I’ve been waiting for an MMO to implement a dungeon similar to the Ancient Cave from Lufia., an awesome RPG from 1995.
The gist is:
- There are nearly 100 small levels, all randomly generated so every time you enter it is never the same. You can travel down into the dungeon but not back up.
- Starting the dungeon resets everyone’s characters down to level 1. You have no traits, no unlocked skills, and only starter gear (or no gear for more hardcore).
- Experience is accelerated so you gain nearly 1 character level per level of the dungeon. Creatures are of the same level, but of course are randomly picked from all the creatures in the game. You can run ahead in the dungeon and skip creatures, but you’ll lose out on valuable experience.
- Gear drops from creatures and chests. There is some awesome gear to be found in the depths.
- You can’t take anything back out of the dungeon except gear of a certain quality or category. This gear you can actually bring into the dungeon with you on future runs so that you don’t start from scratch (although in this game that might increase the incidence of “LFG, must have full gear set”. Not too different with the way fractals will become perhaps).
- Any time the party wipes they get an instant ejection from the dungeon.
The mechanics of this means that:
- You get to experience group teamwork and combat from character level 1 through to x.
- You have to work with what you’ve got, gear-wise and skills-wise. You don’t know what situations you are going to come across, so resilience as well as team synergy is very important.
- All gear becomes valuable to the team as you are rapidly trying to upgrade what you’ve got, even with whites. Success means players sharing, trading, and negotiating gear (the trash gear) so everyone gets stronger.
- It’s a dungeon of survival, where all the big and small decisions count.
The foibles of an idea like this for GW2 are that:
- Something like this might not work until trait builds can be saved. That way there can be a UI that helps you pre-plot your trait points and skill point use so that players wouldn’t get halted by having to spec.
- I also have my doubts about the special gear category for a dungeon like this. It’d be incredibly controversial and would have very strange social and economic effects. It’d almost need to be account bound only so that you acquire what you have first hand rather than from the market, and so there’s no peer pressure to give this gear you can’t use to teammates.
People vary.