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General: Community Spotlight: Why are Instances Bad?
MikeB
Community ManagerAdministrator RarePosts: 6,555
This week’s Community Spotlight focuses on the thread “Why Instances bad?” started by SEANMCAD. A fairly simple premise to an often controversial topic, SEANMCAD simply wonders why many gamers consider instancing a bad design choice:
“Why? I do not undertand. I am not supporting them becuase I dont understand what the issue is at this time.”
Comments
I have no problem with instances, especially if it helps create a much better game then the mmo's we have now and maybe eventually we can create better and better games with less instances wich would be nice, but right now I'm way more interested in a better game rather then worrying about whether its instanced or not... maybe I should post this in the threat but oh well :P
I have no issue with instances for dungeons, raids and pvp mini games (as long as they don't take from the game world).
What i do have an issue with is entire instanced zones and quest hubs.
Oh and zoning out a city so i see a god damn loading screen everytime i enter a room is pathetic.
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
I believe players are misplacing their dislikes. They see instances with precooked activities and its admittedly bad so they hate it. They're tired of such babysitted content.
But that's not the real problem with new MMOs. Quests too give players precooked activities, pre-cooked exploration, pre-cooked stories, pre-cooked rewards.
For this reason even instances can be good if they're entirely customizable by players. A MMO can EASILY give players TOOLS for them to create their own scripts, stories, combat situations inside instances. They would work! There can even be a "dungeon master" that controls in realtime players and creates content on the fly.
So it's not really important the presence of instances, what matters is that players are allowed to create content in them.
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Why are they bad?
The same reason mmorpg shoudn't have star craft 2 articles on here.
instances take away the feeling of massive, which is a pre-req for this genre of game.
in the same way the industry gets dumbed down by websites putting things that don't belong on said genre, the games get dumbed down by over instancing in a game that has no business having them.
PoopyStuff: Well then you also have to agree that quests too kill the genre, by providing a linear progression thru levels and maps. You can't deny that in the average MMO maps are scaled according to your level, and the NPC's guide from A to B.
They take away the need to explore, to gain wealth, to craft equipment, to FIND lore, even to socialize.
You can't deny that recent MMO's are more of SOLO experiences that last nomore than a month and when a player touches level-cap, they change game.
If you blame instances vs massivity, you MUST blame quests too.
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Because they're lazy. Every benefit gotten from instances could be put into a real live world with a little better game design. But its the easy way out. It gets rid of the massive feeling and makes it feel more of a series of arcade like mini games than a virtual world.
I think it all depends on the game and its related mechanics as to whether instancing is good or bad. I think, for a game like EvE, there is really no place for instances because the other game mechanics do not supprot it. I mean, what good would a locator agent be if a player is hidding in an instance? For games like WoW, it makes sense. There is a linear storyline you are trying to progress and, without instances, you would be stuck camping a boss for a quest. Additionally, it prevents you from brining a whole guild for an encounter that was designed for 5 players.
What I have trouble supporting is the instancing of, what should be, social hubs like major cities. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me and seems like a lazy way to spread the server load around or circumvent possible poor design choices.
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers.
Do something wrong, no one forgets"
-from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
But DAoC had a linear quest for Epic Armor and no instances, it worked fine. For raids, you just have to make the boss scale to the people brought to the encounter, and for quest boss mobs, you have to make enough other content where that linear quest isn't all there is to do in the game, so it doesn't end up camping.
It is true though, that for those quest mobs, you could bring more people than intended for the encounter, it didn't occur to me because for some reason people didn't do it in DAoC.
But the majority of this is harder than just slapping it in an instance, so its not done anymore, because devs want the quick and easy cash grab route.
Take the case of Champions Online. Most people who haven't played it say every thing in the game is instanced. But actually the outdoor zones are just as large as those in City of Heroes. The instancing is the multiple copies of each of those zones, that hold 100 folks each. (if that many people were playing the game, but that's another story)
People who have played the game don't gripe about the instanced zones, because actually they are fine / convenient in a lot of cases (is your quest a long time from resetting? change instance). So ex-CoH players (like me), our real complaint about CO is not enough instanced indoor missions. CoX made it easy to jump on a team and roll through a bunch of what were essentially superhero-ified dungeons. In Champions there are too many outdoor missions, and players unanimously want more of the indoor ones like in CoH
At the same time, the audience for these games has grown exponentially and I can understand the implementation of instances as a sort of quality control mechanism. I think you touch on a point though, instances are quick and easy. I mean, as soon as you decide to implement an area as an instance, you have changed what could be a large number of variables into a managable number of constants. At the same time, people demand content updates on a regular basis and instances certainly make that more doable I think. So, in the end, people get what they ask for whether they realize it or not :P
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers.
