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Those huge dungeons
Varkun
Member, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
I know that not all dungeons will be huge sprawling affairs but how does intrepid make us the players want to explore every part of them? What incentives could be put in place to make it relevant or worth while to explore those side passages rather than just take the most effective path straight to that last boss?
For me I can not help but think back to vanilla wow and black rock mountain and how it all linked together to form a huge sprawling dungeon and I can't help but wonder if intrepid has any similar sorts of plans for their dungeons.
Anyone have any thoughts on this?
For me I can not help but think back to vanilla wow and black rock mountain and how it all linked together to form a huge sprawling dungeon and I can't help but wonder if intrepid has any similar sorts of plans for their dungeons.
Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Close your eyes spread your arms and always trust your cape.
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Which way it affects the boss fight is another question thought.
In most games I've played, exploring the side branches made the final fight easier
in Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you could explore the world or walk straight to the final boss fight as you were.
Exploring the world would make fighting the final boss easier.
I wonder if you could implement this the other way around, so that exploring the side branches increases the difficulty of the boss?
Not sure which direction would be more appropriate.
(maybe one boss in one direction, another boss in the other direction)
Intrepid has mentioned that killing early bosses quickly will result in a tougher fight for the next boss perhaps by exploring those side tunnels there might be some way to slightly mitigate the increase in power.
Good thoughts though @maouw
This is for two main reasons. The first reason is taht many dungeons in EQ2 were open as opposed to instanced. The second reason is that a lot of ex-EQ2 staff work on Ashes. Obviously I may be wrong here, but as a generalized assumption it is likely not too far off.
What that game did to encourage people to spread out around a dungeon was quite simple - dungeons didn't generally have an end boss.
Instead, each dungeon had several (often several dozeon) bosses and mini-bosses spread out all over the zone. It meant that the best strategy for taking on a level appropriate dungeon was often to just to go to an area of the dungeon that wasn't currently occupied.
This worked in that game because the more desired items were usually on a shared loot table rather than being specific to one encounter (though some encounters did have the occasional piece of unique loot). With Ashes having encounters drop materials rather than items, this should fit in just fine.
This whole thing allows dungeon designers to have side paths, offshoots, and even just random rooms that are all worth players time.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
It was the same in Tibia, the oldschool game I used to play.
Usually it would just be handled politically, but yeah, we need dungeons to be big.
It is true with Ashes that there is that option of pvp when you come across another group and this plays into the dungeons needing to be large. With materials being a portion of boss loot and I would imagine the mobs within a dungeon would provide some form of resources also the need to protect a farm location and the ability to work off corruption through experience gain may very well provide yet more incentive for pvp within dungeons.
I just hope that the very large dungeons will have many viable options when it comes to exploring them depending on what the goal of a party is. Should provide for some interesting encounters with other player groups let alone the NPC mobs.
You enter the dungeon with a few people(not full group), most likely you will look for either 2-3 tiny rooms connected, or one medium room to satisfy your clear speed with respawn timers, you will contest those rooms with other small groups, or a bunch of solo players that will try to defend their 1 tiny room, and might try to collaborate with another solo player whose other room you try to take, which will eventually lead to a somewhat equally sized conflict.
You enter the dungeon with a full group, most likely you will look for the biggest room to satisfy your clear speed, or a lot of connected small rooms, which will lead to conflict between full groups for those big rooms, or if a big group tried to take multiple small rooms(which might consist of multiple tiny rooms), the players in those rooms(not full groups) might collaborate to give opposition to the full group.
You enter the dungeon with an alliance of groups, your primary goal would be to clear the bosses and leave, or clear the bosses and 'close' a big part of the dungeon after you clear the bosses, so your groups would split accross evenly to satisfy their clear speed with respawns, which will naturally push away(or force to fight) all the groups that are currently sitting there. If they choose to leave, they will be forced to look for a similar room in that dungeon, and either occupy it if its free, or contest it against same "pushed over" groups.
Thats how it will work most likely, from my previous experience with such dungeons. Every single room of those dungeons will be occupied eventualy, if it fits the average progression of the area. Some rooms will be more desired than others, some groups will be stronger than others, which will lead to dynamic reallocation of people inside the dungeon all the time.
