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Adventures - More useless instancing?
So the Adventures feature was announced recently and instantly after watching the flick I felt a little disappointed.
Adventures seemed like Rift's Instant Adventure, a feature I greatly despise because it takes leveling out of the world and so separates players to even more instances, rewards you for brainlessness, doesn't encourage memorizing your questing route to optimize future character leveling, introduces more level-scaled content, discourages exploration and finally the feature just makes no sense.
I didn't give up hope yet after just watching the rather cryptic flick, but later I read the article on the Adventures feature and I felt what I had feared was true.
Now personally I have been looking forward to Wildstar because it seemed like a game made for a raider. Current generation games like WoW and Rift have OK raiding but they fail at other parts and hence are unplayable (for me personally). However, I was also expecting Wildstar to go back a few steps towards older games to appeal more to older themepark players. Now it seems like Wildstar is in fact copying modern games instead of taking the good of slightly older games (or their older versions) and improving upon that.
Take for example scalable content, because Adventures will, afaik, scale according to your level. In my ideal MMO, there is no content that scales according to your level because it doesn't make sense: character progression is a core part of roleplaying games and sometimes content just isn't suited for the level of your character. Why have levels at all if content is scalable?
Take for a second thing instanced questing which is what Adventures appears to be: why do we need more options for leveling anyway? Why not just improve upon the questing system and add more small-group content there? Surely open world questing suits an MMORPG better. And to talk about options when it comes to leveling, we already have grinding (at least hopefully this will be a viable option), questing and normal dungeons. What normally constitutes the non-instanced world population are levelers in these types of themepark games, and what seems to be happening here is that the developers want to make the world empty of them, too. Why would they do that? Besides, giving players a button to randomly generate an instanced quest for them instead of them going around the world looking for quests just makes for stupid players.
Last I'd like to talk about rewards. Why oh why does everything have to reward you with XP and gear? If the Adventure system will be as simple as pushing a button to randomly generate a quest scenario, do you really think a player deserves a big reward for this? If you want to create an option for lazier levelers who cannot be bothered to go around the world looking for quests, at least don't give them additional rewards for using the lazy tool.
If the game's group questing experience really needs refining and the Adventures feature was introduced to fix this, then I think what should be done is improvement upon the existing quest system. There's no need for a completely new system, and games certainly don't need more instanced or scaled content.
Well, that's my two cents.
Comments
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
I like instancing but not when its overdone. Raids and dungeons are instanced for good reasons, but when partaking in activities other than those two I like to feel like I actually play a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game.
The Weekly Wizardry blog
In that case, allow me to clear up some of your misconceptions
Adventures don't scale to a player's level, but instead rallies them down to the level of the instance. Even though I was playing on a level 25 spellslinger, I was dropped to the same level of stats as at level 15. There will be veteran modes for some Adventures as well at level cap.
Yes, they're an alternative to questing, but that's deliberate. Not everyone enjoys questing and not everyone wants to do it all the time. Having variety is important. They're also difficult - don't expect to sleepwalk through them at all.
Nope, they're not scaleable - you get rallied down.
It's already in. Players can group up together, earn XP together and will need to help eachother for some of the tougher mobs and challenges. When grouped you also earn Renown, which can then be spent on cosmetics for your house, other items, or even founding a guild.
WildStar also uses open tagging so that you don't have to compete with other players for mobs. It makes the whole open world questing experience much more pleasant, as people tend to help each other out more naturally than normal.
It doesn't feel like a grind, but questing is definitely worth it. Normal dungeons are there too, as are veteran modes at cap.
It's the age old carrot and stick. The trick is to make the difficulty justify the reward. Generally though, WildStar offers much more challenging gameplay as a rule.
Currently playing: WildStar, Guild Wars 2, EVE Online, Vain Glory.
One man's junk is another man's treasure. Me and my wife play rift for the instant adventures because we like the short, tight stories we can do in it.
HOnestly its the thing that confuses me about Wildstar. YOu're obviously a raider, i hate raiding. So its interesting that this game is appealing to the opposite playstyle of the raider.
I actually like Rift's chronicles for the same reason I hate Dungeons and Raids.
Too many folk we encounter do Dungeons and Raids like jobs because games are designed that way. It's hard to find a group you can relax and enjoy a dungeon with, and don't even try a raid.
