red_kangaroo wrote
Unfortunately, IVAN suffers the bane of many old roguelikes, having a set of "ascension gear", the best items for their slots - boots of agility, belt of levitation, cloak of fire resistance.
I was thinking about this as well and it occurred to me that the "ascension" gear is always the same because the final boss/levels always present the same obstacles. I think having a circumstance where the ways that enemies attak you or obstacles in the level design change from game to game, so that you arent spending the whole game chasing the 5 essential items. Why do you need a cloak of fire protection? because the final level has a bunch mages fireballing the shit out of you EVERY TIME. if the enemy set later in the game was more varied, you would have to rely on different equipment sets for different games. Also you could make the generation of some items mutually exclusive so that you couldn't get a full kit in every game and would have make do without part of it.