I dislike instancing quite a bit. Not only does it cause issues with socialization but it makes devs balance entire dungeons around a full group. Part of the fun in EQ was I could walk in a dungeon and solo near the entrance. I could find a friend and we could duo some of the easier parts, then maybe 2 more friends show up and we go and do the hard parts. A single dungeon could allow me to play with anywhere from solo to a full group.
I also really dislike the trend of dungeon instances not having any respawns.
Build more content, spread out where the bosses spawn and what has the loot in general to stop some of the camping issues and you have yourself a game that doesn't need instances. Heck you can even put multiple copies of the same dungeon in the game if you want and just change the skins some. Have Blackburrow and then another full copy of the zone but call that one a different name and make the gnolls look slightly different. No reason to create an infinite number of copies and have them separate from the rest of the game.
I agree. As for copies of dungeons, you could build modular sections and easily change them up. You could also easily have different skins for the look of the walls, some moss covered or brown stone or marbled. And you could have a variety of optional add-ons for each main room, such as pillars, arches, or a variety of decor. Mix and match quickly, and build a huge world full of content. Lore can account for a lot of similarity too. Look at Skyrim, lots of this was done there, and it actually made the game feel more immersive.
As far as the social aspects, open worlds can't be beat. Players make friends, guilds gain new members, and guilds make alliances because players are in the same world together. The drawbacks of griefers (in any form, including loot stealers) can become a positive if the game has social meaning and becoming an outcast of some sort hurts a player.
The thing that always got me about instances was the dumb respawn of trash mobs. You already cleared them and the bosses never respawn, so what is the point except to irritate your fanbase?
Have to disagree that Lotro is heavily instanced, more than 90% of the game is not.
The major problem is theme park style MMOs that force all 5000 new folks in the starting area to all be at the same point at the same time.
Kill 5 trolls - 5000 Avatars just statnding around waitting for a turn at the trolls or Dungon or what ever.
Older MMOs - RPGs had open worlds and smaller populations, people would wonder off and do their own thing because the games rewarded that, now we are all forced to follow the same paths.
Logiclly how many people would be on the same personal quest as you? NONE!
Get rid of these stupid personal quests and then we could have less instances. SWtoR is a prime example of story over actual MMORPG game play, it might as well have been a solo game with group play optional for PvP and Dungons.
Bring back gold as the primary reason for adventuring.. eliminate this gear and / or personal story grind fest crud we have now.
Make dungons hard so it takes a group of players and some form of team work, not this die and respawn crud we have now!
Make crafting and harvesting essential not some after thought like the crud we have now!
STOP QUESTING US TO DEATH, let players strike out into the unknown and find tons of good content with out having to search out joe-shmooo with a giant question mark on his head, and have him hold our hands, as we ping pong back and forth from one meaningless task to another, stopping to hand over three pelican beaks or whatever dumb quest item, ever 10 minutes, as we complete his 50 part quest line to get the blade of choppy chop chop so we can keep up with the jones'es!
Do these thing and social grouping will start again.
One way you can do instanced dungeons is the anarchy and daoc route.
The dungeon is part of the world, you can just enter it and meet other people. When too many people are in the dungeon - like 50+, it spawns a second instance.
As one system among many in the game it is fine. I think it is a problem when all of endgame character progression is instance based. It is like when you reach max level all of a sudden the game becomes a multiplayer game lobby, and ends up feeling more like a console single player game multiplayer mode than a real MMO.
Instances make sense when you want to tell a story or when you want to tightly control the environment. However I think they are overused.
Games need more non-instanced content at max level that scale from small to large groups. The open world where people dynamically come together and take on challenges feels like what an MMORPG should be, not just a lobby for small group content.
The major problem is theme park style MMOs that force all 5000 new folks in the starting area to all be at the same point at the same time.
(snip)
That's an excellent point. The pre-designed direction doesn't allow players any freedom to get away from the crowd, and instanced dungeons are a necessity.
Give me a Sandbox world any day, and let players choose their path and where they head out to, and what they want to pursue.
Ahh the good ole' days... or was it the bad ole' days?
My first MMORPG was Asheron's Call, WAAAAYYY before instancing was introduced as a mainstay to may MMO's. And I painfully remember actually WAITING IN LINE to get the cool object of that open world dungeon. I actually think that is the first place I heard about Ninja Looting was from someone who didn't want to wait their turn and run up (out of their place in line) to grab the item and log out. While, it was an interesting aspect of the game, most time only the rich (level wise) of the game ruled those places, and the poor single player had to return day after day/week after week to attempt to get that one quest item.
