Guild Wars 2

I enjoy that ArenaNet tried to add some variety to the dungeons, but when you take a magnifying glass to the concept, does it really hold water?

We have story dungeons that seem to always involve the squabbles of Destiny’s Edge, a group of heroes that are almost forced upon the player with little to no back story or concrete information pertaining to why these heroes even matter. Destiny’s Edge did something with the dragon, blah, blah, Logan ran away, blah. It’s almost as if Destiny’s Edge was created solely as a cheap plot device to churn out these horrible, shallow storylines.

Next, we have the explorable dungeon format which contains 3 (4 in Arah) “unique paths”. Great idea on paper and certainly an alluring marketing device, but let’s examine closely.

In my opinion, the dungeon path concept:

- Segments and marginalizes any narrative value to the main story.
- Diverges only slightly from a template in that the first few scenarios are always the same fights.
- Don’t really deliver any valuable story information and just generally seem like a lazy tack on. (Example, CoE dungeon doesn’t give you any new or different narrative between paths, you just decide on a new way to break out and have different, but mostly the same, boss encounters)
- Alienates the new players trying to do story from those trying to run explorable because of improper rewards.
-Not only does it alienate new players, but it creates an artificial schism in forming parties. Wouldn’t it be great if we could say LFG Ascalonian Catacombs Explorable rather than what path? We’d surely get groups faster without these arbitrary restrictions being that not everyone wants to run all paths because others are easier.
-They are imbalanced across the board in regards to difficulty.
- The required level…who decided on that? Ever try to run CM with a party at-level? It’s hard enough at 80 with exotics and no exploits. What message is this sending to new players?

So with this said, i really have to question the logic behind this design decision. Would it not have been better to just design one really spectacular explorable mode rather than 3-4 lazy ones? Seems like a hurried push for marketing purposes.

I for one hope that ArenaNet looks at this in the future and rethinks moving forward with this dungeon design format. Any thoughts?

Destiny’s edge has tons of backstory. In fact I believe they made an entire book based off of them as a prequel to the game.

I think Anet really improved upon the dungeons and if you ever played gw1’s Eye of the north it really shows.

In the first game tons of dungeons were recycled, few were really borring to run through and most of the time people only did them for certain weapons.

In this game at least there is some story are varied game play within each dungeon not to mention no two dungeons look alike and that’s an improvement.

This isn’t an attack on the dungeon design, this is a discussion about the reasoning for splitting them up into paths. I played GW1 for 6 years and while system limitations and differences in game design make GW1 dungeons a bit archaic, i dont think that anything in GW2 can even hold a candle to UW, FoW, Urgoz, The Deep, etc. I don’t feel that any dungeon in GW1 was recycled, they were all just as unique as in GW2.

I wasn’t aware that a primary purpose of dungeons was to provide more story.

Different paths give different experiences to people. The dungeon physically doesn’t change, but the area you go to may, as in Twilight Arbor. The dungeons are showing what happened to that area after you did what you did in it the first time.

In AC, King Adelburn warns you there are things much worse than ghosts deeper, and those things become a problem when he’s dead. I’m not sure I need much more of a story than that.

Dungeons are supposed to be challenging play…that’s it. The place where people go with a team to challenge themselves. Sometimes this works well and sometimes not. The thing is the most popular path is CoF path 1 because it’s easiest and fastest so people farm it. The rest of the dungeons are there for tokens to get armor or weapon skins…that’s what they’re designed to do.

I don’t love the dungeons as they’re laid out, but then, the redesign of some of the bosses might help. There are dungeons I like more and dungeons I like less. But they all have the story in common. CoE is about shutting down an Inquest lab, after the inquest have been defeated. You’re fighting the experiments they left behind. Three paths, all of which lead to different challenges. I’m not sure I’m seeing a problem here.

To be sure, the Destiny’s Edge story mode dungeons were not done as well as they might have been, but having read the books, I know there’s a story there, even if they didn’t do a great job in translating that into the game. Actually the best indication of what happened is the kids on the steps in the beginning of one of the personal story missions (level 30 I believe) when you go to Lion’s Arch. Just listen to the kids and you’ll get the substance of what happened.

But once dungeon bosses become more interesting, dungeons will server the purpose for which they were designed.

I think the idea is that they wanted to make them so you could bash out a few of them quickly with some friends after work and such. Also it aloud them to reuse parts that were already built to add a bit of dungeon verity and let players pick what they like.

Also to save cash reuseing asets and makeing the game have a bit more to do in dungeons. Most MMOs lack a bit in this on day one GW2 dose not.

My biggest problem with dungeons is them reusing most of the same stuff for each path. I mean AC you pretty much run to the same rooms, fight the same mobs, fight the same bosses with very little actually different. I originally envisioned these paths as seeing 1 piece of the whole dungeon, instead we got the same dungeon just a different slightly different version. Any rooms you cleared in previous paths would be clear for the next path, meaning no spider boss, Kholer and troll EVERY run. Instead if you killed spider boss & Kholer in path 1, their boss rooms will be empty and cleared in Path 2 should you have a reason to go through them.

