I will apologize in advance if this thread seems to general to be put in the suggestions section but I could not find a more fitting section.
Frankly speaking, and I’m sure most people who have discovered most of Tyria will agree that 80% of renown hearts are boring. Most of them are the same but with different context, kill x amount of y, run around and press F to win, or collect n amount of animal pieces. Now, I’m not saying that renown hearts are the worst thing ever and should be removed, nor are they bad per se. They definitely are a step above than your regular fetch or other traditional quest. But why stop there? Why be happy with “better than average” instead of “great”?
That’s where the other 20% come in. I’m talking about the hearts that are distinct from all the others, possibly the highlights of the zones they are in. They all have very different mechanics to be completed and most of them are minigame-like. These are the most fun and I enjoy them every time, no matter how many alts I’ve done them on.
Here are some examples off the top of my head.
- The Seraph training heart in the south of Queensdale, where you have to pick up a training weapon and time your blocks and attacks against Seraph.
- Charradis Estate in Diessa Plateau: You have to catch the right bug and feed them to the right cattle, all with a time limit.
- The heart in the western part of Snowden Drifts with Briar the Tanner: You have to catch rabbits with a bow that you have to aim yourself. Pretty frustrating if you don’t know how to do it but it’s amazingly fun if you get it right.
- The prison in Iron Marches, where you have to collect ore and throw it into the furnaces. That doesn’t sound so different by itself but running around and actually having to throw the ore is pretty exciting if you try to do it quickly. It would be even better to have some kind of time limit on it. FASTER! FASTER! BREAK THAT ROCK!
There are a few more but I can’t remember them without looking them up but I hope everyone understands what I’m talking about.
Now, what am I actually suggesting?
Well the simplest answer would be: Make more of those kinds of minigame-y renown hearts. Not every single one has to be like that but more than one in every zone would definitely make 100%ing maps less boring.
Secondly, turning some of them into actual minigames, like the holiday event minigames would be great. Just imagine, if most zones had a minigame like that, surely more people would come and visit otherwise empty zones. I would prefer if entering the game wouldn’t teleport you out of the zone but just put you in some kind of arena/platform/fenced zone you can’t access otherwise. They don’t even have to be terribly complicated minigames.
For example, let’s take the Charradis Estate. You’d only need a second fenced in zone with their own cows and bugs, a timer, a score, and voilá, it’s a minigame.
But those are all things for wasting time, having some diversity in the otherwise boring 100%ing of maps.
Now what is that about the dungeons? Let me explain. I do CoE often because I want charged cores and after a while you just stop paying attention and press your skills mindlessly to finally beat this bunch of trash mobs so you can get your chest and your blues and greens and no cores. Even Alpha is just dodge once every 7 seconds, spam your skills, however that is still something you need to pay attention to unlike some other bosses in some other dungeons. I often find myself enjoying the laser part of all things, it wakes me up and gives me a good chuckle whenever I fail because I was sleeping or someone swifted us, killing everyone.
What I am actually trying say is, put more minigame-ish gimmicky parts into dungeons that require reaction time and some hand-eye coordination. Not something extreme, just some minigame that takes your mind off the constant skill spamming. Some dungeons already have these, like the CoF p1 orb carrying. But I’m thinking about something that requires even more attention and teamwork. Like carrying an artifact through a number of traps, while passing that artifact between players to avoid damage from the traps and open new pathways. Or if we take the Bell Orchestra and turn it into a gate unlocking system, maybe even with a random factor. These are just simple examples so please don’t scream at me how they wouldn’t work because of x, y, z, I’m just trying to clarify what I’m talking about. Things like these would definitely make dungeons less of a chore.
In the end, all three of my suggestions are about making the monotonous gameplay a bit less monotonous, it doesn’t have to be exactly as I said, but I’m just hoping for more polish to the existing areas to make the core game more enjoyable and fun.
Oh wow, this ended up way longer than I had expected, so cheers to everyone who read all of this.