dungeon-design
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Should there be another kind of five player dungeon?
The first dungeon I ran in World of Warcraft was the Deadmines. Not the Deadmines we have today, of course, although the layout is largely unchanged, but the original, Edwin VanCleef helmed Defias operation. From there, it's been a lot of years and a lot of dungeon crawls (not just in WoW, either - I've been crawling around in dungeons ever since the Caves of Chaos were build adjacent to a Keep on some Borderlands) and so I've come to have some opinions on dungeon design and variety that I think are worth nattering on about. In general, some of the dungeon complexes released with the launch of World of Warcraft took labyrinthine to new extremes. As much as I love it, Blackrock Depths is a positive pain to navigate for a new party - it was terrible before the dungeon finder existed, it's not any better now. Modern dungeons tend to have moved as far away from the 'sprawling mega complex' design as possible. Current dungeons tend to be what I call 'bite sized' in comparison - smaller, self contained wings or experiences that contain between three and four bosses, to be consumed in a 20 to 30 minute chunk of time with four strangers via LFD. It's understandable and even unavoidable that this had happened, but I think there's some wisdom in considering how to have a happy medium between these extremes. Dungeons like Dire Maul, for instance, saw minimal change in Cataclysm because it was already perfect for the new system. Three wings, mostly self contained (one could previously get from north to west via a tunnel into the library, which was removed) with a reasonable assortment of bosses, tied together by theme yet distinct in terms of what you faced in each. Maraudon, on the other hand, is still a sprawling, difficult to navigate dungeon made worse by the addition of incredibly arbitrary starting locations that the dungeon finder only exacerbates.
And the dungeons keep on shrinking
I've run the new Scarlet Monastery dungeons on the beta several times now. They're fun, well-designed, interesting dungeons. They are a bit jarring if you're familiar with the current Scarlet Monastery, however. The current four dungeons have been cut down to two, and it's been achieved by removing a lot of the long hallways full of trash pulls we're familiar with now. The Armory section of the new dungeon almost feels abrupt if you (like me) ran SM over and over again in the olden days of WoW. It's not that the new dungeons are bad. They're objectively good, even great at places, with a good sense of the history of the place and call-backs to the classic dungeon. They just feel kind of short to me. Smaller. Actually smaller, not in terms of the size of the hallways or anything but in terms of how much real estate they cover. And while I often rail against nostalgia, lately that sense of scale has been driving me to run older content not even to gather loot for transmog but just to see it, to look around at the scope and scale of the older dungeons. Now, I don't want to pretend that these dungeons weren't often hideously irritating to run at the time. Getting a 5-man group all the way through Stratholme back when it was all one big, interconnected burning city full of undead and no one ever wanted to clear both sides wasn't anything but an exercise in learning colorful new metaphors as they spewed from your own mouth. You'd end up amazed you even knew the Basque term for that particular deviancy. Still, there is something to be said for the epic scale of some of the older 5-man dungeons.
Blizzard's post-mortem on Cataclysm dungeons and raids
Blizzard recently released a blog from Dave "Fargo" Kosak that acted as a post-mortem for Cataclysm's quest design. Following on its heels is this entry from Scott "Daelo" Mercer, the lead encounter designer for World of Warcraft. In it, Scott talks successes (Dungeon Journal, Raid Finder) and failures (difficulty level of launch heroics) in the dungeons and raids portion of the game's third expansion and shares what he's looking forward to with the release of Mists of Pandaria. I'm definitely with him in anticipating challenge modes and PvE scenarios. Read the full interview after the break.
MMOGology: Build your own adventure
I hope all of you got to check out Elizabeth Harper's great preview of the upcoming LEGO Universe MMOG by NetDevil. I'm personally a huge fan of LEGO and proudly admit to playing with those little, plastic blocks well beyond the recommended age rating. There's just something great about a product that gives you the tools to create without limiting the possibilities of your imagination. When it comes down to it, LEGO is simply another medium like clay or paint. It's up to the artist/designer to manipulate the medium into something unique and meaningful. NetDevil's product will allow us to partake in that enjoyment in a digital fashion, although, unlike creation in Second Life, it appears as though artists and designers will not have free reign over content creation. In the context of an all ages game, the choice to place limits on creativity seems like a valid one. Allowing users to create anything they wanted with LEGO obviously opens up a Pandora's Box of offensive possibilities. I'll take the high road for now and refrain from mentioning the many examples of naughty things you could create in LEGO. But beyond potentially offensive things, creating absolutely anything you wanted in a game could potentially destroy the game from a design and gameplay perspective. User-created content brings up a variety of questions. To what extent can users shape their worlds without breaking them? To what extent can they expand and add to the content without altering the original vision of the developers? What role can user-generated content play in the future?
Anatomy of a Monster
Blizzard's written up an interesting look into their design process in this article about the creation of Thaddius, a boss in the upcoming raid dungeon Naxxramas. And even if you aren't interested in this behind-the-scenes stuff, the article does give some insight about what we can expect to see in Naxxramas when it opens in patch 1.11!
