I must be missing something here, as all of your concerns seem to revolve around the idea that there isnt enough content.
If you have a dungeon with 60 rooms, each room takes 20 minutes to clear to the boss and then respawns after 20 minutes, a group can only expect to be able to hold two rooms. That means this dungeon can hold 30 groups - more than any dungeon in any game I have ever played holds.
If we then assume a shared loot table (or several loot tables that are shared between many bosses), no one group has any reason at all to fight any group for any room. Just go on to a different room with the same loot table and go for it.
If we then assume that loot rights are based on performance over the whole event rather than just the boss, no group has any real reason to attempt to steal a boss from another group.
Since the very idea of even being in this dungeon is content, rather than PvP, groups in the dungeon - especially deep in the dungeon - will not want to waste time with PvP, or with trying to kill steal, or anything like that. They will want to find a appt where they can do what they came to do. In that regard, it is very similar to the Library in Archeage - a large, open dungeon with more than enough room for anyone wanting to be there, and this lead to very little PvP ever happening in that dungeon (a LOT happened at the entrance to it, however).
I'm assuming I am missing something from you here, as it isnt like you to be so actively against something without good reason.
On that note.
Is anyone worried about the scale of the carphin dungeon?
Initially it looks huuuge.
But when i had a closer look the first room of the tower already takes up 20% of the dungeon volume. Yet it only holds a few mobs, not even enough to grind for 1 group. It also does not look spacious at all.
I skimmed through the wiki and the tower of carphin has actually a lot of infos around it. https://ashesofcreation.wiki/The_Tower_of_Carphin
As it seems the tower has 5 floors? And the last 2 floors seem to be bosses?
In order to be the biggest PvE attractor of the neighbouring 5 nodes, the dungeon should be able to at least hold around 10% of the neighbouring nodes´ population. Shouldnt it?
10k pop /85 nodes * 5 nodes * 0.1 percent= 59 pop
New content drops through the story arc systems are gonna be chaotic lol
The dungeon will look like a clowns car.
On that note.
Is anyone worried about the scale of the carphin dungeon?
Initially it looks huuuge.
But when i had a closer look the first room of the tower already takes up 20% of the dungeon volume. Yet it only holds a few mobs, not even enough to grind for 1 group. It also does not look spacious at all.
I skimmed through the wiki and the tower of carphin has actually a lot of infos around it. https://ashesofcreation.wiki/The_Tower_of_Carphin
As it seems the tower has 5 floors? And the last 2 floors seem to be bosses?
In order to be the biggest PvE attractor of the neighbouring 5 nodes, the dungeon should be able to at least hold around 10% of the neighbouring nodes´ population. Shouldnt it?
10k pop /85 nodes * 5 nodes * 0.1 percent= 59 pop
New content drops through the story arc systems are gonna be chaotic lol
The dungeon will look like a clowns car.
It depends on what you mean by 'worried'.
I'd assume this was intentional. That's the type of game Ashes' design suggests to me.
There's a strong appeal in keeping the lore and design basic, the dungeons smaller, and the conflict potential high, for this game type, I would think.
It's not high on my list of 'really enjoyable designs' but neither is it outside scope, it's right there in that middle where I figure most people will be okay with it even if they don't love it, and it will probably generate lots of 'drama' when combined with the other mechanics, so I'm not sure what there is to be 'worried' about.
New content drops through the story arc systems are gonna be chaotic lol
The dungeon will look like a clowns car.
Yeah, the tower felt quite small for its apparent size. I didn't really pay enough attention to it before, but I checked older videos of other dungeons and I definitely feel like like the overall size of rooms and heights of ceilings seem to be waaaay too damn big for their own good.
Open world dungeons require real in-game space, so it feels kinda counterproductive to make them huge in size but small in content amount. And first floor of the tower looked like a single room. The page you linked says that second floor has a few offices so I'm assuming several tiny spaces with maybe 2-3 mobs at best? And 3rd seems to be somewhat similar, but probably with fewer but bigger spaces.
In other words this feels more like a combination of an instanced dungeon and open world accessibility. Maybe Intrepid want us to clear the whole dungeon as a single piece of repeatable content? And that is exactly why the dev discussion's question was phrased in such a way.
I definitely hope there's gonna be more variety in dungeon types and especially some super cramped ones that take up little space but have a toooon of content in them.
New content drops through the story arc systems are gonna be chaotic lol
The dungeon will look like a clowns car.
I definitely hope there's gonna be more variety in dungeon types and especially some super cramped ones that take up little space but have a toooon of content in them.
The appeal of this design type isn't that high in my experience though?
Ashes is definitely in that 'TableTop game converted into MMO' space of design, which is unsurprising given Steven's basis for it. That puts its 'appeal' in the direction of FF and Neverwinter when it comes to dungeons and mob placement, I could probably run you through a bunch of decisions that clarify why certain dungeons in Alpha-1 were the way they are, based on that.
If my experience means anything, I can say that if you try to tune the 'numbers' for TTK, difficulty, group Synergy, content length, and dungeon size, you get specific outcomes for the 'lesser importance' values by putting in the ones that are 'important' to your goal.
Different games have different 'importance' assigned to each of those, that's all.
Basically dungeons in Ashes can't be large unless they make them big and 'grindy'. That might even be why we got the Dev Discussion that we got. I'd absolutely expect that.
The things we know are important to Ashes and probably have 'set values', in priority order by my estimation:
1. Group Synergy
2. Difficulty
3. TTK of Mobs and player
4. Dungeon Size
5. Content Length
Simplest solution as developers would be to put Dungeon Size lowest, ask the community about Content Length and bump its priority up to 4, and then tune the Dungeon Size. I think they know what they're doing. "It might not make you ecstatic, but this is what peak performance looks like".
