar and unique reasons. As long as the core of monster den’s syle and gameplay remains, no one should complain.
about 9 months ago
The aesthetic change was very weird. Also, I really liked the old skill system better than the new one. Being able to choose among 8 skills and 2 passive skills gave more diversity than only being able to choose from 3 at a time. The artwork customization for Book of Dread was a little more streamlined as well.
Still good games tho, hope you keep on keeping on.
about 9 months ago
I’d also like to add that comments about Chronicles on Armorgames and Kongregate (both wonderful sites) are mostly written by 12-year-olds. Nothing against 12-year-olds! But they are likely not the target audience for further iterations of the Monsters Den series.
You’ve done fantastic work. Don’t be discouraged by negative reviews, although there may be some accurate criticisms within. These are great Flash games. They’d make even better inexpensive mobile or PC based, browser-independent games as well.
about 9 months ago
The thing, I think, that got most people was the difference in balancing. Book of Dread was overall an easier game. You could basically brute force your way through the levels that should be hard for your party (excepting certain difficulties and modifiers). In Chronicles, if you don’t go in with the right party, from chapter two on, you will die. A lot.
TLDR, people not really getting the whole, “Strategy” thing.
about 9 months ago
Well, the “Kongregate” achievement badge for Chronicles; “Campaign Completionist Badge” explains it to me, there is no endless sense of adventure with Chronicles. At least in the original and book of dread I could keep a party going over a period of weeks and play for 10 minutes at a time and be moving forward constantly.
The only ongoing thing on Chronicles was the endless wave after wave and I do not know if you are aware, but it sparked a lot of people into making characters with retaliation gear and the just taped down their space bar and viola, a day later, amazing levels.
The new aesthetics I think are fantastic, bravo on that. And the upgrade-able emporium is fantastic, something to strive for at last! But what the game really needs again is a sense of random, ongoing adventure that can only be attained by actually playing, not exploiting or botting.
More randomness please! Also, the Spark of Legends were a great idea but maybe make them more rare in future games? It kind of becomes just another one of those things you take for granted if you have too many of them.
Thanks for reading/asking, and it is very late at night so I hope I didn’t repeat myself too much, cheers.
about 8 months ago
I’ve been thinking about this for a little bit. I think a lot of it could be nostalgia. For me, the Book of dread was a breath of fresh air. It hit me at just the right time.
I love Chronicles, and think it is in many ways a better game. It is more challenging. After leveling the Emporium a bit, the game became easier. I like the persistent party members, and the carry over that creates a sense of investment. Perhaps some people like the fresh start at the beginning of each new game. Maybe have an ability to always have new level 1s at your disposal? Like a mercenary company?
Chemistry can be a tricky thing, and there is no accounting for taste. I think overall Chronicles is a better game, but I might not have gotten sucked into the franchise by Chronicles the way I did by the original. (I played the first version before the Book of Dread.) Chronicles feels a bit too involved for “casual” gaming, I think. It is a serious strategy buff’s game.
I see the point of many of the comments here. The change in appearance was initially jarring. I really like it now, but the simple layout of the older had an appeal. I miss some of the races of monsters. And I miss the Legendary mobs that would appear randomly, and the bait. That was cool! It also might have been a tad overpowered.
Being a beta tester early on certainly gave me a perspective that new players might not have. Who knows how that shaped my appreciation?
I am looking forward to seeing the next iteration of your work. I hope you have the ability to try different aesthetics, and find new ways to re-interpret Monsters Den. But sometimes, people just like things the way they were.
about 8 months ago
Obviously, Chronicles is vastly superior in lots of ways. But as people have said already, it’s just a little bit too complex for the kind of casual gameplay you get from BoD – you can’t really relax with it. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but some people play turn-based games at times when they don’t want to feel under any pressure at all.
Also, the much more complex (and admittedly vastly superior) graphics slow things down a lot. BoD was more like a card game – you got a graphic that lasted maybe a second or two and a quick sound-effect. Now you have to wait for up to six opponents to do quite complicated things, some of which seem to take forever – that purple energy flow thingy in particular goes on for about ten times as long as should, when a two-second purple zap would have made the point just as well.
Realistically, combat should be faster. Playing Chronicles, I found myself wondering why the heroes just stood there while their foes slo-o-o-o-owly gathered themselves to do something extremely predictable – duck, you schmucks!
