Randomized training towers

[TheAlicornSage]

I hate grinding the same quests over and over.

Since grinding is such and expected part of the game however, the idea here is to make a selection of randomized dungeons that are different each time you enter, thus making every run exciting and different since you never know what the layout will be or what obstacles you'll face.

You can have a number of them with different themes, so one might be dungeon, another a mansion, a third might be the demonweb, etc. Each with different possibilities, and each could be sold separately.

One aspect if this though, is that the whole dungeon will be the difficulty selected in terms of creature CRs and such, but as players go deeper, encounters have more enemies and happen more often, increasing the actual difficulty without increasing the numerical difficulty of DCs and saves and such. This also does two things, lets players explore longer without exiting and re-entering, and yet does make it a challenge to see how far they can go, especially if these dungeons have infinite depth. This challenge aspect can be enhanced by making rest shrines become ever rarer and consumables rare to non-existant as loot.

You might even have the Ultimate Growth difficulty, which has every level increase the number of things like champions, reaper rules (if playing epic levels), etc. And for this ultimate difficulty, loot is stored in a chest that is accessible only if the player leaves alive, but if they die and have to return to spirit binder, then they lose all the loot they gained.

I could do a whole design doc if the devs are interested at all.

[TheAlicornSage]

A lot of people have looked, but none responded. Is this a terrible idea, or just meh, or what? Does no one want something better than doing the same quest 50 times?

[SoVeryBelgian]

User generated Random Dungeons SEEMS like a good idea, but good luck implementing something like that in a game this old. Code pathways are crustier than a Wharf.


Also you fall into the whole 'If it is random, then it isn't story-driven, unique or creative'. But hey, some people, as you've pointed out, aint' on board with Repetition.

[Annex]

Hello, TheAlicornSage!

Over the years, dozens of players have suggested adding random dungeons to DDO. Numerous games now include procedurally generated dungeons and most versions of the suggestion ask to create such a system here.

Darth Severlin spoke about random dungeons in a fairly recent Live Stream, within the last three or four months. I cannot recall his exact words, but I believe he called it, "a very heavy lift". That tends to mean it will not happen any time in the next year or three, if ever.

Various players have suggested less complicated methods to achieve a random dungeon. Most of those end up working like The Shadow Crypt.

Player feedback on random dungeons is mixed. Some think it is a good idea. Some think random dungeons are pointless and quickly become tedious. Do you come to DDO looking for action or a role play experience? People who favor role play tend to disfavor random dungeons.

The real problem, in my opinion, is the very slow content release schedule for DDO. The game offers a huge number of interesting dungeons to new players. Veteran players, on the other hand, get a few new dungeons each year, consume them almost instantly, and then face boredom.

Living games face a myriad of issues like this one, all tangled together with budget and developer resources.

There is an old saw that armchair generals discuss tactics while real generals discuss logistics. I believe the same applies to living games. Armchair producers discuss features while real producers discuss budgets and resources.

[bowtietim]

A lot of people have looked, but none responded. Is this a terrible idea, or just meh, or what? Does no one want something better than doing the same quest 50 times?

Wiki says there are : 630 quests, 46 wilderness areas and 27 challenges.

[Antheal]

It may not be possible to randomize in a completely unique way, but it may be possible to collect areas from different pre-existing dungeons and randomly arrange them, along with randomly selecting from a pool of various quest objectives or locations. There's already an in-game system of the Fortune Cards from Ravenloft's "An Invitation to Dinner" quest to randomly select the locations of quest objectives.

It would probably end up looking like the "Nephilim Rift" system from Diablo 3.

[TheAlicornSage]

[QUOTE=SoVeryBelgian;6437300]User generated Random Dungeons SEEMS like a good idea, but good luck implementing something like that in a game this old. Code pathways are crustier than a Wharf.[quote]

Inability to implement an idea does not make an idea bad.

Also you fall into the whole 'If it is random, then it isn't story-driven, unique or creative'. But hey, some people, as you've pointed out, aint' on board with Repetition.

Whatever gave you that idea? Randomization can fit perfectly well with unique, creative, and even story-driven. Notice I gave a lore friendly way to include it even.

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Despite what was said, the difficulty is in integrating it into the existing code, though I think there are a couple possibilities to do it easy depending on how map data is accessed and stored.
Beyond that, random isn't that hard to implement. Shamus Young even made a program to generate continent sized areas completely random. It even had randomly created tree species and randomized individual trees, as in each tree is randomly created and unique yet clearly of the particular species, and it was all done better than any other game I've seen and in mere weeks by a single guy working alone.

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Badly done random can be tedious, though it generally doesn't need to be great to at least make it so you never know your way around a place.

A decently done randomization can both avoid tediousness and also still include a story. Though including a major story on par with the best quests in ddo can be somewhat difficult as you need to ensure certain things for the quest to progress properly, but it's not that much more difficult.

If I was making ddo today, I could even make every single quest randomly generate everything around the preset story so that while the story is always the same, the layout and other factors would change each time. Every players journey would be different. The complication would be storing certain player choices and making them matter beyond individual quests, but using random actually makes that easier as the choices can be taken into account as a dungeon/quest is generated.

[SoVeryBelgian]

If I was making ddo today, I could even make every single quest randomly generate everything around the preset story so that while the story is always the same, the layout and other factors would change each time. Every players journey would be different. The complication would be storing certain player choices and making them matter beyond individual quests, but using random actually makes that easier as the choices can be taken into account as a dungeon/quest is generated.

Isn't that the rub then, if you made DDO today, you'd make a modern MMO. This ol' hunk o' junk is from 2006. It has not kept up with the times by any stretch of the imagination, yet here we are, clinging to a drowning form of entertainment.

The sticky wicket here is that you're bored, to which I can only suggest a different game altogether. With the pace and overwork these SSG devs have to put up with, fully-randomized and auto-generated maps are as pie in the sky as a cosmetic closet or additional bank storage that isn't bugged to hell.

[TheAlicornSage]

Isn't that the rub then, if you made DDO today, you'd make a modern MMO. This ol' hunk o' junk is from 2006. It has not kept up with the times by any stretch of the imagination, yet here we are, clinging to a drowning form of entertainment.

The sticky wicket here is that you're bored, to which I can only suggest a different game altogether. With the pace and overwork these SSG devs have to put up with, fully-randomized and auto-generated maps are as pie in the sky as a cosmetic closet or additional bank storage that isn't bugged to hell.

On the contrary, A) it isn't boredom, it is that I'm an explorer type, so grinding the same thing over and over is anti-thetical to my idea of fun, B) me making it today has nothing to do with modern design, in fact ddo is closer to my ideal mmo than any other I've ever seen. Mabinogi makes a nice second, but nothing else comes close. I don't have a problem with the older design factors. I still play ddo precisely because it is closer to my ideal. Doesn't make it perfect though, and avoiding running the same quest 50 times in a row would be a massive improvement.


My comment about making it myself shouldn't have used "today" as the techniques I would use would work on a game from the 90s even. In fact, I am currently using such techniques to make a game.

Procedural generation has bad rep, and the handful of cases I've seen use it have been horribly designed, but procedural generation can do so much better.

[Oxarhamar]

If I was making ddo today, I could even make every single quest randomly generate everything around the preset story so that while the story is always the same, the layout and other factors would change each time. Every players journey would be different. The complication would be storing certain player choices and making them matter beyond individual quests, but using random actually makes that easier as the choices can be taken into account as a dungeon/quest is generated.

No thanks