Mega-dungeons. I want one. With tunnels.

[Dorateen]

Mega-dungeon populated with lots of levels, combat, traps and tricks and puzzles and such. With it's own internal storyline. Preferably built by an ancient race of dwarves.

 

Yes and yes.

 

Harumph!

[septembervirgin]

I can't say this topic hasn't come up in meetings. Why don't you guys turn this into a user poll and see if there is serious interest in a mega-dungeon. The things I would be curious about are...

 

1. How mega is your idea of a mega dungeon? 5 levels?10 levels? 20? More?

2. How important do you think story is in said mega dungeon?

3. Would you still support a mega dungeon if it diverted resources from the main plot/game? My guess is no, but I had to ask.

4. Is this something you would like to see as a high end stretch goal or set of stretch goals?

 

1. I would like to see a fifty level dungeon with most levels spanning several screens on maximum zoom-out. It should be awe inspiring and a legend in its own right. I want a dungeon I'll be able to brag about seeing on my deathbed. There should be secret levels. There should be exits throughout the land represented in the game. Expansions to this game should include expansions to the dungeon. There should be paid content to add extra levels. There should be spin-off games based entirely around the dungeon and not just on mobile. It should be increasingly devious, even with living levels, bottomless pits from which terrible things fly and slither, flooded levels, entire cities, and magical scrolls composed of hallways that wend in the shape of runes.

 

2. I think the story of the dungeon itself should slowly reveal itself as part of the story, should be a possible "home of the gods" and have the histories of hundreds of adventurers who perished therein. An undead being might populate a library with journals of perished adventurers, with manuscripts gleaned from the confessions of captured adventurers.

 

3. I would support a mega-dungeon if it diverted resources from the main game. I mean, it would be a stretch goal, right? I suspect it would be and I support it utterly.

 

4. I would love to see it as a set of stretch goals. I even made such a suggestion in a separate thread.

[Crooked Bee]

Sorry, but long dungeons that only focus on combat are very boring. IMO, dungeons should have few but powerful enemies, should focus more on traps, hidden treasure areas, puzzles to get the better loot, and creepy atmosphere.

 

Well, I don't think anyone wants this to be a "trash mob dungeon," really.

[Muzrub333]

I can't say this topic hasn't come up in meetings. Why don't you guys turn this into a user poll and see if there is serious interest in a mega-dungeon. The things I would be curious about are...

 

1. How mega is your idea of a mega dungeon? 5 levels?10 levels? 20? More?

2. How important do you think story is in said mega dungeon?

3. Would you still support a mega dungeon if it diverted resources from the main plot/game? My guess is no, but I had to ask.

4. Is this something you would like to see as a high end stretch goal or set of stretch goals?

 

1. Depends on how large the levels are I guess. More important to me than levels is variety. Get crazy.

 

2. There should be a reason to go, so there needs to be a story. I would like to see the story develop, with added complexity, the "deeper" we get into the dungeon, or series of dungeons.

 

3. Ugghh...not so cut and dry with me. Dungeons usually, (if well done), are my favorite part of any RPG. Overland encounters, and grand heroic story arcs actually bore me. But, it's not my game alone, so no...don't pull from the main content. Either have the funding to do a major dungeon the right way, or leave it out completely.

 

4. Stretch goals...toss a couple different levels of goals out there for us. That said, the first tier needs to be enough to make a good quality stand alone dungeon. That way we don't get a half assed dungeon. Just make higher stretch goal tiers add to the Ohhh Ahhh Arrghhh factor.

Edited September 21, 2012 by Muzrub333

[Klaleara]

I say a mega dungeon is a requirement.

[Gibbscape_Torment]

3. Would you still support a mega dungeon if it diverted resources from the main plot/game? My guess is no, but I had to ask.

 

HELL NO! A game can't be everything to everyone. If you want to make a story driven game, make one, if you want to make a dungeon crawler, make another one. Never mind the fact that these concepts tend to appeal to different people, if you try to do both simultaneously, likely neither one will come out terribly well.

