Instead of Dungeon Totems and Premade Mob Groups

Premade mob groups are boring. It will basically be the same encounters everywhere.


You should be able to place 1 individual mob and create your own mob group.
Each room could have a max limit of placeable mobs.

This will do a few things

Allow a far greater combat challenge that is different in each dungeon.
You can throw a Faun into a mix for it's confuse effect. An Earth Elemental for it's aoe stun. Etc Etc

You can combine these custom mobs with deco for some truly challenging and unique encounters

Requiring players to formulate a strategy instead of always brute force before defeating each room.

Far greater customizations for questing

Various themed dungeons with different mob sets.

Easy to frequently create new or modify existing rooms so a dungeon doesn't get stale.

There are just a lot more advantages and possibilities with custom mob placement



Instead of looting schematics for generic encounters and killing mobs to level your dungeon

There is another way of populating your dungeon that will improve loot, add to the economy, give people something long term to do other than grinding the same mobs over and over and create some fun in adventuring.

Capture the essence of any creature in the game
Every time you defeat some enemy, there is a small chance you can capture it's essence allowing you to place that 1 mob in your dungeon.

Example

While killing a bunch of Kobold warriors, an essence drops and you can now place that 1 Kobold warrior in your dungeon.

This would add value to every zone and creature in the game as even killing a horse could net you something funny and unexpected.

Players will benefit from venturing into different zones since in any zone you might come away with something cool or valuable.

There will be a market for buy/sell/trade from people wanting to construct their own unique dungeons plus some new loot surprises for people who just continue their usual routine.

Essences can drop from any creature in the game from a chicken to a dragon to a copy of Tharsus Vrul.

Duplicate drops would be the method for leveling your creatures.
A Kobold warrior essence would create a replica in power of the Kobold you killed.
Combining it with another Kobold Warrior would bump it to the next Tier.

You could use a totem to reduce it's power to tier 1 if you only want it for cosmetic purposes, but it would also remove the XP and loot.


It would be relatively easy for players to get a typical end game dungeon up and running for just grinding / XP since things like skeletons, lichs, elves are heavily farmed and the essences would be readily available.

But there would be a large variety of unique combinations as well as players use their creativity to create anything from the Tier 14 Chicken encounter to the swashbuckler filled pirate theme dungeon to challenge dungeons where you might fight 3 Tharsus Vruls at the same time.

There are also a large variety of mobs or items in game that would be useful aside from fighting purposes including things like chest mimic or a schematic for a 3 day blessing statue.



Individual mobs provide plenty of attractive ways to help fund the game as well with the crown store since people can purchase individual cosmetic mobs for their dungeon

Things like

Pre-made mage, archer or melee humanoid soldier wearing your heraldry
Huge variety of unique creatures and monsters
Lore or factions - Obsidian order, Norgard knights
Seasonal mobs and creatures


In the future, individualized mobs could also pave the way for equipping player crafted weapons and armor on dungeon mobs.

 

Yeah being able to really tweak out a room sounds much better to me than using pre-made groups.

 

I agree with some aspects of this.

If monster spawners are limited to the room type it will basically be a dungeon full of the same room over and over again and exploring others dungeons will be pointless. It will get to the point where room xxxx wouldn't be worth using at all because the spawner doesn't fit the dungeon design, despite the fact that looks / dimensions of the room itself would be perfect for your quest.

In the way it was explained during the live stream if I wanted to do an undead dungeon I would be limited to 2-3 rooms because of the spawners.

Give us the option to pick a dungeon room that fits our design and our quest and then give us the options to add whatever spawners type we want.

Port has said multiple times they want to give us players the ability to create our own content. Implementing it the way its planned at the moment would tie one hand behind our backs and stifle the creativity of the community.

 

I have to admit I was a bit disappointed in how this was explained to work - While I understand some limitations must exist to prevent inevitable player abuse, there are already limitations in place for dungeons (such as the xp/loot reduction, placement limits, etc.) that players will be hard pressed to create something equally lucrative to existing adventure scenes in terms of reward for the effort.

Linking mob type to room type is going to end up with boring, same-y dungeons..oh look a lich room, GUESS WHATS GOING TO BE IN HERE!
Liches! Oh boy. The player will know the moment they see that room "oh, this again."

I want to fill a dungeon with huge corpions! I want to put reapers in a cave! If its going to be, oh let me go farm another lich room ....or, if I have to have that...hideous crumbly spider room in order to have a spider in my dungeon, that takes a lot of the fun out of it and wont really offer a very unique experience. Treat the spawners as their own placeables and since you're already limiting deco in encounter rooms to prevent 'fish in barrel' scenarios, if I want a dungeon full of bears then let me have a dungeon full of bears. If I have to just do 'same bear room' after 'same bear room' that's going to get pretty old....

Think of the storyline possibilities!

This fishing hole has been befouled by bears, slay them and cleanse the pond.
Look, the bears are all having a bath in the underground swimming pool.
Now they're lined up on this spooky altar worshiping the bear god....