In smaller instances i can team with some buddies and actually play a role playing game. It's nice, relaxing. I'm shielded from the people i think ruined MMORPGs potential and birthed this bastard known as the MMO. Now its all crafting, raiding, sandboxing. Carrots and segration based on if you've run the and dungeon 1,000 times.
I know levels only scale downwards. Still, it makes no sense to me. In single player games scaling difficulty is understandable but in a multiplayer roleplaying game it makes no sense for a high level character to suddenly become a much less powerful version of themself. If such a feature is introduced, at the very least loot drops shouldn't scale up to the character's actual level because if they do, its just the devs being lazy, recycling low level content for high level players.If the problem is about high level people not being able to do stuff together with their low level friends, then either don't introduce an XP penalty for grouping up with a high level player or balance the XP gained from mobs in such a situation so that it corresponds to the speed the high level player can kill mobs at, so that XP/hour will be about the same as it would be without being boosted by a high level.
You mention that not everyone likes questing and this is an alternative. I rather see this as a lazy man's questing system: press a button, receive a quest to do, no searching around for questing areas to be done. So what the feature pre-max level actually is is instanced questing. This is why I don't think its a feature for people who dislike questing, but its a feature for people who want to put in only the minimum amount effort. Practically they want to be spoonfed the content. If I was a developer, I would rather spend the resources from developing this feature to implementing more non-instanced events and quests, to make the questing system better so that even the lazy people wouldn't feel a need for button-click-generated, instanced quests. In my opinion that would make for a better MMORPG; this sort of thing would be more suited for non-massive multiplayer games instead.
This goes sort of off-topic, but again speaking from a personal point of view I would like to say that I dislike open tagging. It discourages player interaction, and in my eyes player interaction is almost always good, be it positive or negative. It may not seem like a big thing to ask another player to invite you to get credit for a mob he's about to kill, but situations like this have spawned both, long friendships and hatreds (both of which are in my opinion important parts of an MMO).
That's exactly what guilds are for: finding the type of people you like to play with.Small-group content is all good for me, I just think it could be done way better than by implementing a button to press that teleports you to an instanced map where you get to do a pre-defined quest (practically an instanced quest). A feature like this rather sounds like something from a singleplayer (or maybe non-online multiplayer) game.
The Weekly Wizardry blog
I am not sure I like that sound of that, I like more open world stuff, that all sounds like over instancing. I am not a huge rail/quest hub grinding person, but I don't know that I want to grind instances instead. I enjoy some open world encounters/dungeons to go along with all the instancing. Is Wildstar basically a instanced game, without any of that? I can see having choices, but I think the adventure gets taken out of it when you don't have quality non-instanced encounters that are not static and as controlled as a instance (yes, other players add to that, which can always be a plus or minus, but it adds to not having the exact same encounter time after time).
Unfortunately too many games reward big guilds, and big guilds promise more raids, more dungeons more work all the time. Though, my solution has been to get on role playing servers and find small family guilds that are only a guild in name only.
A couple of points:
Adventures are intended as an alternative to dungeons, not questing. Given the choice between a dungeon with a predetermined outcome and one where I can influence the result, I know what I'd pick. There's nothing spoon-fed about it - they're still very challenging - but the choice makes them inherently replayable.
On the subject of open tagging, my experience in beta is exactly the opposite - they encourage people to play together, rather than drive against it.
Currently playing: WildStar, Guild Wars 2, EVE Online, Vain Glory.
Adventures are optional content. They dont detract from anything already in the game and simply provide you with something else to do. If you dont like them, great!, dont do them. Do dungeons instead. Or quest instead. Or Pvp instead. Or all of the above. Choice of content is always a good thing.
I don't really see this as adding any choice, because rather than being an alternative to questing, the system currently appears to simply introduce instanced group questing. More content is almost always good, sure, but do we really need more instanced content?
If the answer to my last question is yes, why not just add more story-driven dungeons that work with less than 5 people? Actually the Adventures system seems like a rather lazy addition from the developers' part in that it scales according to your level (at least downwards) and re-uses in-game zones. In practice this is recycling content, a sign of lazy developing, and maybe the actual reason this is being implemented actually is the fact this will be cheaper than to develop more dungeons. But is it really best for the players? Would you not rather see new content than recycled such?