 

BG1 did both simultaneously.... and really really well.

 

And there is a such thing as story-driven dungeons, you know. The concepts are neither mutually exclusive, nor do they have a history of polarizing the fanbase.

 

It really didn't. It had some of the most shallow character interaction and little narrative choice within 90's and early 2000's RPGs. BG2 was an exponential improvement in this regard, but it lost some of the exploration in BG1. But if given the choice, i would choose in-depth character and narrative choices 10x over more exploration. There's a reason i could never get into the Elder Scrolls series.

[Monte Carlo]

I'm pleased that so many people agree. I also think Stun was on the money when he said...

 

When I judge a game, I remember the memorable moments in it, and it doesn't make a lick of difference if those moments came from the main story, or if they came from that optional dungeon.

 

There are some people who find them irksome, but even some of them would dip their toe in. I'd make maybe one level of the mega-dungeon plot relevant. The rest would be optional, for example by clearing the first level and rescuing someone you drive the plot forward. Whether you delve deeper than that is up to you, but at least part of the dungeon gets used.

 

Let's face it, a greater proportion of supporters want dungeons more than romances. You could have a romantic dungeon, but that's all a bit Fifty Shades of Grey right now. xD

[Crooked Bee]

Romantic dungeon is a good idea, but only if your loved one is the end boss encounter.

[ogrezilla]

I fully support a mega dungeon.

[drithius]

Give us a dungeon comparable to the depth (in scope and story) of Durlag's Tower! All these years later, and BG: Tales of the Sword Coast still sparks so many fond and poignant memories; even moreso than most of the base game.

Edited September 21, 2012 by drithius

[Cahir]

Love the idea of one massive, intriguing dungeon like the Durlag's Tower from BG1. From all IE games loved that one the most.

 

But what I really want to see in PE is a sinister and twisted location like famous Castle Drachenfels from pen-and-paper Warhammer 1ed. module.

 

What was the most exciting of it?

 

1. One nasty, enourmously powerful and diabological adversary.

The one that PE players should remember a long time after they finish their games. This final enemy could have i.e some political (mostly by intimidating way) connections, be really really old and have vast knowledge of various things, the nature of souls for sure. The option to pact with this entity instead of killing it would be a thrilling twist in main character adventures. This could be beneficiary for players if devs appreciate developing tiers for evil characters.

2. A twisted, insanely dangerous and tricky dugeon/castle with deadly traps and horrors.

I'll appreciate presence of traps in PE a lot, especially unusual and not obvious ones. I really love mind-controlling and maddening ones, more narrative in nature than instant. The ones that lure the character into something dark and evil. Oh I want this, sooo much.

3. A well placed and motivated enemies, not just mindless hordes that main enemy constantly throwing at You by waves. Maybe some tormented souls trapped forever in this haunted dungeon, seeking a way out or just so insane, they only wish to rip the poor mortals apart. Maybe not necessarily hostile inhabitants with minds twisted from sheer presence of this great evil, but willing to share some important lore with main character when carefully approached.

 

So, yeah, it should be a great story around this dungeon, not just enemies, corridors and dozens of similar traps. It should be twisted, intriguing and by most unexpected. It should have many dramatic moments and memorable NPC's.

 

If devs could create such a location, I'm on for it!

[PsychoBlonde]

I will say that the isometric perspective doesn't lend itself all that well to traditional Eye of the Beholder-style dungeons. The narrow corridors in BG were absolutely dreadful and I am SO glad they improved on that for BG2.

 

That being said, this does NOT mean they can't have a huge, sprawling, complex, puzzle-filled, difficult-to-navigate area to explore. I think this is a great idea. Just don't try to squeeze it all into one map.

[Sordel]

I think that this is a great idea. Some thoughts:

 

a) This should be a place where people who want a high mandatory difficult can prove themselves: hardest area of the game, maybe only accessible on the highest difficulty setting, so that people who want that elitist experience can push themselves.

