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Instances. Love or hate on them?
Amathe
Member LegendaryPosts: 7,630
My first mmo did not have any instances. I can still remember the many fights players would have over who had earned the right to be in a certain location, who had established a "camp", or who had arrived first (or sufficiently ready) to engage a rare boss spawn. Those are not fond memories. Many of those fights got pretty ugly. I did, however, enjoy there being a "one world" quality to my game experience, which made it more realistic.
Later, when instances became more common I initially thought they were a good idea. Now my group or my guild could enjoy an encounter without having to quarrel over it, or have it ruined, by someone else.
Then along comes developers such as Cryptic, which typically turns practically the entire game into a series of instanced encounters. The same is true for Guild Wars, with the added "feature" of no assigned servers. To me, a line had been crossed. I no longer felt like I was in a world at all, and the community of players suffered because they were so easily separated from each other.
Lately some games have gone retro and tried to return to a complete lack of instancing.
What do you think? Are instances good, evil, or does it depend on implementation and moderation?
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Comments
I think instances are good for a Boss Mob at the bottom of a dungeon, or the end of a long quest.
Otherwise, no instances. They make the world feel small and cramped, and they are boring.
It was one of my biggest dislkes of City of Heroes. All the dungeons were instances, and even worse, they scaled to your party.
Very, very boring to have the instance scale so you knew you could beat it no matter what the size of the party.
Love em when I want interesting PvE; things with scripted events, randomness and boss fights tailored for epinness at the scale of your group. World mobs are for farming, ones in instances pose a threat while finishing the goal.
Hate em for when I want to PvP though; the maps get boring, the people are random and mean nothing to me, and there's always some kind of ladder I have no interest in. World PvP is where it's at, there's tons of places to take it and you run into "old friends" often enough.
(just shallow examples of where it's good/bad to use instances)
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
For bosses, I love them. I don't want some asshat coming along and kill-stealing after I've put in the work to get there and I don't want to get there and find it camped by high-level characters who never, ever leave. I've had both happen and if I can avoid them with instances, give me instances.
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Hate them, but i don't do much PvE, so I am biased....
as a pvper i like both instances and an open world
instances gives you competitive yet balanced matches.they are also nice for those times where you just have 30 minutes spare, cant devote hours looking for a fight that might or might not appear, or get hot just when you HAVE to leave.
open world is for the epic large scale wars and the adrenaline fix of roaming around expecting to gank or be ganked
I dont like all instances, nor all open world, because then im missing one of the two options, and my game sessions are never the same.
I like having the freedom to choose what to do , depending on the time i have.
they're good but not bloody 5 man ones. That is turning a game into a multiplayer rather than mmo.
When traveling around the gameworld I don't like them.
STO makes me loath instances. WoW seemed to be reasonable and only use them for dungeons. And Guild Wars drove me nuts with the invisible walls, I didn't even bother trying to level. Looking forward to Guild Wars 2 however.
Do not try to be a great gamer, just be a gamer. Cause, I don't care how good you are anyway.
I've only played MMOs that have instances, but I find them quite boring. Its nice to be able to kill boss mobs without someone interfering, but it also takes away some of the danger involved in killing highly sought after mobs. I was considering playing WoW again, but I heard of X-realm instances. Now you can do instances without ever leaving Dalaran. They might as well delete the game world and save me some hard drive space.
Instances are fine in moderation, but games that are completely made of instances or mainly depend on them are hardly massively multiplayer. I'd like a game where they keep the whole world relevant instead of using instances as a crutch.
In our real world we also use instances all the time.
Going to the mall, football stadium, theater, school, bank, the scouts camp, ...
These activities are pictured against an open seamless world you live in and travel in.
By train, plane and automobile.
So every excellent mmorpg has to have this all: from battleground (football stadium) to dungeon (theater), from open seamless worlds with a minimum of downtime (limited in loading screens) to means of travel - freely - on land, sea and air ... and on foot.
I am sure it's one of the secrets of WOW's succes. The cross server things behind the instances (be it BG's or Raids/dungeons) are merely there to have a full room to watch the sports/theater, while the free travel through Azeroth continents without loading screens is smooth and immersive.
"Open world PvP" should be used sparsely and with care as open war distorts RL too and can hamper the fun of playing in that "world". Thus things like "full loot" and destroying each other properties are not good to play mmorpg's in the long run.
The succesful mmorpg of the future has more in common with "second life" than with Darkfall.
Want a real mmorpg? Play WOW with experience turned off mode and be Pve_Pvp King at any level without a rat race.
