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Creating Bosses and ACTUAL 5 man content
tacc4990
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 161 Bounty Hunter
Any official word on when or if we'll be able to create legit 5 man dungeons with real bosses? I've looked and been unable to find anything. When I first heard about Foundry this was what I was most excited about. Most MMO's these days seem to fall apart for no other reason than lack of content at max level. Foundry is the PERFECT solution to this. But only being able to make solo quests SEVERELY limits the whole system. I could see myself playing this game for months/years if we're able to create our own 5 man dungeons with cool bosses and our own fight mechanics (adds popping out at x% health.etc) but as it stands right now with Foundry being only solo missions. It'll be cool for a while... But I doubt that I'm alone when I say I think I'll get bored of doing solo stuff pretty fast. I don't play MMO's for solo content.
Please don't try to tell me about how you can create 5 man content by adding a bunch of solo encounters to simulate difficulty. This is NOT the same as creating REAL 5 man dungeons and everybody knows it. Why can't we make our own dungeons with bosses similar to the Dragon at the end of Lair of the Mad Dragon?
Please don't try to tell me about how you can create 5 man content by adding a bunch of solo encounters to simulate difficulty. This is NOT the same as creating REAL 5 man dungeons and everybody knows it. Why can't we make our own dungeons with bosses similar to the Dragon at the end of Lair of the Mad Dragon?
Post edited by tacc4990 on
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I think this stuff will come, I hope it comes! Right now you have to use hard encounters and the 4-5 boss encouter types they give you.
But it is something they said they would like to do down the road. In the mean time, you can make some pretty impressive stuff that requires 5 people and coordination. The Cragspeak Crypt is the quest you need to check out.
Tyvm Bobcat and Winin
As previously stated the cryptic team is looking into actual bosses it's on their short list of things to work on post launch, the dungeon Bobcat and Winin are referring to I had made specifically four groups, it should showcase what the foundry is capable of in terms of 5 man content.
I will be posting a separate column of what processes I go through to help others create awesome dungeons for their friends to play shortly here after launch. I have the link here to The Cragsteep Crypt.
Grab some friends and give is a try and hopefully you will be just as excited to create you own 5 man dungeons when you see how truly powerful the Foundry tool is.
Ravenloft
Look for@Apocrs1980 or visit the main page here or Ravenloft here
Himmelville - Are you easily frightened?
Click Here
On one side of the mountain, there were bones...
I love your dwarven attitude! maybe at low levels, and a bunch of pots!!! I think I went through 20pots, died like 6 or so times with 3 of us at end game challenge.
Me dwarven pride was put to the test in that adventure! Well when I faced off against me self! those other dead authors where kind of wimpy... like that little halfling Chili hahahahaahahhahah!!!
Actually when we started the fight Aproc yelled KILL CHILI!!!! lol so we burnt him down fast... atleast I think. I died like 5 times really quick lol.
Dead Crazy Ray is far more lethal that the live one I control! Good to know that he at least is smart enough to go after the healer.
To the OP: I agree with you completely, I really want to be able to create cool boss encounters and 5 man content. Currently the content I have tested at max level is far tougher than it is at earlier levels but we need group focused UGC for sure.
It will come (they say) so we just have to wait for it, which I hope will not be long after OB "launch".
They should add a new set of boss encounters, that people can tune themselves...
In STO, the most popular missions are the heavy fighting ones. I imagine the same will be true here, because once you play a story, there is little reason to replay it. But a combat-heavy dungeon is fun every time.
I try to pace out the combat, exploration and downtime, toss in alternative pathways and hidden areas and you have something player likely will play again with friends and purposely try to find hidden rooms and different paths they might have missed the first time.
Since you're posting this in a thread about 5-man content, I'll assume that you're implying that the longevity of MMOs relies on group content. As a response to that, let me ask you a rhetorical question:
Why do you think pretty much every single mainstream MMO in the last few years has focused almost exclusively on solo content?
It's an old, established truism that the important customers in an MMO play almost only group content. Market research and data mining of active MMOs has revealed that this is very, very far from the truth, and the design of these games has changed accordingly. The vast majority of players stick to solo content, whether you like it or not. Because Cryptic prioritized making the Foundry work for solo content first and foremost, with group content as a post-launch possibility, it should be clear that they see things in the same way. The Foundry will offer a near endless stream of solo content (and a large amount of group content too, although it will be limited in scope in the beginning) to satisfy the typical players, and this is what's truly going to secure its longevity.
The myth about group content being vital to MMOs probably comes from forum study. If you read one of these games' forums, you'd be likely to assume that nobody plays solo content at all and that customers leave in droves if there's not an enormous amount of group content available at all times. What you need to consider is that the forum population is not even close to being representative of the game's actual population. This might tie into the whole introvert vs extrovert personality thing, but that's merely speculation.
If solo content truly was the most important thing in these games then all those other games I played wouldn't have flopped in 2 months. Most of them had plenty of solo HAMSTER to do. People just get bored of that stuff super fast once they hit max level. Cryptic has the perfect opportunity to provide literally ENDLESS amounts of endgame content for players to stay busy forever. All they have to do is give players the ability to make their own legit 5 man dungeons and perhaps 10 man raids. Which it sounds like is something they're working on and I'm glad to hear it. I just hope they get it done and have it working very quickly after OB releases. Hopefully in the first major patch. Cause if they wait too long people will start getting bored and not everyone will come back to give it a second chance.
They could have all the solo content in the world and I don't think it'd be enough to keep the average MMO player interested past the 3-4 month mark. I could be wrong but history tends to repeat itself and my 12 years of experience with mmorpg's says I'm not.
But as Mapolis and Robobo hinted at there is some mind blowingly amazing stuff coming down the tubes later on.
