Favorite Zone ever?

[James]

BWL was amazing, I don't get how you don't think it is. It's the only raid zone in the game where the trash you killed, omg, stayed the fuck dead. To top it off, it had some really neat encounters in it like Nef and Broolord and Vael.

[Neric]

Originally Posted by Komido

Blizzard should hire me to do their instance design. Here is a rough concept of a zone I call "Corridor Chaos".

=[]=[]=[]=[ ]

The ceilings will be a 100 feet high and the zone will be filled with trash mobs just standing around waiting to be pulled (There sure as fucking isn't any other apparent reason why are just standing around.). Obviously every other open room will contain a boss with a large loot pool, but only drop one piece of loot per kill. That will give the customer a reason to keep returning and enjoying the zone several times until their desired item drops.

When do I get paid?

You certainly deserve a shot! Unfortunately there is a copyright problem as you can notice by looking at these LDoN maps:

[TOOL]

EverQuest Lost Dungeons of Norrath Expansion

I still love the sales pitch for LDoN.

* Personalized Adventures tailored to challenge your group.

Everyone loves to do math and manipulate the group's average level to pick the difficulty of the mobs. That's obviously a much better system than letting players choose which mobs they fight themselves.

* 48 distinct zones. 19 more than any previous expansion!

What did they actually deliver, like six or eight different flavors of copy pasta?

* Customize your equipment with new Augmentations.

* Succeed in Adventures, and choose how you wish to be rewarded.

Now you get to farm twice as many items as before if you want to upgrade your hit points and keep up with the Jonses!

Still bitter after all these years. The irony is that I refused to buy that expansion, and I never experienced it except watching over a friend's shoulder.

[Reggie]

Originally Posted by TOOL

EverQuest Lost Dungeons of Norrath Expansion

I still love the sales pitch for LDoN.

* Personalized Adventures tailored to challenge your group.

Everyone loves to do math and manipulate the group's average level to pick the difficulty of the mobs. That's obviously a much better system than letting players choose which mobs they fight themselves.

* 48 distinct zones. 19 more than any previous expansion!

What did they actually deliver, like six or eight different flavors of copy pasta?

* Customize your equipment with new Augmentations.

* Succeed in Adventures, and choose how you wish to be rewarded.

Now you get to farm twice as many items as before if you want to upgrade your hit points and keep up with the Jonses!

Still bitter after all these years. The irony is that I refused to buy that expansion, and I never experienced it except watching over a friend's shoulder.

I actually felt sorry for the 'groupers' that had to grind out that bland shit. Hours upon hours getting the item, then aug'ing it and you got less than VT quality.

I was raiding PoP in a 'family guild' I think at the time and really felt bad for folks that would spend twice as much time as me for half the loot.

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When I started dicking around with WoW again recently I definitely headed back to the Gnome Dungeon and Deadmines for some fun. FIrst places I thought of when I wanted to WoW it.

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Edit: Let's compare Rujarkian Bland Shit with say most folk's favorite.... Old Sebilis.

First Level:



Second Level best charm bet is an Ilis Knight for quad 144's



And of course Guk:

Live Side (personal favorite, all the loot whores were on dead side, less problem PL'ing, etc)



Dead Side




Besides the Ghoul Lord hall not too many human corrals in the joints.

Game Devs: Linear design is BAD M'Mmmkay?

[Thunderbane]

Blackburrough - Don't fall in the hole!
Upper Guk
Timmorous Deep - Hello Firepots!!

And I'm pretty sure BRS > BRD

[ismaris]

Originally Posted by James

BWL was amazing, I don't get how you don't think it is. It's the only raid zone in the game where the trash you killed, omg, stayed the fuck dead. To top it off, it had some really neat encounters in it like Nef and Broolord and Vael.

Really? I thought Vael was a pretty simple boss fight. It was just a matter of farming until your guild had enough fire resist, and having a guy who gets gibbed, who admittedly got a cool buff.

I've seen many better encounters than that in both WoW and in Vanguard.

[Kreugen]

I hit 60 in Charass and never saw another group there. I considered that bliss at the time.

[Kreugen]

Originally Posted by ismaris

Really? I thought Vael was a pretty simple boss fight. It was just a matter of farming until your guild had enough fire resist, and having a guy who gets gibbed, who admittedly got a cool buff.

I've seen many better encounters than that in both WoW and in Vanguard.

Going through six or more tanks in one fight can be fun though. And the buff was fun.

The AE pulse interrupting casting was mega fucking gay though. A running theme in the zone. Nobody would claim that BWL had the kind of balance that later encounters have.

[Cuppycake]

Man, all this LDoN hate! I thought it was a spectacular idea and design with slightly poor implementation in terms of variety.