I'm on the fence on this one. I think some MMO's go way overboard on instancing, but to make game play fair for those hardcore vs. those weekend warriors, I think it was a inevitably needed change (and from I remember, widely applauded in AC) it, as with many things has some drawbacks.
In closing, I like instancing I believe. It allows me to take a night of my life with friends (or even solo) and not have it ruined by someone, just wanting to be a jerk.
It's fine to prefer non instanced gameplay. But realize that many games, and even some of the 'old classics', moved towards instancing because it solved a number of problems.
Other solutions might help. Or you can try to define them away as not being issues. The problems (things like spawn camping, greifer tactics, kill and loot stealing, even server loading) are still going to be there though. At that point you have to budget the game to match the numbers of players who will agree with that definition.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
I know I'm probably the minority with this, but I never cared about instances... just like combat animations, or character models, it's an issue I never understand what's the fuss with
If it fits the game, and the game is good and fun, I couldn't care less if it's open like Vanguard or LotRO, or heavily instanced like Neverwinter. Though I agree with Arglebargle:
Originally posted by Arglebargle
It's fine to prefer non instanced gameplay. But realize that many games, and even some of the 'old classics', moved towards instancing because it solved a number of problems.
It was a nice column, I liked the TOR part, wrote the very same back in the days after I first got burned with a different outcome I've always left group before talking to an npc (and of course I was rarely in a group in the first place, since the game is so heavily solo-focused). One of the worst move from them, having great storylines and npc's, then put in such a lame system for interaction if you're in a group... conversation rolls? wtf?
Also liked the Architect part, sadly it was heavily exploited for farming, but even those experiences helped Cryptic to make the Foundry a better tool later in STO (and Neverwinter).
My problem is that instances didn't really solve a number of problems, it put a bandaid on a lot of problems which just created more problems. I'm talking mostly instanced dungeons here, not story content.
It kills the social aspect of the game, it forces people into doing everything with a full balanced group. It took away progression in dungeons. It hands out loot way too fast. It is a killer when it comes to open PvP.
It is a bandaid fix for not having enough content. It is a bandaid fix for not having dynamic boss locations.
If you pose to me a problem of how to spread the players out to avoid another Sebilis from EQ the lame bandaid answer would be to let everyone have their own copy of the dungeon. The much better answer is to create 10 more dungeons and make the spawn locations of mobs more dynamic so everyone didn't want to camp the exact same parts of the dungeon. The old EQ dungeons were more fun than instances in every other way. The only complaint I ever saw was someone was camping the mob I wanted and that isn't fair.
The dungeon progression is a huge key in this for me too. An EQ dungeon had areas you could farm solo, places you could duo, places you could farm with an ineffecient group and then spots where only a balanced group could survive. One single dungeon serviced all different types of players. Instances are built for a balanced group and the entire dungeon is usually balanced at around the same exact difficulty outside of maybe one boss being harder than the rest these days at least. WoW had a little more progression than that. To me this is limiting the content as much as it is making it accessible.
I think a system like the old open dungeons (eq, daoc, etc) plus making them phased/instanced where you can say have the first 50 people go into Deep Bog 1, the next into Deep Bog 2, etc. and maybe cap them at say 60 (allowing for people to move when wanted). This allows the best of boths worlds as i could see in eq or daoc now if they were released these areas just TOO full.
But for sure my fav. form of dungeon.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
What I would have liked to see in this article: a discussion of how instancing is an unintended and artificial way of segmenting memory. When we instance, we tell the brain that it's done with its previous task and onto a new one.
I hate crowds and lag, as well as perma camped names and names on long respawn timers.
However, it is important to balance instances with contested dungeons (containing names on reasonably short timers for competition), overland zones with elite raid mobs on long respawn timers and awesome loot, legendary epic quests only doable by raiders as well as do able by soloer/groupers, and world events/fluff/cosmetics, etc. If you can't have fun content and you make the game to hardcore you end up like Everquest 1, where practically everyone was a hardcore raider and almost everyone else left for Eq2/WoW.
If you never do fun world events and cosmetics you end up like WoW, where every game update is more raids, and never even new dungeons/scenarios, just mostly raids and more dailys.
Having no crafting/tradeskilling makes you like SW ToR, where its pointless to craft for the most part.
Meanwhile, having no contested open dungeons makes you like Everquest 2 with "The Hole", which was nerfed and then remained empty, after being massively crowded and packed. They didn't add in enough contested dungeons and by only having 1, everyone had to be in the same zone at the same time.