If I did AC I’d do something along the lines of:
Path 1: Mopping up remaining ghosts(kholer), another ghost encounter, & Ghost room with ghost boss instead of the current one.

Path 2: They’ve found a secret passage and are going deeper but explorers keep going missing(spider queen), graveling horde attacks, and finally the gravelings are dealt with by killing the graveling boss(pick one!).

Path 3: With the gravelings defeated, excavation has continued and has uncovered powerful artifacts in a sealed chamber. The artifacts are cursed though and corrupt the excavation team(happens in front of you), As you struggle to overcome the horde of corrupt members by prying their artifacts away, 1 makes an escape. Each encounter after is basically chasing this person towards the entrance as they summon new enemies and set traps.

It’s not perfect but at least each path is very different.

Vayne.8563:

I wasn’t aware that a primary purpose of dungeons was to provide more story.

Different paths give different experiences to people. The dungeon physically doesn’t change, but the area you go to may, as in Twilight Arbor. The dungeons are showing what happened to that area after you did what you did in it the first time.

In AC, King Adelburn warns you there are things much worse than ghosts deeper, and those things become a problem when he’s dead. I’m not sure I need much more of a story than that.

Dungeons are supposed to be challenging play…that’s it. The place where people go with a team to challenge themselves. Sometimes this works well and sometimes not. The thing is the most popular path is CoF path 1 because it’s easiest and fastest so people farm it. The rest of the dungeons are there for tokens to get armor or weapon skins…that’s what they’re designed to do.

I don’t love the dungeons as they’re laid out, but then, the redesign of some of the bosses might help. There are dungeons I like more and dungeons I like less. But they all have the story in common. CoE is about shutting down an Inquest lab, after the inquest have been defeated. You’re fighting the experiments they left behind. Three paths, all of which lead to different challenges. I’m not sure I’m seeing a problem here.

To be sure, the Destiny’s Edge story mode dungeons were not done as well as they might have been, but having read the books, I know there’s a story there, even if they didn’t do a great job in translating that into the game. Actually the best indication of what happened is the kids on the steps in the beginning of one of the personal story missions (level 30 I believe) when you go to Lion’s Arch. Just listen to the kids and you’ll get the substance of what happened.

But once dungeon bosses become more interesting, dungeons will server the purpose for which they were designed.

What part of mmoRPg isn’t clear? RPG’s have story elements pervading them. If storytelling isn’t going to be central to what the player does, then perhaps it’s time to change the genre you define your game under?

I rather have a dungeon without paths. It opens innovation for the players. Finding out what is the fastest, let the people create their own paths. you can even split up here and there. I think GW2 lacks alot of choice towards the players. Escpecially with builds/skills.

lothefallen.7081:

I enjoy that ArenaNet tried to add some variety to the dungeons, but when you take a magnifying glass to the concept, does it really hold water?

We have story dungeons that seem to always involve the squabbles of Destiny’s Edge, a group of heroes that are almost forced upon the player with little to no back story or concrete information pertaining to why these heroes even matter. Destiny’s Edge did something with the dragon, blah, blah, Logan ran away, blah. It’s almost as if Destiny’s Edge was created solely as a cheap plot device to churn out these horrible, shallow storylines.

Next, we have the explorable dungeon format which contains 3 (4 in Arah) “unique paths”. Great idea on paper and certainly an alluring marketing device, but let’s examine closely.

In my opinion, the dungeon path concept:

- Segments and marginalizes any narrative value to the main story.
- Diverges only slightly from a template in that the first few scenarios are always the same fights.
- Don’t really deliver any valuable story information and just generally seem like a lazy tack on. (Example, CoE dungeon doesn’t give you any new or different narrative between paths, you just decide on a new way to break out and have different, but mostly the same, boss encounters)
- Alienates the new players trying to do story from those trying to run explorable because of improper rewards.
-Not only does it alienate new players, but it creates an artificial schism in forming parties. Wouldn’t it be great if we could say LFG Ascalonian Catacombs Explorable rather than what path? We’d surely get groups faster without these arbitrary restrictions being that not everyone wants to run all paths because others are easier.
-They are imbalanced across the board in regards to difficulty.
- The required level…who decided on that? Ever try to run CM with a party at-level? It’s hard enough at 80 with exotics and no exploits. What message is this sending to new players?

So with this said, i really have to question the logic behind this design decision. Would it not have been better to just design one really spectacular explorable mode rather than 3-4 lazy ones? Seems like a hurried push for marketing purposes.

I for one hope that ArenaNet looks at this in the future and rethinks moving forward with this dungeon design format. Any thoughts?

The “paths” idea are actually good because IN THEORY it offers players choice instead being forced of the same dungeon over and over.

The problem is its not well implemented. The paths are not balanced. That’s their downfall.

Most of your complaints are about exploration (vs story) or dungeons in general. Dungeons are SUPPOSED to be higher difficulty content that rewards HIGH end items. Its natural that low levels are initially excluded until they are ready. Story Dungeons are actually easy and can be done by non-lvl80+exotics.

Zenith.7301:

Vayne.8563:

I wasn’t aware that a primary purpose of dungeons was to provide more story.

