So, this is going to be a bit open ended. I welcome all forms of response in regards to this, albeit I'd like to keep the general. "Hurhur git gud/go to a different game derkaderka" types. I've talked to a few people, there is obviously threads out there and whatnot. However, I really have never heard anyone actually say something of value that says Open World dungeons are superior to Instance. Now, before people flame the comment, don't just scream "Oh NOOO WoW FAN" people have forgotten that old school instances were very good. Don't say they didn't involve a social aspect, they did. You had to shout for a party, and go there and enter and work together using CC and proper tactics and killing targets in order while talking to people.
They were social and fair with some difficulty, and we've seen bad instances that require no skill and fights that last seconds. GW2 for instance has horrible instances, there is many cases.. however Instance is superior for both quality of game and order of game. In an Open World, people have to compete for content for no other reason than.. you want that? Camping, people assume others will go in order? What happens if people say just ignore the order of the parties arrival and do what they want.. then you.. train on them?
No, Instances are better for the community, the safety of parties since it limits respawns as they don't make sense anyway, you can make content more complex since fights don't have limitations in regards to being able to utilize more space since they have an instance to play in, you can tell a story far better with quests and just.. actual story elements and add far more interesting traps and such? I'm saying.. make these massive sprawling multi wing huge dungeons.. instanced, it will produce less lag and just a better service.
I'd just love to hear why Open World is better, I have never seen it.. and I've played.. a LOT of games and have a friend who has played EQ and lived through the camping/chaining wars. I've personally experienced the.. failures of FFXI camping/dungeoning systems as well.
Hoping for proper and excellent defenses and counters to this!
PS: DWARF POWER.
Hello bud,
I will quote Bazgrim on this one :
Bazgrim said :
9.0 Are dungeons open world or instanced?
All dungeons are open world. There are no plans for instanced dungeons at this time. The dungeons will be very large to handle multiple groups of players. More shards/servers will be added if overpopulation becomes a problem.
Pantheon has been designed this way from the beginning. Pages upon pages of discussion about this here:
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/1348/instanced-versus-non-instanced-areas
Feel free to answer to the already opened topic on the subject to gather every data at the same place, instead of opening a new thread !
That thread is locked, Mauvais. Here are a couple open ones:
stellarmind is right. Open Dungeons vs. Instanced Dungeons are Apples vs. Oranges.
An instanced dungeon (done right) is designed to present a content-driven storyline experience to a single group of players. This can be very powerful and memorable. A downside, however, is that replay value tends to be minimal. You "do" the dungeon, and then you're done. The next time you go in, it's the same as the last time.
An open dungeon (done right) is designed to present an area with a variety of themed content and encounters that can be experienced by multiple groups of players simultaneously. This approach allows you to set up scenarios where the multiple groups of players can actually enhance the experience for each other. It also tends to create much larger dungeon areas, which encourages repeat visits and adds to replayability. The downsides of this approach are first, that you can't control how many players will be in the area or what they'll be doing, so conflicts and overpopulation are real issues that can occur. Second, because the entire dungeon needs to have respawns, it becomes much harder to present storyline experiences (although not impossible) in an open dungeon.
I think the main reason that many of us are so supportive of open dungeons is simply that very few games have even tried to use them for many years now. We've been instanced to death, so to speak. It doesn't mean instances are bad in and of themselves, but too many instances leads to the world not feeling like a shared or persistent environment anymore. The pendulum *needs* to swing back the other way.
That said, it's really important that Pantheon's dungeons are designed well. A poorly designed open dungeon is just as damaging to player experiences as an overabundance of instancing - just in different ways.
I'm well aware that it is GOING to be Open World, I'm mostly interested in why people seem to believe it is superior, that being said I can see how some people just prefer one over the other. I just.. have never seen a reason why it is supposedly better, and nobody can state why it can compete with Instanced.
oneADseven said:That thread is locked, Mauvais. Here are a couple open ones:
Dang it !
Thought as it was originally pointed by Kilsin as a route to go, It would remain open. I'm not even half a OneAd/baz in fiability.
Well there are some fallacies you are basing that on. Social aspect is all on the person and also how the instances are built.
Istaria was all open world and I only spoke to people I wanted to. It didn't matter if I ran into, across or over people. I was only social if I knew them and that was probably just a wave as I flew bye.