There's a strong appeal in keeping the lore and design basic, the dungeons smaller, and the conflict potential high, for this game type, I would think.
It's not high on my list of 'really enjoyable designs' but neither is it outside scope, it's right there in that middle where I figure most people will be okay with it even if they don't love it, and it will probably generate lots of 'drama' when combined with the other mechanics, so I'm not sure what there is to be 'worried' about.
My main worry would come from the amount of such dungeons. If there's enough of them to have 3-4 groups per each dungeon - yeah, this would be roughly the same as L2 in terms of pvp inclination and potential (relatively speaking).
But if we'll have hundreds of people aiming to farm a dungeon like Carphin seems to be - that would be even harsher than what L2 had with most of its dungeons. L2 had two tower dungeons at 40-55 lvl range and 49-76 one, 3 and 12 (14) floors respectively. The first dungeon could house ~16 parties on the first floor and ~10 on the second. The other dungeon held ~4 parties per floor, depending on their size/power.
Even if we assume that Carphin will have 2-3 mob spawns on that first floor - that's still content for one party, unless the mobs are insanely difficult and take a shiiiitton of time to kill. And if they're that difficult then we come back to your argument of skillchecks by the attackers and the whole damn pvx crumbles, because no one would be able to kill the mobs.
Now I'm obviously all for a ton of pvx content, but there's gotta be a good balance. Either the content is easy enough to support a ton of pvp while pveing or there's enough of hard content to decrease the amount of pvp around it. L2 kinda had both, but balanced it with suuuper long leveling and player funneling. Players would have a backup location to farm, but usually wanted to go to the top places, of which there was a limited amount (especially when you consider loot).
But due to long leveling you wouldn't have a shitton of people going for the exact same lvl of mobs, so the playerbase was more spread out and most of the time your backup location would be a relatively safe choice, if your first choice was taken already.
With AoC's dungeon designs we might get hundreds of people going for the same locations, while the location can, at best, support a group or two. The game will obviously have the same slow leveling so that's definitely a plus, but they'll need to have enough content to semi-evenly distribute the players across it. The size increase of the map would imply that this is exactly what they're doing, but the design of locations kinda goes against that implication.
Ashes is definitely in that 'TableTop game converted into MMO' space of design, which is unsurprising given Steven's basis for it. That puts its 'appeal' in the direction of FF and Neverwinter when it comes to dungeons and mob placement, I could probably run you through a bunch of decisions that clarify why certain dungeons in Alpha-1 were the way they are, based on that.
Simplest solution as developers would be to put Dungeon Size lowest, ask the community about Content Length and bump its priority up to 4, and then tune the Dungeon Size. I think they know what they're doing. "It might not make you ecstatic, but this is what peak performance looks like".
Yeah, I get that and I definitely get the appeal of the cool large spaces and their vibes. I just hope they'll balance it out in the context of their own planned systems. I believe they can cause they haven't shown any real indication of inability to do so, but the worry is still there
With AoC's dungeon designs we might get hundreds of people going for the same locations, while the location can, at best, support a group or two. The game will obviously have the same slow leveling so that's definitely a plus, but they'll need to have enough content to semi-evenly distribute the players across it. The size increase of the map would imply that this is exactly what they're doing, but the design of locations kinda goes against that implication.
I'd say 'not really', but at that point I'd have to bring out the proverbial whiteboard.
I think the most important thing for anyone to do here is, as usual, to try to ditch whatever they expect, bearing in mind that Intrepid is now full of designers from different games, who probably know at least as much as I do about how to crunch the numbers and pull the levers, by default.
Personally I'm expecting around 200-400 'dungeons' total by the time they're done, depending on how they choose to connect certain ones together and how they tweak the 'Content Length' part.
Hundreds of people going for the same locations seems unlikely to me, given their model.
Using that, Carphin is pretty 'large', it's not trying to be the size of a BDO Dungeon, since the game's principles aren't based on being 'grindy'.
Personally I'm expecting around 200-400 'dungeons' total by the time they're done, depending on how they choose to connect certain ones together and how they tweak the 'Content Length' part.
Hundreds of people going for the same locations seems unlikely to me, given their model.
If this will be the case, my worries will go away.
Using that, Carphin is pretty 'large', it's not trying to be the size of a BDO Dungeon, since the game's principles aren't based on being 'grindy'.
Yeah, that "grind" part is mostly where my assumptions come from. But we've discussed how I see the pvp system working with the mob/dungeon design before, so I won't go into my concerns on that front again.
Personally I'm expecting around 200-400 'dungeons' total by the time they're done, depending on how they choose to connect certain ones together and how they tweak the 'Content Length' part.
Hundreds of people going for the same locations seems unlikely to me, given their model.
If this will be the case, my worries will go away.
Using that, Carphin is pretty 'large', it's not trying to be the size of a BDO Dungeon, since the game's principles aren't based on being 'grindy'.
Yeah, that "grind" part is mostly where my assumptions comes from. But we've discussed how I see the pvp system working with the mob/dungeon design before, so I won't go into my concerns on that front again.
Well, I mean, I'm glad to talk about it if it helps literally anyone.
In my opinion we all need to let go of specific things we expect or like from our favorite games because the tweaks just don't work otherwise.
I for example need to drop the idea that this game will be 'hard' because their designs don't allow for it to be 'hard' at the tier I'm used to, but that doesn't mean it will be terrible, it means it will be Neverwinter tier. I say this because owPvX content can't be that type of hard without creating a situation where people who enjoy disrupting others won't be able to enjoy it really easily.
Similarly, I drop the idea that it will be immersive in PvP in the same way that BDO is (I'm not complimenting how BDO is even when I say that).