 

And this is why they should not even attempt to place crap in player made dungeons. We have a game that is 90% people in UT grinding away and now something that players want more and more and more private content so they can create their own "stuff" in their private dungeons.

This was a great idea to allow players to make adventurous stuff on their properties but with each step all we are doing is making the whole world less and less usefull.

there was so much potential OUT THERE in other places in the world yet all we seem to do is focus on Localizing all new stuff in ONE place.

Fishing Adventure?? what a waste of resources, they could have done so much more by adding a part of Coral Reef to someplace Like Fortus End to make that someplace one goes to, to fish critters off a reef. Or in one of the Swamps created a larger nice, diverse Fetid area. Spread all this out there . . . .

Mysterious swamp is a cluster of bosses from all over, instead of creating something more divers in each of their original locations they clutered them all in one place so players can farm them in one stpot???

Now players want stuff so they can farm a Lich boss in their own dungeon and after that gets boaring, Spider, then . . . . .

SOOO Much potential just squandered.

There are a lot of nice ideas in the thread but why all just for Private Dungeons, how about working on all this IN THE GAME so it is out there and avail to PLAY, not just farm.

Sure it nice for Stories written by players for their own content but the GAME as a whole needs just as much work. (if not more)

Why is there so much minimalizing, privatizing of the locations of content

Again this is not the worst idea just wish players would ask for stuff to be done in the Game in General

It seems that we add new content and take it thru step 1, (fix it over and over) then on to step 2, then it gets left there and not really flushed out.

 

Yea, its almost like they should make an episode 2 with a new land mass, new zones to explore and stuff.

 

LoL only be 1/2 as good since they spend 50%+ working on limited content.

 

Basically because the dungeons are going through, there's going to be a significant amount of time spent developing them and nothing is going to stop it.

There are tons of threads on how to improve the game world including quests, lore, loot, factions, you name it, but they decided to focus on player dungeons.

Might as well concentrate on the task at hand.




As far as the mob spawners personally I think they could be working on this in a different order.

Before mob spawners, it should be

1) All the npc tools such as writing dialogue and the mechanics for placing, looting, turning in a quest item and receiving a reward
2) Interactive items in a dungeon such as levers, switches/opening doors, filling a room with poison, starting and stopping a timed event, quest triggers to turn mobs hostile etc
3) Then mob / resource spawns last

If they did it in this order then players could make far more progress working on their quests and dungeon designs simultaneously and just toss in the mobs when they are complete

 

I don't agree with this, get the mobs in. Those are already almost there. Traps shortly thereafter, those are already almost there with the stretch goals from a little while ago.

But personally, I just want to summon the mobs myself. Don't come in unless I'm home, and when I am I'll choose monsters on the fly and really try to jack your world up. Oh look behind you! Wisps! Muahahahahahahh!

 

You can do some fun stuff with the dialogue

Especially if they expand the system where instead of just seeing if you have an item in your inventory like a quest item or whatever,

they include skill, stat, virtue or equipment checks as well.


Example scenario

There is an NPC guarding a locked door.
The standard method is kill a bunch of NPC's til a quest item drops, trade it to the NPC and the door unlocks.

With improved checks, there could be multiple ways to get past the guard

Through Dialogue
1) Here are my papers. Let me pass. (Inventory check Item Letter of Passage)
2) I will return when I have the papers.
3)You must let me pass. I am the Herald of Horsefoot with urgent news for the King (Virtue check Truth -200 or Stat check Int +50)
4) RAAARGH!! ME SMASH!! (Stat Check Str +200 or Int -50)
5) Guarding a door must be thirsty work. Let's have a drink! (Inventory check Item Bottle of 7 yr whiskey)

Through Skills
1) Pickpocket the key from the guard and unlock the door (GM Pickpocket)
2) Stealth past the guard (GM Stealth)
3) Pick the lock and open the door (GM lockpick)

Through Combat
1) Kill the guard and open the door yourself
2) Kill the nearby Captain of the Guard, loot his equipment, equip it on yourself and then speak to the guard
"Hrrmpf...mumble" Right away Captain! (Inventory check Items Captain of the Guard Helmet, Chest armor and Weapon)

 

I somewhat agree: Considering that the dungeon rooms are taken from the adventure scenes, then spawn-locking these rooms is guaranteed to have one very unfortunate result: dungeon rooms will be the same as the adventure scenes.

Every dungeon won't be an innovation but a remix. It's dungeons by a Hollywood producer. It's conservative and unimaginative

Individual spawn nodes with values attached to them would be better. The size of the room could determine how many of each node can be placed.

 

I missed the dungeon show last night.

This is a great thread. I love the OP and much of the ideas in the follow up posts and it shows what would be possible adventure wise with this incredibly imaginative player base. The issues with the current quest system and number of quests would fall somewhat into the background and the Devs could focus their limited resources on building truly new content if players could craft their own dungeon quests and encounters with rich stories and exciting challenges. The rooms themselves are great, I believe we are getting containers that can be manipulated to spawn rewards in accordance with player set criteria, so they are... that... close.