Do something wrong, no one forgets"
-from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
Uh, no. The effort and work required to make a good party instance work in open world would be an absolute logistical nightmare. Balancing, griefing from outside groups, respawning issues... I'd go so far as to say that it's simply not even feasible. Nevermind trying to run things like battlefields. Certainly not without an unrealistic amount of computational power being consumed, that's for sure.
It can be argued that instances destract from immersion, and that too many games use them as a crutch, but they also represent an opportunity to improve immersion, by allowing for more controlled story-telling and event triggering.
A Modest Proposal for MMORPGs:
That the means of progression would not be mutually exclusive from the means of enjoyment.
They simply take the World feel out of some mmos for me, i don't hate instances but their use should be limited. GW for example is instances everywhere! that game had absolutely no "massive" feeling in it for me. But consider say WoW, the territories aren't instances, only repeatable things such as dungeons and battlegrounds are. That didn't take away from the massive world feeling
I've never been able to understand either why instancing is bad, take DDO for example, the game is built around private instances yet we have seen the title make a dramatic turn-around in player numbers, it's part of the game and has been accepted by the player base.
Instances in general are there to provide us the players with goals that are to be achieved by us personally or by an invited grp over a short space of time, the experience is usually linear and is designed to be entertaining yet challenging and to offer the player something that is very different to the content in the open areas of an MMO.
I still have fond memories about EQ1 and going into Unrest for the first time and seeing all the grps lined up along the walls and seeing the trains hurtle past with some unfortunate trying to outrun the ghouls, yet I also remember the frustration of wasting hrs of my time waiting for a spot to open up so that I could start to play within that dungeon, even when I came with a grp there where no camps available and we had to wait for a spot to open, invaribly we would move to another zone.
I certainly enjoyed the feeling of danger you get when you have so many ppl together in a dungeon, but the downside is the content has already been done and you either wait for respawns which could take hours or you move on, which means you either miss out on that dungeon as you out lvl it or you keep wasting your time coming back to check to see if you can get a spot, all of this takes away from what your supposed to be paying for, entertainment.
So instancing came in and hallelujah we all got to experince the entire game at our discretion, no more waiting in queue's for camps to open up, no more having to worry if the bosses have been killed, no more having to worry about another grps ineptitude in pulling, we got to do the things we wanted at our own pace and the way we wanted them.
Now if you want to go back in time and end up on old EQ1 raids of 100 plus ppl and sit in one room for 11hrs then by all means you go ahead and do that, but I like the way instancing works, and I'd be loathe to go back to the frustrations of 10 yrs ago.
Now whats wrong with that?
I think the instances themselves are fine. It's when they have only one special item per each run that everyone in the Fellowship is trying to get. After 10 plus runs on the Grand Stairs in The Mines of Moria, I gave up on trying to get exclusive armor pieces. If it took the same number of runs to get the full suit, I could be looking at over 60 runs through the different instances for I finally get the whole suit! That gets redundant and boring to me.
If they had a random aspect to them then I doubt they would be as hated. If you never know what your getting yourself and your group into it would add to the expierence. I like instance content because I usually play casual and like the easy to get to content.
Like in WAR ever instance is the same, from the first time you enter. It becomes a grind of the same content overe and over, so you lose subs do to MMO-ADD.
Collector of old minis.
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Age of Conan has plenty of instances.
Age of Conan is a lot of fun.
So, instances do not hamper my fun.
"I don't give a sh*t what other people say. I play what I like and I'll pay to do it too!" - SerialMMOist
The only reason I dont play Age of Conan is for the instanced zones, it totaly sabotaged the game when we back in the day had 15-20 versions of each zones. It takes away so mush of the game when you have to zone to get to group members. Enemies zoned out to get away. The game world felt small and cramped and empty as everyone was spread out....
WoW Instances is the max you should ever do in an MMO. They have found a balance but many games like champions online AOC, DDO have failed horribly and games like TOR will probalby follow them.
EVE is also instanced each solarsystem is a diffrent zone BUT you dont get 80 diffrent versions of Jita just because its crowded, doing that in EVE would destroy the game.