So for you, I guess I'm suggesting to drop two perspectives:
1. The game will give you a grind that you could reasonably expect to do for hours at a time
2. The game intends for small scale conflicts to lead to 'positive' feelings
The first, I say because even the wording of their tweet, as you noted, implies this. As I understand it, no L2, FFXI, or BDO player would ever speak of 'Dungeon' using the word 'Clear'. Even 'delve' was sort of 'sus' relative to that perspective.
The second, I say because of the combination of how Corruption works and the Dungeon design style of Alpha-1 (strongly echoed but not really confirmable in the Wreckage and Tower of Carphin designs).
You talk about 'clearing' if you're playing Onigiri, FFXIV (to an extent), Neverwinter, etc. Also FFXI instanced Content. You can definitely make Open World dungeons that you would also use the word 'clear' for, but what would normally happen is that players would clash with each other, create drama and unpleasant friction interactions, and that sort of atmosphere would spread throughout the server. And for most designers this would be a negative so they wouldn't do it. It's just not apparently a negative to Ashes' goals.
But the whole point of this game is to be unlike anything else, a true PvX MMO. It has to 'make its own definitions' in design too.
So yeah, there will be dungeons that we can 'clear' and that means people will be able to 'contest and disrupt your clear' and that's reflected very directly in the wording they use, even from the Dev Discussion.
"Note that most dungeons in Ashes of Creation will be an open-world experience, where you may compete with other players to progress through the dungeon."
So for you, I guess I'm suggesting to drop two perspectives:
1. The game will give you a grind that you could reasonably expect to do for hours at a time
2. The game intends for small scale conflicts to lead to 'positive' feelings
Yeah, that first one will definitely be difficult to drop purely because I do that in pretty much all the games I play, even if it's not necessarily optimal. I think that's just the result of my personality and gaming experience. I find it difficult to warp my head around a game that doesn't support grind.
Ashes promises a ton of varying content so I do think that I'll be able to grind it for hours, but I think you're definitely right on the dungeon part of the grind. Their current design and communication definitely points towards a non-grindable direction.
So yeah, there will be dungeons that we can 'clear' and that means people will be able to 'contest and disrupt your clear' and that's reflected very directly in the wording they use, even from the Dev Discussion.
"Note that most dungeons in Ashes of Creation will be an open-world experience, where you may compete with other players to progress through the dungeon."
Working as intended.
This is kinda the reason for my confusion though. My preestablished assumptions clashed with the "clear" design exactly in the context of contending content. Your second point addressed this and I definitely agree that I need to distance myself from this particular assumption, but it's, in a way, even harder than the grind one, because it definitely goes against what would seem to be the logical course of actions.
Grindable content allows for that "positive" feeling to stay with you even if your gameplay was interrupted by pvp, but clearable content would imply that you really want to finish it in one go or that it might even require you to do so in order to complete it correctly. And any pvp interruption would fuck you over and set you back by who knows how long (well, Intrepid know obviously). And that definitely doesn't seem in any way positive.
Obviously we're missing a ton of info on how exactly Intrepid intend on succeeding with that kind of design or at least how they intend to keep their players in the game and experiencing every aspect of the game w/o one type of player completely removing the other type from the game.
There's a chance that the whole dungeon experience will be instead just as my "single room" suggestion from this thread. You'll kill a few mobs with a few breaks in-between and then you kill the boss, and that's your dungeon "clear". But just as you pointed out, the mobs would most likely not be all that difficult. And I'd assume that pvers like at least some good difficulty in their content, while majority of pvpers would probably not really care one way or the other.
Which to me seems to defeat the design's own purpose. You make kind of a pve-centered design, but you fill it with sub-par pve and on top of that you let pvpers interrupt said pve. Maybe I'm just a bit too confused, but to me that definitely sounds silly. Or at the very least like the sharpest design edge to try and successfully walk on. If they do succeed though, Ashes might be a very very successful mmo. Hope they do.
Personally I'm expecting around 200-400 'dungeons' total by the time they're done, depending on how they choose to connect certain ones together and how they tweak the 'Content Length' part.
Hundreds of people going for the same locations seems unlikely to me, given their model.
Using that, Carphin is pretty 'large', it's not trying to be the size of a BDO Dungeon, since the game's principles aren't based on being 'grindy'.
We kinda have the number for dungeons and raids, its around 12 in total.
The metadata leak of the A2 map a while ago, gave away all planned POI.
Maybe it wasnt complete? But in terms of geographic POI it surely was complete.
Also the current footprint of the dungeon makes it unlikely to have 200 of em. The whole area is like the size of half a ZOI.
The way intrepid worded the dungeon in context to the neighbouring nodes also makes it seem like the biggest POI for several nodes.
Hundreds of people going for the same locations seems unlikely to me, given their model.
Using that, Carphin is pretty 'large', it's not trying to be the size of a BDO Dungeon, since the game's principles aren't based on being 'grindy'.
There is no way this game is not grindy.
We have so many systems stacked on each other, there is no way they can feed that this game enough content.
Also i dont see it as a conflict between big spaces and ow pvp/risk vs reward, i think big spaces are a necessity when it comes to balancing things like corruption.
Ashes is probably the most tactile game when it comes to space, it has so many touchpoints, like caravans, grinding spot, varying population densities, and so on and has a decentralized structure.
You are not gonna grind through the local questhub from level 10-15 and afterwards the zone is dead... the nodes are a big attractor from which all player activity will be directed from. 85 times over.
I wanted to tap into that topic also since the freehold system also seems very expansive, taking away 21% of the map.
21% without freehold spacing, without landmarks, without the environment, without other systems that may make the placing of freehold space even more complicated.
