The older adventures are way better than the ones released after mod 21

forumaccount

I recently replayed all the adventures on my alt after not having done that at all for most of them since they were campaigns.

Doing that I realised that the older adventures are way better than ToD, Rothe Valley or the scaleblight summit.

Rothe Valley and Scaleblight summit have 10 quests each, ToD has 15 quests. Meanwhile Elemental Evil has 4 parts with 22-26 quests each and also optional quests in each part.

Or as a comparison of time it took me about 1-1.5 h to complete each elemental evil part when it took me maybe 30 minutes to complete the ToD and 15 minutes to complete the Rothe Valley or scaleblight summit adventures.

I'm fine with Rothe valley being a short adventure because it's just there to bring an old map back, that many people like. I still wish there would have been some more quests. At least the heroic encounters were added and they are used for the current battlepass so for a while I will go back to the map.

I'm pretty disappointed with the ToD Adventure. Before mod 21 it was that massive campaign that started at a pretty early level and spanned over 4 maps. With mod 21 that got reduced to the Well of Dragons part. And to make it an adventure the devs basically took all repeatable quests in WoD, bundled them together and called it a day. There is nothing new added to make it a better story line and not just a bunch of quests that you complete to get the boon points.
But I can kind of forgive the little effort put into that adventure because it had to be remade for the release of the current mod and was probably just an afterthought.

Now to The Scaleblight Summit. It is the first adventure released after mod 21 and the only one so far that wasn't just a rework of old content. My main compalin with that adventure is that it is very short. If you had done the dragonbone vale campain before or at least the introductory stuff there were only 7 quests to do. It didn't even have its own map and just expanded the dragonbone vale map a bit. Because of that there were no new enemy types and just the same old thayans and dragon cultists. Also having Valindra as the main boss again is pretty boring. We already fight her in the leveling adventure, dread ring campaign, and kind of in malabog's castle.


Now what I like about the older adventures more than the new ones.

Untermountain has 5 maps (7 when counting the yawning portal and stardock), took a good time to complete and introduced the expeditions, which are a great feature (please bring something similar back future mods).

Elemental Evil has 4 maps, each part takes a goot while to complete and I like that the main AD rewards are mission rewards instead of a big payout at the end of the adventure. It also has some enemies that are on no other maps of the game as far as I know (like air giants)

The Dwarven King and The Maze Engine are both unique that they don't have a new map but use many personal instances for their quests. Also the story is very good and I like that I can fight together with drizzt, minsc etc.

Acquisitions incorporated has a very unique humor, that not a lot of people like. In my opinon it's way better since the campaign was turned into an adventure because you only have to do the quests once. Overall it's probably the worst "older" adventure.


Cryptic, if you decide to make more adventures in the future, that aren't just reworks of old content, please make them more like Undermountain or Elemental Evil. I want a good story, new maps, new unique enemies and a big bad that we haven't seen before. But most importantly make the adventures a longer so that I can have fun for more than 20 minutes.

masteryoda

I think the playerbase are split on this, some want longer adventures/campaigns and some do not, at least that's my take from looking at multiple different posts on this forum

greywynd

Meanwhile, Cryptic wants the majority of the playerbase to be "endgame". Seems that is where the money is.

arazith07

Rothe Valley is almost the same as it was when it originally was released as a leveling zone, so I would not really classify it as a new adventure. There was like one more quest here and there, but you really aren't missing much. I don't mind longer adventures, as long as it's actually more content and not just another fetch or kill quest in the same area that I already killed and fetched stuff in.

rikitaki

I think they are wasting time by turning the reworked areas into a "dev cut". Let me explain.

The main reason for levelling rework was player retention. And the result looks exactly like what a statistician would do - quests, which got often abandoned/chased people away, got removed. Regardless of the root cause.
You can see that on the current Ice Peak - it used to be a massive campaign with a coherent story, but people tended to abandon it way before the end... so it got butchered, regardless the reasons why people used to abandon it. (It was long, and if you did not binge it, you quickly overlevelled your char - while spending literally hours by travelling back and forth on that long noodle of a map. Let alone you had to know where to ask for final set of quests as the (!) sometimes did not work there properly.)
The campaign would be fine with fixed XP, two more shortcut tunnels and fixed exclamation marks - but instead, well, the most prominent aspect which managed to survive is that annoying pony ride.

The thing is, there really is no rational reason to cut the story out of campaigns. Grind quests - cut them, but the story? It really feels like an effort to amputate any value from the game. Especially in standalone campaigns that are purely voluntary, not bound to anything, offering a roleplay experience as the most attractive reward.

greywynd

The fault lies with the devs that things got skipped. People outleveled the zones too fast. Like the old bounty bags, you were leveled past any gear that you might get from them by the time you had enough to buy one. And the game has continually progressed with the "faster/better" mentality. Often to the detriment of the players not knowing how to play content.

pitshade

Rothe lost quests to kill assassins, collect slave ledgers, kill spiders, check doors and I think that is it. The Assassins was a minor side trek to find enough. The slave ledgers are now replaced with weapon caches and the spiders completed automatically with the Daughter of Lolth instance. The doors took no time either. I guess the troll quest is disabled as well which is the only real loss.

Icespire changes were more expansive especially the change to the triage camp. Most of what was removed otherwise was just fetch/kill quests. The sideplot with the double dealing wizard was removed.

Vellosk got the worst changes IMO, the Spirit Animal thing is the single change I actively HATE though. It was easily my least favorite zone even before mod 21.

Personally, I am glad that Tyranny got decimated. Nothing of value was lost.

Sharandar mod 1 is the only campaign I miss.