Everquest 1 used to have all these open contested dungeons, because they didn't have instances, and they were really fun for their time. However, you need to have a huge variety of them, so everyone isn't packed like a sardine into the only one in the entire game.
Talking about the lack of flexibility fully balanced group, that is why wow added flexible raids, and why everquest 2 raiding is annoying. You can't fill 20 slots of a 24 man raid force, you have to have all 24 players, they have to be this class or that class, you have no choice. If you don't have this class and that class you can't win.
Everquest 1's huge 72 man raids used to allow 14 wizards or rangers or whatever you wanted, 12 clerics for heals... 6 paladins some of them group healing, or anything else you wanted because you had the raid slots and didn't have to be particular! Nowadays, the pickyness is rediculous, as raids on WoW have to consider tokens. Who is on the same token? Oh no, we have to many druids, we don't want anyone who shares with the druid token or no one will get their tier set bonuses!
Or other loot just goes to alts and wasted, because no one was on that tier token and it kept dropping. How many alts got decked out in full TSO gear on Eq2 before main raiders? Plenty!
They need to go back to allowing flexibility of different classes, and not forcing people to play classes they don't want to be just to raid...
I remember Sebilis, the crowds were insane and everything was over camped... camp checks were a daily thing on Everquest 1 of course, lol. Why not just make more dungeons? With today's technology of scaling on Everquest 2 and instances however, we can have different zones of Sebilis. The zones can all have dif players same artistic layout, but different npcs and quests... That would give some reason to playing it even though its copy/pasted same geography.
I love this article. The author is so bright and obviously more than well educated. The world should turn to blood and ashes if it rejects these clearly brilliant views of instanced gaming. If only the game makers could she thing the way this author does. I am more than certain that the world would be a much better place if she were in charge. (Not to mention the fact that games would be more fun.)
Originally posted by goldtoof Those older games that have it, introduced instancing later on.E.g. vanilla EQ & daoc didn't have instancing.
Asheron's call 1 and Asheron's call 2 also don't have instance, lineage and lineage 2(dunno newly released free2play lineage2?)also dont have instance. Darkfall(Darkfall 2 becouse of crybabys have now safezones thats todays generation:() had no instance.
And many more old mmo's did not have instanced which in my view is best mmmo no instance.
But it will not changed im convinced it will even get worse mmo's 100% instanced see how most replyers here argue.
For them its a nightmare if they even see one maybe attemp to interup there hunt or run.
This all have to do with antisocial behavior and what they have learn in chilhood cry alot and mommy grand you your wish.
Mommy protect you i'll shield you from other kids so you have it all for yourself.
Spoiled rotten kids who get there way bah:(
Instance are SAD and ruined the mmo's
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77 CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now)) MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB PSU:Corsair AX1200i OS:Windows 10 64bit
Comments
I agree. As for copies of dungeons, you could build modular sections and easily change them up. You could also easily have different skins for the look of the walls, some moss covered or brown stone or marbled. And you could have a variety of optional add-ons for each main room, such as pillars, arches, or a variety of decor. Mix and match quickly, and build a huge world full of content. Lore can account for a lot of similarity too. Look at Skyrim, lots of this was done there, and it actually made the game feel more immersive.
As far as the social aspects, open worlds can't be beat. Players make friends, guilds gain new members, and guilds make alliances because players are in the same world together. The drawbacks of griefers (in any form, including loot stealers) can become a positive if the game has social meaning and becoming an outcast of some sort hurts a player.
Once upon a time....
The thing that always got me about instances was the dumb respawn of trash mobs. You already cleared them and the bosses never respawn, so what is the point except to irritate your fanbase?
Have to disagree that Lotro is heavily instanced, more than 90% of the game is not.
Smaller game worlds/server sizes would allow more open world content and interaction without the use of such heavy instancing.
Much of the choice to instance comes from the huge populations and huge numbers of plays at launch.
EQ's launch was huge at the time an measured in thousands.
SWTOR's launch was huge at the time and measured in millions.
With tens of thousands of players on a server, how could content not be largely instanced.
The major problem is theme park style MMOs that force all 5000 new folks in the starting area to all be at the same point at the same time.
Kill 5 trolls - 5000 Avatars just statnding around waitting for a turn at the trolls or Dungon or what ever.
Older MMOs - RPGs had open worlds and smaller populations, people would wonder off and do their own thing because the games rewarded that, now we are all forced to follow the same paths.
Logiclly how many people would be on the same personal quest as you? NONE!
