A dungeon idea

We have not received permission from arsnn to share the quoted post.

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.

We have not received permission from arsnn to share the quoted post.

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.

NiKr wrote: »

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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".

Azherae wrote: »

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.

Azherae wrote: »

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

NiKr wrote: »

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'.

Azherae wrote: »

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.

Azherae wrote: »

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.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

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.

Azherae wrote: »

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."

Working as intended.

Azherae wrote: »

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.

Azherae wrote: »

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.

We have not received permission from arsnn to share the quoted post.

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...

Azherae wrote: »

But, that's kind of weird, isn't it? I feel like even the Alpha-1 map had more than 12 PoIs...

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.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

But, that's kind of weird, isn't it? I feel like even the Alpha-1 map had more than 12 PoIs...

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.

@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?

We have not received permission from arsnn to share the quoted post.

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.

We have not received permission from arsnn to share the quoted post.

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.

We have not received permission from arsnn to share the quoted post.

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.

We have not received permission from Percimes to share the quoted post.

I mean, I'm definitely into super high zooms as well, but AoC's dungeons are also wide as fuck.

In other words

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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.