 

b) It has to be long enough for a real sense of oppressive anxiety to set in, where stockpiled potions and scrolls are always under threat of running out, where you can't just change your mind and teleport or quit.

 

c) It needs to be loooong, but I'd suggest that it be playable in, at most, twelve hours: that means that people can plan it for a weekend or maybe one epic play session.

 

d) It should be completely optional, and available fairly early in the game for people who want to run the risk.

 

e) It should contain three or four items that are the best in the game: better than the MQ rewards.

 

f) Yes, divert resources to make it. This is just the sort of thing that drags in players who wouldn't normally play the game, so it's all part of the marketing really.

 

For the record, I don't see any way that I would run this dungeon myself (I'm just not a hardcore gamer) but this should be the thing in the game for the type of people who run cutting-edge raids in WoW: loads of bragging rights, where the rest of us can kid ourselves "hey, that's something I'd really like to try some day". It's something that I would see only about 5% of players ever seeing the end of (except, of course, on YouTube!)

 

By the way, I'm not sure that you're talked about DLC and this shouldn't be that, but if the game is successful a second mega-dungeon could make for very good piece of DLC ... if the first has been as welcome as most people in this thread seem to think.

[Monte Carlo]

Sordel I love where you are coming from, I really do, and would buy such a dungeon (let us say, sotto voce, Module) in the blink of an eye. But in the game proper I think, to justify the time and assets, it would need to be a part of the game that most would (at least) have a try at.

[Sordel]

Sordel I love where you are coming from, I really do, and would buy such a dungeon (let us say, sotto voce, Module) in the blink of an eye. But in the game proper I think, to justify the time and assets, it would need to be a part of the game that most would (at least) have a try at.

 

I think that one of the many aspects of "old skool" gaming that is slowly coming back is the idea that players don't need to see every part of the game. Developers lost confidence, feeling that everything coded had to be attainable by every player or it was a waste of their. But that just worked against games that were thirty, forty, two hundred hours ... until we end up with console FPS games that have a 4-6 hour single-player campaign. In most RPGs, you're still only hitting level 2 or 3 in that time.

 

One thing that the Elder Scrolls games have proved pretty conclusively is that there is a market for games where it is pretty much impossible to do everything. (And I speak as someone who sunk hundreds of hours into Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim.) Now, obviously PE can't do everything those games did, but fortunately the top-down system means that they don't face anywhere near the same production expectations in terms of graphics & speech. The trade-off is that people are going to be able to expect depth of game mechanics and story.

 

So: I do think that there is an argument for diverting development resources on something that an FPS-style RPG can never deliver (just because of the expense of its graphical assets).

[septembervirgin]

While such a dungeon should not formally be the centerpiece of the game, in actuality it's the true test of a CRPG designer's ability. Can they construct an entertaining and challenging dungeon and for how long. The dungeon should be enrapturing, fifty levels deep or more. You could pay an ivy league RPG fan anywhere from a thousand to two thousand dollars to sketch out a fifty level dungeon with hundreds of rooms per level, insisting that notes be pertinent to numbers in the rooms to potential use for each room. Populate the entire thing. Don't leave rooms barren. Make it look full. Pester these ivy league role-playing game clubs for ideas. Ask at MIT too, they're often better than ivy league, especially with systems.

 

The concept of chthonic deities should not be unfamiliar to you. Sacrifices being burnt then buried or just buried. A massive subterranean structure could've once been conceived as home to the deities of the world. Before then, it might have been a shopping mall, but you know the walking dead and what not. Always happens.

 

Oh. No, I'm not saying fifty levels populated entirely by walking dead. That's a silly notion. Anything less than thirty different types of monster, at least a fifth of which cannot be found above ground, would be a ghastly lack of variety! Try for one hundred types of monster plus human opponents.

[KenThomas]

I don't know why we've got multiple threads on this topic. A merge would be nice.