Get rid of these stupid personal quests and then we could have less instances. SWtoR is a prime example of story over actual MMORPG game play, it might as well have been a solo game with group play optional for PvP and Dungons.
Bring back gold as the primary reason for adventuring.. eliminate this gear and / or personal story grind fest crud we have now.
Make dungons hard so it takes a group of players and some form of team work, not this die and respawn crud we have now!
Make crafting and harvesting essential not some after thought like the crud we have now!
STOP QUESTING US TO DEATH, let players strike out into the unknown and find tons of good content with out having to search out joe-shmooo with a giant question mark on his head, and have him hold our hands, as we ping pong back and forth from one meaningless task to another, stopping to hand over three pelican beaks or whatever dumb quest item, ever 10 minutes, as we complete his 50 part quest line to get the blade of choppy chop chop so we can keep up with the jones'es!
Do these thing and social grouping will start again.
The dungeon is part of the world, you can just enter it and meet other people. When too many people are in the dungeon - like 50+, it spawns a second instance.
As one system among many in the game it is fine. I think it is a problem when all of endgame character progression is instance based. It is like when you reach max level all of a sudden the game becomes a multiplayer game lobby, and ends up feeling more like a console single player game multiplayer mode than a real MMO.
Instances make sense when you want to tell a story or when you want to tightly control the environment. However I think they are overused.
Games need more non-instanced content at max level that scale from small to large groups. The open world where people dynamically come together and take on challenges feels like what an MMORPG should be, not just a lobby for small group content.
That's an excellent point. The pre-designed direction doesn't allow players any freedom to get away from the crowd, and instanced dungeons are a necessity.
Give me a Sandbox world any day, and let players choose their path and where they head out to, and what they want to pursue.
Once upon a time....
Ahh the good ole' days... or was it the bad ole' days?
My first MMORPG was Asheron's Call, WAAAAYYY before instancing was introduced as a mainstay to may MMO's. And I painfully remember actually WAITING IN LINE to get the cool object of that open world dungeon. I actually think that is the first place I heard about Ninja Looting was from someone who didn't want to wait their turn and run up (out of their place in line) to grab the item and log out. While, it was an interesting aspect of the game, most time only the rich (level wise) of the game ruled those places, and the poor single player had to return day after day/week after week to attempt to get that one quest item.
I'm on the fence on this one. I think some MMO's go way overboard on instancing, but to make game play fair for those hardcore vs. those weekend warriors, I think it was a inevitably needed change (and from I remember, widely applauded in AC) it, as with many things has some drawbacks.
In closing, I like instancing I believe. It allows me to take a night of my life with friends (or even solo) and not have it ruined by someone, just wanting to be a jerk.
Moon
It's fine to prefer non instanced gameplay. But realize that many games, and even some of the 'old classics', moved towards instancing because it solved a number of problems.
Other solutions might help. Or you can try to define them away as not being issues. The problems (things like spawn camping, greifer tactics, kill and loot stealing, even server loading) are still going to be there though. At that point you have to budget the game to match the numbers of players who will agree with that definition.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
I know I'm probably the minority with this, but I never cared about instances... just like combat animations, or character models, it's an issue I never understand what's the fuss with
If it fits the game, and the game is good and fun, I couldn't care less if it's open like Vanguard or LotRO, or heavily instanced like Neverwinter. Though I agree with Arglebargle:
It was a nice column, I liked the TOR part, wrote the very same back in the days
after I first got burned with a different outcome I've always left group before talking to an npc (and of course I was rarely in a group in the first place, since the game is so heavily solo-focused). One of the worst move from them, having great storylines and npc's, then put in such a lame system for interaction if you're in a group... conversation rolls? wtf?
Also liked the Architect part, sadly it was heavily exploited for farming, but even those experiences helped Cryptic to make the Foundry a better tool later in STO (and Neverwinter).
double post - sorry
My problem is that instances didn't really solve a number of problems, it put a bandaid on a lot of problems which just created more problems. I'm talking mostly instanced dungeons here, not story content.
It kills the social aspect of the game, it forces people into doing everything with a full balanced group. It took away progression in dungeons. It hands out loot way too fast. It is a killer when it comes to open PvP.
It is a bandaid fix for not having enough content. It is a bandaid fix for not having dynamic boss locations.
If you pose to me a problem of how to spread the players out to avoid another Sebilis from EQ the lame bandaid answer would be to let everyone have their own copy of the dungeon. The much better answer is to create 10 more dungeons and make the spawn locations of mobs more dynamic so everyone didn't want to camp the exact same parts of the dungeon. The old EQ dungeons were more fun than instances in every other way. The only complaint I ever saw was someone was camping the mob I wanted and that isn't fair.
