Found an interesting article that I want to pass along to you readers. This was published yesterday on GamesRadar.com and has a lot of really good information on what we can expect from the dungeons in the mid to higher level range in WAR. You can read the full article for yourself but I want to highlight a few key points that stood out to me.
- Some dungeons will be open-world and some will be instanced.
- “While dungeons are still full, rich experiences, they’re all split into three different wings, and an average wing in an average dungeon will take about an hour-and-a-half to run. The great thing is that you don’t have to run the wings all in one sitting – you could choose to do them over three separate nights.”
- Each of the wings is governed by a theme
- Sections can be done at different times (Similar to LOTRO where your progress is saved) – You can swap party members between runs as well.
- Mount Gunbad is open-world lvl’s 23-30
- The maximum number of people that you will need to complete any dungeon in the game is 6
- Mini-bosses are spread throughout these dungeons with a final boss at the end.
- Bastion Stair is open-world levels 33-40
- If you die you respawn IN the dungeons (no long walks from graveyards)
- Last dungeon in the game is called Lost Vale. It’s Open-world and only 6 people needed – each wing here will take about two hours to finish, and in addition to the wing bosses and final end-boss, there are also three sub-bosses in each level.
- Each dungeon in the game has a set of armor unique to it.
I found this quote from Destin Bales, expansion producer for Mythic, to be interesting:
“We’ve spent the most time of any of our dungeons on Lost Vale. Often, in other MMOs, the company will spend a lot of time making sure the beginning of the game is wonderful, but the rest of it can sort of peter off. But we haven’t done that with Warhammer. From start to finish, all the way through, we’ve spent the time and resources necessary to make the entire game compelling.”
Definitely read the entire article. The guy who wrote it goes into detail about a few of the fights in these dungeons.
So much WIN.
“an average wing in an average dungeon will take about an hour-and-a-half to run.”
and
“The maximum number of people that you will need to complete any dungeon in the game is 6”
THIS. No more spending 6+ hours crawling through UBRS just to get some crummy blues or staying up until 3am to kill Rag because my guild can’t get organized.
I am so happy! Someone finally GETS it!
100% Yes. Bring us back our open world excitement. Bring back the stuff from the good old days.
1) Less emphasis on gear
2) “Dungeons” are quick and don’t take long to get groups for!
3) Vegas Looting System superior to pure luck of the draw.
1 + 2 + 3 = WIN for WAR dungeons!
Yeah I’m not a huge PvE fan, but I like the occasional dungeon trek, and this article sounded very promising.
Res in the dungeon when you die? No mana so no downtime while the mage drinks? 1-2 hour wings, with longer dungeons split into multiple parts? Non-instanced dungeons with instanced bosses? A *full set of gear* for every class, in every dungeon? This is like the holy grail for casual-friendly PvE!
Add to that rumors of mobs with modified hate tables (for example, Dark Elf mobs prefer to attack High Elves), and some genuinely fun sounding encounter mechanics in that article, and it really looks like Mythic did their homework and is focusing on the best ideas to come out of MMORPG PvE in the past few years – and have finally kicked the a lot of outdated tropes of MMORPG timesinking to the curb.
This is a nice change of pace when compared to other MMOs. (WoW in particular. yeah, I brung it up.) Having to spend 3+ hours with 4 (or 9, or 24, or 39) strangers was not a fun experience. WAR’s got the mechanics set. The only thing that could possibly throw it off is class balance, but I think that’s going to be fine.
…I need to buy a new PC, bad.
Once again, the WAR devs are saying the right things. I can’t find fault with this. I do hope that there are some lower level dungeons for lowbies like WOW had with the Deadmines (loved VC!).
I hope this ends up being as good as it is being described.
They put so much effort in “Lost Vale” and make it an open-world dungeon fpr just six people? 🙁 Would like if this is going to be instanced in release 😀
You’re going to see A LOT of groups of six people in there though. If you’re on a open RvR server then I bet you’ll be able to fight other players in there too – making it like Darkness Falls. 😀 (I hope)
Don’t forget open groups. You can run into a dungeon and within that dungeon look for an open group to join. No need to spam lfg in your capital city.
Awesome point jmdw12. Dungeons will become very popular “pickup and level” spots.
Mm now this is the kind of info I want to hear. Are there only going to be the three instances that you mentioned or will there be more at launch? (Its ok if there isn’t its just gonna remind me more of lotro than wow is all where there’s only three ladder instances.) Thanks for the info Keen
It all sounds great, hopefully it is! As more news and each day closes in on the September release, I keep getting more and more excited about the game. I hope I’m not setting myself up for a huge disappointment, that would suck!
@Thallian: I believe there are more dungeons than this. I’m almost certain of it.
@Thallian: I believe there are quite a few more than that intended for release, those three are just the most polished at the moment would be my guess.
Has the august 5th pre-order announcement happened yet? I can’t access the site from work.
@Graktar: I think it has been pushed back to the 6th. Mark Jacobs has also mentioned more ‘good news’ coming tomorrow or later today that he feels WAR fans will be happy about.
