Mordiceius' Gaming Blog Flying Away on a Wing and a Prayer

Massively Multiplayer Online Dungeon Crawler

Tobold, Gevlon, Spinks have all been talking about challenge lately. Tobold brought up a New York Times article that talked about the difference between hardcore and casual marathon runners. Gevlon finally understood that most hardcore do not really care about a challenge but just want to flaunt their e-peen but he disagrees with content nerfing because he is in the minority that actually play games for the challenge. Spinks on the other hand just analyzes how the free access to information has made the hardcore consider only twitch challenges as valuable challenges as any information on strategies, secret locations or quests can be readily found online.

Playing Torchlight has got me thinking about the random nature of the game. It also makes me wonder what the feasibility would be of random dungeons within MMORPGs. I wonder what something like Diablo or Torchlight would be on a mass scale.

The overworld would remain static but if all dungeons and dungeon loot were randomized, it would go far to keep the game interesting. You could still have some static dungeons. Extreme lore dungeons could remain static, but there are a lot of dungeons that do not have extreme ties to lore and could just be randomized instead.

In WoW, for instance, places like Drak'tharon keep could remain static but places like Utgarde Pinnacle or Halls of Stone could be randomized. You could also have generic dungeons in areas that were randomized. There could be a 5man random dungeon in Grizzly Hills where you fight a furbolg tribe. Every time you went in, the dungeon map would be different.

One of the reasons I always liked Violet Hold (aside from it being just one room and located within a city) was how the first two bosses could be any of six. I just wonder what the feasibility of this would be on a wider scale.

I do not know about you all, but I know I would play a massively multiplayer online dungeon crawler.