 

IMO a mega dungeon would be sweet if it's crafted with inspiration and the different parts of it all have a purpose. Extra long hallways that are there just to take time to walk through are silly. Generally in any dungeon I think part of good design is;

 

-easy to find ways to get down, but harder to find ways to get up. If you are able to drop through the floor somewhere, guards on the floor below should be mostly looking the wrong way as you've gotten behind them. That should last until you open a door that's unguarded on the side you opened it because then you've gotten to the spot in the level that's past where you dropped in.

 

-Traps should be present and should work both ways. You should be able to use traps against the inhabitants if you've noticed them before tripping them. Good AI design would have them knowing and avoiding the location of their own traps, but you could use that to force them to eat an AOE spell since they'd be unwilling to cross that section of floor to escape.

 

-The dungeon should have some kind of purpose in the game world. Jail is an overused idea, I'd like to see something more like a manufacturing centre that perhaps is making use of lava vents for an essentially infinite supply of heat. Perhaps a stronghold of one of the major factions in the game including several ranking members of that faction. If it ends up being a monster's lair, I'd like to see the rooms used for something even if its only storing captives for breeding purposes. Endless tunnels of pointless rock would be nice to avoid.

 

-Some kind of fast transit inside the dungeon itself once you've obtained the proper keys or opened the proper doors. It's unrealistic to expect that in order to get to the commander's headquarters of whatever this place is an underling is going to jog for an hour around the most circuitous route possible of every level. There should be a short way guarded by the toughest enemies and toughest traps. Desire to clear out the entire place should come from a desire to ruin its functionality, ie killing craftsmen, burning equipment etc. otherwise, you run into problems later in the game because that centre was restaffed and is still doing whatever its purpose is.

 

-Quest items that get picked up there and are able to be used outside of that setting. IE plans for a weapon prototype that you could take back to your faction and manufacture for your side's use. Eggs of the foul creature that can be tamed and bred by your faction eventually into soldiers or mounts or something. Information on where other resources might be located. The names of people who are working as spies. The kinds of things that people would store in a location assumed to be secure. Some of them you should have to interrupt an NPC before he can dispose of them.

[TCJ]

I'm not a fan of mega dungeons. Watcher's Keep and Durlag's Tower were actually two of my least favorite parts of the BG series. To me, they were tediously long and became boring and just seemed like XP/treasure crawls. I completed them... I completed them every time I played through because I'm one of those players who feels compelled to do EVERYTHING a game offers, and I can't say I HATED them, but it would have been nice to see that fancy equipment and the tough fights spread out a bit more rather than be stacked all in one place.

[Ieo]

I can't say this topic hasn't come up in meetings. Why don't you guys turn this into a user poll and see if there is serious interest in a mega-dungeon. The things I would be curious about are...

 

1. How mega is your idea of a mega dungeon? 5 levels?10 levels? 20? More?

2. How important do you think story is in said mega dungeon?

3. Would you still support a mega dungeon if it diverted resources from the main plot/game? My guess is no, but I had to ask.

4. Is this something you would like to see as a high end stretch goal or set of stretch goals?

 

I think this kinda works better as a survey than a poll, personally...

 

1. I dunno, how big was Durlag's Tower?

 

2. For me, the most important thing. I'm not a dungeon-trolling kinda person. The reason why DT was miles ahead of any other dungeon experience I can think of (Watcher's Keep, and stuff like DA:O, and uh IWD I guess) is because the contained dungeon implementation was deeply rooted in layered narrative: Why did it matter to go in? Why are there so many traps and mazes and riddles and things to fight? WK had a basic reason for those items but lacked any depth. Durlag's Tower's story required an attention span and memory greater than a hyperactive squirrel; it added punch to the narrative by punctuating such narrative junctures with dangerous combat or puzzles that tested historical knowledge and/or made contextual sense. Even PS:T had something like a maze-dungeon, though the Modron cube combat was far too formulaic compared to DT. Another reason why DT is dear to me and is, as far as I'm concerned, a necessary diversion in BG1 is because its narrative parallels the main storyline; I'm sure not everyone feels this way, but the slowly divulged, fragmented storytelling of DT painted a picture of the dungeon that made its history and former residents meaningful in such a way that I went back a couple times later hoping that the sad ghosts were freed. And then returning to Candlekeep in BG1 and remembering DT's story? Yeah...