For instance, after you’ve seen a blow land, the target recoil. and a bit of blood or whatever appear momentarily in mid-air, and observed that the victim’s hit-points have dropped, you don’t really need a peculiar, stylized, totally unrealistic graphic of a neatly triangular shower of blood spattering on the floor and then draining away. But that happens every single time anyone gets hurt, and that alone makes each encounter longer than it needs to be, for no good reason.
Seriously, speed up almost every action – especially those of Banshees and Wailing Widows, and of course that purple energy nonsense – until it takes no longer than it does for somebody to fire an arrow. Having totally immobile characters bob back and forth to indicate they’re about to strike adds nothing, especially when you can clearly see it’s about to be their turn, and the shower of blood or that white stuff you bleed after being hit by magic adds nothing at all, except that you have to wait for it to end before anything else happens.
If every combat went much faster without losing any actions, just the pointlessly overlong graphics, I think you’d find people warming to it more than they already have. Which would presumably be a change you could make almost entirely by simplifying or trimming existing code rather than writing a whole lot of new stuff. As it stands, after a while I started wishing there was a “skip intro” button on every single round of every single battle.
Also, maybe this is a consequence of your feeling a bit rushed, in the same way that there are no female PCs yet but there will be later, but some of the visual aspects of the game seem sketchy, unfinished, and frankly unappealing.
You really should replace quite a few of the monsters with better-looking ones. It’s pretty obvious that you were saving time by using very similar monsters over and over again, sometimes with no greater variation between them than having differently colored skin, which is kind of dull. And although the Cultists are fine (which is presumably why you used the same basic designs for the Undead bosses), some of the Undead and the Demons look like rush jobs – I mean. what’s with the pink ghost?
So, visually, I’d say you need scarier and more varied Undead and Demons, though that doesn’t matter anything like as much as the speed factor. Oh, and while you’re at it, there are a few little visual things you could tweak that would make it look more polished.
For example, it’s odd that, with the characters rendered in great detail, the type of ground they’re standing on is only indicated by an abstract icon – how much trouble would it be to actually render a stagnant puddle? And why is every battle standard I’ve ever seen totally blank? I thought white flags meant surrender!
But other than that, it’s a great game, which could be greater still with some fine-tuning. Also, have a look at some some really good pictures of demons before designing the next lot. Some of the Dutch Old Masters were exceptionally good at painting them – see especially Breughel the Elder, Cranach, and of course Bosch.
about 8 months ago
Chronicles was an overall improvement, no doubt, but a few things were missing from it I really enjoyed in Book of Dread.
Lost in Translation:
- Legendary weapons. In this game, we have only Spark of Legend to get that fix of the highest rarity items. In Book of Dread, there are quite a few good top-tier rarity items with interesting effects. As a collector, I really miss having more variety at the highest level of rarities. Spark of Legends just doesn’t give me the same effect.
-Legendary battles. By this I mean the fights against Hydra, Medusa, and the Minotaur. This game really doesn’t have such an equivalent. Sure, there are a few good boss fights, but nothing random, and that’s really what made it fun. Nothing beat that feeling of wandering around some floor only to find those yellow swords in the next room.
-Enemy diversity. I didn’t exactly count the unit types between Book of Dread and Chronicles, but I can tell you a whole race is missing: Dwarves. And even if the number of units is the same, it still feels like there are fewer, because a race is missing.
Moved in the wrong direction:
-Rarities. It might seem like nitpicking, but this was a big one for me. Artifact and Legendary had only a single item in game to each. It felt like such a waste. Going through the game, getting ready to collect all those Artifact and Legendary weapons and, oh wait Received Wisdom and Spark of Legend was it. It was a real let down.
about 8 months ago
I’m less of a gamer and more into storylines (even crappy ones) so to me (unlike the others) it was more that Chronicles started out weak plot-wise and even if you went with the cheating route, the pay-off for the plot seems very…bland. It really had more of an arcade feel to it than a half game/half item collector feel of a dungeron crawler.
The first serious downer was that you were supposed to be thrust into this epic stealth mission but instead the plot was happening at every level and the farther you went, the less sense it made. It was one of those games that felt like it had a rpg engine tacked on but was at heart just a pseudo-beat em up on top of a turn based engine.