The dungeon progression is a huge key in this for me too. An EQ dungeon had areas you could farm solo, places you could duo, places you could farm with an ineffecient group and then spots where only a balanced group could survive. One single dungeon serviced all different types of players. Instances are built for a balanced group and the entire dungeon is usually balanced at around the same exact difficulty outside of maybe one boss being harder than the rest these days at least. WoW had a little more progression than that. To me this is limiting the content as much as it is making it accessible.
I think a system like the old open dungeons (eq, daoc, etc) plus making them phased/instanced where you can say have the first 50 people go into Deep Bog 1, the next into Deep Bog 2, etc. and maybe cap them at say 60 (allowing for people to move when wanted). This allows the best of boths worlds as i could see in eq or daoc now if they were released these areas just TOO full.
But for sure my fav. form of dungeon.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
What I would have liked to see in this article: a discussion of how instancing is an unintended and artificial way of segmenting memory. When we instance, we tell the brain that it's done with its previous task and onto a new one.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/11/09/study-shows-doors-can-be-linked-to-memory-loss/
I hate crowds and lag, as well as perma camped names and names on long respawn timers.
However, it is important to balance instances with contested dungeons (containing names on reasonably short timers for competition), overland zones with elite raid mobs on long respawn timers and awesome loot, legendary epic quests only doable by raiders as well as do able by soloer/groupers, and world events/fluff/cosmetics, etc. If you can't have fun content and you make the game to hardcore you end up like Everquest 1, where practically everyone was a hardcore raider and almost everyone else left for Eq2/WoW.
If you never do fun world events and cosmetics you end up like WoW, where every game update is more raids, and never even new dungeons/scenarios, just mostly raids and more dailys.
Having no crafting/tradeskilling makes you like SW ToR, where its pointless to craft for the most part.
Meanwhile, having no contested open dungeons makes you like Everquest 2 with "The Hole", which was nerfed and then remained empty, after being massively crowded and packed. They didn't add in enough contested dungeons and by only having 1, everyone had to be in the same zone at the same time.
Everquest 1 used to have all these open contested dungeons, because they didn't have instances, and they were really fun for their time. However, you need to have a huge variety of them, so everyone isn't packed like a sardine into the only one in the entire game.
Talking about the lack of flexibility fully balanced group, that is why wow added flexible raids, and why everquest 2 raiding is annoying. You can't fill 20 slots of a 24 man raid force, you have to have all 24 players, they have to be this class or that class, you have no choice. If you don't have this class and that class you can't win.
Everquest 1's huge 72 man raids used to allow 14 wizards or rangers or whatever you wanted, 12 clerics for heals... 6 paladins some of them group healing, or anything else you wanted because you had the raid slots and didn't have to be particular! Nowadays, the pickyness is rediculous, as raids on WoW have to consider tokens. Who is on the same token? Oh no, we have to many druids, we don't want anyone who shares with the druid token or no one will get their tier set bonuses!
Or other loot just goes to alts and wasted, because no one was on that tier token and it kept dropping. How many alts got decked out in full TSO gear on Eq2 before main raiders? Plenty!
They need to go back to allowing flexibility of different classes, and not forcing people to play classes they don't want to be just to raid...
I remember Sebilis, the crowds were insane and everything was over camped... camp checks were a daily thing on Everquest 1 of course, lol. Why not just make more dungeons? With today's technology of scaling on Everquest 2 and instances however, we can have different zones of Sebilis. The zones can all have dif players same artistic layout, but different npcs and quests... That would give some reason to playing it even though its copy/pasted same geography.
Asheron's call 1 and Asheron's call 2 also don't have instance, lineage and lineage 2(dunno newly released free2play lineage2?)also dont have instance. Darkfall(Darkfall 2 becouse of crybabys have now safezones thats todays generation:() had no instance.
And many more old mmo's did not have instanced which in my view is best mmmo no instance.
But it will not changed im convinced it will even get worse mmo's 100% instanced see how most replyers here argue.
For them its a nightmare if they even see one maybe attemp to interup there hunt or run.
This all have to do with antisocial behavior and what they have learn in chilhood cry alot and mommy grand you your wish.
Mommy protect you i'll shield you from other kids so you have it all for yourself.
Spoiled rotten kids who get there way bah:(
Instance are SAD and ruined the mmo's
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit