A rougelike reborn?

[Longelis]

While I dont mind the dungeons, I cant help but feel that after I've completed them once, they're a total bore.
The mechanics, the areas, and the bosses are all neat, but only while they remain fresh and new and you're trying to learn them. So I was wondering, why not... have something similar to randomly generated dungeons for players to go through?

The idea I had in mind was something along the lines of :
Go to any dungeon zone. (You know, the doors that just open duty finder?) And say, you sacrifice an item to determine the parameters the dungeon is based around.
Depending on the place you sacrificed the item would determine the aesthetic theme of the dungeon; but also the types of mobs and bosses that would appear. The level, or value of the item would determine the strength of the mobs, as well as the value of the drops.

[Longelis]

What is everyone here's take on the concept of dungeons being randomly generated? I'd like hear not only what other people think for/against the idea, but how people feel about FFXIVs dungeons as a whole!

(Second post only because of the character limit.)

[Ashira]

While I do like the idea of randomly generated content, like Diablo for example, it doesn't seem to fit very well in a story driven world like Eorzea. Haukke Manor will always be Haukke Manor; you start switching it up and you sacrifice immersion.

We already know the tools are there to do something like this and I'm sure they could put it to good effect, but I doubt it's something we'll see.

[Kaloran]

It's an interesting idea, but the execution would be terribly complicated. Visually, I prefer a well-designed, organic dungeon environment over the walls-in-a-can feel that a randomized dungeon setting would neccessitate. It also wouldn't completely solve your problem. You'd eventually get to a point where you'd walk into an area and say to yourself, "Oh, it's this room. I've seen it before. This is what we need to do to get through it." The only way you would be able to truly experience random, non-repetetive content is if some developer genius came up with a true AI, and if that happened, not only would we never win in-game, we'd probably have much more to worry about...

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

[IzumiRaito]

Looks like a cool idea, however the only way random dungeon could fit to a lore is some kind of dimensional rift.

Making bosses more ai-based than script based will also make game more interesting. Actually i dont see it to difficult to program compared to scripted fights working for randomied enemies.

[PiedPiper]

I think the current dungeon system embodies a nice variety of fights and mechanics (From positioning based fights such as garuda hm/ex, to active dodging fights like titan hm/ex to wave survival fights like turn 4 to "holy shit that dragon hits hard" turn 5, there are lots of different mechanics in the game). That said, do anything enough and it will become old hat.

An interesting dungeon might be a sort of random arena, like the bonus challenge area in 13 or the beast arena in 10, that pulled from all extant monsters (normal, boss, and other wise) and assigned some random mix to the encounter (scaling up and down mob strength randomly/ as needed for the intended difficulty of the dungeon). Ex: You might face a slightly weaker Siren and Garuda side by side, or have to fight CT's iron giant boss while on a (larger) demon wall platform. I'm sure a writer could come up with it being the atheric after images of defeated entities, maybe tie it in to what ever lore accounts for Lightning being present. Even just massively up-leveld version of some open world mobs could be fun if faced in packs/waves.

[synaesthetic]

FFXI did something similar to this with Moblin Maze Mongers.

I hope it comes back. That was fun.

[CzeslawVarpulis]

FFXI also did this with Nyzul Isle Investigation. 100 floors, limited time but you could save every5 floors, objectives per floor with a decent amount of variance. Sometimes you'd get screwed with the random objective + monster combination, like Kill All Enemies + Mindflayers. There were also side objectives like don't get caught by imps, while killing target monster.

And boss battles every X floor. I hope they being something like that.