One of the things I find really fun about the open world in the game is the occasional massive meta event that culminates in an epic encounter. Especially in the BWEs and around launch, you would occasionally walk into an area, see one of these massive bosses, and say, “Hey, that’s really cool!” They were really fun fights, and definitely a positive aspect of the game.
Very rapidly though, something changed. People started figuring out exactly out long it took for each of these bosses to spawn, and exactly the conditions that led to their spawning. You very quickly got websites that would tell you how long it was until each was next up, for each server. These bosses, I think, changed from a really cool thing, to basically a scheduled repetitive farm, hoping for some valuable drops.
I think this is really for two reasons. First, as I mentioned the events could be accurately predicted to a schedule, so you could see an event would be active, waypoint, kill the boss, and take the loot. It stopped being about fun. That brings me to the second reason: The fights don’t change. The bosses are fun once or twice, but after that you know exactly how the boss is going to react, what the things are you need to dodge, and so on. Some of them could also stand to scale more to player count, as they get trivialized by the large numbers, especially after the recent chest loot improvements.
I think a lot of this could be rectified simply by changing how the monsters spawn. Instead of making the Shatterer spawn every three hours or so, make it more random. Maybe it’ll spawn in three hours, maybe not for a day, or even a week. Or perhaps have it spawn as a result of various individual and meta events all over the zone, instead of being tied to just a couple factors.
This still doesn’t avoid the issue of the fights getting old. It will help that a less predictable schedule means players encounter them less often, but they’re still bound to get tired of them after a while. So maybe you could add a little variety there too. Maybe give bosses a different set of skills and attacks each time they spawn, or allow them to spawn in multiple locations, or so on.
These next ones are probably not achievable except in the long term, but I’ll include them anyway:
You could also make a single event chain maybe choose a random boss to spawn from two or so, instead of being the same boss every time.
One would also think these massive bosses would have more impact on the world. Maybe you chase them around and try to kill them as they terrorize villages, rather than the bosses sitting around on a hill until some brave heroes decide to slay them. To paraphrase a quote from the original blogpost about dynamic events, long before release, “They just sit around in a field picking daises, waiting to be killed”
I realize some or most of this may be difficult to accomplish due to development resources, priorities, engine limitations, and so on, but I think that such changes would make the world a lot more active and vibrant, and make these bosses fun to fight again.
