MMO Weekly: The Dungeon

10 Nov 2009 at 00:00:00 by Jeff Hollis

Hey there, fellow MMO fanboys and fangurls, and welcome to this week's highly instanced edition of MMO Weekly. In this week's article, we'll talk about a topic near and dear to my heart: the dungeon.

As I've spoken of in the past, computer RPGs and MMOs are all really trying to duplicate the experience of tabletop role-playing games. This is particularly true of Dungeons and Dragons, the first and most influential RPG of all time. (I'd argue that D&D is the most influential *game* of all time, but that is whole other Oprah). The core experience that D&D offered to players was a concrete adventure, most often a dungeon-clearing expedition. The most familiar iteration of this in a modern MMO is the instanced dungeon.

This past week, I learned of Blizzard's upcoming plans for their dungeons, and those plans are so brilliant, I have to give them some serious kudos. 

When I first read about patch 3.3, I initially felt that it was more of the same: the introduction of more repetitive endgame grind content, and the emphasis of raid content over small-group dungeons. As you probably already know, I consider this trend to be at the heart of WoW's slow, unintended, but inevitable suicide. Blizz is repeating what other MMO developers have done before them, making the endgame unnecessarily difficult, and making WoW vulnerable to the first good new MMO to appear on the scene. Why? Because none of that kind of endgame crap is any fun.

And then I got to the part about Blizzard revamping its dungeon system. When I read the planning patch notes, I practically sat bolt upright in my chair. Yes, it's that good.

At the heart of the new dungeon system is a revamped version of their "Looking for Group" interface, which is already in the game. However, this new system acts in the same manner as the current Battlegrounds system. No longer are players looking for dungeon buddies on their poor, lonely realm. The entire battlegroup is now the players' oyster. In other words, if you (a warlock) and your buddy (a rogue) form a group to run The Oculus, you'd normally have to sniff around for a tank, a healer, and one other player to make a full group, and you'd have to do this from the limited resources on your server. Now, if the server next door has a lot of healers and yours does not, this problem is automatically solved. Just put into the LFG interface what you need, and it sorts all that out for you. 

If you are familiar with the way the Battlegrounds queue works, this doesn't mean that you'll automatically get a group with the perfect players immediately. Sometimes there's a wait. On occasion (though generally rarely), the wait is 20 minutes or so. Even on those days, the BG queue is far, far superior to the current LFG system. There have been many times in which I couldn't find an adequate PUG at all, even after having tried for over an hour (this has even occurred very recently) and then I've just given up and done something else out of frustration. If the BG queue is any indicator, those days are gone. The new interface will find tanks, healers, DPSers, and whatever else I need from a pool of servers, and then auto-teleport us all into the instance once we're full. Nice. 

Here's a few of the other features the new LFG system is promising: 

• Join as a Group or Solo
• Cross-Realm Instances/Grouping
• Instance Teleporting
• Smarter Group Matching
• Daily Random Dungeons
• Repeat Random Dungeons
• Choose Multiple Dungeons
• Vote Kick system
• Lovin' the PUG Bonuses
• Looking For Raid
• Need Before Greed Updated
• Group Disenchanting

This new system includes rewards for running the "instance of the day" (my term), and there are other new tools and incentives to get players to participate. Without going into too much unnecessary detail (all the details can be found here), there are a few things about the system that I either don't completely understand, or don't think will work out ideally, but to be frank, they're small potatoes. This idea is simply brilliant.

Of course, this isn't the only feature in the upcoming patch. There are many more - this is just my personal favorite, and one I think is a very good move on Blizzard's part. It may breathe new life into the game for those who, like myself, hate the grind, but still find joy in dungeon runs.

And with those last kicks and grins, my friends, it's time to take my leave. If you enjoyed this bit of dungeoneering, come and visit us over at WanderingGoblin.com, where we engage in this kind of nonsense each and every day. For now, ciao!

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