Thread: Reminiscing of 1.0 Dungeons

Originally Posted by GaiaGuardian

If you have to get around PS3 limitations, just keep making sections like you've done in previous ones. But longer/harder dungeons would be more than welcome!

It's not a PS3 limitation, it's a "Can a casual player get through this without difficulty" question.

Currently all the dungeons are designed to be easily cleared with minimal effort, it's sad but it's the way the development team want most of the content in ARR to work;

•Easy Access
•Easy Loot
•Easy Progression

I did play 1.0, but the diffirence with dungeons now and dungeons back then is simple.

2.0 dungeons have a path you take from A to B with no deviations. This allows for bosses to show up at set intervals, makes coding a lot easier and especially allows for the developers to put a lot of details in/around just that one path.

1.0 dungeons are completely diffirent. They might have had an entrance which was your starting point, but the rest of the dungeon was a maze. There was no ending, nor any direct route through it all. Considder it a big open area, not unlike for instance Southern Thanalan now. Many paths to take, many corners and rooms, lots of things to explore and see. But that was the beauty of it. You could lock yourself inside for hours and kill the respawning monsters with a group or even solo for EXP, or search around the map in search of bosses that spawned for the loot they dropped. While i myself was never ever bothered by it, people's main gripe with it was that the amount of details were lacking due to it being a large spread out area and that they had to re-use certain objects more than once opposed to making them unique. Which is silly really, but with a game so interesting, i guess people really needed to look hard for atleast -something- to complain about. Which is rediculous really if you look at the maps from back then...

I'd much prefer our dungeons to return to the 1.0 format any day, but that's just not going to happen anymore. Perhaps they could, one day, re-introduce the 1.0 dungeons as a sort of "free mode" that you can enter solo. I know i'd love to roam around Sastasha again by myself or with my Chocobo. But with the reception and complaints about the old dungeons, i dont think they're ever going to touch those even with a 10 feet pole ever again.

For example, Old Sastasha:

Originally Posted by TheRogueX

Anyway, WoW popularized the modern "linear scripted dungeon," for the most part, and so many players grew up on WoW and think that's how all MMOs should be.

False on both fronts. Look up Blackrock Depths, Uldaman and Sunken Temple if you want moderate examples of dungeon design. Nexus and Occulus if you want non-vanilla examples.

Despite tendecies towards linearity, I'm still having more fun doing ARR's dungeons over playing the "run to the beacon to despawn everything else" things that tried to pass themselves off as dungeons in 1.0.

Originally Posted by Magis

Unless they were re-introduced.... you are bringing up dungeons from vanilla WoW.... from 2004. When it was more of a classic MMO. I was complaining back when TBC came out that all the instances were glorified hallways compared to previous dungeons (add Stratholm to the list, it had to entrances that intertwined).

Black Rock Depths owned, it had some many paths and options to choose from. It was literally a giant dwarf city.

The person I quoted claimed that people who "grew up" with WoW never saw non-linear dungeon design. Such people more than likely would have played vanilla, where as you and I have confirmed, had non-linear dungeon design. It's also why I mentioned Nexus and Occulus from Wrath of the Lich King (which came out in 2008). Both were non-linear and Occulus had the bonus of not being laid out like any other dungeon. I just don't like people making false claims.

Originally Posted by Surian

1.0 dungeons are completely diffirent. They might have had an entrance which was your starting point, but the rest of the dungeon was a maze

Like Sastasha? Because those weren't dungeons. The dungeons in 1.0 were fairly linear just like they are in 2.0, the main difference is the fact that there was so much more effort into min/maxing the runs to do them as fast as possible back then and pretty much everyone followed the exact same strategies.

Dungeons were more about learning and mastering those strategies then just steamrolling through it with no difficulty.