Thoughts on Story Dungeons in FFXIV

[Ariannaid]

No, not dungeons that you have to run as part of the main story quests--dungeons that, in and of themselves, tell a story through their mechanics and the ways in which your party interacts with the zone.

As I was writing up a prior post on FFXIV's content release cycle, I remembered my absolute favorite thing about another MMO I used to play, Everquest II; namely, some of the dungeons in it (usually 1 or 2 per expansion cycle) were significantly longer, more difficult, and more elaborate in terms of zone design than the other, regular dungeons. Those who played EQ2 may remember Estate of Unrest, Erudin Library, Tower of Frozen Shadows, and others in the same vein. For the many more who didn't, think of each one as something like a zone dedicated to being a mini-adventure game, where you had to solve the zone's puzzles (along with, of course, fighting mobs) in order to progress through the zone by unlocking doors, summoning mid-bosses to fight, and so on.

The nature of the puzzles varied between each dungeon. Unrest was more akin to games like Myst, with a lot of item collection and environmental interactions that led you through a haunted manor and its surroundings, while Erudin Library was pretty much a zone-wide game of Clue that you had to solve in order to fight the final boss, with different results each time. What they all had in common, though, was some hook that made them more than just a prettily-decorated corridor that you ran through in a straight line from entrance to final boss, with exactly two mid-bosses along the way and a few trash packs between each mid-boss. They also tended to be on the challenging side in terms of both trash and bosses, requiring groups to coordinate and work together in order to be successful--but, notably, they were not raids. They were designed for single groups, and they didn't require any particular group composition in order to be successful (something more important in EQ2, which had much greater variety in terms of class roles than FFXIV does).

In addition to being generally fun and interesting to play, I think something like what I've described would fit a particular need I see that has thus far gone unaddressed in FFXIV: deep, challenging content for light parties. For full parties, we have both ends of the difficulty spectrum covered--for the purposes of this post, let's leave aside arguments about how well the middle is treated, please--but I think most people would agree that all of the light party content that has been released is definitely on the easy side. More than the difficulty, though, is the complexity and depth; quite honestly, I'm tired of the trash-trash-trash-boss-trash-trash-trash-boss-trash-trash-trash-boss corridor formula. New dungeons are worth doing a few times just to enjoy the scenery and new boss mechanics, but that only lasts so long.

Admittedly, even the most complex, challenging dungeon runs the risk of becoming old after the hundredth time you run it, but at least to me, that's a lot better than never wanting to see Hullbreaker HM (insert your least favorite dungeon here) again after the second week into the patch. This also ties into the reward structure for the dungeon; right now, dungeons are simple, quick, and easy because we're expected to run them over and over, day after day, for tomestones. In keeping with the EQ2 source material I'm drawing the idea from, I would propose a several day lockout on any story dungeons, with rewards in the form of direct item drops or high-value tokens similar to Alex pages/parts, rather than tomes--and, correspondingly, not part of any roulette. That way, dungeons of this type would become something extra to do when available rather than something you might feel you have to work into a daily checklist along with your roulettes, beast tribe quests, scrip gathering, and so on.

So, thoughts? Does this--some number of lengthy, challenging dungeons with unique zone mechanics--seem like something people would like to see in FFXIV? Even at a rate of only one per expansion, it seems like it could do a lot to break up what can be a somewhat repetitive content structure, and I think there's a lot of room to do some more in-depth exploration of parts of FFXIV's world. Imagine a story dungeon going into the floating city of Nym (the ruins you can see in Outer LN, not WP), for example, or exploring deeper into the ruins that, according to lore, Qarn was built on top of.

[Felis]

Dungeons that tell a story?
Tam-Tara (hard) : How Edda became crazy
Dusk Vigil: how the winter outbreak after the calamity closed in the soldiers in the fortress, and how the hunger bring them to eat each other

[Brady672]

The story of Tam Tara hard is the reason I count it as one of the best dungeons in the game, regardless of the actual mechanics. I loved it so much.

The subtle stories and things you can learn in fractal was really cool if you took the time to stop and think.

[SendohJin]

Sastasha Normal has a lot of things most others don't.