Ok, this is just getting silly. It’s an announcement. Just announce already.
I sighed somewhat at the decision for open dungeons. I dislike World Bosses in WoW, I hated open dungeons in Age of Conan because of all the problems that arose. I would much rather an instanced setting for all dungeon content.
Still, it’s the first thing i’ve seen that’s given me a real negative view on the game and although that shouldn’t be too much of a biggy, it will dampen my experience a fair chunk, dungeon wise at least, which is something I was looking forward to.
@Shamutanti: Just a couple of things in response. 1) There are fully instanced dungeons as well 2) Open world dungeons still have instanced boss fights, so the biggest disadvantage of open dungeons will be gone.
Ugh… you’ll have to forgive me for posting an off-topic comment, but this summer drought is starting to feel more like a famine. NDA’s still up, announcement still uannounced, and no games to play to tide me until WAR’s out….
I guess I’ll just think of the open dungeons until something else comes up. ._.;;
Dungeons and don’t forget about lairs, which are non-instanced mini-dungeons in the open world that require some sort of mechanic to unlock. For example, a person finds a random lever in a small cave somewhere. On the other side of the zone, a lair door opens. Now, anyone that wanders into that lair will have access to it, but only if someone has flipped that hidden lever. Sure, eventually they will be found and documented on spoiler sites, but for the initial find it will be hella cool. Hella yeah!
I am hoping for something like Darkness falls to appear… I remember when we would take Darkness falls, and enter only to see armies of mids or hibs standing there ready to fight us at the entrance, level 20s running in like the cannon fodder they were… good times, good times.
raids seems to be saved for rvr and city sieging.. or PQs, which I dont mind, I DO kind of hope Warhammer has a few world bosses that you can just throw people at (kinda like the dragon in DAoC… you didnt HAVE to kill it, but if you did it dropped gobs of items that everyone wanted).
I’m pretty sure they’ve said there’s nothing like Darkness Falls planned for release, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t add something like it eventually (though one could argue that capturing a city is much like flipping control of Darkness Falls – you could argue it rather convincingly actually).
I remember the PuG raids scouring the halls of the dungeon for enemy players, then rampaging to the bottom to kill the bosses. I also remember farming mobs for the tokens they dropped, as well as logging out in DF only to log back in when its controlled by another faction and get brutally ganked. Lol, good times.
Those were good times. I have fond memories of the same experiences in Darkness Falls. I’m hoping that Lost Vale may end up being a permanent struggle for control on the open rvr servers.
so what is the planned release date these days is it 16th of sept or 30th or something completely different now also on a side note whats the lvl cap :3
warhammers? 40, not a high level, but it doesnt need to be, im really hoping to bring back the “pug raid” style of gameplay, it was fun, it was chaotic, and it was fun just throwing corpses at enemies, wow’s raid style has left me annoyed and frustrated, farm, farm, farm… oh look, ONE person DC’d at the wrong time, bam, wipe, 10-15 minutes to wait/rez, another 5 min on boss… repeat over and over as some trivial mistake kills you again.
Room for error is not a bad thing.
Open dungeons. =( =( =(
There are open AND closed dungeons Rog. Don’t fret. Something for everyone. 🙂
Each wing of a dungeon has a boss at the end
And that boss will be camped by fzzjjxrth and sniglttzry, teamed with XxRandomDoodzxX.
All I can do is hope these “Boss” rooms will be instanced for that group…
Open world dungeons= leet losers making the game suck for everyone else.
I’m with Openedge1 about this, I mean the fact some instances are closed off is a big bonus, but there’s going to be some instances that aren’t… and that’s when the problems pop up. Now if somehow the open instance has a closed set up for boss fights then that’s a plus, although it leaves me thinking why not just have the instances as closed anyway?
I honestly see nothing positive about open dungeon play. It allows (and supports) griefing and frustration within the game setting. There’s little in the way of promotion of socializing also within that. The argument that getting groups is harder is a nonsense one, if there are problems getting groups it’s normally down to dungeon design, not class/spec design.
It’s only recently there’s been a huge bump up in ‘problems’ with groups in WoW (as an example) because of this… snobbery, about being ‘full epic’ and being ‘the right spec’and so forth. The days of level 60 and hitting Scholomance/Strat with dodgy gear and bad specs still exist in my head and were there when level 70 was first reached.
I believe the end bosses are instanced, even in open-world dungeons, so that everyone can attempt them.
It’s still too early to get all bent out of shape over this.
Like Keen said, and I’ve said, and other people have said, the ‘phat lewt’ bosses of the open world dungeons are instanced. You gain access to the instance through participation in the open world part of the dungeon. Nobody can ‘camp’ the bosses, or prevent you from getting a shot at loot. The open world dungeons are like gigantic public quests in a dungeon setting. This isn’t EQ.