I personally am only interested in making Dungeons and Raids, I'm group content focused! That stuff gets me excited
Heck I may even get around to leveling up a character one of these days
Ravenloft
Look for@Apocrs1980 or visit the main page here or Ravenloft here
Ultimately, I think they will have to cave to true 5 man content. Personally, I think it would be a good reward for Foundry author achievements, along with flagging an author for a persistent zone.
Every time they idiot-proof something...they make better idiots.
"There are two things that drive technology forward in a huge leap in this world, one is war and one is business..."-- Timothy Wade 2012
"If you wish to join a guild, that will be running a guild foundry RP campaign then come take a look at [BLOOD]"
I agree 100%. This is a big problem for traditional subscription-based MMOs. F2P-games don't really require that players keep playing constantly however, which is their big strength. All they need is for new content to be released regularly so people will check in once in a while and buy some stuff. The content you're talking about missing is the solo content though. I don't know if you're aware, but the content that keeps people playing a character from level 1 to max is almost always dominated by solo stuff. When people reach max level and realize that the only content remaining to them requires groups, they quit out of boredom. In this you are completely correct about the situation, but you reached the wrong conclusion based on it.
I get that you feel that group content is what keeps these games alive, but the fact is that you're wrong. You're using nothing but anecdotal evidence. I'm pointing to actual games with actual content. As I said, why do you think there's been such a huge shift towards almost exclusively solo content in MMOs? I remember the days when you almost couldn't do squat in an MMO unless you were in a group (I believe Dark Age of Camelot was the last such game I played), and while these attracted a niche of dedicated players, it wasn't until WoW and its well-structured (for the time) solo content that developers realized there was more to this genre than they thought. Then LOTRO went through several iterations of expansions that changed the game from having a wide variety of group content spread throughout the game into becoming solo-focused for almost everything, and when combined with the F2P model this made the game extremely profitable and successful. Other developers have picked up this model since, including Cryptic. Feel free to deny it, but this is easily observable fact, and one that MMO developers speak openly about.
The loot issue is VERY disconcerting, and since players will always follow the path of least resistance, any Foundry quest providing easy loot would be exploited. It's inherently risky to allow authors to control loot tables. That being said, as a quest and level designer hobbyist, it's tough to want to bother with the Foundry at all when it's basically just a narration tool; no boss level mobs makes for no tension, no loot control makes for no player satisfaction. There's no reward for the player and no reward for the designer. (And let's be realistic, this game is not driven by story, it's driven by loot, it's the money-maker here after all, and I'm cynical about the voluntary 'donation' of AD).
I'll plink around with it I'm sure, but right now I'm not certain why the average MMO player would want to bother running a foundry quest when she knows it's going to be an average outcome with trash mobs and trash loot... especially when she could be running a dev-designed dungeon and competing for actual gear.
As of right now, there's is no competition between the two, and there isn't supposed to be either. We'll see what they come up with eventually, but I do agree that some system for loot is sorely needed. This was on my top 10 list of requested features at the end of the Foundry beta.
I've had just as much fun in Aproc group UGC as the dungeon delves. I have done a bit of the high lvl delves also. The loot is better in devs of course(I'm talking the 5man content), but I'm here for the fun! Thats just me, and I know where some of you are coming from, a lot of people play the game for loot.
I am just glad I'm not one of them.
While it's true that solo content is heavily played, I believe you are drawing somewhat faulty conclusions. The players demanding mass amounts of solo content are your casual gamers. While these are a large crowd, they are just one aspect of your gaming crowd, and are largely the followers. The raiders are often seen as the pinnacle of PVE gamers, and are what many casual gamers either aspire to or track as they game. If a game is so lacking in end game that it cannot maintain a strong raider presence, that game suffers. I submit for your consideration, SWTOR. That game had all sorts of potential, but I know I personally and several guilds I have friends in left the game once we reached end game and found it to be a joke. The game has shrunk to a shadow of it's opening might.
So while yes, solo content is an important focus for a game, I truly believe for a game to truly aspire to greatness it needs to maintain a superb raiding scene.
I never got to end game in it, I was having to much fun with four man group stuff, and solo stuff. I actually created two different troopers and went through the story twice. Once the server merge happen and I lost my jedi name that I took a day of work off to get ended it for me. I actually lost every single name that I had. My son lost his jedi knight name, and so did my wife. I left and have no desire to go back unless they add a naming policy like crptic.
Its a shame it didn't have good end game. I just HAMSTER around with raids and such, I usually do all the raids in an MMO though. Just takes me double the time the usual play I think.
Himmelville - Are you easily frightened?
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On one side of the mountain, there were bones...
While I never played SWTOR myself (I've been a huge Star Wars fan since I was a kid, and this game more or less took a huge dump on the history of the setting merely to attract more customers. I won't give my money to developers who succumb to that kind of temptation), from the discussions I've read about the game, most people seemed to love the stories but strongly disliked the game mechanics. It was too derivative of WoW, and the players I've heard about were bored long before they reached the end game. My impression is that it wasn't the lack of solo or group content that killed that game, but rather a lack of fun gameplay mechanics. In their eagerness to supplant WoW on the MMO-throne, Bioware ended up cloning too much of it. At least Neverwinter won't have that problem.
Personally everyone I know who stopped playing didn't mind the mechanics, it was the end game that did it in for them. I havn't gotten the chance to try Neverwinter yet, but I am excited to give it a try on the open beta.
My point however was simply that SWTOR is a game that focused VERY strongly on the solo gamer, lots of solo story, lots of solo events. They completely disregarded the desires of the raider and group gamer. That combination, along with other things, is what then led to the game falling down the pit it presently resides within. I think every game needs to cater to both the casual solo crowd, and the raider crowd. Not to mention the PVPers.
Sorry I am ranting and off subject. SWTOR was an great game!