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Randomized Dungeons and Instances? Opinion away! ^^
Elikal
Member UncommonPosts: 7,912
Last night I had an epiphany! No, silly, that's not dangerous, I mean A VISION! What if I said, we get randomized dungeons and instances?
Now hear me out first! ^^
I KNOW from the majority of experiences randomized stuff is often inferior to handcrafted. We all know the experiences from single player RPGs. Take Daggerfall, I think the Elder Scrolls II, which had probably 1000 dungeons or more, and hundreds of cities, but all had been randomized. So Daggerfall on the one hand gave endless content, but at the price of being relatively boring.
BUT: That was SINGLE player. Now we talk MMOs.
You see, I have been a Dungeon Master in tabletop games for 30 years now. (Gosh...) And the most important thing about Dungeons and regions: the player didn't KNOW them. So they walked carefully, they didn't rush, and they always were surprised. We all have this feeling of grind, especially in dungeons and instances who play an important role especially in endgame these days. People are in one way or the other repeating dungeons and instanced zones. Now the downside is: they are always the same. No surprises, just boring, rushing zerg-grind. Not cool.
Now what if I told you, we randomize them? No try to imagine it seriously. Randomized traps (DANGEROUS traps, not the lame of today, one you really feel PAIN and demands slow approach and a Rogue to sneak ahead, as in the good old days of dungeons, when dungeons were fearful places!). Randomized bosses, so you DON'T have some google or some smartass preset strategy. Bosses have been currently made ridiculously strong, because the MMO developers know, people will KNOW the strategy. So they can't make them difficult by finding the strategy, they make them difficult with high Health and over the top attacks. But that's not difficult per se, and people just redo the googled strategy over and over. Same with hidden places with really valuable stuff which can be randomized and randomized puzzles.
Sure, the dungeon or instance would still have crucial "control points" which remain relatively the same, to allow some sort of guidance. But the pathway between would be at least to some degree be always random. I mean, computer games SO MUCH invested into better graphics, which is all fine and dandy, but should it not now invest into SMARTER engines and more intelligent design? Especially MMOs, where players will repeat content and especially dungeons many times, should not MMos try to be more interesting? (Didn't Diablo make random dungeons? Not sure.) And yes, maybe 1990 games were not able to make that right, but maybe 2013 games can do it with our technology. Or maybe at least that would be something worthwhile for game companies to put effort into and not over the top photorealism.
So this is my idea. Toss it around. Maybe something comes out of it. 
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Comments
-Love it.
Yes, make rogues iimportant- No more zerging and memorizing things (or looking them up online)
Even quasi-random (i.e. handcrafted but the traps are in seperate areas every time) would go a LONG way.
I have often thought about this and think you summed it up nicely. I love it.
http://anarchyonline.wikia.com/wiki/Missions
still waiting my DM v.2.0 ,maybe Ultima Online 2 can do it.
Let's internet
See: Dungeon Runners
...or this.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Already done ... Diablo 3. Torchlight 2. .....
It is not a new concept.
Since I didn't play any of them, I dunno how well that worked. It's as with many ideas, which sound good on paper but play horrible in reality. Like migrating mobs.
So hence my idea. But I think for MMOs dungeons and instanced stuff it would be great for a MMO.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
works well enough in D2 ... many players play that for years.
works well enough in D3 ... it is still top 11 or 12 on xfire. With very limited content, the game will be done in a month if not for random dungeons.
But "works well" is a personal preference. I just want to point out that it has been done before, in quite a few games, and you can try it out yourself.
Oh, MMO can borrow ideas from a lot of other genre. So no disagreement here.
Random dungeons have been around for a long time. There have been many discussions about it. This isn't a new idea.
The problem is one of quality. They look like random dungeons. Now for F2P games (aka: low quality) it might be good enough for the person who doesn't pay for it but most people want professional quality dungeons.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Yes and Yes
Never seen any logic why MMOs are not using random instances.
But dont forget we now have Path of Exile , which is MMO in its own right
....Not to mention games like Diablo 3 and Torchlight
It's not just a question of whether you randomize things. It's also what you randomize and how you randomize it. Many MMORPGs randomize loot, for example--and often I think they shouldn't.
Guild Wars 1 randomized mob placement a little bit. You might have the same mobs several times that you do a dungeon, but their starting location would be slightly different, which would change how you could pull them.
Anarchy Online's random instances really just had a bunch of hand-done rooms and then linked them together randomly.
Spiral Knights got a fair bit of mileage out of hand-doing several different mob placements for the same map. Thus, you could do a level that used a particular map, but if you did the same level later, there might be totally different mobs in it.
One other issue with randomness is how many people can do it. A level designer probably doesn't have the mathematical background to randomize his art very well. Someone who can't make a decent hand-done level but can randomly generate levels just as good as what he can do by hand can't make decent randomly generated levels, either.
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Also, if you want to really do randomly generated levels right, you have to put a ton of work into it. You can't expect to use random level generation as a way to cut the level design work by 90%, or else you're going to end up with randomly generated bad levels.
Think of public quests, for example. Guild Wars 2 hardly invented the notion of public quests. But where Warhammer Online and Champions Online only had a handful of public quests that people mostly ignored, Guild Wars 2 put the work in to make a ton of them and make it into a major game mechanic that you do everywhere. That made public quests work a lot better.
It's worth trying, definitely.
It's not going to really solve every problem it claims to solve though. For example one of the "problems" solved is googled boss strategies, and yet you're going to end up with bosses who have "traits" basically, and there will be strategies for each trait -- and that's going to be up on the strategy websites within a week.
