Revenge of the Round Arena!

[TheRogueX]

Most of the dungeons nowadays are round arenas connected by short paths. These dungeons are becoming incredibly boring and repetitive, no matter what the visuals are outside of this ridiculous pattern. Hell, the dungeons don't even make sense anymore; the paths and arenas are completely disconnected from the dungeon at large, in some of them, as if the dungeon is just a visual theme for the paths and circular boss arenas.

Please, for the love of the twelve, bring back real dungeons. I don't know what your reasoning is behind what you're doing now, but it really really needs to stop. I ran through Stone Vigil and Dzmeal Darkhold the other day for the first time in a long time, and it was absolutely refreshing to be in dungeons that made sense. We need more of that, please.

[Zigabar]

Stone Vigil. So you'd rather have square arenas? I'm not sure I'd call that refreshing.

[MilesSaintboroguh]

Stone Vigil. So you\\'d rather have square arenas? I\\'m not sure I\\'d call that refreshing.

Hexagons ftw

[Yasuhiro]

Alexander Midas 6 was really daring
A corridor and then a mixture of circular and square arena's, the absolute mad man, how did the board room meeting go? Even the yes men didn't know whether to nod their heads.

[Moomba33]

I suspect they don't do more interesting arenas because the playerbase usually finds a way to exploit it. Like how at launch you could dodge Doom from Qarn's first boss by climbing on the rubble, or how players would drag the Relic Reborn chimera up the hill so ranged wouldn't have to move for Dragon's Voice, or how people would hide in a ditch in t5 to force Twintania to Divebomb from one direction and make it easier to dodge.
I don't see the circular arenas as a big deal myself but variety is always nice.

[TheRogueX]

Stone Vigil. So you'd rather have square arenas? I'm not sure I'd call that refreshing.

I was using Stone Vigil as more an example of a dungeon that actually made sense. It was a building. It felt like a building. The "square arenas" made sense.. because you were in a building. Most dungeons nowadays feel completely out of place. Seriously, I first noticed this trend in CT2, and it's only gotten worse as time went on.

I suspect they don't do more interesting arenas because the playerbase usually finds a way to exploit it. Like how at launch you could dodge Doom from Qarn's first boss by climbing on the rubble, or how players would drag the Relic Reborn chimera up the hill so ranged wouldn't have to move for Dragon's Voice, or how people would hide in a ditch in t5 to force Twintania to Divebomb from one direction and make it easier to dodge.
I don't see the circular arenas as a big deal myself but variety is always nice.

All of these things are things they can plan for. Instead they don't and just make flat round arenas; it makes them look lazy.

[Jetstream_Fox]

All of these things are things they can plan for. Instead they don't and just make flat round arenas; it makes them look lazy.

While you're not wrong, they could have certainly planned the Chimera out better as well as T5, the reason why we don't get variety is more on part with how they decided the gameplay was going to be in early stages of development. Since they went with the trinity, almost everything has to be small enough for a tank to control. You can't really have anything else because every tank is going to take every group to a centralized location to fight, had this game not focused on the trinity, rather a more chaotic battle flow with AI that doesn't lock on to one specific player but the group as a whole, then we would see different layouts and designs.

[Ronove]

And while we're at it, a trial that isn't a completely flat playing field would be nice. SE, you added jumping to 2.0 despite so many people's outcry over it, make it actually flipping useful in a fight.

I think there's a reason everything's flat now; in T5 you could trivialize certain mechanics because there were slopes.

[Canadane]

I suspect they don't do more interesting arenas because the playerbase usually finds a way to exploit it. Like how at launch you could dodge Doom from Qarn's first boss by climbing on the rubble, or how players would drag the Relic Reborn chimera up the hill so ranged wouldn't have to move for Dragon's Voice, or how people would hide in a ditch in t5 to force Twintania to Divebomb from one direction and make it easier to dodge.
I don't see the circular arenas as a big deal myself but variety is always nice.

I don't really see a problem with out-of-the-box strategies like that.

[Riardon]

Stone Vigil is one of my dearest dungeons ever. I really liked the design of the corridors and the difficulty it had. It made it very interesting. I think they make the boss rooms circular in order for players to have more space for dodging. I remember they stated this in some interview some time ago. I do agree that the circular areas in many cases do not seem to fit at all with the surroundings.
There are plenty of ideas for boss areas/rooms.
We can fight a boss in a forest like area where we have to hide behind trees to dodge aoes, or in plains like/valley where the enemy flies and dives towards us, or a mountain path near a cliff, a beach area etc. There can still be "invisible" walls but at least visually the place can feel more open. I do agree that the circular areas became too much repetitive and boring. I'm still waiting for more dungeon like the Vault where enemies running towards you and not waiting to be killed like statues. Please dev team take a not note on this.