As to instances it depends on how they are designed, you pretty much lump them all together and there's mulple design options for instance....
1) Solo - designed for unique story interaction with an NPC. A solo quest or a group quest in which everyone that is part of your group comes in. But privacy os key
2) Crowd control - Instances are designed to accomodate "X" amount of people before another instance is triggered for overflow. Here you are exposed to a lot of people I've seen up to 100 or more per instance. Usually the trigger is well before to allow grouping and adding group members from other instances But communications can be made cross-instance in the case of groups trying to gather members or friends chatting away.
3) Raid - accomadates the raid size.
But all in all how "social" people are is more a function of the person not the game design. I mean you would have to design a game that only allowed one person per instance and generate a new instance for each player for it to be anti-social. As I remember it (and it's been a long time) but EQ2 had instances for certain caves and dungeons but they weren't exclusive as there were times when there were more players swarming around then mobs. Of course EQ2 also did instances for housing and that could be a solo instance if you made the settings such.
Mayceus said:I'm well aware that it is GOING to be Open World, I'm mostly interested in why people seem to believe it is superior, that being said I can see how some people just prefer one over the other. I just.. have never seen a reason why it is supposedly better, and nobody can state why it can compete with Instanced.
As was pointed out, one isn't necessarily better than the other because they are not the same thing. Each brings to the table a wholly different approach to content. I prefer open world but I'm not saying they are, necessarily, superior to instanced. I can see the benefit to have some content be instanced while other content be open world as it depends upon what is the best way to present that particular piece of content.
Mayceus said:I'm well aware that it is GOING to be Open World, I'm mostly interested in why people seem to believe it is superior, that being said I can see how some people just prefer one over the other. I just.. have never seen a reason why it is supposedly better, and nobody can state why it can compete with Instanced.
you just answered your own question XD it's just a matter of perspective. what side of the looking glass do you want to see through? are you seeking an opinion from a targeted group like pvpers or open worlders?
SoWplz said: It is better for some, and other not so well. The open world bring in issues that you do not have in instance. Too many the issues are what make it good. The world is not made for you and your group, you and your group will be lost in the world. As much as we hate camp stealing issue, training, over crowded... that is part of the world. If you do not want to wait for 4 hours for a camp, go to another zone, explore somewhere else. In an instance game you get what you want and are not forced out of your comfort zone at times. People make the game in an open world, the good ones AND the bad ones. I agree if some parts were instanced they could keep the story intact better, making it feel more in depth. No one wants to fight their way down to the king of the dungeon and him not be there, or dead already. But it is the players that are in the kings room that make the game memorable, not the NPC king. And just to clarify Stellarmind the PvE is the meat... the PvP is the side dish. Haha
maybe i should have said pvp=carnivores pve=herbivores XD
Mayceus said:I'm well aware that it is GOING to be Open World, I'm mostly interested in why people seem to believe it is superior, that being said I can see how some people just prefer one over the other. I just.. have never seen a reason why it is supposedly better, and nobody can state why it can compete with Instanced.
Well, consider loot flow into the game as one issue. I am not going to get into percent chance for drop, rarity spawns, etc... just giving you a basic idea.
Open world:
100 players go to kill a mob.
Mob A is on a 30 min timer drops 1 item, can be killed 12 times a day with the chance of total loot being brought into the game as 12 (most likely much less realistically ).
12 of the 100 walk away with loot from that mob.
Instanced World:
100 players go to kill a mob.
Mob B is always up is spawned in the instance and 100 players start an instance and go kill Mob B.
100/100 players walk away with loot from that mob.
Certainly a lot of that can be adjusted, but for the most part, this is a common problem with instance based games. They introduce loot much faster than a static open world contested system.
See that is certainly a defensible point, the loot is in fact a bit more skewed towards Instance, since bosses tend to drop an item. Given, I kind of think you can simply add drop chances or have a nice diverse loot table to said bosses so it inspires people to do content more than just once. Add enough branches or randomized bosses it can change it up. I again, don't agree with people saying Instances don't provide social aspects, that is just wrong. Games nowadays certainly don't.. not that I like bringing up WoW, but yes.. WoW now has no social aspect in an instance, but older school instances did. Fights took awhile and talking was crucial and I made an endless plethora of friends in Instances.
