Critque and hope for the future of Dungeon Design.

[Xanfer]

I'll try and keep this one short and sweet due to word count limits.
Playing FFXIV since ARR Beta2 I have seen so many cool and interesting dungeons that come with each patch, designs that are incredible to traverse through, and places that stay within my memories for years after, such as the times I went through Coils 6 (2nd coil part 1) and a lot of 50+ dungeons from ARR.

And even though I adore the boss fights and creature designs, I have noticed a trend in the design of dungeons since around Stormblood? maybe even earlier? (and you can see it in a lot of dungeons) of the typical way, the party progresses through the dungeon with the typical 2-4 groups of mobs and pulling them "wall to wall". Going through the dungeons in the past expansion and what we currently have, has left me yearning for more approaches to how we handle going through content, even to something as simple as a direction change. I felt like before we had a bit more verticality in the dungeon pathing, in comparison to the past year of dungeon content.

What would I recommend? I'm not going to say "this is a perfect idea and must be followed through verbatim!" but something I would be interested in seeing is different non-combat mechanics to tackle dungeons (nothing too complex) or maybe even a variety in the number of people who go into an instanced dungeon. For example, one dungeon can have 8 party members, maybe in 2 separate parties within the instance, who have to start off together and eventually split off to tackle separate halves of a dungeon.
Maybe even have a strange 6 man dungeon (with a static amount of how many of each role is needed) and maybe have them take on even bigger baddies!
A lot of what I would consider interesting to see in dungeon content comes from my time doing the ARR coils and HW raid fights (both normal and savage).

My final thoughts are, that I would rather see new and interesting ways of spicing up the way we run dungeons, even if every once in a while we get a stinker, rather than having a safe repeated method of doing the content.

[Renalt]

I feel like I've seen this word for word somewhere else like a month ago.

[Jin-]

Not gonna work OP. They have already planned in years advance that the dungeons and raids will be generic cheap bulk content without any kind of variation since that slows down the development or requires designers with some imagination and pride for their work

[Jeeqbit]

Everything changed for a reason.

In ARR, there were no walls so we could pull too much. This is still a problem in some of them such as Amdapor Keep where, unless you have an extremely good tank and healer, pulling wall-to-wall will probably get you killed. The chances are that either the tank or the healer is new to their role or the DPS is low. We got walls and although wall-to-wall pulls can still be challenging now, new healers can manage it with a good tank.

Coils are not dungeons, so everything before the boss is regarded as raid trash which SE stopped doing. We had two dungeons with 8 people in, Castrum Meridianum and Praetorium and it made players impatient enough to speedrun while cutscenes were being watched, which wouldn't happen with only 4 players. With them having just been reduced to 4, I doubt the idea will be revisited. We are getting criterion dungeons where I think we can adjust the amount of players like we do with deep dungeons.

Parties split off to do separate objectives in alliance raids, but it would be interesting if that was in a dungeon. Non-combat mechanics could work, but I wonder if they would interfere with speedruns.

[Xanfer]

Yea I know they do a lot in advance, they probably are close to done designing for 7.x series, but you miss all the shots you don't take lol

[Xanfer]

Lol I can assure you I've never seen it, I don't browse here frequently enough

[NekoMataMata]

Everything changed for a reason.

In ARR, there were no walls so we could pull too much. This is still a problem in some of them such as Amdapor Keep where, unless you have an extremely good tank and healer, pulling wall-to-wall will probably get you killed. The chances are that either the tank or the healer is new to their role or the DPS is low. We got walls and although wall-to-wall pulls can still be challenging now, new healers can manage it with a good tank.

Coils are not dungeons, so everything before the boss is regarded as raid trash which SE stopped doing. We had two dungeons with 8 people in, Castrum Meridianum and Praetorium and it made players impatient enough to speedrun while cutscenes were being watched, which wouldn't happen with only 4 players. With them having just been reduced to 4, I doubt the idea will be revisited. We are getting criterion dungeons where I think we can adjust the amount of players like we do with deep dungeons.

Parties split off to do separate objectives in alliance raids, but it would be interesting if that was in a dungeon. Non-combat mechanics could work, but I wonder if they would interfere with speedruns.

If anything, the players are a big part of the reason why dungeons became streamlined like they are. It just also coincidentally falls in line with being easier to make these streamlined dungeons too.

[Xanfer]

Yea things do change for a reason, ARR has these open ended pull paths, and besides adding a barrier to the boss, the way dungeons have been pulled haven't really changed.

I was referring to coils content in regards to ideas that could be implemented towards dungeon design to keep the "trash" part out of raids and move it to dungeons (even though my opinion is that the newer raids with just boss fight is boring but it's whatever)

And I will disagree with the prae dungeons, people spedran those because SE goofed up in putting multiple important cutscenes mid dungeon, which regardless of 4 or 8 would cause anyone to become impatient. Since they learned that, I believe the team can attempt another one that follows the no mid way cutscene mentality.

[Psytic]

Snipped
My final thoughts are, that I would rather see new and interesting ways of spicing up the way we run dungeons, even if every once in a while we get a stinker, rather than having a safe repeated method of doing the content.

This thread topic is in the section called Dungeons on this forum btw. Many agree the Dungeons are trending towards Final Fantasy 13 corridor style gaming territory and dont like it. Hell you can argue FF7 Remake has a bit of corridor'itis to.. Yoshi P in his interview on FF16 made it sound like the game would be more like that as well.. I dont get why they keep trying force this style of game down peoples throats. If I want a on rails action adventure full of set pieces I can go play Uncharted or something. Not saying this type of game is bad but when you think Final Fantasy you think traveling on an open world map etc and being able to explore.

They claimed they had some metrics that people only take the quickest path to finish each dungeon which is 100% true when they are on farm for tombstones but what about the initial experience of the first few runs. You used to need to throw some levers or oil some gears or go down different paths or floors in the ARR dungeons for example. Thats unique flavor that sticks with you. Slamming your head against an invisible wall as you hold the "W" key with set piece mobs flying in from off screen doesn't. Dungeons are almost as boring currently as putting a pile of mobs in a purple circle with no mechanics (Fates) and calling it leveling content.

The longer the game goes on the simpler it becomes. Dungeons are simpler, classes are more homogenized,. The game is objectively getting worse as they try to make it more for the main stream and this happens time and time again with MMOs.

[TheMightyMollusk]

This goes back to at least Snowcloak in ARR. Wish people would stop pretending it's new.