Garden of Wonders

Hello folks, I'm Quintalian and there's something I'd like to share with you.

About a year ago, there was a thread on the Lodestone which encouraged posters to share ideas for dungeons they would like to see in ARR. At the time, I posted a quick idea and called it "Tinker's Toybox." Eventually I decided it would be fun to expand it into a complete dungeon design.

That idea became the Garden of Wonders, a document that I brought to the Las Vegas Fan Fest with the intent of sharing with the dev team, just for fun and perhaps some feedback.

I've shared this with a few friends, all of whom play (on occasion), hoping to garner opinions on what works and what doesn't. Responses ranged from "it's pretty good" to "it's not bad," which unfortunately told me nothing.

I've sat on this document for a good while, but now I'm reaching out to all of you. Please comment and critique if you like, but before you sharpen your claws to shred it to pieces, bear in mind two things:

1) I'm presenting the content as-is from when I printed a copy to hand to the dev team. I ran out of time and skimped on a few spots; the last thing I tried to complete were the maps.

2) I finished the document the day before the Las Vegas Fan Fest, so Patch 2.4 wasn't out yet. Anything that seems derivative of content added after that is just coincidence.

I hope my amateur attempt at dungeon design is at least entertaining. If any of you have done or are trying to do something like this, I would love to see it!

I like it! Seems like a really fun dungeon but my only request would be maybe add or switch out a boss fight to include a wind up Bubumi fight. If her and Cait Sith were so close, it would be suitable and tragic that he would make a toy/mammet of her once her life ended so she could be with him forever.

So I gave it a quick look over and my initial impression was that the concept was interesting, but the details needed a bit of rework.

A lot of my feedback will be based on what I found works and what doesn't when designing dungeons and instanced content for MMO's.

I will break my feedback up into categories and I will be editing this post to add in more feedback as I can.

STORY AND CONCEPT

Overall I thought the concept and story was pretty good. I liked the "giant palace gardens meets theme/amusement park" setting a lot.
The story was generally good and I liked that you put so much thought into it, but tbh it is a bit much. The story for content like this needs to be short, sweet and easily digestible. You can keep the overarching story but it needs to be trimmed and condensed down. When thinking of the story think of how it will be presented to the players. A lot of the story that you present would have to be told to the players via walls of text in NPC dialogue. I have always strongly believed in a "show don't tell" design philosophy, meaning that I feel it is best to convey story and ideas through the events and actions that happen in the gameplay or cutscenes rather than long NPC monologues. Keep the lead in dialogue and story light, voiced/themed properly, and avoid exposition. You want to bait the hook that will make players want to know what is going on, not tell them what is going on. The majority of the story should unfold and be implied in the dungeon.

DUNGEON LAYOUT AND DESIGN

I feel that the layout and activities for the dungeon need some work. Many of the rooms appear to be large areas when the players move about to accomplish some activity. Large open rooms tend to not work very well in MMO's like this and while I myself hate it, small rooms/areas connected by halls/corridors/walkways does work best. Believe me, I've designed stuff to try to be more open and it doesn't ever really work out quite right. So I would suggest reworking the layout to tighten up the spaces to make it flow a bit better.

As for the encounters, I feel you are relying too much on interaction gimmicks to provide gameplay. In my experience, things like forcing interactions just breaks up the combat and can quickly become boring or frustrating. Here I would suggest coming up with 1 good gimmick for the dungeon and playing off that, like the heads being killed on the platforms for Qarn or needing to pull the packs of mobs away from the totem effects in Wanderer's Palace HM. You could technically have two gimmicks but they should work thematically and you really should be careful to not go overboard on gimmicks.

ENEMIES

I like that you have a good number of garden animals as enemies, especially the ladybugs, but I think you could play up the automatons/dolls more and have some of them as enemies. For this you could use mammets as well as having regular people looking enemies that serve different functions as enemies, for example you could have enemies that look like lalas that use cnj abilities and are called something "Automated Gardener" or some such. This opens up a lot of potential enemy variety with little to no new art assets needed, although a wind-up key in their back would look cool.

You should also expand on the packs of trash mobs and how they are grouped and distributed throughout the dungeon. When making trash packs think of the make up of the group and how the different enemies will interplay with each other and how that combination of enemies will be handled by the players.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Linadae

include a wind up Bubumi fight

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That is something I hadn't considered, but I like it! Perhaps on one of the platforms in the last area.

TouchandFeel, in hindsight, the unlock quest was too long. If I were to do this again, it'd be about the same length as similar quests. I agree with the "show don't tell" approach. The entire estate is meant to be a reflection of its former owner; while the area names may imply that, the other doc content doesn't do much to establish it. A great example: the library mentioned a few times in the lore isn't on the map, but it should be. The layout and maps were rushed, which I regret. There's also no script for the cutscenes and other events. Ah well.

Don't get me wrong, its a very good start but even the best designers pretty much never get their designs right the first time, its an ongoing process of reworking and refining and believe me, you will never feel that you are ever truly done with your work or designs. I still think about content that I designed and built years ago and how I want to redo different things.
When designing things like this you learn by doing over and over and over.

So again, its a very good start with some really good concepts and ideas, but like every design it needs to be refined and reworked until it shines.

There are a plethora of elements that I could improve upon in this design, and I thank you for your critiques. That's precisely what I was after in the first place! It means a lot that you took the time to share your thoughts. Thank you TouchandFeel!

I'm curious wether you were able to present this to a dev at Las Vegas Fan fest, after trying to get it done in time, and what their reaction was.

Actually, I did have a nice binder copy of the doc which I handed to Koji Fox. He opened and skimmed it, but I think it may have been a bit much to process in the middle of the Fest, considering how busy everyone was! Considering the push towards Heavensward, I'm not expecting dev attention any time soon, though it'd be awesome!

glad to see your post from reddit here. ty for posting! i hope the devs can take this and run with it!