I have never played EQ2, but I am currently going back through EQ1 now. I assume much of the same design philosophy carried over to its sequel. In those dungeons, as Noaani pointed out, there are lots of bosses to keep moving around to and incentivize mobility in a party, or let them camp an area to farm a specific item or group of mobs.
Keep in mind, dungeons have shifting 'hidden' areas that may or may not be active, so going back over areas could be super rewarding if you have a keen eyed adventurer in your group.
There was also mention of solo instanced dungeons? No idea how that works or would be balanced.
My incentive for completely exploring it would be.........because it's there. This is admittedly a good reason to play a stealth class because they can usually go places others can't without the need to hack/slash their way through it.
Why hack and slash when fire works sooooo much better.
Ulduar is my favorite raid of all time across all MMOs. I absolutely loved it. I must say that I would not expect anything like a WOW raid in AoC. Because the bosses are open world they will just be prize piñata's. Imagine doing yog25 with 60-120 people all fighting each other, and the boss. You can't tune a boss for that amount of people present, and have it be challenging. Steven says this is not the case, but I am extremely skeptical. I hope that once we get more into the alphas and people start raiding. Intrepid will see that in order to maintain the integrity of a challenging raid boss. You need to have it happen in an instance, and the fight needs to be tuned for an average gear level that is on the edge of what is currently obtainable. The gear system in AoC is another variable that makes me skeptical about AoCs open world raids being difficult. Imagine if you could have ICC25 man gear while fighting yog25. That may very will be the case. With the over enchant system, it is going to be very hard for the devs to come up with a scaling system to makes it so that the bosses are not getting melted by clans of players in the highest tier OC gear they can bring to the zerg.
To further drive my point home. Anyone who raids seriously has seen the difference between week one strats and week two+ strats. What is the difference? Enough of the raid got a few peices of gear, and we are now skipping mechanics or just outright able to ignore them. That is how tightly tuned a modern raid is. You can't have that in an open world, with multiple party's showing up, and a gear system that allows for such a vast range of power.
Now don't get me wrong here. I am not hating on AoC, I love everything I am seeing about the game. As much as I loved Ulduar, I loved going around with my clan hunting raid boss spawns and fighting for them in l2. It is a different game style. Politics and territory control Vs set experiences. We have plenty of the games with the modern raids that are tightly tuned to precise party sizes and gear scores. WOW/FFXIV have proven to both be very very good at that. We don't have enough of what AoC is showing us it wants to be. I want the open world PVP economy based sandbox that AoC is showing me it is.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
Some great points and yes Intrepid are going to have many hurdles to over come to get the dungeon/raiding into a good state with so many variables thrown into the mix. I often wonder if they intend to instance many of their raid bosses so they can control some of the variables and create a competitive raid environment. That 20% of instanced dungeon/raid content.
I have thought about it a lot. That is why I get a little wordy when the topic comes up. I won't be able to give actually feedback until Alpha2 myself, but I am extremely eager to see how the raid bosses pan out. Even if the raids are lack luster. The game will still be fantastic. With the focus on open world PvP, and economy. The game may just be closer to a fantasy version of EVE. Which would be perfectly fine by me. I don't NEED raids. I need a game that rewards socializing, and makes the work I put into my gear valuable for longer than a patch.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
The more feedback they get, the better chances for the raid to improve
I'm quietly optimistic that they'll have mechanics that prevent zerg without having to lean on instancing.
If not, we can discuss a few.
There are certainly a lot of variables to consider in terms of power balance for both dungeons and raids as well, so I'm sure we'll be asking for all of your detailed feedback on tuning those knobs as we get deeper into testing
Possible solutions could be that who ever first engages the boss would have the entire party ( so long as they are inside the dungeon) teleported to the boss room, and all other players who are not in the party will be teleported outside the door to wait their turn so to speak. or perhaps an activation beacon that can only be activated if someone is not in combat could be present just inside the door that essentially does the same thing.
Systems like that really shine with party contention, but are a plague when it devolves into guilds owning entire sections of the world so you can't farm there ever again.
I like big dungeons in general so I don't have much to say against that idea specifically. Especially when lore is involved.
U.S. East
A stronger guild wants to get the place for themselves 24/7? That's when you and your allies form a coalition to fight back, or maybe support with mats their rival guild, maybe even you and your guild save to pay a mercenary guild to wipe them out of the place.
There are many ways to handle that situation in a social sandbox. Be creative!