[Nalien]

I always figured they could put Treasure Maps in dungeons... It would make opening the various Treasure Chests and side paths in dungeons more worthwhile, it would break the monotony of current dungeons by giving a solid reason to do something optional (optional paths in early dungeons rewarded potions, it's no wonder nobody ever did them), and they can even tell a sort of mini-story... Even make a chain of it, so perhaps you're running Fractal Continuum... You find an Allagan Node, it identifies you as an intruder and some enemies spawn, you kill it and get rewarded with tomestones, then there's a chance it also mentions other intruders, and you can go there to find some Garleans... Kill them, more tomestones, chance for a dead Garlean to have a map that leads to a final challenge against a sort of mini-boss... That tells a little story, it offers some worthwhile rewards to bother with, and given it's random it can break up the monotony of a dungeon...

IDK, I enjoy Treasure Hunts and Aquapolis for their random nature, although even those aren't perfect... Aquapolis just shouldn't be a thing... Adapting the same kinda thing into dungeons would require more interesting level design that SE can fill with more interesting mechanics and lore... Just make it optional and some light puzzles are fine IMO, the biggest problem with previous optional parts of dungeons is just that the rewards weren't there... Going down an optional path for additional Lore? Seems worthwhile to me...

[Alberel]

I would absolutely LOVE a dungeon like Nektropos Castle or Estate of Unrest.

People that haven't played EQ2 will honestly have no idea how complex these dungeons were. They weren't linear paths, they were basically small instanced zones with no obvious way to progress. You had to pay attention to what NPCs were saying and what enemies were doing to try and work out what was expected of you. There were secret passages, hidden bosses, mysteries to solve and a story that you actually lived through instead of just witnessing it.

Honestly I think the best way to think of them is mini Dark Souls dungeons. NPCs give cryptic clues. You would find obscure items with no obvious use. Some of them even had false endings. These were unique experiences that forced players to explore and problem solve with trash mobs being much less of a focus. Some of the bosses were unique in that they required you to have found certain items or done certain things around the map in order to be able to beat them.

Man... exploring those old dungeons was so much fun.

[LineageRazor]

While I would personally love to see stuff like this, there are factors to consider...

One of the reasons that dungeons in this game are so mentally unchallenging is that they're intended to be run over and over and over - the first time to progress through it, and all subsequent times to help OTHERS progress through it, in exchange for Tomestones. They're built so that you can run them practically on autopilot, and easy enough that a success is virtually guaranteed, even if you have one or more newbies in the party who have no idea what to expect or to do.

Because speed and efficiency are emphasized, "story" tends to get in the way. Tam Tara (Hard) was brought up, which I agree was fabulously atmospheric, and the notes scattered throughout the dungeon were great. But how often do you see a tank slow down to let new players read those notes? The Praetorium and Castrum Meridianum were other great examples - they were VERY story rich, and the proliferation of cutscenes to tell that story generated so much strife between those who wanted to watch, and those who just wanted to get it over with so they could get their Tomestones and queue up again, that SE vowed to never do anything like them again.

You could remove all rewards for repetition - but then the problem transforms into finding a party to do the instance with, the very problem that those Tomestone rewards solved.

I have a crew that I run new content with, both easy and hard stuff, and a story-driven puzzle dungeon of this kind would be something we'd welcome with open arms. Creating such a thing, and guaranteeing that new players years down the line can still find a party for it - that's the big challenge to overcome.

Did EQ2 do anything to encourage helping new players through those dungeons? Or was it like in FFXI, where you could spend days or weeks of real-life time searching for a party to do aged content with?

[Ariannaid]

I always figured they could put Treasure Maps in dungeons... It would make opening the various Treasure Chests and side paths in dungeons more worthwhile, it would break the monotony of current dungeons by giving a solid reason to do something optional (optional paths in early dungeons rewarded potions, it's no wonder nobody ever did them), and they can even tell a sort of mini-story...

That would be a lot of fun, and a neat way to add some unexpected elements to the existing dungeon designs.

What I'm proposing in the OP is more of a different way to design some dungeons--not to completely replace the current two new dungeons per patch, but to occasionally augment them with something more in-depth than we have currently. Dungeons like this would certainly take a lot more time and effort to develop, so they couldn't be an every-patch type of thing (maybe one released at the midpoint/later in the expansion cycle).

For an illustration of what I mean, I'll try to summarize how a group might progress through Estate of Unrest in EQ2, which is still my gold standard for how a dungeon like this could play out. There are a lot of story elements woven through this whole process, but if I tried adding them in as well, this post would be even more ridiculously long; for some background lore, you can see Unrest Lore.