For that matter the tight balancing of non-random bosses is actually a very strong form of gameplay -- you actually need to adapt to the boss' abilities or you're going to lose -- while with randomized boss traits the average boss wouldn't be quite as challenging (to avoid the degenerate cases of bosses who are ridiculously too powerful, and since they provide the same randomized reward as any other boss players would just skip them.)
Diablo 3 does a great job teaching most of these lessons really (in case players hadn't learned this from earlier randomized games): randomized bosses are fun, they help stretch content a long way, they tend to be not very tightly balanced so they're slightly less reliable at providing a satisfying challenge, and there will inevitably be broken combinations that need balance tweaking.
Rift and Defiance actually involve no small amount of randomization to their content already, but it's hybrid randomized/handcrafted content: world invasions in either game are going to be against a random opponent type (element/faction), and then they'll be a random hand-crafted scenario within that type. It's basically a giant Random Encounter Table for the game. Defiance even takes it a step further by having all those little discoverable quests in the game world (like GW2) that may or may not be happening at any given moment.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You're assuming that the randomization will be done in a particular way. That is one way to do it, but it's hardly the only way.
Who says that you can only have a few options for a boss? If you've got 50 different boss skills available, then picking 5 at random for a particular boss to have gives you over 2 million possible combinations right there. If you want to restrict things to one from this category, one from that category, and so forth, you could still easily have many thousands of combinations.
Boss stats give you even more randomization possible. You could set the sum of a boss's attributes and pick the attributes randomly such that they total that sum. Or you could fix the sum of the squares of the attributes or whatever.
If you do only have a handful of particular random bosses available, then who says every boss has to give the same loot? You could track which bosses usually get killed versus which ones usually get skipped, and give dramatically better loot for the latter.
^^THIS. Obviously random map generation is essential to 4x games like Civilization, but they are merely ok in tradtional dungeon crawlers like the Diablo series. They take on a samey-samey quality and it becomes a game of "find the door". "Oh look, it's over here in this map."
Of course I'm pretty down on instancing in general, so I'm biased, but if I had to have instances, I'd rather have them well-thought out, creative and semi-logical rather than slight variations of chaos.
"There is no reason a Boss should not be able to roam around a dungeon and obliterate an un-prepared raid group killing trash."
This is a good point and actually makes a case for designed instances. That is to say, when designing these durn things, design them as if the mobs inside actually lived there as opposed to just standing around waiting for the pull.
Who says that randomly generated zones have to be instanced? Who says you can't have a thousand (or a million!) randomly generated zones linked together to make an enormous open world?
No one. My point is that randomizing is not the magic bullet that will make mmopgs not suck any more.
Compare Daggerfall's dungeons to Morrowind's, and Morrowind's to Oblivion's. Morrowind's dungeons were best imo. Oblivion (and all Bethesda games thereafter) used a template or building blocks to build the dungeons and they just haven't felt as good (although they've been better with every new release - maybe they got more building blocks).
Nevertheless, randomized content can never reach the same level of quality, attention to detail and personal touch. I imagine making even half-decent randomized content is exceedinly complicated.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I agree wtih this. The big issue is making the experience consistant and enjoyable which can be an issue in games. Diablo 2 accomplished its randomization mostly by having various versions of the same map and adjusting where/how the mobs spawned which diablo 3 took and did the same though a bit less varied and added unique mobs with random suffixes which showed the way NOT to do it, making combinations that are just stupidly cheap. Still the concept of making bosses more varied could be good if done better then what they did there.
Randomizing the dungeons through various different maps and blocking certain paths with random mob spawns is perhaps the easiest method to achieve a random dungeon, and given some more randomized bosses and all it could actually make it quite entertaining. It wouldn't feel as stale if done right though it can easily become frusterating or annoying as well.
Its not a bad idea at all and with some careful work it can feel natural, though its still a difficult challenge if you want truely 'random' dungeons with far more complex things then 'blocked paths' or 'varied maps' to really make something feel more randomized.
True statement. Fixing MMOs requires fixing humans. =P
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
This is certainly something that should be added. City of Heroes had wondering mobs in their instances, bosses should be doable as well.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
To expand on what I said earlier, if you want to do a random world properly, you need to put as much work into it as you would a hand-done world. Instead of making 50 zones by hand, you create 50 different probability distributions that you could generate a zone from.
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Really, though, the question isn't so much randomized versus not randomized. Rather, game designers should constantly be thinking, can I randomize this little piece of the game without making it worse? Sometimes the answer is "no". But the answer should be "yes" a lot more often than most game designers are willing to do it.
Random out of a pool might be interesting but a directed build based on what the groups abilities are might be more challenging. You have a fire mage in the group - boss has anti-fire abilities.
As to loot, an idea I have been playing around with is a system where players get a number of slots to allocate to different loot types: armor, weapon, potions, rings, crafting, etc. In each slot, you can fill it with tokens that can affect the loot roll and the outcome. You get loot rolls when you defeat a boss and it acts like a slot machine. You can bust and lose all your tokens. The boss will random have types of loot when are matched against the loot slot allocation.
Tokens might be something like: plate helm RNG STRENGTH bonus +10%. You can get them from chests and crafters, perhaps quests/in game events. The more tokens in a slot the higher the bust chance. Powerful tokens increase bust chance.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
The player base might not care about quality. I was just suggesting it might. In general, I think players mostly want the shortest path to the most powerful loot.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"