New Endwalker dungeon is more of the same cookie-cutter bland dungeon design

[EgilTheStressedMage]

Started in 2018. When were old dungeons interesting again?

[pikalovr]

now imagine if you will we take a page from binding coil of bahamut and make a dungeon (i'm thinking kinda like we go back to garlemald and there's an abomination in their towers/castle jail area and so we go and clear it out) with 6 mini bosses and then the final boss split the mini bosses into 3 groups of two (human bosses, mechanical creatures/systems, and abominations) now for those who want to speedrun they will have a straight shot to the boss all they gotta do is turn around and hit a switch to unlock a path straight to the boss but they will have a far harder time than those who choose to deal with the mini bosses

now let's say for example if you choose path 1 the humanoid path by defeating the first mini boss you prevent your ranged DPS from having to kill the reinforcements the boss abomintion summons on walkways above the arena that will cast healing spells on the boss. the second mini boss prevents the summoning of suicide bombers to the arena that will move even while they're about to explode (not liek the necro bombers who stop before they explode.

if you choose path 2 the mechanical path by defeating the first mini boss you stop the anti intruder system from releasing poison gas into the area at random points, if you kill the next boss you stop the machine from unleashing the flame turrets on your party. (now the flame turrets will have to be destroyed once summoned unlike the poison dispenser)

if you take path 3 the abomination path killing the first boss stops the main abomination from absorbing it halfway through the fight augmenting it's skills to a harder variant. killing the second boss in this path would prevent the main abomination from calling upon it at random points to drop jail cages that if you get caught under immobilize you and your party has to break you out similar to titan.

now after every mini boss you can reach a jail cell that has a "secret tunnel" back to the starting zone so if you wanted to you could kill all 6 mini bosses before the main boss or for example only kill the first boss of each path go back hit the switch and go straight to boss.

yes people will speedrun or find the optimal bosses to kill but thats not the point if they choose to straight speedrun they are still challenged by an extremely hectic and difficult boss fight if they find the optimal bosses to kill they still ahve to interact with the dungeon to do it altogether there's alot of combinations you could try to make the boss as easy or hard as you want.

[S__th_rn_fl_am_]

the dungeons are amazing art and lore wise, but terrible to play through more than a couple times. It would be cool to see a system similar to mythic from WoW, but people have been talking about that for years and its never happened. I'm looking forward to the upcoming criterion dungeon system. I sounds like it could be cool, but it also might be just another deep dungeon iteration. We'll see what comes in a few months!

[RayneBoemir]

I barely engaged with the Squadron AI because I'd rather play with people. I'd rather something like Toto-Rak again. Oh wait they butchered it and turned it into another freaking hallway. Destroying what made it special in the first place, a dungeon with multiple paths to explore and fun to be had. Nope that's all gone now, it's just the same cookie cutter design now. The fact you are defending this practice is disheartening to say the least. As someone that has been playing since Beta I'm fed up with this design and it needs to be seriously changed, or just stop hyping up the dungeon in the story as some place that'll kill us when it won't because it's so gosh darn easy I could do it in my sleep and not give a darn.

When was Toto-Rak fun? it’s a dreadful dungeon with very uninspiring design. I dread getting this and others low level dungeons were bosses are basically smash till it dies.

[moteets]

hehehehe funny stuff

[Quanta]

People are weird praising WoW's dungeon design for its non-linearity when the thing most people do whenever a new WoW dungeon comes out is they go on the PTR and figure out the optimal route, and then that's how the dungeon gets run: go this way, avoid this trash pack, skip this boss, etc., etc. and then anyone that tries to stray from this optimal way of doing things gets yelled at and yeeted from the group. I fail to understand how this is better than just designing the dungeon like that from the get go. Like, is it somehow better when a content creator designs the route you take thru the dungeon versus the actual designers designing the route? Help me out, here.

[Jirah]

Doing wanderers palace or Pharos is fun. I fear the day the “fix” both by making wanderers more generic with room and doom crap we’ve been doing for the past 8 years, and Pharos by minimizing DPS interest with the first two bosses.

Still, what did you expect dungeons were never really good. Shocking that dungeon design has literally been at a standstill for 3 expansions striaght, with EW being the first to actually regress

[Absurdity]

People are weird praising WoW's dungeon design for its non-linearity

When people are praising dungeons in WoW they're most likely praising the vanilla dungeons and I'll die on the hill that Blackrock Depths is the best dungeon ever created to this day, it's an actual city-sized dungeon with something like 25 bosses, some of which dropped loot that was still useful late into the endgame.
You can say a lot of things about vanilla WoW but the sense of scale, exploration and rewards was something they got right with those dungeons. It always felt like you're adventuring into a place that people actually live/lived in and you got something useful out of spending your time there.


But what you have to keep in mind is that the dungeons were designed in a different era and a different game, no matter which of the several paths you took, there was always valuable loot and gear upgrades to get, something that doesn't exist in XIV dungeons, which is why this design just wouldn't work without also reworking dungeon rewards... and considering how simple the gear in the game is, probably wouldn't work at all.

It is also why this design doesn't exist in current WoW dungeons, they're mostly linear corridors as well, except you can go down the wrong corridor.

[Charak]

Hallway dungeons are the best way forward. Modern gamers are more goal-oriented so they will always prioritize optimization.

If you start making branches with extra mobs, you end up with a situation where the tank is suppose to memorize the optimal route and everyone else is expected to know where to skip past mobs. You end up in a situation where people will hate anyone who breaks the optimized route, either by mistake or from lack of knowing.

An example of optimization, in Guild Wars 2's Citadel of Flame, you would run through a long corridor picking up every mob along the way and run towards an empty room with rocks you can climb up. Everyone is expected to know how to jump up it, and by doing this it resets all the mob aggro and you go straight to the boss. For most new players, this just results in them dying somewhere along the way and people just kill the boss without you.

If you need an example of the worst dungeon I've ever seen in WoW's is called Shrine of the Storm. So much trash you needed to know how to skip, so why even have the extra trash.

WoW's mythic+ system is possibly the MOST toxic environment you could place yourself into, and FFXIV is not in the business of promoting toxic gaming.

[Yeastyloins]

M+ toxicity issue isn't due to the dungeons itself, its the potential punishment of key depletion if you are unable to time the key. Hence why people just leave as soon as it "appears" that the key wont be timed.