Maybe i’m just too set in my ways. I mean I experienced ‘open world’ instances in Conan… and they were dire. They were worse than dire. Terribad I would describe it as. I’ve got that image in my head for Warhammer and I simply can’t shake it off because I see ‘open’ + ‘instance’.
But personally I still don’t ‘get’ why the instances are wide available yet the bosses become seperate. Maybe there’s no need to ‘get’ them, but I just feel there has to be a choice of why. It feels disjunctional to me, or at least ‘feels’ as much as I can percieve it behind my jaded specs.
Surely it should be either one way or the other? The idea of participation within the dungeon to enable/allow access to bosses and so forth sounds interesting, but there has to be suitable reason/lore behind a gathering of people to do such a thing surely? It has to be done at least in the right way, every time, or it will lose the immersion (if that’s what your after) and lose the reasonable sense. I’m not one to call up on lore, especially with how GW is currently handling theres, but it’s hardly this idea of ‘band of brothers’ that has become part of the Warhammer fiction.
It was Gotrek, Felix and a couple of his mates. Not Gotrek, Felix and half a rampaging army.
Does anyone know what the Boss encounters are going to be like? ie: Will they all be Tank and Spank or will they be challenging, have scripting and mechanics.
I’m curious about Tank’s mechanics and Threat management and how that will work.
I didn’t get much dungeon exposure in AoC, but from what I did get, it was very boring, just zoomed from Mob to Mob, no difficult pulls, and the bosses barely required much in the way of tanking.
The article hinted at one of the fights in Lost Vale gives players the opportunity to gather an item earlier in the dungeon that will help them burn webs away that the boss puts on people. I think we can expect something a little more dynamic than tank and spank.
Stompfoot: In the article they also gave this example:
“In Mount Gunbad, this is a giant squig… [A nearby] Morcane artifact also provides you with the boss battle’s main challenge: if you let the squig stay too close to it he’ll become empowered to erupt projectile vomit…. but keep him away too long and he becomes enraged [doing more DPS]….”
And that’s the easiest boss in the lowest level dungeon, as I remember. They also mention that the dungeon encounters are designed to introduce tactics and techniques needed to beat later mobs early on, and then slowly ratchet up the difficulty.
It seems that the open world dungeons are going to be less like an instance in WoW with 20 people fighting over mobs, and more like, say, the pre-instance areas with all the elite mobs you have to fight through, and then a boss right on the other side of the instance portal. At least before they made all those elites normal trash.
I imagine that rather than being irked by the presence of other players, you’ll be happy that someone else is there to help you clear out the trash. Or, if the area is RvR enabled and there are players from the rival faction, well, spontaneous PvP is often the best kind!
A lot of you guys are posting mindless worries without READING the article or other people’s posts that are in the know…
This gets frustrating!
@Shamutanti – I think you worries about open dungeons/closed bosses are off – you just have never seen this done in the right way. Using AOC as an example well.. is just wrong… AOC often put the worst possible game mechanic in.. leaving many of us scratching our heads. If you have played any other games then WOW and AOC you really have missed some great experiences. WOW is FAR too closed off, I found raiding fun, but the 5 man groups after awhile were meh… In contrast… seeing all the different groups camping lower guk in EQ.. now that was something, and it was social, you would often change groups depending on the spawn/loot you needed and people really got to know each other.
What I REALLY liked about the article was showcasing bosses NOT being tank and spank.. I really hope there are alot of curve balls, like built in modified race related hate tables. This is exactly what has been missing in modern MMO’s, and for me is one of the reasons I can no longer stand WoW, because it caters to incredibly generic gameplay.
Yeah bring on the class imbalance QQ’s.. WAR is never fair 🙂
You know oddly enough, I recently purchased EQ2 and i’ve been dabbling in Vanguard now and then to experience exactly what i’ve missed – at least attempt to. I’ve got nothing but positive things to say personally about EQ2, so maybe when I run into how dungeons should actually be run my mind will change.
The reason I pull up AoC is because I’ve got such a limited knowledge on open instances, that’s the first strong impression I have and well… it’s not pleasant.
As an information side note, I did read the article, although it didn’t elaborate enough on the open dungeons enough for me to ‘realise’ what the set up might be like, whilst at the same time alot of what’s been said around the blogosphere concerning open world dungeons is a mixed bag of yes, no and oh my god, or at least all I’ve seen anyway, so I feel I’m left, prehaps less so now, with that feeling of worry over open instances.
I didn’t care about the cutting down of cities or classes because I understood the reasons why. I couldn’t see, and even now am dubious, the reasons why they wanted to bring in open instances when for me closed works so well, although I thank you for the extra tid bits of information. I’ll obviously have to look into this more and tap into a few more mmorpgs.
I have just recently been running around main system pulling bosses for more level appropriate groups. While fun, the mechanics of that zone are just horrible.
So it really is in the implementation. Who knows.. maybe the open dungeons will fail my expectations. Staying positive for now. One thing nice about the ‘blogosphere’.. a game can be 99% polished and complete, and all you will hear about is how crappy the 1% is.