BaSkA13 wrote: » Most of the discussions here are thinking there will be a second boss. I believe that will only happen in open world dungeons, not open world bosses, i.e. a dragon on top of a mountain.
Noaani wrote: » BaSkA13 wrote: » Most of the discussions here are thinking there will be a second boss. I believe that will only happen in open world dungeons, not open world bosses, i.e. a dragon on top of a mountain. We know there will be open raid dungeons. We do not know if there will be open world raid bosses like what you are saying - outside of events and such. Most of the language around raids has been somewhat muddled. The language used could indicate that they are talking about dungeons, or that they are talking about event bosses, or that they are talking about PvP raids, or that they are talking about god knows what else. In regards to dragons, all of the talk I have heard in regards to them have been either raid dungeon or event boss. There may well be open world bosses like you say, but we don't know. We do know that there will be raid dungeons though, so it makes sense to mostly talk about that.
Abominatus wrote: » The lack of instanced dungeons and raids is the reason I hesitated to buy into Alpha, and I'm still not convinced I made the right decision. Making all PvE content uninstanced creates a fundamental imbalance in the game, in that it becomes impossible to tune for difficulty. While I get, and support, the idea of having some world bosses and broadening player engagement in the open world, I also think that if you want to attract a stable raiding community, you need to provide an environment in which they can be challenged by the PvE content and also one in which they can control to some degree their raiding time. Most raiding guilds want, and need, to be able to schedule their raids. If a guild finds that it cannot do the content it wants to do, when it wants to do it, then this will lead to frustration. If raids are facing challenging content, and are disrupted while doing it (either by being griefed, or by others joining in and making the content easier than it is "supposed" to be), the value that players assign to the achievement of completing that content is diminished. If you make all PvE content non-instanced, then effectively all content becomes PvP content. The balance does not swing the other way. I enjoy a bit of PvP, and I don't see any reason why open-world PvP should be discouraged. Getting involved in contested areas while trying to farm or gather materials or do quests is fine. But there needs to be a point at which I'm entitled to engage challenging PvE content for it's own sake without that content being either trivialized or gated by it being in the open world. Ultimately, I see enough value in this project that I'm willing to spend money to support it in pre-alpha because giving this vision an opportunity could result in something great. But if we get to a point where there's no meaningful PvE progression because everything is open world, then that will alienate a lot of potential long-term players (myself included), and an opportunity will have been missed. Those who think that instanced content eliminate the open world aspect of the game are overstating the problem. From the perspective of a veteran WoW player, I can say with absolute certainty that instances didn't hurt the open world in classic or TBC. What started to diminish the open world experience was the addition of features like being able to teleport into dungeons from the city, and being able to engage in that kind of instanced content without ever having to interact with the world inbetween. It became possible at some point to level to about 10, and then just sit in a city and spam dungeons to maximum level from then onwards. Obviously that's a terrible deterrent to having a great world environment, but there's no automatic slippery slope that takes you from "everything is open world" to dungeon-finder without the ability to find a middle-ground along the way.
