People get bored of a dungeon for two reasons. The first is people now a days have the attention span of a gofer. Nothing we can do about that. Second thing is once you learn how to beat the puzzle it loses its appeal. That we can fix.
I propose making a labyrinth. Now that sounds really hard but hear me out. You make a dedicated layout of interconnection passages. Then you add doors at every junction point. What doors are open changes when ever the dungeon is empty of players and then a player enters. This would create a new path and new dead ends every time you go threw. (It wouldn’t change for each person so that people don’t get separated). Then you can spice it up by having different threats in each area. Could also have multiple big bosses with their own loot unique from each other. However you only encounter one of them per run threw.
This would make the replay value of the labyrinth extremely high if you wanted to collect all of the boss level loot.
I kinda like the idea. Many games already re-use features by using the same map for various dungeons/locations and just blocking different passageways so that the actual layout of the place is different from the others.
One thing to take into account, though: The game already has an annoying amount of randomness when it comes to getting the loot we want. Killing the same boss over and over again in hopes of getting that one legendary drop is tedious. Needing to run through a labyrinth many times to even find that one boss that maybe, hopefully, drops that legendary, would be even more tedious. But that’s a design decision for the developers to make - how high or low they want to make the odds of a certain item drop.
I think dungeons would become more interesting if we got actual mechanics in boss fights, currently most fights are “tank and spank” and both of these jobs are done by your thrall whole you can stay AFK next to it.
Though I bet people are against this because “it’s too similar to RPGs or MMOs and CE should stay a survival game”. But then again, just because it’s a survival game it does not mean boss fights have to be boring and easy.
Making dungeons pure Labyrinths… I don’t know about that one. I personally dislike labyrinths, for me they are just an easy way to stretch non existent content to make it look like there is something to do.
There would defiantly be a calibration period for the loot tables. Having a 1% drop rate would not be good. Having a 50% would be to easy. Things to experiment with and discover.
A labyrinth is something to do. It’s a 5 star Sudoku puzzle. Getting to the end feels good. However where as a traditional puzzle gets solved and is now useless, a labyrinth with a shifting layout gives it replay value.
@Anglinex I built a labranith on my gportal server copied from something I found on line managed to get 1 person to go through plan on install various npc and barrier after people get used to it with timer. Think they’re folks out there who would like your idea.
It’s funny, I’ve just spent the last week or so perfecting a maze generation algorithm (for a proprietary project at work, so can’t share unfortunately). All the time I was doing it, I felt like it’d be fun to implement something like it in CE. While CE currently doesn’t do any kind of procedural level generation, it’d probably not be trivial - then again, player structures, while not procedural as such, are certainly (very!) dynamic structures, so it should support it just fine.