• The group zones into a large courtyard in front of a run-down manor house. They have to explore the courtyard and the manor grounds to find several items: a key to the house, some chess pieces, and--dropped from mobs--a few key items.
• Once they've found the house key (the other items can be collected later), they can go into the first floor of the manor. Most of the doors are locked, but they can go into the bar, where they have to fight a mid-boss to unlock the manor's back door.
• Once they've collected certain of the key items from outside, they can also go into the kitchen to do a ring event (waves of trash mobs that you have to kill quickly before too many spawn and overwhelm you) that unlocks a door on the second floor of the manor.
• After all of the chess pieces are collected (two from the manor grounds, one from the kitchen, one from the bar), the group can go through the manor back door into the game room and fight a mid-boss for two lever screw key items.
• These lever screws allow the group to unlock the main doors from the first floor into the manor foyer, but there's a catch: each screw has to be used with a lever on opposite sides of the first floor, and the levers have to be pulled at the same time (and, of course, they spawn enemies when pulled). So the group has to split up and coordinate pulling the levers, and either fight the mobs on the spot or pull them back together and rejoin the group to fight them all at once.
• Once the levers have been pulled, they can go into the foyer, where they fight a mid-boss before heading to the second floor. Much like the first floor, most of the doors on the second floor are initially locked.
• Another of the key items from outside allows the group to break down a door into a bedroom, where they have to rescue the ghost of the manor lady from groups of tormenting spirits. Once the spirits are killed, she tells the group about a nursery room.
• In order to unlock the nursery room, they have to find the ghosts of her father (in another second floor room) and mother (outside in the manor grounds), talk to them, and return with key items they give whoever speaks to them. She will then open the nursery and disappear.
• Inside the nursery, the group fights a mid-boss to receive an incomplete hymn. They can take this to the conservatory on the second floor and attempt to play it on the piano there, but it fails.
• To complete the hymn and make it playable, they need to take it to the manor lady's father's ghost, who originally wrote it. At that point, they can then play it on the piano in the conservatory.
• Playing the hymn starts a ring event, and once that's completed, it unlocks a door into the chapel, which has been taken over by a corrupted priest (mid-boss). Killing him gives a holy symbol key item.
• With the holy symbol, the group can go back down to the library on the first floor and unlock a secret staircase behind a bookshelf. This leads down into the final part of the dungeon, the catacombs.
• Once in the catacombs, it's a fairly straightforward route through a few mid-bosses and trash groups to the cavern with the final boss (though some of the trash groups are interesting, since they appear as doppelgangers of your party members and have custom skills and speech).
• To kill the final boss, the group has to explore the cavern and find the pieces of his skeleton, while in the process hiding from (and, if necessary, fighting off) his ghost as it flies around. Once all of the skeleton pieces are found, the group can take them to the center of the cavern, assemble them, and fight the real form of the final boss.

I think I'm probably leaving out a few steps, since I don't actually remember what the kitchen ring event unlocks (maybe the dining room where the father's ghost is?), but that list should give a fairly good idea of what I meant in the OP by longer and more complex dungeons.

[Ariannaid]

While I would personally love to see stuff like this, there are factors to consider...

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Did EQ2 do anything to encourage helping new players through those dungeons? Or was it like in FFXI, where you could spend days or weeks of real-life time searching for a party to do aged content with?

I completely agree with your points, and replayability/helping new players would be very important things to keep in mind when designing dungeons like this. Part of it comes down to the rewards; EQ2 (at least at the time I played) didn't have anything like tomestones, so all items were directly dropped, and Unrest had a ton of bosses and unique item drops to chase. That alone pretty much guaranteed that people were always up for running it whenever it wasn't on lockout, at least when it was current content.

I think a model like that, with unique glamor items, minions, and such would work in the FFXIV context as well. In later expansions, EQ2 did similar things to FFXIV in that various quest lines (mythical weapons, heirloom items, etc.) would require you to revisit older dungeons.

[Alberel]

While I would personally love to see stuff like this, there are factors to consider...

One of the reasons that dungeons in this game are so mentally unchallenging is that they're intended to be run over and over and over - the first time to progress through it, and all subsequent times to help OTHERS progress through it, in exchange for Tomestones. They're built so that you can run them practically on autopilot, and easy enough that a success is virtually guaranteed, even if you have one or more newbies in the party who have no idea what to expect or to do.

One solution to that would be to have these dungeons operate separately to the normal roulette dungeons and not be part of the roulette system.

Call them something else and turn them into a unique type of 4-man content. These kinds of dungeons work a lot better with very small groups anyway.