 

3. Um, that'd be a negative.

 

4. I'm not interested in a pure dungeon romp with completely arbitrary and meaningless hack-n-slash (I kind of get enough of that in MMO play), also because I'm not sure that type of content fits with the supposed depth planned for PE; nor is a weak "reason" like that in WK any better because it's entry-exit-only while DT's narrative design covered the entire dungeon. If a large dungeon with strong storyline could be made to enhance the main content but not be required, the way DT is for me, I think that'd be great for a stretch.

[Minttunator]

I can't say this topic hasn't come up in meetings. Why don't you guys turn this into a user poll and see if there is serious interest in a mega-dungeon. The things I would be curious about are...

 

1. How mega is your idea of a mega dungeon? 5 levels?10 levels? 20? More?

2. How important do you think story is in said mega dungeon?

3. Would you still support a mega dungeon if it diverted resources from the main plot/game? My guess is no, but I had to ask.

4. Is this something you would like to see as a high end stretch goal or set of stretch goals?

 

1. I'd say anything that takes more than 10 hours to complete at a normal pace.

2. The players would need some incentive to go into said dungeon. Other than that, it would be incredibly brilliant if the dungeon could have its own ecosystem (I believe one of the prior posters already suggested this) à la Ultima Underworld - i.e. if the denizens lived their own lives and the dungeon actually changed in time. A world within a world, if you will. I realize this is unrealistic, of course.

3. Of course not. However, I believe you guys will end up making so much money off the Kickstarter, you can probably afford to divert some resources to developing a bad-ass dungeon.

4. Stretch goal, sure. Anything to squeeze more money out of us is fair game.

Edited September 23, 2012 by Minttunator

[Gurkog]

There should be a dragon in the first room and by the end of the crawl it will like a sickly duckling in comparison to the final encounter. No... there should be a herd of dragons in the first room! Perhaps ones of differing lineage and temperment having a discussion on where to place furnishings in their new abode. yes... I can see it now. Persuade one group of them that their choice of drapes over the air shaft is excellent and egg them into a confrontation. Perhaps if you aid said drape lovers you can convince them to guard the entrance from other adventurers in return from retrieving sick loot from below!

 

EDIT:

 

1. I would say... 20 levels more or less depending on the size and number of puzzles/traps/encounters.

2. Perhaps some historical books or ancient texts/stories could give clues to the location of the dungeon and what lies at the bottom (really vague). There could be creatures inside with tasks for you and they can shed some light on the purpose of their level and perhaps the whole shebang.

3. I would prefer it to have minimal impact on the rest of the game. If it is a no-go there could perhaps be a few ultra-hard puzzle/encounter single level crypts/dungeons/caves scattered around the world. In an ideal world you could do it all!

4. Definitely a stretch goal. Lots of people love a good dungeon crawl and those turned off by the less combat oriented nature of the main game might kick in for an adrenaline fix.

Edited September 23, 2012 by Gurkog

[Volourn]

"a) This should be a place where people who want a high mandatory difficult can prove themselves: hardest area of the game, maybe only accessible on the highest difficulty setting, so that people who want that elitist experience can push themselves."

 

You have good dieas except this one.

 

Content like this should never be locked down based on 'difficulty level'. Everyone should be able to play it without having to fight triple hit point enemies. If I want to play on normal or hardcore level I should be able to enjoy alla reas and not worry about 'missing out' because I don't play on SUPER DUPER MEGA DEATH DIFFICULTY LEVEL. L0LZ

[septembervirgin]

Maybe the dungeon should be a truly colossal living thing that somehow petrified and was used as a temple to the gods who petrified it. As time progressed, a vast religious complex formed around its structure. Maybe it was a huge truffle that had holes in it. Who knows.

[Monte Carlo]

* BUMP *

 

Look what happened --- 15 levels later!

[Ieo]

Give me Durlag's Tower x4 and I'll be quite the happy camper.