A Tale of Two Dungeons
When you think of bad dungeons in MMORPGs, ones that you would not run again if the alternative was death by flesh-eating ants, ones where you seriously consider whether or not the dev team was pulling a practical joke on its playerbase by designing the most sadistic instance ever, ones where souls are broken, guilds destroyed, and parties continuously wiped from its mere presence — which are the ones that spring to mind?
For me, it’s two in particular: WoW’s Gnomeregan, and DDO’s The Pit. So sit on back as I take you through a tale of two dungeons and what went horribly, horribly awry with each.
Gnomeregan
In Vanilla WoW, the dungeoneering experience gets off to a pretty great start. Horde gets to jump in the earliest with Ragefire Chasm, followed up with the twisty-turny (but still popular) Wailing Caverns, while Alliance got to experience one of the best dungeons in the game — Deadmines — and the epilogue, Stockades. But then level 30 rolls around, and Alliance gets the shaft.
It’s Gnomer Time.
“Gnomer” is such a disappointment as a dungeon because it had such incredible potential. A dungeon consisting of an irridated former capital of the tech-happy gnomes, with leper gnomes and gadgets a-plenty? Where do I sign up? Oh. Hell. Hell is where you sign up.
Then you get there, and Gnomeregan proceeds to flay your interest in it, one strip at a time. Highly mobile mobs chain aggro your party like crazy. The instance is a bit confusing in its layout, which is complicated by the annoying keycard quest (you have to collect a handful of keycards which are to be used at different locations around the place). And some of the bad guys are simply brutal — there are dwarves that lay down mines capable of wiping your party in seconds, not to mention the little aggrivating alarm-bots that bring reinforcements if you don’t kill them ASAP.
Now, I’m sure this place is a lot easier post-Dungeon Finder, but in Vanilla WoW, you had to really love someone to be willing to go back into Gnomer for a second time. It’s got a great look to it, sure, but where you should be having fun with wacky gnome gadgets, you’re beating your head on the nearest hard surface instead.
The Pit
DDO specializes in dungeon design, considering that they have dozens and dozens of them all over the place. It only stands to reason that you’re going to favor some over others, but in my stint in the game, the one dungeon that was almost universally despised was The Pit.
The Pit fails in the fun department in so many ways it’s not funny. The dungeon itself consists of a multi-level waterworks plant thing, connected by two spiral pylons that you’re constantly running up and down. It’s terrifically easy to get lost and separated from your party, and since the whole multiple level thing makes it impossible to know where they are on your map, good luck ever finding them again.
On top of that, The Pit is one of those puzzle-happy places that require you to find locks and levers to unlock sections to proceed. Death by falling and acid/fire/frost-spewing traps are more common than death by mob.
And did I mention that you’re going to be doing more jumping and platforming than your days with Super Mario Bros.? So you’ll be jumping, dying, struggling to complete the puzzles, and doing this all for hours with a group that often implodes under the weight of this place. Oh yes, it is a joy to experience. To get a better idea of the marrow of this instance, check out this guide and count the insane number of steps that it takes you just to complete one run.
Bad Design Notes
Gnomer and The Pit have different layouts and approaches, but both help to illustrate dungeon design decisions that serve to frustrate players rather than entice and excite them:
- Too long for casual small groups
- The layout is confusing and easy to get lost in
- Too complicated puzzles/quests that require a lot of backtracking
- Too many ledges and other places to fall to a quick death
- Trash mobs with abilities and tendencies to cause nasty party wipes
So what are your most hated dungeons and what should designers learn from them?”
- Posted in: Dungeons & Dragons Online ♦ World of Warcraft
Y’know… I loved gnomer.
I feel all alone having loved both gnomeregan and Fable II.
WoW: The instance and raid where you ride on drakes! There was always someone that got lost or, Hey guys this place is cool, I have NEVER been here before!”
Ugh… Gno***… to this day I refuse to utter its name.
I remember being in there with an at-level guild group on my first character. None of us had been in there before, but we were committed to it and trying to keep things under control.
I don’t even remember what happened, if it was an alarm bot or a mine or what, but at some point something happened and we THOUGHT we were okay. Oh no. No no no. Five seconds later about 100 very angry dwarves came running down the hallway in a mob with pitchforks and fire.
We never stood a chance.
Culling of Stratholme.
Game developers should learn that once you’ve completed a dungeon X times, it’s really not necessary to watch the opening cutscene and each subsequent cutscene again. And again. And again. And, well, you get the point.
In fairness to Blizzard, at least they did remove the ridiculous introduction to Trial of the Champion, even if CoS remains unchanged.
Great topic and post, as usual.
I totally agree with Gnomeregan. After switching from the Horde to the Alliance after one year i was especially looking forward to experience a dungeon full of crazy gnomes with all their explosive weapons, “gone-wrong” warmachines and gadgets. What i found was pure madness.
Like you allready mentioned the dungeon was crowded by thousands of robots and other things that you could barely see. Every step had to be planed carefully and every mistake made by one player was an instant wipe. I remember dying about 20 times before I swore to myself to never come back again. I eventually completed it one year later with a much higher level. To revenge myself of course.
But one thing immediately came in my mind when i saw the word “Gnomeregan”. The music. Oh god. The instance was far too long and after listening to the music for about 1 hour you had the feeling, that you turn into a crazy gnome too. It was the worst part of the worst dungeon i ever came along.
