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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Dungeons, specifically design philosophy
Hey everyone,
Earlier today, I was having a conversation with a friend, we had quite an in-depth discussion about dungeons, and the way they are presented in modern day mmo's.
I wanted to touch on a few things, and gauge the response of the community.
Dungeons, traditionally were big, labyrinth type places, with secret passages, special keys to unlock rooms, traps, all of that. However, these days, dungeons are basically a lot of trash mobs and a boss. It's a very linear experience, as a result, dungeons are farmed en masse.
They don't take long, and their linear designs have people figure out the way to optimally farm the place. This design is okay, if you have like half an hour to play, and can get a group fast.
There are probably many reasons why the mmo community as a whole gravitated towards this model.
What dungeon design would you rather see, a smooth, fast, linear, straight forward experience?
Or a more traditional one, with secrets, traps, labyrinths?
Obviously the downside of the traditional one is time consumption. But I personally feel the experience gained from it (Personal experience, not character) is a lot better.
What are your thoughts?
Earlier today, I was having a conversation with a friend, we had quite an in-depth discussion about dungeons, and the way they are presented in modern day mmo's.
I wanted to touch on a few things, and gauge the response of the community.
Dungeons, traditionally were big, labyrinth type places, with secret passages, special keys to unlock rooms, traps, all of that. However, these days, dungeons are basically a lot of trash mobs and a boss. It's a very linear experience, as a result, dungeons are farmed en masse.
They don't take long, and their linear designs have people figure out the way to optimally farm the place. This design is okay, if you have like half an hour to play, and can get a group fast.
There are probably many reasons why the mmo community as a whole gravitated towards this model.
What dungeon design would you rather see, a smooth, fast, linear, straight forward experience?
Or a more traditional one, with secrets, traps, labyrinths?
Obviously the downside of the traditional one is time consumption. But I personally feel the experience gained from it (Personal experience, not character) is a lot better.
What are your thoughts?
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Comments
Hours upon hours is quite a vague term though. You can have a complex dungeon, with a maze-like structure, traps, secret passages, keys that drop to open certain doors, and have it take like two hours. Which, I would assume, and hope a casual can do too.
I personally prefer the longer ones too. But I like investing time into things, it makes it more rewarding for me personally.
Exploration being rewarded as well, if you search every hallway and cavern there should be things hidden away that take time to find riddles to solve, traps to avoid, not just hoards of mobs to beat up on. Things like doors that can not be passed until lore is discovered in another part of the world with the clues on how to open it. I do hope with sprawling dungeons its not just kill them all in one run through job done never go back, there need to be hidden secrets that can only be unlocked if you have found the means to do so from other sources.
I would like the means to unlock further secrets to be very subtle and hard to discover, could be a ritual you need to preform an item is required, ancient tome needs to be found, unlocking one secret path simply opens up more choices. Plus opening every tomb or secret vault should not be just instant reward, I would like to see the possibility of some true horrors being unleashed upon the world, know many would hate this but the group that unleashed such evil may very well be its first victims. Also why not have beings that will do good to the node after being released not everything that is imprisoned has to be evil.
How about an artefact that was sealed away behind arcane magic's that are suddenly broken by over zelous adventurers, strange things begin to happen within the node, crops fail, water turns putrid, strange creatures begin to appear and wreak havoc, the only way to stop this is to reseal the vault which may take quite some resources and researching on how to replace the arcane seals. Now suppose an opposing node catches wind of this and sees the effect this is having on their enemy, so perhaps it is in their interest to have the seals broken.
I guess that went more than a bit off topic in the last part, more of a zone event.
It's good that we will have both shorter and longer dungeons so you can chose where you wish to go depending on how much time you have to spare.
Long ones are good for 1 time, story mode, rare events, short ones are better for repeated farming. Sooner or later you learn any dungeon, and better to be bored of something, that is fast to play through, than being tortured by having to complete XXXth time a longer one.
Blackrock Depths (BRD) was one of my favourite dungeons in WoW, as it exemplified the design principles espoused by @Ariatras. Some of the things that made this dungeon one of the best:
That last point is really referring to the knowledge of the layout of the dungeon itself, not to specific boss mechanics. Because it was so large and sprawling, and a number of the disparate areas linked in certain ways (which could be shut off depending on a decision made by the players at the start of the instance), if you knew the instance well you could guide a group through much faster and more efficiently – knowing where the patrols went, knowing when to move and knowing the shortest routes between two points.
One of the greatest aspects to BRD however was that it was challenging. As it was my favourite instance, and I knew it well, I was often asked to tank it for groups that had failed at one point in particular – if you have done BRD you will know the torch room I am talking about.
Even with well-geared players, if you weren’t on the ball and your grouping wasn’t tight, you would wipe and wipe and wipe in this one particular section. No it wasn’t a boss fight, it was just a challenging room to get through. Over time it was the instance that I have run the most in any game and I still miss it.