Different paths give different experiences to people. The dungeon physically doesn’t change, but the area you go to may, as in Twilight Arbor. The dungeons are showing what happened to that area after you did what you did in it the first time.

In AC, King Adelburn warns you there are things much worse than ghosts deeper, and those things become a problem when he’s dead. I’m not sure I need much more of a story than that.

Dungeons are supposed to be challenging play…that’s it. The place where people go with a team to challenge themselves. Sometimes this works well and sometimes not. The thing is the most popular path is CoF path 1 because it’s easiest and fastest so people farm it. The rest of the dungeons are there for tokens to get armor or weapon skins…that’s what they’re designed to do.

I don’t love the dungeons as they’re laid out, but then, the redesign of some of the bosses might help. There are dungeons I like more and dungeons I like less. But they all have the story in common. CoE is about shutting down an Inquest lab, after the inquest have been defeated. You’re fighting the experiments they left behind. Three paths, all of which lead to different challenges. I’m not sure I’m seeing a problem here.

To be sure, the Destiny’s Edge story mode dungeons were not done as well as they might have been, but having read the books, I know there’s a story there, even if they didn’t do a great job in translating that into the game. Actually the best indication of what happened is the kids on the steps in the beginning of one of the personal story missions (level 30 I believe) when you go to Lion’s Arch. Just listen to the kids and you’ll get the substance of what happened.

But once dungeon bosses become more interesting, dungeons will server the purpose for which they were designed.

What part of mmoRPg isn’t clear? RPG’s have story elements pervading them. If storytelling isn’t going to be central to what the player does, then perhaps it’s time to change the genre you define your game under?

Have you PLAYED MMORPG’s before? Because story is not usually huge in instances anyway. And most MMOs don’t give you a personal story at all. Guild Wars 2 at least does that. So they have a place for story and the dungeons aren’t it.

It’s nice that you want more story in your dungeon but from the beginning, it’s pretty clear that Anet wanted to make the dungeons the challenging area of the game. It’s also pretty clear to me that many who like story don’t particularly like dungeons. I know a lot of people like this.

So putting the story in dungeons will only exclude from the story many who really want to experience it.

I think the story in GW2 is easily the worst part, this is especially true for dungeons. The story potential of AC was incredible (look at Story Mode, or even many of the DEs that take place in Ascalon and deal with the stories and legacy of Ascalonian ghosts – lore rich from GW1) yet we got three stories that have little or nothing to do with one of the most lore dense subjects in the game – Ascalonians – and instead get three generic plots which involve killing a giant graveling lacking in sentience and consequently everything that makes a villain interesting. Compare that to WoW and the Deadmines, the story of Van Cleef and his bandits was built off of a random multiplayer map, they fleshed it out with a plot involving the King of Stormwind, unpayed debts, shafted workers and the formation of a rebel gang who had threads throughout much of the world. The story was deep and penetrated many areas of the game, the characters had motivations and reasons for doing what they did (they also had reasons to empathise with them). Ascalonian Catacombs explorable paths were really, incredibly underhwelming. The average DE had a much better story (and often, design) than most of the AC content.

Then look at Twilight Arbor which has three paths that seem to occur mutually exclusive of each other. That’s freaking confusing as all hell. The Nightmare Court is a somewhat interesting organisation and yet instead of dealing with them as an organisation, we deal with the egos of three of their members, only one of which can be canon and which ultimately seems to have little relevance to the Nightmare Court in the long run (or their leader).

The story of explorable modes doesn’t have the epic scale it needs to justify being group content, story driven and memorable. It’s one of the few areas of the game where ArenaNet is able to make permanent changes with lore (DEs largely need to be nameless NPCs, dungeons are one time events in history that we can repeat for gameplay reasons) so making full use of that by making the lore than is explored and developed in the dungeon interesting, significant and memorable is very important.

Honestly, it’s too late to fix the story (hopefully that will be improved across the board with future content – FotM fell flat on its face in this regard) but another thing they can improve is the pathing. Instead of making new dungeons with three paths, making new dungeons with different variations randomly selected (sometimes the left door opens, sometimes the right door opens) would be a kind of improvement (although it increases the lameness of the RNG dependency this game has).

I still think Storymode should have been solo-able with low rewards or rng tokens dropping from mobs (0-3 possible).
That way a player gets:
an intro to the particular dungeon, gets to watch the cutscenes, takes away the pressure of running it fast, and gets to learn the mechanics of bosses before taking the leap to explorable mode. And if they put in small amounts of tokens dropped the player will get just enough to want to run explorable mode to get more tokens.

The rewards are low so exploitation is not possible and if you have to leave in the middle because of RL, the dungeon resets but at the same time a party isn’t penalized.
It’s not impossible to find a party for story mode, but it certainly isn’t the mode most groups want to run. There is a lot of pressure to do it fast and skip the story aspect.

Prelaunch it sounded like dungeons would branch randomly dynamically through the different paths as you played through them, also there would be a bunch of random interrupt events that could happen. Story mode will be easy for regular players, but explorable will hard and require organized teamwork to beat. SO MUCH FOR THAT.