Could you not just instead introduce a better open world group experience instead of separating the community even further? Its supposed to be a massively multiplayer online game after all, and something recent games have done wrong, I feel, is that they've put too high an emphasis on non-open content like the system we are discussing right now. We've already got instanced raids and dungeons (which both are in the game for a good reason), but does even the leveling experience need to happen in a closed environment, hidden behind a loading screen? Especially with content that recycles its skins and models and scenery from other parts of the game?
Edit: Also, me myself refraining from using the feature does not fix the issue. People often say the same about Dungeon Finder: if you don't like it, don't use it. What they might not understand is that the feature changes the way the game is played so much one cannot help being affected by it. Separating players into more and more instances certainly affects the whole playerbase, and adding more "queue" type features fundamentally changes the way a game is played and perceived.
The Weekly Wizardry blog
Your assumptions are entirely unfounded. The game world is already packed with things to do. There already are challenge areas and events and public bosses etc. Having a small segment of the population disappear from the game world for short periods of times to do something is very much unnoticeable. This can easily be observed in any game that has instanced pvp queues. Do all the people who go to pvp detract from the game world population in any serious way? No. Do the people leaving to go do an instanced dungeon detract from world population in any serious way? No. So why would adventures all of a sudden make a noticeable dent?
Queue-type systems' effects open world population are not really my main point here, but the truth is, these systems affect it in a major way. In games like WoW and Rift its very noticeable that levelers spend a grand part of their time in instanced environments, often doing the same dungeons repeatedly.
From that last sentence of mine I'll get to another point. Features like this make games feel more arcade-like and, in my opinion, cheap. The feature represents the lobby-type approach a lot of developers now have for MMORPGs, and frankly I disagree that this direction is a good one. That's my main gripe about this feature. Queuing up for random adventures does not sound like a feature from this genre we play, now does it. You're supposed to be out in the world exploring, finding adventures. When you introduce a button to press that generates you one instantly, sort of spoonfeeds it to you, it doesn't feel right. Part of the fun is sort of taken away, and the level immersion is greatly reduced.
The Weekly Wizardry blog
I think your a little offbase here.
Instant Adventures in Rift were open world and not instanced and they were nothing like Wildstar's Adventures.
Adventures are not quests they are essentially dungeons with a different focus. The focus of dungeons is on boss encounters. The focus of adventures is not on the boss encounters but story driven choices and killing trash mobs. The idea if Adventures appears to be a way for groups to grind mobs and offer an alternative to leveling. Will this work? I don't know. I would rather have simply got more dungeons. But I am willing to try it and see how it plays out.
Wildstar is set up to allow players to level through traditional quest directed gameplay, groupplay (in Dungeons and Adventures) and/or by PvP. Choices are a good thing. My question is will it be viable to level efficiently by doing only group play in Dungeons and Adventures? Given what we have seen form modern games my guess is no and that questing will be the fastest and most efficient manner of leveling. But that remains to be seen and keep in mind there is likely 5+ months left of testing for all these systems to be worked on and ironed out. I just hope they take their time and do not force an early release.
Again, I realize that practically Adventures are supposed to be story driven "dungeons" with a given objective, so in a sense they do indeed seem like nothing more but instanced group quests. They even recycle the open world zones instead of using their own dungeon maps! Now, I may be repeating myself here, but given that this is, as far as I can see, supposed to be the leveling content for people leveling in small groups, don't you think small group leveling could've been done better, in a way that would suit a game of this genre a little better?
Personally I am anticipating Wildstar precisely because I am looking for a game with good dungeons and raids but without some of the arcade lobby -type features recent games have introduced (such as queuing up for events from anywhere and then being teleported there). The Adventures feature however seems like a part of that type of game design at least I personally have come to greatly despise.
PS. About Rift's instant adventures, I always thought they were instanced because mobs' levels would change and you wouldn't run into players outside of your instant adventure group. Maybe they're phased, then, which is practically the same thing as instancing? What ever they are, the feature itself, a mechanism generating you a kill quest after kill quest by the press of a button, is lame.
The Weekly Wizardry blog
Well, this quickly degenerated into "I hate instances, instances turn MMOs into lobby games".
Thank you OP for such an original insight.