For the longer instances in Ashes, I would love to see many of the design aspects of a dungeon like BRD be adopted. I think this was instancing done right. I know that the 15 minute speed run instant gratification crowd would be utterly horrified by running through BRD, but that is the same mentality of those who find Raiders of the Lost Ark to be a slow movie!
I am more than fine with a few smaller dungeons that take 30 minutes or so. I dislike speed runs, and despise that speed has become the driving force behind dungeon design. If you are a fan of 10 minute dungeons, then there are plenty of games that offer satisfaction in this regard. I very much hope that Ashes will offer us something with a little more meat.
I want to go into a dungeon for an experience not for 5 points towards filling out a progress bar.
I want to go into that dungeon again to experience that content again, not to grind for an RNG gear drop, or for another 5 points.
Nice post.
It is tricks and short-cuts(hello to the Lava Swimming Team) and secrets (and random stuff?) that makes things interesting IMO, and for that to happen you kinda need a rather big place to play with for the design - which is why that isn't very suitable for small rush-rush dungeons.
Oh, and please have a something open or activate after you down the last boss/riddle/whatever to take you back to the entrance/exit or give some way out (running back in AQ40 is zzzzzZZZ).
If they balance them so that reward is appropriate to dungeon length (longer dungeons give you more reward then shorter ones, which should be logical) then they will be equally good for farming since you will get same amount of rewards per time spent farming.
What about the Grimm Guzzler though? I often had a Rogue in my group, he naturally wanted to kill the Gnomish bartender. Aggro'ing that place, so that the backdoor gets destroyed, that was very challenging, one wrong pull and it was a wipe. They were all humanoids, so at low hp they started fleeing, another level of danger. I've had many many wipes in the instance. And for some reason, people accepted that as part of the experience. In later expansions, if one wipes once, or twice, everyone leaves.
I really don't think they'll be good for only one run, if they are long, I think, and hope, that those types of dungeons, should they be present in Ashes, will provide players with an experience they'll likely never forget. Much like BRD.
PS: I still get lost when physically finding the appropriately coloured entrances for Maraudon.
As far as design I would like to see the following.
-mobs in different places not just in same place every time.
-same dungeoun but different difficulty should have more mobs and maybe one more ability for mobbs. For example most mobs just do physical damage (actually just about everything in the game only does physical damage) giving one of them a 1 second stun. minor heal,just some minor ability to make things interesting. It could have an (xx) percent of happening so when it does it is a surprise.
-Mobs should have loot that is desirable. I mean I have been in some runs were we kill a bunch of mobs and everyone just foregoes the loot. Putting things in like crafting materials, recipes, gems, pets,. For example. You kill 5 humaniods, oh look one of had some type of leather that can be either sold or used to craft item.
-In game it would be like 5% chance for the Random Number Generator to go to another loot table for additional items. That way at least players are looking for those items. Not just seeing what the boss drops..
-Finally I agree some dungeouns are just way to linear and flat. A set of spiral that go to different wing adds immersion. Having doors or gates that need to be opened separating one area from another, not just having everything packed in there, one room after another.
Here is one idea have a huge non-linear dungeouns, players can go in there and choose which part they want to do. If they have little time they could came back later to do the rest.
I think games like Diablo and WoW have a cool element to their dungeons where you can increase difficulty and add affixes. It adds variation and fun factor.
Like @Bajjer said: If I repeat a dungeon, it is mostly to experience it again. That and following reasons:
1. The challenge of actually completing the dungeon
2. Getting the dungeon quests done (which excludes regularly-repeatable quests)
3. Loot: Yes, getting loot is a reason to repeat a dungeon a fair amount of times. It doesn't matter if the dungeon is short or long though, because this is just a side aspect. A chance for a rare item in a long dungeon though is a nice extra
4. Helping someone to achieve the others reasons
And number 1. is way more important then the others. The example of the torch-room in BRD is quite perfect. I do want challenging bosses, but the rest can be a challenge, too. I am fine and even happy with actually having to think about how to defeat a room full of guards and two patrols passing by. And I don't only want that in a raid, there it's mostly about the bosses, but in a friendly 5-8 man group in a dungeon that fills the complete evening or afternoon. And maybe we didn't even finish it because we failed here and there. That is okay. We will be back and the satisfaction of completing it will just be bigger.
Pretty sure puzzles will be part of our dungeon running experience along with many other tricks and traps to keep us on our toes. I just have this feeling we will be pleasantly surprised by what dungeons will contain.
Will have to wait and see but just have this feeling that tricks and traps are not going to be easy to find, you don't have the right skills to detect them then you are going to walk into something nasty. This is why you are going to want to take a rogue with you to detect such things, I feel that all classes will have a place in a group and people will seek them out.
I know that it pays at times to expect the worst, thus you are not so disappointed when this turn out that way