I still get headache when i hear it. Argh…
FFXI’s had problems with the Promyvion dungeons. The promyvions are the first fights of the Chains of Promathia mission line, and they are capped at level 30. The problems were.
1. They were capped at a low level, but they were hard, much harder than many of the missions that followed. While they are easy if you pay attention and plan well, a lot of people trying them were new at missions, and thought they were low level content. Much deaths and frustration ensued.
2. They were long. To beat them you had to do 3+ floors and a tough boss fight which you could wipe on, 3 times. Once per each crag. Factoring in retries it could take a good amount of gametime just to get past it. Again, this at level 30, when you are a noob.
3. It relied on cheat items. Anima could be used on the boss to lock down their abilities briefly. However the way the game works, mobs spam their abilities at 25% health or less, and the abilities were what killed people. So you had to set up an anima rotation, and couldn’t really fight without them because their abilities were so powerful.
The experience was cool as hell though in spite of it. It is an amazingly atmospheric zone, filled with decaying towers and unearthly, empty creatures. Music is eerie, check it out here at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SjlcnNn6LI
FFXI did so much right and yet so much wrong at times too.
Oculus
Done
Ahhh gnomer, on my hunter engineer i soloed that instance more times than i care to remember for a rare recipe drop from the last boss. I had it down to a science, in the end i could have ran thru it blindfolded.
But yeah, the biggest problem with gnomer is the confusing layout, but once you got past that i grew to enjoy it. I would say that gnomer was by far the most ambitious instance of vanilla wow, all it lacked was execution.
And yes, deadmines is the best instance blizzard has ever done and i’ve seen them all, a close second is kharazan.
I loved, and still do love Gnomer.
I did it at level on 3 or 4 of my toons back in vanilla.
Recently, I have even run “tours” for our guild lowbies.
Now Sunken Temple….
…the horror. THE HORROR!
Skarlarth and Company
Medivh
@Dblade: Oh, how true about FFXI and Promy. As I recall, initially it was so bad that specific setups were almost required to take down the bosses – double SMN for the 2hr. ability comes to mind.
And if you failed, that meant waiting it out.
Gnomer was awesome, seriously. I remember finding the entrance the first time and seeing my first ‘skull’ level mob at the bottom. And beating it with a level appropriate team was sweet.
It required you to be deliberate and on your toes at all times. As the game stands now, it’s how fast can we get through this instance. No CC. No real teamwork. No strategy. As long as you don’t pull too many mobs off the tank, you can faceroll through just about anything now.
@Dblade:
I agree with you on everything you posted. I’m an old FFXI vet myself and have both good and bad memories of the Promyvion zones. The whole Chains of Promathia expansion featured some of the absolute hardest fights I have ever seen in an mmo period. not only we’re they challenging but in most cases if you didn’t have a static group of players to finish missions or the “right” job for a mission leveled then you we’re often unable to complete content. For all the things in FFXI that were great (and there was a lot that was) there was double that amount that was just horrible and a chore to complete. I’m sometimes embarassed about how long I endured that game, when there were so many other good games I missed out on.
Oh, I remember a few in EQ… LOL. Actually, most of them were very good, especially back then.
Perhaps this puts me in the *extreme* minority, but I never saw the big deal about Deadmines. It’s a good run through, but nothing special. I really think people have such fond memories because, for so many players, it was their first, big MMO dungeon crawl… which was, thankfully, well executed.
Gnomer is tough, but not ridiculously so. Yes, you’re going to screw up the first few times you go in there, but once you learn what to expect (and the layout) things aren’t so bad. Randomly grouping up with people can be trouble, though. I highly recommend, if doing a pickup group, to have a few people who can res, especially one who can res after dying. But once the group gets the hang of it, it’s not so bad.
Back in AC there was a dungeon called “Jahannan Vault”, the fire-elemental dungeon. It was filled with jumping challenges, some that made you think “hey I didn’t realize I was playing a platformer like Super Mario”. The jumps had to be precise – you could undershoot or overshoot, and fall either to your death, or fall into the middle of a bunch of mobs that would kill you.
After many complaints, Turbine added some “stoppers” to the jump destination – things like overhead beams and/or floor beams, which would stop you from jumping too far and overshooting. It was far more enjoyable after this.
@Aillas
That dungeon was awesome. I remember forgetting my death items doing those jumping puzzles and losing a couple of my things.
Good times.
For LotRO fans,
Fornost… *shudder*
Ironically the problem really wasn’t the design of the dungeon per se. Learning how to get around was hard, but once you did it was no big shake to get from A to B. Fights were tough but doable, usually…
What made Fornost such a nightmare was.
A: To complete a certain quest line, you to go that damned place of a dungeon and back out FOUR times to complete.
B: It’s PACKED with mobs. I’ve seen some dungeons that are fairly well occupied by mobs, but every single little room or spot in the entire dugeon had mobs. In the entire zone there was like 4 or 5 safe spots, which it was constant no break fighting from start to finish.
C: Bloody huge. It took foreeevvveeerr to get through, compounded greatly by the aforementioned mobs. One marathon session took me 10 hours and 3 pugs to get through my quests, and then I had to go back through all of it all over again.
Needless to say, saying you made it all the way though Fornost = big accomplishment
I’ve never puged Gnomeregan and I used a guide the first time I ran it. So I’m sure people’s hatred are warranted. I always rather liked the instance for two reasons. It has a mailbox in the middle. You get to teleport in if you’re horde.