Mayceus said:See that is certainly a defensible point, the loot is in fact a bit more skewed towards Instance, since bosses tend to drop an item. Given, I kind of think you can simply add drop chances or have a nice diverse loot table to said bosses so it inspires people to do content more than just once. Add enough branches or randomized bosses it can change it up. I again, don't agree with people saying Instances don't provide social aspects, that is just wrong. Games nowadays certainly don't.. not that I like bringing up WoW, but yes.. WoW now has no social aspect in an instance, but older school instances did. Fights took awhile and talking was crucial and I made an endless plethora of friends in Instances.
Certainly you can attempt to manage this with rarity in your instances, both in the spawning of mobs and that of the drop (this is also a component of open world mobs as well keep in mind). The problem then becomes that the rarity of the boss/drop has to be tuned so high so that it isn't common due to the raw number of chances instances will provide (remember, there are only 12 spawns in 24 hours in our open world example).
So, what do you do? Do you put camps on the instances and random them to the players? I think that will get you a lot of angry people as now they will be grinding an instance to get to a boss mob that may not spawn because 12 other groups already farmed it this morning. You won't know that though, but the reality is that you could be there with ZERO chance of a drop.
You could limit the number of instances that could be done, but to put iit into the same perspective as the open world mob, you would likely anger people who show up to do a dungeon and see a message "WE are sorry, but you are at your capped instances today".
All of this tuning of the content which creates numerous other problems as well as placing in artificial mechanics that stick out like a sore thumb.
As for community building, you won't see me argue this in too much force. I really don't care about the social aspect, game play is more important to me and the way that open world limits gear, and slows progression I find to be more appealing than my experience with instanced based MMOs.
((that's how i feel about instancing. if everyone wins, why even bother playing the game?))
Another bad day for the straw - it is being reaped in large quantities to make straw-man arguments.
The closest this comes to being a legitimate comment is that perhaps the major purpose of instancing a few dungeons would be to give everyone a chance to *attempt* them without them being taken away repeatedly by higher level characters or excessively aggressive guilds.
But the mob encounters would very likely be *harder* than open world dungeons since you wouldn't have other players around helping you out whether you wanted help or not. The hard part about open world dungeons is the competition with other *players* not the mobs - which is why more than a few of us describe what some people like to do in them as pseudo pvp. They do not directly kill other players they train mobs on them to kill them. They grief other players - look at some other recent threads where people admit to having been in raid guilds that camped bosses they didn't need *just* to slow down potential competition from other guilds. If this isn't griefing - bannable conduct in most MMOs - I don't know what would be.
In an instance the encounters are carefully tailored to fit the intended level and gear of the players coming in. Maybe the players win 5% or 10% of the time if it is a real challenge.
So no, not even remotely close to being true that everyone wins. Everyone gets a chance to play. Is that so bad?
I think this discussion is veering into something different from the original topic. Contested content is a separate thing from open-world design, even though open-world design does increase the possibility for contested content to exist. We should not conflate the two.
When it comes to contested content, I think that many people (though of course, not all) would prefer that the challenge come from the content itself, not from other players.
When it comes to open world design, I think that same general group of people like the concept of open world design because it feels less limiting and scripted, with more opportunities for exploration and discovery.
These are just words, of course, and everyone has a different opinion on what they should mean.
my point is that in open world pvp setting there's a lot more variables and makes content exciting and memorable. i mean i can't remember a time the last time i got a meaningful piece of gear in instance settings since WoW BWL when i got the untamed blade upgrade from the pvp weapon the unstoppable force. that one upgrade was able to push me into grand marshal status. and that took months of raiding and farming my DKP. and if there is a guild that can lock me out from that then i can respect it. you know how hard it is to build and maintain a guild capable of doing that? doesn't that build a sense for you to want to take down that guild or be a part of it?
Again I just see people making gross generalizations. Instance does not mean "only me" or "only my group". Yes there are designs like that. But there are also instance designs where the instance is open to all. You want contested content trying have 5 or 6 groups of characters running around a not so big instanced area killing a limited number of mobs looking for the very slow popping boss who also happens to pop at random places within the instance.