If you think about it though, it was a huge leap in the direction of casual MMO experiences. Never before had an MMO provided you with quick fixes of microentertainment. EQ *especially* was the master of requiring hours upon hours of dedicated playtime in order to accomplish anything. This was the first time in an MMO that I could get some friends together and run a dungeon that would only take a half hour or less. There was always random loot that someone could either use or sell. There was lots of money to be earned. There was the scaling dungeons which was something truly unique to EQ. It didn't matter if you were level 40 or level 65, you could do an LDoN dungeon. It gave content that crossed all the level boundaries. You could even customize your experience with easy or "hard" dungeons for increased difficulty and more lucrative rewards. You earned points that you could use to spend things (mmm..how meta).

Regardless if the dungeons were 'stale' and carbon copies, LDoN was a huge advancement in MMOs. Perhaps not the advancement that a lot of you hardcore raider type welcome, but none the less huge. I'm interested in seeing if a game without instanced dungeons could fare well after LDoN raised the bar.

[Kevincheese]

Quick fixes of microentertainment?

What the fuck are you smoking Cuppy?

That shit REQUIRED the time it took to put together a group, travel there, do an hours worth of killing, for next to NO reward. In the most boring ass zones in the game.

God, I still hate sony for that expansion. Even more than LoY.

What LDoN is based on, as well, what you are touting as brilliant and bar raising, is what ruined the fucking game in EQ.

[Grave]

Instancing seems to put designers in a different frame of mind when it comes to layout and zone progression, which is probably why we are seeing more and more linear dungeon experiences.

In the old days of EQ the designers would have to take into account a potentially very large number of groups working their way through the zone and accommodate for that by having multiple camps, paths and areas of interest. While it can still be done, as people have mentioned BRD/BRS, it is probably less likely that the designer will be thinking in this way as opposed to just trying to give the player a quick and enjoyable experience, which unfortunately becomes more shallow as well. Still, I don't see it changing in WoW at least. Why spend time making a huge, sprawling, maze-like dungeon when only 5 or 6 people are going to be inside it?

Maybe whichever game Green Monster is working on will go the right way and give us both non-instanced and instanced dungeons, appeasing both playstyles.

[Fog]

Originally Posted by ismaris

Really? I thought Vael was a pretty simple boss fight. It was just a matter of farming until your guild had enough fire resist, and having a guy who gets gibbed, who admittedly got a cool buff.

I've seen many better encounters than that in both WoW and in Vanguard.

I enjoyed Vael (maybe just because I never raided before WoW) a ton because the fight was so intense in every way. It was a high-profile, gateway kind of battle that was over in all of two or three minutes - half a minute if you fucked up. The constant AOE damage, the explosion debuff, Vael starting at low health, and the super-damage buffs everyone got all contributed to a huge sense of excitement and urgency. I'm sure it was even more stressful for the poor tanks trying to get aggro and then dying every 45 seconds! It was a matter of atmosphere; I remember going in there the first time and when I saw him at 30% health and looked at my buffbar with the infinite energy buff I almost shit myself.

The fight wasn't tremendously challenging from a technical perspective (although it was tougher then because people hadn't quite figured out exactly how threat worked) but it was a ton of fun.

[Reggie]

OK OK. We were able to use the manastone again when buffing and if you zoned fast could nuke like a tard. Having said that we just multi charmed to make it fun and thankfully faster. My enc alt had more ldon points than my wiz for sure.

In hindsight they could have just re populated the original respective zones like with the unrest task and kept the same shitty RvR item purchase system/camps.

While the above is a totally shitty 'plan A' it would still have been better than the zones we were given to group with in ldon.

Pulling south ro with a flux staff and insta jibbing the train is the most excitement I got outside of charming trash and looking at the 23/54 numbers go up. Yee Haw!

[manslayer]

I'll also vote for Seb as probably my favorite zone ever. Oldschool CT was pretty amazing fun as well, was pretty disappointed when they revamped it, would much rather they had revamped zones that sucked. LDoN was kinda interesting once they switched to only needing 3 characters to run instances there. 3 boxing for augs!

[Danth]

"Never before had an MMO provided you with quick fixes of microentertainment"

This is incorrect. There were MMO's out there that I could log onto for an hour at a time and have fun doing so before Everquest was even a thought inside Brad Mcquaid's brain. It's easy to forget due to the passage of time, but Everquest received some criticism for requiring excessive time commitments even when it was new.

LDON did much to drive me out of Everquest, with Omens being the final nail in the coffin, for reasons posted earlier. The idea had merit, as the popularity of Warcraft instances attests to, but Sony flubbed it as was usual by that time ('03/'04 being about the height of SOE's corporate greed/arrogance/indifference). In the end LDON left me with little more than memories of horrible textures* and relatively sub-par items that took way too long to get.

*The blinding white walls in some of the Everfrost-related zones particularly annoyed me. A literal majority of LDON dungeons had some form of dull brown walls, years before Vanguard made "too much brown" the forum joke.

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In keeping with the spirit of the thread, my favorite zone in any fantasy MMORPG has to be Everquest's Unrest, although pre-expansion Everquest was filled with excellent dungeons.

Danth