Personally I'm expecting around 200-400 'dungeons' total by the time they're done, depending on how they choose to connect certain ones together and how they tweak the 'Content Length' part.
Hundreds of people going for the same locations seems unlikely to me, given their model.
Using that, Carphin is pretty 'large', it's not trying to be the size of a BDO Dungeon, since the game's principles aren't based on being 'grindy'.
We kinda have the number for dungeons and raids, its around 12 in total.
The metadata leak of the A2 map a while ago, gave away all planned POI.
Maybe it wasnt complete? But in terms of geographic POI it surely was complete.
Hundreds of people going for the same locations seems unlikely to me, given their model.
Using that, Carphin is pretty 'large', it's not trying to be the size of a BDO Dungeon, since the game's principles aren't based on being 'grindy'.
There is no way this game is not grindy.
We have so many systems stacked on each other, there is no way they can feed that this game enough content.
Also i dont see it as a conflict between big spaces and ow pvp/risk vs reward, i think big spaces are a necessity when it comes to balancing things like corruption.
Ashes is probably the most tactile game when it comes to space, it has so many touchpoints, like caravans, grinding spot, varying population densities, and so on and has a decentralized structure.
You are not gonna grind through the local questhub from level 10-15 and afterwards the zone is dead... the nodes are a big attractor from which all player activity will be directed from.
I wanted to tap into that topic also since the freehold system also seems very expansive, taking away 21% of the map.
21% without freehold spacing, without landmarks, without the environment, without other systems that may make the placing of freehold space even more complicated.
I definitely understand your concern better now, and can agree that if I take all the same bases as you are taking, I definitely share it.
I also have no strong reasons to try to push back or counter your bases, so, yeah, you can tentatively consider me both educated and convinced, with my only addition being that I'd expect multiple nodes to have "Catacombs".
I'm not going to go so far as to give up my perspective entirely, but I do accept that my bias is from coming from games with much more Dungeons/Monster zones. BDO has at least 70 Monster Zones, 44 of which can be considered 'Dungeons', in their 300 sq.km. FFXI has smaller ones and isn't open world but has about 180 if you count the instanced ones and 'stuff that feels like a Dungeon' (they're all technically just zones, but I count the ones with corridors and chokepoints for this).
But, that's kind of weird, isn't it? I feel like even the Alpha-1 map had more than 12 PoIs...
Is it that you don't count those smaller things as dungeons?
This is somewhere between 1/5th and 1/10th of the world with no Catacombs active (I feel like they're going to be one of the most effective methods of creating vertical dungeon content since you can't put Freeholds ON the Node Footprint easily anyway).
So even assuming 1/4 of nodes can have Catacombs that would get us to between 90 and 180, right? Am I misremembering or misunderstanding something?
Yeah, 9 elite/bosses and 13 dungeons. I do feel like that POI leak might've been either super old or just way too unfinished.
Those dungeons were some open world points of interest with 5-20 mobs and a mini boss. The other POIs were smaller than that.
The only thing i would count as a dungeon was the wyrm raid.
Ye maybe you are right and we shouldnt expect anything that resembles dungeons from other mmos.
But then anything else this game is build around doesnt make sense to me tbh.
Also the map would be like 80% dungeons as the footprint of carphin is at least 2skm
Filling the rest with 20% freeholds.
Doesnt sound fun.
Also the map would be like 80% dungeons as the footprint of carphin is at least 2skm
Filling the rest with 20% freeholds.
Doesnt sound fun.
I mean, Carphin is a tower with a surrounding area. Iirc the wyrm dungeon just had a small (relatively) hole in the ground as an entrance. On top of that, the catacombs Azherae mentioned could start in the nodes themselves and be as deep as Intrepid wants them to be. Hell, I'd fucking love that. All they'd need to do is extrapolate on the idea of mega-catacomb under the Divine metro https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Divine_nodes
In other words, it wouldn't be 80% of the world, but it would definitely be 80% of the underground, with the remaining 20 being the underworld (probably with its own dungeons too btw).
Also, they could always just have a tower w/o linking it to a huge surrounding zone, while the tower itself could house quite a bit of mobs.
Yeah, 9 elite/bosses and 13 dungeons. I do feel like that POI leak might've been either super old or just way too unfinished.
Those dungeons were some open world points of interest with 5-20 mobs and a mini boss. The other POIs were smaller than that.
The only thing i would count as a dungeon was the wyrm raid.
Ye maybe you are right and we shouldnt expect anything that resembles dungeons from other mmos.
But then anything else this game is build around doesnt make sense to me tbh.
Also the map would be like 80% dungeons as the footprint of carphin is at least 2skm
Filling the rest with 20% freeholds.
Doesnt sound fun.
Well, they are basically aiming to more or less 'reinvent/advance the genre', but I understand your perspective if you only really consider the Pyroclastic Wyrm as a Dungeon.
What would you say to '80-130 mobs + a full strength boss' though?
Because I, in my bias, think that's achievable with the correct applications of verticality and 'not making bosses too huge'. I would expect even the upper strength bosses to be at most 16-man content, not 40, given their other design goals and the choices made by other games with similar design goals/structures.
What would you say to '80-130 mobs + a full strength boss' though?
Sounds like 3 groups could have fun there.
Im viewing this exclusively from the player capacity in this argument.
I dont see how 10%-20% of the concurrent playercount=1k to 2k
or 10%-20%players of every node=12-24 players,
can participate in dungeons that make sense with the layout requirements and scale of the map.
Let me add another point. The story arc system will probably prevent us from goin to the next floor.( which i think is very exctinig)
This means though in the beginning the scope of the dungeon will be even smaller.
What would you say to '80-130 mobs + a full strength boss' though?
Sounds like 3 groups could have fun there.
Let me add another point. The story arc system will probably prevent us from goin to the next floor.( which i think is very exctinig)
In the beginning the scope of the dungeon will be even smaller.
My assumptions are different because I come from a game with like a 50-80 second TTK on stronger mobs, which I suppose doesn't really make any difference to Ashes (though it felt like Ashes could have been trying to get up there if you really wanted to get max exp).
So to me, 80+ mobs with a 5 minute respawn is 6 groups minimum, accounting for conflicts.
I'm not saying that's what they're going for, I'm saying that's what I'm 'here for', and I didn't experience anything that immediately made me go 'no this isn't for me' in Alpha-1. All depends on your priors.
Yeah, the tower felt quite small for its apparent size. I didn't really pay enough attention to it before, but I checked older videos of other dungeons and I definitely feel like like the overall size of rooms and heights of ceilings seem to be waaaay too damn big for their own good.
*Puts on his tin foil wizard hat*
The real reason the ceilings are this high is to give enough room for the camera (for the 3rd person view) to reach Steven's favourite viewing distance!
The real reason the ceilings are this high is to give enough room for the camera (for the 3rd person view) to reach Steven's favourite viewing distance!
I mean, I'm definitely into super high zooms as well, but AoC's dungeons are also wide as fuck.
I would run that dungeon. Unfortunately I can't provide any excellent in depth feedback as I am not as well versed as others. However the design philosophy seems sound.
This type of unlock system can work. Single player games like POE let you influence the maps and change the odds of certain types of content and drops occurring.
You will definitely run onto an endless stream of what ifs while planning it out.
Players will do a couple things for sure:
1 They will map out the drop tables and map out the pathway to the most desirable.
2 They will run the most desirable almost exclusively.
3 As the meta changes the "best routes" will change with it.
So the more random you make things the less scripted the whole thing will become as time goes on.
1 They will map out the drop tables and map out the pathway to the most desirable.
2 They will run the most desirable almost exclusively.
3 As the meta changes the "best routes" will change with it.
So the more random you make things the less scripted the whole thing will become as time goes on.
I mean, that predictability would provide a player funnel to pit them against each other on that desirable content, which imo is kind of the point of a pvx dungeon. This is also why I added the "mobs get stronger after a respawn and you also get a boss later on", so that people could in fact just sit in one place and farm rather than wasting 1h running around semi-empty hallways filled with useless trash mobs.
This type of unlock system can work. Single player games like POE let you influence the maps and change the odds of certain types of content and drops occurring.
An MMO with PoE's map system as its solo, group and raid instanced end game content (along with some open dungeons and open world bosses) would literally be my Holy Grail of MMO's.
1 They will map out the drop tables and map out the pathway to the most desirable.
2 They will run the most desirable almost exclusively.
3 As the meta changes the "best routes" will change with it.
So the more random you make things the less scripted the whole thing will become as time goes on.
I mean, that predictability would provide a player funnel to pit them against each other on that desirable content, which imo is kind of the point of a pvx dungeon. This is also why I added the "mobs get stronger after a respawn and you also get a boss later on", so that people could in fact just sit in one place and farm rather than wasting 1h running around semi-empty hallways filled with useless trash mobs.
Very true. It would be a fun system to test out for sure.
I also like Placeholder mobs. It adds an extra layer to the mobs in each area. Of course, even bosses can be a place holder mob. Depends how deep you want to go down the rabbit hole.
I also like Placeholder mobs. It adds an extra layer to the mobs in each area. Of course, even bosses can be a place holder mob. Depends how deep you want to go down the rabbit hole.
Yeah, placeholders can be all good - if done well.
In EQ2, with the encounter types described in the OP (ring events in EQ games), you would have some of them that would respawn about 8 - 10 minutes after the last mob was killed, but with a chance to spawn the desired boss, or a placeholder.
There were also some events that had much longer respawn times (60 minutes was common, several days existed), and these were obviously guaranteed to spawn the boss.
There were also some events that had mini-bosses during various waves, and also some where the end boss could be one of a small handful.
Essentially, the encounter type is just straight up versatile.
1 They will map out the drop tables and map out the pathway to the most desirable.
2 They will run the most desirable almost exclusively.
3 As the meta changes the "best routes" will change with it.
So the more random you make things the less scripted the whole thing will become as time goes on.
I mean, that predictability would provide a player funnel to pit them against each other on that desirable content, which imo is kind of the point of a pvx dungeon. This is also why I added the "mobs get stronger after a respawn and you also get a boss later on", so that people could in fact just sit in one place and farm rather than wasting 1h running around semi-empty hallways filled with useless trash mobs.
But what exactly are you pitting them against each other doing?
To be clear, when these sorts of things get discussed, I find that they really do move more towards PvE gaming primarily, where there's some specific lockout or 'guarantee' to a group or subset of players based on some prior action.
So what is it you mean here? Two sets of players attempt to follow the 'best' route to spawn a boss they want to fight, the boss spawns. What then? Or were they supposed to fight it out before the boss spawned? I'm asking because every 'protection' added makes the game more toward the FFXI/EQ side than the L2 side, doesn't it? Not much downside to me, obviously, but I don't 'get it'.
If people are 'racing', it's a PvE contest. If they are 'trying to kill a different group that spawned the boss', it's not really 'good content' for most people at all on either side. If they're trying to get a drop first for some reason instead of just 'number crunching to figure out how to optimally PvE in harmony', then the game's design doesn't really lend itself to hard mobs or Synergies (to me).
So... what exactly is the 'contest' you're seeing? Is it just the 'Mostly PvE' ones?
Comments
I must be missing something here, as all of your concerns seem to revolve around the idea that there isnt enough content.
If you have a dungeon with 60 rooms, each room takes 20 minutes to clear to the boss and then respawns after 20 minutes, a group can only expect to be able to hold two rooms. That means this dungeon can hold 30 groups - more than any dungeon in any game I have ever played holds.
If we then assume a shared loot table (or several loot tables that are shared between many bosses), no one group has any reason at all to fight any group for any room. Just go on to a different room with the same loot table and go for it.
If we then assume that loot rights are based on performance over the whole event rather than just the boss, no group has any real reason to attempt to steal a boss from another group.
Since the very idea of even being in this dungeon is content, rather than PvP, groups in the dungeon - especially deep in the dungeon - will not want to waste time with PvP, or with trying to kill steal, or anything like that. They will want to find a appt where they can do what they came to do. In that regard, it is very similar to the Library in Archeage - a large, open dungeon with more than enough room for anyone wanting to be there, and this lead to very little PvP ever happening in that dungeon (a LOT happened at the entrance to it, however).
I'm assuming I am missing something from you here, as it isnt like you to be so actively against something without good reason.
Is anyone worried about the scale of the carphin dungeon?
Initially it looks huuuge.
But when i had a closer look the first room of the tower already takes up 20% of the dungeon volume. Yet it only holds a few mobs, not even enough to grind for 1 group. It also does not look spacious at all.
I skimmed through the wiki and the tower of carphin has actually a lot of infos around it.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/The_Tower_of_Carphin
As it seems the tower has 5 floors? And the last 2 floors seem to be bosses?
In order to be the biggest PvE attractor of the neighbouring 5 nodes, the dungeon should be able to at least hold around 10% of the neighbouring nodes´ population. Shouldnt it?
10k pop /85 nodes * 5 nodes * 0.1 percent= 59 pop
New content drops through the story arc systems are gonna be chaotic lol
The dungeon will look like a clowns car.
It depends on what you mean by 'worried'.
I'd assume this was intentional. That's the type of game Ashes' design suggests to me.
There's a strong appeal in keeping the lore and design basic, the dungeons smaller, and the conflict potential high, for this game type, I would think.
It's not high on my list of 'really enjoyable designs' but neither is it outside scope, it's right there in that middle where I figure most people will be okay with it even if they don't love it, and it will probably generate lots of 'drama' when combined with the other mechanics, so I'm not sure what there is to be 'worried' about.
Open world dungeons require real in-game space, so it feels kinda counterproductive to make them huge in size but small in content amount. And first floor of the tower looked like a single room. The page you linked says that second floor has a few offices so I'm assuming several tiny spaces with maybe 2-3 mobs at best? And 3rd seems to be somewhat similar, but probably with fewer but bigger spaces.
In other words this feels more like a combination of an instanced dungeon and open world accessibility. Maybe Intrepid want us to clear the whole dungeon as a single piece of repeatable content? And that is exactly why the dev discussion's question was phrased in such a way.
I definitely hope there's gonna be more variety in dungeon types and especially some super cramped ones that take up little space but have a toooon of content in them.
The appeal of this design type isn't that high in my experience though?
Ashes is definitely in that 'TableTop game converted into MMO' space of design, which is unsurprising given Steven's basis for it. That puts its 'appeal' in the direction of FF and Neverwinter when it comes to dungeons and mob placement, I could probably run you through a bunch of decisions that clarify why certain dungeons in Alpha-1 were the way they are, based on that.
If my experience means anything, I can say that if you try to tune the 'numbers' for TTK, difficulty, group Synergy, content length, and dungeon size, you get specific outcomes for the 'lesser importance' values by putting in the ones that are 'important' to your goal.
Different games have different 'importance' assigned to each of those, that's all.
Basically dungeons in Ashes can't be large unless they make them big and 'grindy'. That might even be why we got the Dev Discussion that we got. I'd absolutely expect that.
The things we know are important to Ashes and probably have 'set values', in priority order by my estimation:
1. Group Synergy
2. Difficulty
3. TTK of Mobs and player
4. Dungeon Size
5. Content Length
Simplest solution as developers would be to put Dungeon Size lowest, ask the community about Content Length and bump its priority up to 4, and then tune the Dungeon Size. I think they know what they're doing. "It might not make you ecstatic, but this is what peak performance looks like".
But if we'll have hundreds of people aiming to farm a dungeon like Carphin seems to be - that would be even harsher than what L2 had with most of its dungeons. L2 had two tower dungeons at 40-55 lvl range and 49-76 one, 3 and 12 (14) floors respectively. The first dungeon could house ~16 parties on the first floor and ~10 on the second. The other dungeon held ~4 parties per floor, depending on their size/power.
Even if we assume that Carphin will have 2-3 mob spawns on that first floor - that's still content for one party, unless the mobs are insanely difficult and take a shiiiitton of time to kill. And if they're that difficult then we come back to your argument of skillchecks by the attackers and the whole damn pvx crumbles, because no one would be able to kill the mobs.
Now I'm obviously all for a ton of pvx content, but there's gotta be a good balance. Either the content is easy enough to support a ton of pvp while pveing or there's enough of hard content to decrease the amount of pvp around it. L2 kinda had both, but balanced it with suuuper long leveling and player funneling. Players would have a backup location to farm, but usually wanted to go to the top places, of which there was a limited amount (especially when you consider loot).
But due to long leveling you wouldn't have a shitton of people going for the exact same lvl of mobs, so the playerbase was more spread out and most of the time your backup location would be a relatively safe choice, if your first choice was taken already.
With AoC's dungeon designs we might get hundreds of people going for the same locations, while the location can, at best, support a group or two. The game will obviously have the same slow leveling so that's definitely a plus, but they'll need to have enough content to semi-evenly distribute the players across it. The size increase of the map would imply that this is exactly what they're doing, but the design of locations kinda goes against that implication.
I'd say 'not really', but at that point I'd have to bring out the proverbial whiteboard.
I think the most important thing for anyone to do here is, as usual, to try to ditch whatever they expect, bearing in mind that Intrepid is now full of designers from different games, who probably know at least as much as I do about how to crunch the numbers and pull the levers, by default.
Personally I'm expecting around 200-400 'dungeons' total by the time they're done, depending on how they choose to connect certain ones together and how they tweak the 'Content Length' part.
Hundreds of people going for the same locations seems unlikely to me, given their model.
Using that, Carphin is pretty 'large', it's not trying to be the size of a BDO Dungeon, since the game's principles aren't based on being 'grindy'.
Yeah, that "grind" part is mostly where my assumptions come from. But we've discussed how I see the pvp system working with the mob/dungeon design before, so I won't go into my concerns on that front again.
Well, I mean, I'm glad to talk about it if it helps literally anyone.
In my opinion we all need to let go of specific things we expect or like from our favorite games because the tweaks just don't work otherwise.
I for example need to drop the idea that this game will be 'hard' because their designs don't allow for it to be 'hard' at the tier I'm used to, but that doesn't mean it will be terrible, it means it will be Neverwinter tier. I say this because owPvX content can't be that type of hard without creating a situation where people who enjoy disrupting others won't be able to enjoy it really easily.
Similarly, I drop the idea that it will be immersive in PvP in the same way that BDO is (I'm not complimenting how BDO is even when I say that).
So for you, I guess I'm suggesting to drop two perspectives:
1. The game will give you a grind that you could reasonably expect to do for hours at a time
2. The game intends for small scale conflicts to lead to 'positive' feelings
The first, I say because even the wording of their tweet, as you noted, implies this. As I understand it, no L2, FFXI, or BDO player would ever speak of 'Dungeon' using the word 'Clear'. Even 'delve' was sort of 'sus' relative to that perspective.
The second, I say because of the combination of how Corruption works and the Dungeon design style of Alpha-1 (strongly echoed but not really confirmable in the Wreckage and Tower of Carphin designs).
You talk about 'clearing' if you're playing Onigiri, FFXIV (to an extent), Neverwinter, etc. Also FFXI instanced Content. You can definitely make Open World dungeons that you would also use the word 'clear' for, but what would normally happen is that players would clash with each other, create drama and unpleasant friction interactions, and that sort of atmosphere would spread throughout the server. And for most designers this would be a negative so they wouldn't do it. It's just not apparently a negative to Ashes' goals.
But the whole point of this game is to be unlike anything else, a true PvX MMO. It has to 'make its own definitions' in design too.
So yeah, there will be dungeons that we can 'clear' and that means people will be able to 'contest and disrupt your clear' and that's reflected very directly in the wording they use, even from the Dev Discussion.
"Note that most dungeons in Ashes of Creation will be an open-world experience, where you may compete with other players to progress through the dungeon."
Working as intended.
Ashes promises a ton of varying content so I do think that I'll be able to grind it for hours, but I think you're definitely right on the dungeon part of the grind. Their current design and communication definitely points towards a non-grindable direction.
This is kinda the reason for my confusion though. My preestablished assumptions clashed with the "clear" design exactly in the context of contending content. Your second point addressed this and I definitely agree that I need to distance myself from this particular assumption, but it's, in a way, even harder than the grind one, because it definitely goes against what would seem to be the logical course of actions.
Grindable content allows for that "positive" feeling to stay with you even if your gameplay was interrupted by pvp, but clearable content would imply that you really want to finish it in one go or that it might even require you to do so in order to complete it correctly. And any pvp interruption would fuck you over and set you back by who knows how long (well, Intrepid know obviously). And that definitely doesn't seem in any way positive.
Obviously we're missing a ton of info on how exactly Intrepid intend on succeeding with that kind of design or at least how they intend to keep their players in the game and experiencing every aspect of the game w/o one type of player completely removing the other type from the game.
There's a chance that the whole dungeon experience will be instead just as my "single room" suggestion from this thread. You'll kill a few mobs with a few breaks in-between and then you kill the boss, and that's your dungeon "clear". But just as you pointed out, the mobs would most likely not be all that difficult. And I'd assume that pvers like at least some good difficulty in their content, while majority of pvpers would probably not really care one way or the other.
Which to me seems to defeat the design's own purpose. You make kind of a pve-centered design, but you fill it with sub-par pve and on top of that you let pvpers interrupt said pve. Maybe I'm just a bit too confused, but to me that definitely sounds silly. Or at the very least like the sharpest design edge to try and successfully walk on. If they do succeed though, Ashes might be a very very successful mmo. Hope they do.
We kinda have the number for dungeons and raids, its around 12 in total.
The metadata leak of the A2 map a while ago, gave away all planned POI.
Maybe it wasnt complete? But in terms of geographic POI it surely was complete.
Also the current footprint of the dungeon makes it unlikely to have 200 of em. The whole area is like the size of half a ZOI.
The way intrepid worded the dungeon in context to the neighbouring nodes also makes it seem like the biggest POI for several nodes.
There is no way this game is not grindy.
We have so many systems stacked on each other, there is no way they can feed that this game enough content.
Also i dont see it as a conflict between big spaces and ow pvp/risk vs reward, i think big spaces are a necessity when it comes to balancing things like corruption.
Ashes is probably the most tactile game when it comes to space, it has so many touchpoints, like caravans, grinding spot, varying population densities, and so on and has a decentralized structure.
You are not gonna grind through the local questhub from level 10-15 and afterwards the zone is dead... the nodes are a big attractor from which all player activity will be directed from. 85 times over.
I wanted to tap into that topic also since the freehold system also seems very expansive, taking away 21% of the map.
21% without freehold spacing, without landmarks, without the environment, without other systems that may make the placing of freehold space even more complicated.
I definitely understand your concern better now, and can agree that if I take all the same bases as you are taking, I definitely share it.
I also have no strong reasons to try to push back or counter your bases, so, yeah, you can tentatively consider me both educated and convinced, with my only addition being that I'd expect multiple nodes to have "Catacombs".
I'm not going to go so far as to give up my perspective entirely, but I do accept that my bias is from coming from games with much more Dungeons/Monster zones. BDO has at least 70 Monster Zones, 44 of which can be considered 'Dungeons', in their 300 sq.km. FFXI has smaller ones and isn't open world but has about 180 if you count the instanced ones and 'stuff that feels like a Dungeon' (they're all technically just zones, but I count the ones with corridors and chokepoints for this).
But, that's kind of weird, isn't it? I feel like even the Alpha-1 map had more than 12 PoIs...
@arsnn - yeah this is moreso what I remember.
Is it that you don't count those smaller things as dungeons?
This is somewhere between 1/5th and 1/10th of the world with no Catacombs active (I feel like they're going to be one of the most effective methods of creating vertical dungeon content since you can't put Freeholds ON the Node Footprint easily anyway).
So even assuming 1/4 of nodes can have Catacombs that would get us to between 90 and 180, right? Am I misremembering or misunderstanding something?
The leaked map had around 150 POI, of which around 12 were raids and dungeons.
Those dungeons were some open world points of interest with 5-20 mobs and a mini boss. The other POIs were smaller than that.
The only thing i would count as a dungeon was the wyrm raid.
Ye maybe you are right and we shouldnt expect anything that resembles dungeons from other mmos.
But then anything else this game is build around doesnt make sense to me tbh.
Also the map would be like 80% dungeons as the footprint of carphin is at least 2skm
Filling the rest with 20% freeholds.
Doesnt sound fun.
In other words, it wouldn't be 80% of the world, but it would definitely be 80% of the underground, with the remaining 20 being the underworld (probably with its own dungeons too btw).
Also, they could always just have a tower w/o linking it to a huge surrounding zone, while the tower itself could house quite a bit of mobs.
Well, they are basically aiming to more or less 'reinvent/advance the genre', but I understand your perspective if you only really consider the Pyroclastic Wyrm as a Dungeon.
What would you say to '80-130 mobs + a full strength boss' though?
Because I, in my bias, think that's achievable with the correct applications of verticality and 'not making bosses too huge'. I would expect even the upper strength bosses to be at most 16-man content, not 40, given their other design goals and the choices made by other games with similar design goals/structures.
You got a point. If needed dungeons could have a small footprint.
Sounds like 3 groups could have fun there.
Im viewing this exclusively from the player capacity in this argument.
I dont see how 10%-20% of the concurrent playercount=1k to 2k
or 10%-20%players of every node=12-24 players,
can participate in dungeons that make sense with the layout requirements and scale of the map.
Let me add another point. The story arc system will probably prevent us from goin to the next floor.( which i think is very exctinig)
This means though in the beginning the scope of the dungeon will be even smaller.
My assumptions are different because I come from a game with like a 50-80 second TTK on stronger mobs, which I suppose doesn't really make any difference to Ashes (though it felt like Ashes could have been trying to get up there if you really wanted to get max exp).
So to me, 80+ mobs with a 5 minute respawn is 6 groups minimum, accounting for conflicts.
I'm not saying that's what they're going for, I'm saying that's what I'm 'here for', and I didn't experience anything that immediately made me go 'no this isn't for me' in Alpha-1. All depends on your priors.
*Puts on his tin foil wizard hat*
The real reason the ceilings are this high is to give enough room for the camera (for the 3rd person view) to reach Steven's favourite viewing distance!
In other words
You will definitely run onto an endless stream of what ifs while planning it out.
Players will do a couple things for sure:
1 They will map out the drop tables and map out the pathway to the most desirable.
2 They will run the most desirable almost exclusively.
3 As the meta changes the "best routes" will change with it.
So the more random you make things the less scripted the whole thing will become as time goes on.
Just sayin.
Very true. It would be a fun system to test out for sure.
Yeah, placeholders can be all good - if done well.
In EQ2, with the encounter types described in the OP (ring events in EQ games), you would have some of them that would respawn about 8 - 10 minutes after the last mob was killed, but with a chance to spawn the desired boss, or a placeholder.
There were also some events that had much longer respawn times (60 minutes was common, several days existed), and these were obviously guaranteed to spawn the boss.
There were also some events that had mini-bosses during various waves, and also some where the end boss could be one of a small handful.
Essentially, the encounter type is just straight up versatile.
But what exactly are you pitting them against each other doing?
To be clear, when these sorts of things get discussed, I find that they really do move more towards PvE gaming primarily, where there's some specific lockout or 'guarantee' to a group or subset of players based on some prior action.
So what is it you mean here? Two sets of players attempt to follow the 'best' route to spawn a boss they want to fight, the boss spawns. What then? Or were they supposed to fight it out before the boss spawned? I'm asking because every 'protection' added makes the game more toward the FFXI/EQ side than the L2 side, doesn't it? Not much downside to me, obviously, but I don't 'get it'.
If people are 'racing', it's a PvE contest. If they are 'trying to kill a different group that spawned the boss', it's not really 'good content' for most people at all on either side. If they're trying to get a drop first for some reason instead of just 'number crunching to figure out how to optimally PvE in harmony', then the game's design doesn't really lend itself to hard mobs or Synergies (to me).
So... what exactly is the 'contest' you're seeing? Is it just the 'Mostly PvE' ones?