Worse, just because you’ve unlocked a new plot line, doesn’t mean the characters were inter-changeable. You had to wait to die just to move to the 2nd plot branch but the plot itself sounds like the adventurers didn’t need to be the same ones you picked.
Finally the graphics just aren’t as timeless. There’s the speed change, the enemies then being more tank/immune based, the battles feeling more like tactical games where the cheap ai immediately knows the rules where as the player needs to find out…many of these might fly for gamers but it’s all…off even when compared to harsh roguelike games.
1) The monsters no longer feel like they want to survive. It feels like they were advanced novice TCG card players playing against beginners until the beginners picked up on what to exploit…and to exploit them is the same way. You had to anticipate and understand the rules of the tiles instead of understanding what creature it is you are dealing with. Many of the team set ups seem to be there just to provide balanced where as BoD had that feel that some groups were scouts, others were war buddies, others were captives. It wasn’t spelled out but it had more plot implications than the entire plot of Chronicles.
2) This leads to the effect of the graphics feeling like they were after thoughts even when they were turned to the fastest setting. For example, terrain exists but instead of a graphics for that, you get these tiles and people were randomly pushed off. Doesn’t really feel like a dungeon adventure, doesn’t really quite feel like anything else either except if you saw it as a complex battle engine with a plot tacked on.
3) On top of this, many of the graphical designs feel like they were insults if you just wanted to play/replay a casual dungeon crawler. The save game issue not withstanding, there’s also the whole achievement messages slapped in your face. The whole lack of tombstones for default characters. The way such characters were picked. (Pre-customized before being re-customized.) It really felt more like a bunch of dolls playing on tiles than a Den or a Chronicles placed on dated/minimal designed video game setting.
4) BoD was just flat out a more unique experience with little things getting in the way for prolonged grinding and it had a perfect scenario where there’s the original Den for the initial experience, the 2nd place that wowed you out on the monsters and the survival mode all in one balanced already available “pick at your own pace” introduction.
Chronicles’ idea of prolonged grinding involves deaths and resurrecting with getting stronger stats. The creatures didn’t appear to be factions and it just felt like 4 action heroes being able to JRPG their way (but through death) to an enemy hideout only with more difficulty but with less cinematic pay off. Even the character choices were more rewarding if you knew where to initially see all the unlocked skills that wasn’t very obvious where as BoD gave you that decision on your first level up.
about 8 months ago
Thanks for responding! I’m going to write up a big post at some point giving my perspective on some of the feedback, but I wanted to reply to this separately.
I’ll be honest– this is probably the most confusing feedback I’ve ever had on the game. A lot of the criticisms I simply don’t understand. I don’t mean that I disagree, but rather that it sometimes sounds like you’re talking about an entirely different game.
What do you mean about needing to die to progress / get stronger stats? Lack of tombstones for default characters?
I called the game Chronicles because it’s structured as a series of vignettes– just a sampling of missions from the life of your company. Which is actually not that different from BoD, except that you can use the same characters if you want.
about 8 months ago
Woops! Yup. Rushed the post too much.
Sorry about that.
The tombstone was meant to infer a reference to a somewhat NSFW joke post on either the original MD or BoD where a character died and the item they lost was the pants and the poster making the joke asking what really took place. I don’t remember the exact sentence.
I tend to lump these types of phenomenon as tombstones for simplicity’s sake to infer the phenomenon where a character’s death/downfall changes something that makes their world seem more alive. It also didn’t help that the game that had actual tombstones had a similar theme to Chronicles but yeah it was a different game and I really shouldn’t have rushed the post. BoD had those types of “quirks”. Chronicles was all about stages/levels/dying and restarting with the exception of the more tactical battles.
I probably should replay Chronicles to make sure any of the stuff I wrote is true to the game but I think “die to progress” came to mind because you couldn’t jump a stage with all weak characters which I think led to one of the cheap tricks being bringing a strong character alongside other weak party members to quick level up the weak party members which in itself was an extension of getting/grinding to stronger stats just to bring characters to the next chapter. It could be avoided, true, but the allowance of that process alone meant Chronicles didn’t really have the same suspense and pacing of BoD.