Instancasing dungeons and small group content is fine making hole zones like say make 50 Barrends on the same server in WoW would have been a bad thing.
Developers are lazy and demands on better grafics are making them instances games more and more. Sadly we are left with games that feel alot more like a single player game then an MMO the hole feel of the genre is dying a slow death... Back in the day games had a comunity, because we all had to share the space and get along. After cross server BGs and heavy instancing that comunity is almost gone.... EvE is one of the last games left where player interaction still mathers...
For me instances are an excellent way to set parameters and boundaries, without which a certain style of gameplay may fail completely. It depends on the situation. For example, WOWs open zones work well and create an excellent ‘massive’ feel. However, I feel the size of the instanced zones in AOC also achieves this on the PVE servers.
Where I think instances are a key tool for enhancing gameplay is in PVP. I have never experienced open-world PVP play-out in a balanced and fulfilling manner. One side always has one of the following advantages – significantly greater numbers, significantly higher skill, significantly better equipment – regardless of whether the PVP is one-on-one or two groups engaging. I hear EVE achieves a degree of balance in PVP, but at the expense of the player’s real life.
For me instances epitomise the game concept. Take soccer/football. You wouldn’t go a play soccer on a pitch with no boundaries, with no limits on number of players and with no rules in general – the game would become ridiculous. Many MMO players seem to think that there game should be as realistic as possible, but I’m certain that if such a game was made most gamers wouldn’t enjoy it all that much. And tbh, while we’re still viewing our ‘worlds’ on screens approximately the size of a sheet of A3, there will always be a limit to the degree of immersion available that extends far past instances and the like.
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Instanced dungeons and some instanced quests are perfectly fine. What I don't like is my game world sliced up into instanced zones that break immersion everywhere I go. Age of Conan was the worst offender on this for me, and I left before paying my first month's subscription. How is anyone supposed to feel like they are in a virtual world when they are having to figure out what zone they are in to hook up with friends, or when they are constantly looking at some kind of loading screen.
Everyone says AoC was a huge world, and that may be true, but it felt tiny and disjointed to me. Even though I am a huge fan of Guild Wars, this was the main reason I ultimately left that game back in the day too, although it didn't feel as small and jacked up to me as AoC did.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Instancing is a necessary evil in the world of MMO's. You need it for certain quests and boss encounters to avoid camping and griefing. Problem is, to satisfy technical problems, many of the newer MMO's over do it.
Games who only have the central hub uninstanced, like Guild Wars, are not really MMO's in my book. They just take a brief swipe at the massive part and then provide a diablo like experience.
Some games really over do the instancing, like AoC. One of my favorite worlds and I just can't stomach the game because of the over use of instancing. Star Trek is another game that ruins the play with far too much instancing. Games like these just seem to lose the massive part, you feel like you are playing an rpg instead most of the time.
It is a delicate balance, what to instance and what not to. The best line to use is the less is better approach.
Of course that is strictly my opinion. I can see on this thread that others don't mind it. Each to his own.
I don't think that it's fair to say that MMO's that make second copies of public zones to deal with overload qualify them as instancing. The instancing that the OP is bringing up is the forced instancing that MMO s have been employing more and more to keep group activities private.
I think that it is smart for games to create a second copy of public zones when they fill too much. I think even EQ did that. But I would argue that newer games require less pop before creating that second instance, but isn;t that because devs are afraid that subs will complain if they had to spend too much time camping boss mobs? AoC in its more popular days had players fighting over boss kills despite the additional copies of the zones. Yet on the other hand, AoC also has some bosses that auto-spawned if you had the quest active, which I thought was a clever way to avoid population issues.
The instancing in STO is ridiculous, however. There is absolutely no real content in the game that involves a persistent, public area. The game feels more like a lobby (to mini-games or group missions) than a virual world.
Instancing is needed to make games easier for today's casual gamers. Without instancing, zones would have to have faster respawn rates, and if your group wipes, you would have to re-fight your way through the dungeon again to get to your goal. Too hard/frustrating for today's gamers, no? Personally, I would prefer the hard route, as making a successful dungeon crawl becomes more satisfying.
I think that AOC overall does an excellent job of mixing private instances and public zones. I think they got some pressure from the community to move to more private instancing -- I remember when they changed the Main System to a private instance because of too many ppl complaining about others boss camping there.