Will we ever see group content that isn't a dungeon on rails?

[BHGlobbd]

This was already the case in 2.0 Beta, the dungeons were super long, with multiple bosses. If you killed all the optional bosses, you got more treasure chests at the end. Do you know what the response to this was? A big NO, the community didnt want it.

[Tyla_Esmeraude]

Well if the "community" doesn't want more complex content they don't have to run it, simple as that. They can keep doing their dungeons.

Eventually, people are going to get to a point where running dungeons becomes a tirelessly job and the devs will be forced to create a variety of content that people can actually enjoy, for the simple reason of keeping players' interest to keep subscribing. It's that simple, players that don't have fun will just stop subbing. The getting burned out and bored of dungeons is being experienced by people already, both on the forums and in the game from what I've seen. I can even speak for myself.

I am sure the Devs know they have to add variety to the game or people will start losing interest.

Those players that don't want variety don't represent the community as a whole. I am sure they will get burned out of it too someday and will eventually look forward to different types of content. Unless... their definition of fun means doing the same thing over and over, like robots. Though I am sure they are humans and not robots... right... right?!

I would suggest something like Nyzul Isle. That was super fun. Different and randomized rooms with different objectives and restrictions each with a boss every 20 floors. And yes, the game registered and saved your progress... you didn't have to start over again everytime you went in. You'd just start from the last cleared floor.

Let me add to this (incoming long post lol):

A whole run consisted of mainly 5 floors in 30 mins. If you could do more in that time, the better you'd get rewarded, but the norm was usually 5 iirc. The game saved your progress every floor but you could only start at floors 1,6,11,16, etc. So say you'd beat floor 5, next time you could start at 6.

Each floor was random, with different types of floor objectives to list: Kill all enemies, kill only specified enemy, kill enemy leader, activate all lamps either just one, find all and activate at same time or find all and decipher the order in which they should be activated (this one was a time consumer lol people hated this objective) or if you got lucky, you'd get a free floor! You could find random outside world NMs inside the rooms, with a chance to drop ??? armor, which you had to turn it at a chance of getting their coveted shiny drop.

Every 20 floors there was a random boss. If you defeated the boss, it'd drop 2 pieces of armor.

Sometimes, there were restrictions like "do not get sighted by certain mobs" or "dont kill certain mobs (in this case archaic gears that would always aggro you and make your life harder) on each floor. If you failed to follow this, you'd get penalized with minus one minute timer from the total 30 mins or receive less tokens. There were also "Cannot use healing magic (ouch! this one was horrible, luckily never saw it often)" "cannot use weaponskills (lol this one was fun)" and other random restrictions thati can't remember at the moment. Of course it wasn't all restrictions and you could get random buffs like increased haste, TP regen? etc.

Once you cleared the 100 floors, you could just pick the set of floors you wanted to farm (16-20, 56-60, 96-100). There was a harder version of nyzul isle that came after, where you always had to start from floor 1 but could choose the floor you wanted to reach. Then you'd jump floors randomly instead of one by one, say you'd be on floor 15 and get a jump to floor 19, complete objectives and so on, until you reached your chosen floor.

You'd receive tokens that you could exhange for temporary items to help you through your runs (TP wings, haste, attack, accuracy potions, elixirs, etc). On nyzul isle hard mode, you'd get tokens that you could save up to exhange them for gear in case your desired piece wasn't dropping.

I think something like this would work well in this game. Though communication would be a hard thing if done on DF... specially on objectives such as the lamp. But..maybe this would force people to stop being zombies everytime someone says Hello! in party and actually communicate like human beings?! Crazy I know.