Well, unless Instant Adventures in Rift have been changed recently you are 100% completely wrong about everything about them.Instant Adventures are not instanced nor phased so you can see other people running while in an Instant Adventures and mobs do not scale to your level, you scale to theirs
Seems to be a case of seeing what you want to see so it fits your perspective.
Again, there's nothing wrong with instancing. Where it turns bad is when its overdone and then a queue system starts being introduced for everything, so as to make the world nothing but a lobby for minigames.
As for Rift's instant adventures, granted I guess its in fact the player's level that gets scaled and not the mobs'. Not that I would've done those too many a time because as you might have come to realize, I strongly disliked the feature personally.
The Weekly Wizardry blog
Again if the world was devoid of content one could complain about why the content that does exist was shoved into instances. But the world is thick with things to do, to the point where having a bit of that content off in an instance does not detract from the game. You can group up with folks and do non-instanced content till youre blue in the face or the reverse, stick to instances only, or mix it up. Choice is good.
This is about choice. I choose when i'm online to play with people I really know. I have led and been apart of many of guilds and just have never made the connections I make it real life. I don't like being forced to game with people I wouldn't even say hi too in real life.
I realy like Rifts approach. Instance adventures and public groups that youcan choose to join or not. I don't have to deal with guild schedules and politics.
1) Rift's instant adventures are not instanced. They teleport you around to places in the open world. You aren't getting a special instance. In fact you can run off from where it teleports you to and just continue on in the open world.
2) Adventures in Wildstar are alternatives to dungeons. They are less linear and are about choosing your own adventure in an instanced version of the open world zones. They are designed to let your group make real choices that impact the world, without impacting everyone elses world. Its themepark, but its a nice story element.
It isn't instanced questing, it is larger scale dungeons with multiple paths / options for completion.
The point is, said adventures could be implemented (in modified forms) into the outside world instead which would be much more immersive and that would, in my opinion, make for a much more fitting experience for a game of this genre. Currently the feature once again enforces my view of this game not being a able to correct certain mistakes I feel recent game design has made. When they said they would have 40-man raids and difficult content, I guess I expected to have the whole package: not just quality raid content but a better overall experience.
The existence of features like this prove to the contrary though. And even if you have Dungeon Finder, everything should not, in my opinion, be designed around the same concept of heavy instancing and 0 travel time - the concept of press a button, receive something to do. Now, its okay if you think this direction of MMO design is a good thing but the reason I created this thread was mainly that I personally view it as a bad direction of game design and I haven't been able to force myself to play certain new titles along with at least one older title, WoW, for quite some time quite precisely because of these types of systems and their major side-effects on how people view the games, the effects they have on the mentality players have towards dungeons and such and the way a game world feels.
I will take a point I made earlier: the same argument of more choice being good was often made when Dungeon Finder started becoming a popular feature, but what it has done is shaped the mentality of the average MMORPG player towards a direction where world immersion is no longer a crucial part of the genre and the open game world acts rather as a lobby to minigames rather than a place on the surface of which you find all sorts of dangerous places to have adventures with. In the end, the majority of people will pick the path of least resistance and thinking.
Now because there's no competition in the raiding game, I can live with Dungeon Finder being there personally, but it doesn't have to be a slippery slope to all the game's content working through queue systems.
The Weekly Wizardry blog
I beg to differ. Being in the open world most of the time is anti immersive. With dozens of toons running around in different phases of the epic town saving quest that you thoguht you were special and doing becomes a parody of adventure. It's why when I quest I prefer to do it in dead zones when i'm with my friends, it's the only way we can get into the world and be adventurers and not just the next toons in line.
If I had my way, more games would have more instances that could scale to any size group. If Wildstar is what they said they are, then they will allow me to play fun stories without ever having to set foot in a dungeon or raid.
Adventures DevSpeak. The MoBA style adventure looks really fun
This.
Also, aside from world bosses & ganking, there isn't anything fun outside instances.
The two statements I quoted above make you come off as a bit schizophrenic. People who play this type of game for raiding don't generally give a rats ass about "memorizing your questing route for future character leveling" ... or anything else to do with the progression TO the end game. Wildstar is clearly made for people with a normal mind set about that sort of thing...you're just wierd.
P.S. Wildstar is not my cup of tea either, btw...I just found it a little wierd how on the one hand you seem to be claiming to be a hard core raider and on the other hand you seem like a casual that spends all their time just leveling alts and ignoring end game.