You make my head hurt. Just because theaters and schools have a maximum occupancy does not make it 'instanced'. Painful analogy.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
Purely as a capstone exercise. Too much emphasis on instancing and the overall gameplay regresses into being quite linear.
It's online, it's multiplayer, it's roleplaying- I want contact, interaction, and the uncertainty of leaving the comfort of a base and venturing into the 'open world'.
Without it, I'm just playing LoL.
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc.
We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be.
So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away.
- MMO_Doubter
You make my head hurt. Just because theaters and schools have a maximum occupancy does not make it 'instanced'. Painful analogy.
You can't go to the theater or football stadium without your entry ticket.
It is sealed off for all "intruders".
So you can enjoy the event - sealed off - of the real world.
The analogy makes great sense.
Sadly you only quoted a few sentences as I showed also "open world pvp" is not the way to lure in players for a massively played MMORPG in a "second life" avatar world.
That last part is the real succesful future of good MMO's.
Want a real mmorpg? Play WOW with experience turned off mode and be Pve_Pvp King at any level without a rat race.
Personally, I love them. I think they can really help drive the story in a game, and they add that epic feel to quests that I crave. I remember those days before instancing, waiting hopelessly to kill a mob for a quest or drop, only to find a group of high levels camping it for days at a time....so fun
Or walking into a dungeon expecting the battle of your life, only you find it empty and have until it resets because the group before you already cleared it out?...so fun
How about having another group running away and unknowingly, (or knowingly) training mobs to your group...so fun
Yeah, I remember those days. I'll take instancing (done right) for $300, Alex
Its not a like dislike thing. Just realize that some problems can be cured by instances. Problems such as scaling the encounter to match the players. Or it could protect against asshats.
COX had lots of instances. CO had very few. (same company) STO had many. But STO added something interesting. It opened up instances so that anyone could join. In effect, it was an open world instance. When i played in the open beta, more often than not, my personal instance had many other playing along side me. Just as if it was an open world area.
Not big on instances, however can tolerate them for dungeons only.
One thing I am really down on is "phasing", however, and it looks sadly like MMO's will go through a time of implementing this dreaded and artificial game feature with accomplishes nothing but to further separate the player base.
Instances have thier proper use and for "popular" dungeons I dont think they belong.
However for storyline quests where the events are different for each group or person, its necessary. LOTRO does this.
I just miss real dungeons and the way they used to be. With changes so that camping and KS can be controlled, I dont see a need for instanced dungeons.
I don't mind Instances as long as it's not the only way to do things, being an option helps keep PvE different, imho DAoC did it right, you had massive open lands, open dungeons, open area Raid zones then they added instanced dungeons and instanced Raid dungeons, so you could do any you want and reach similar goals.
Lately MMO's seem to make Instances 8/10 zones and if you don't want to do instances you fall behind in the game or have no other means of advancement at all.
I like instances as they were implemented in vanilla WoW as they were unobtrusive and designed to fit as seamlessly as possible into the open world. For example when you went to Blackrock Mountain it felt as though you were deep inside the bowels of the mountain long before you reached any of the instance entrances.
The key thing for me is that instances should be a small part of a much larger open world and used purely for specific dungeons or encounters.
I do think that a lot of newer MMOs are 'overinstanced' and I see it as part of the larger trend which has developers placing greater emphasis on creating online games as opposed to online worlds.
Obsession over world gameplay is the primary reason for MMORPGs having such low quality content compared to other genres. Instancing (or hybrid-instancing like Phasing) is the way to get a nearly-equivalent quality experience to what you'd find in a singleplayer game (it's the closest you're going to get, at least.)
Personally I mostly look for games with interesting teamplay. If there's a persistent world on top of that interesting teamplay, so much the better. But neither teamplay nor persistence means "non-instanced".
I'm not against non-instanced worlds, but every single one of them I've seen has had worse gameplay as a result of the enhanced world.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Great for theme parks, immersion breaker in anything else.
Instancing destroys the immersion for me.
However if it's limited to a few group instances that's one thing, when the entire game becomes instant travel into instances, that's a gamekiller.
instance is a joke
its not true "mmorpg"
Kain_Dale
I agree.
Waiting for:EQ-Next, ArcheAge (not so much anymore)
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Worst MMO: FFXIV
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Well...I have mixed opinions...
Ideally, I would want an MMO with an entirely open and seamless world, but then again, one of my favorite MMOs currently is AoC which is instanced...
So, it's hard for me to say...
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WAITING FOR: Dust 514
This.