Can I ask however are we jumping the gun on dungeon possibilities prior to their very first release to us? Or is what's coming already well understood? Can we set roaming paths, aggro ranges and respawn rates for the premade spawn rooms? Can we add the traps we are promised into spawn rooms or just link coridors and standard rooms? Can we set the location of the spawn and can we determine the number of spawns per room, or is it 1 spawn point per room?

Whilst initially spawn rooms will be pre made to get them out the door, if we have some controls such as these I have little doubt that amazing subterranean dungeon content can be created WHEN we get the controllable containers.

I just hope that the underlying mechanics of Dungeons version 1 doesn't place hard limits what can be done in version 2 and so forth. The idea of getting a rare drop out in the world of a mob blueprint and collecting these and custom crafting a room of your own with carefully ballanced stuns, knock backs and crafted wave spawns etc is all to mouth-watering to rule out.

 

... and relevant. They were supposedly trying to create an immersive world/story... but these dungeons I feel like just don't jive. Imagine Frodo in the Lord of the Rings deciding instead to dig out a Moria-sized dungeon under his house, and he spawns dragons and skeletons there to fight, instead of going to Rivendell. My reaction would be "... what?"

It'd make much more sense if this was a base-building mechanic in territories that people could establish out in real adventure zones (minus the encounter rooms).

 

Sadly, good point. The world seems to be becoming increasingly disjointed. There is no integration of lore and theme that I can see. I hope there is some masterful 'long term vision' that in time will bring it all together and we see how the meta universe of Novia all fits wonderfully into place as a bigger, more integrated and story-rich 'Whole' .

The danger with such a small income and team is you end up with a budget theme park of disjointed side distractions: fishing, basement dungeons, house decorating, crafting, named seasonal boss hunting.. I hope this is not the extent of the immersion, lore and story of the SOTA world, and I retain some confidence that this will not be the case. Maybe episode 2 will help start to weave the parts together.

 

Ok coing to take a side not with this.

Sunce the Dev team has shrunk to inefficiency, and looks like they are looking to take advantage of a creative community lets take this to its limit.

Dungeons are created by Players and Govonerors hold to thei expansion setup as is. Cotos needed to by roon, caverns, fishing hole . . .


NOW add Simple Single Spawn types of Many degrees. You can have simple one time tier one - 2 spawners . . .

Expanding here

Tier 1 -2 simple 4 - 6counts repeating spawners need a good time in between for respawn and minor loot.

Tier 3 - 4 simple 2 - 3 counts spawner . . .

Tier 4 - 5 simple 1 - 2 count spawners . again timer and loot comparable

now progressive spawners they go from 1 - 6 + same number but they go up to 8 they are very hard to progress and 4 - 5 spawn like 6, then 8, then ,10 , 12 until beaten and progresses on

Progressive 1 - 10+ even harder progression and MUST have a complex progression before hand, the "Boos" is in a sperate room that musty be goten into by fighting thru a very VERY difficult progression, The Bos is hard (almost impossible) and spawns support often and also progressive.

The costs are of course scaled and extremely resource intensive and take reloading.

Make them Worth the adventure to first even create them such as HAEV to get 4 - 8 items from various in game bosses.

Their loot cannot be so imbalanacing that they are farmed and I would even consider some of these loot items to be localized specific for the POT if in one or the Player if in a house.

Nothing that can be used to further expand the gap between haves and have nots.


Develpers HAVE to be strong and consider the ENTIRE world and player base not cater to the ginders.


ALSO YOU CANNOT JUST FORGET ABOUT ALL THE STUFF LEFT FLOUNDERING IN THE GAME - CRAFTIG, QUEST REVISIONS, TAMING, FISHING RECIPIES, . . . . . . .CONTROLL POINTS

 

I agree and it should be there, but the dialog system has to be totally revamped first so it's a non starter right now. That's what I meant.

 

So two things that I consider from this.

1. They are developing infrastructure for episode 2 now in order to help development of faster content. They are also making those tools available to the player as a side effect.

As mentioned, they are working on the static encounters first to sort out the issue with generating nav meshes for random dungeons. This will simplify creation of dungeons for episode 2+ as that is one less step a developer needs to do when making new content. I.E. tackling the simple spawn case.

2. I'd imagine that after fixed content is good and done then upgradable placeable spawns will become a thing. They had the idea about harvesting spider eggs etc. for a placeable spawn point.

I suspect they just want to get the kinks worked out with static placement and ad hoc nav meshes solved first before worrying about dynamic placement.

 

You just reminded me, Chris mentioning procedural dungeons for the future, I don't remember if those were "player set up" (rather than made) or if it was just for the challenge dungeon(s).

But if that's happening hopefully we do get individual spawns.

But I recall all the way back at the start it was sounding a little too rigid for me even then, when they described the spawn system. To me the best dungeon is the one that is being hosted for you on the fly, like a game of Descent (the board game) back in the day.