Death had more to do with completing a stage to unlock the next stage. A party member dying is less about wondering whether you can resurrect him so that you didn’t have to fall all the way back to the floor or risk losing an item and more about re-levelling once the heat was too much in a certain mission.
Now if say each mission had different random sub-missions each time or different bosses, this would have been closer to BoD idea of a surprise legendary monster but each mission was tedious replay to the same story until you reach the next stage and the next stage until the game eventually becomes more of a grinding to stats game/tactical game than a climb towards something.
I don’t know when I’ll be replaying the game as I’m also busy with something else but it’s just a cascading waterfall of changes. I don’t think I was unprepared for the style change of Chronicles. Before the game was released, I read the blog and the plans.
What really was different was how it was all executed.
For example the series of vignettes wasn’t really a sampling of mission when the missions in BoD was about killing an ultimate evil and the introduction texts of Chronicles made it sound more epic and more risky only for it to be a short amount of floors involving tough enemies/getting to those tough enemies/cutting back to the character select screen/heading back towards a different map with a different theme rather than a collected set of random enemies mingling with each other. Even the slight grand pay-off of what your character would say depending on his class when they get to the next level in BoD would have helped closed the gap about the difference between the two games.
The closest experience I could really explain of it is an arcade beat em up. You have a brief time in a stage and you move to the next stage only this time there’s a rpg engine involved to make sure you don’t get to the next stage quite as easily unless you levelled up some. BoD was more of a straight roguelike. The difficulty of the first floor was less about being good at fighting but in dodging the fights that might kill you (esp. for a beginner/novice not using an optimum party). The sub-quests were more on conserving the unexplored spots or weighing between getting the treasure or not. The more you lived, the longer the game took. You weren’t going to see the character selection that soon. Chronicles was all about doing sub-missions that felt more like excuses to do the same thing that didn’t need a sub mission in BoD. The life of your company felt more like the life of your enemies as you were one stepping into their traps. You were the ones meeting their notes. And when you end the stages, the characters you chose weren’t the party gaining notability shocking a skeptical mission giver or infuriating a fearmonger. The reward they get is simply opening up a new stage with a dash of items and stats on the side.
about 8 months ago
Chronicles is at it’s core a great game and in essence same as BoD. For me, I love both the game but personal expectations was high for Chronicles given the high standards of BoD (even if it’s a side release from Godfall) and there wasn’t enough in upgrades/improved features to make it stand out in it’s own right.
It just felt like a BoD DLC with graphic improvement.
E.g mostly same spells/skills with a few more added in.
about 8 months ago
I remember when I first played monsters denBOD. I felt like every step could lead to death and collecting items helped me barely make it to the next floor. It was those very unique battles with boss characters that really wrapped the whole experience up for me.
I would think,
I did all of that to get HERE. It reminded me of playing Chrono trigger getting to the last boss and the battle could last 30-40 minutes and I would be hanging by the skin of my teeth. The rare health potions that revived the entire group that I hoarded, the skills that I worked on, the expensive items that I bought all kept me from facing oblivion against Lavos, the final boss.
I’ve only been down about 4-5 levels in the new game. I had explored every inch of the levels and was doing well. The item gathering, comparing, and selling was a little tedious but I did it all in one go. When I logged back in and found my progress didn’t save I didn’t want to redo the very focused grind/crawl that I had done previously. Why? I think it is the monsters.
As a player my focus, at least in that one go, was on item gathering and exploration that didn’t really seem to make sense because what was the payoff? Maybe level grinding so I can get stronger? The fights could be challenging but for some reason the fights didn’t inspire me. I wasn’t like, oh man, that was really tough I wonder what kind of unique battle will I face next? Maybe I didn’t give it enough levels. I completed the first chapter if I remember correctly.
I hope this is helpful.
I would suggest asking Greg Weir for feedback. He is another developer, approachable, and his blog often depicts his ability to critique games in a fair and constructive manner. I don’t know him personally but just like I have emailed you and received a response he was also very professional and kind.
http://ludusnovus.net/
And I think it would be cool if you guys knew each other
Good luck with your next round of games I’m cheering for you! You are very talented and make smart worthy diversions of time. I wish you had more support so you could leverage others talent and we could see more, bigger, badder things from you.
about 8 months ago
I liked Book of Dread better because it didn’t delete all my save data after I had half the characters at max level.