About 90% of NMD picks this season are objectively straight unfun. Nonlinear, lacking in density, filled with poor objectives.
Let’s take an example of excellent dungeon design in D4 first: Sirocco Caverns.
You are barely able move an inch without 50 new mobs engaging you. This is the correct amount of mob density in an ARPG, the density that every single dungeon should have.
The objective here is to run in a straight line and kill 3 hive nests, then continue running down a straight line and kill 2 bad boys. Not much room for pathing interpretation here. THIS IS EXCELLENT. THIS IS PERFECT. There’s mobs everywhere on the screen, at all times, blowing up hordes of mobs is what makes arpgs fun!
You know what’s not very fun and extremely disrupting to the game flow? Having to run back to pick up anima because the mobs don’t drop it the very millisecond they die (they should). Freeing prisoners. Having to open 50 doors (You can’t even barb leap or sorc tp over it if theres a closed door), Running in the wrong direction to find a useless event to then backtrack 30s to where you came from. Running around for 10 seconds without meeting any mobs, to then kill a pack of 5 mobs in one second because most of the dungeons are still incredibly mob deprived and have horrid, lame pathing. Run west, collect this thing and bring it to the middle, meet absolutely no enemies on your way back to the middle because you already cleared that path, now run east and do that again. The game doesn’t need to copy everything from poe, but mob density (probably at least another +100% in most cases) and clear pathing to the objective are things the game should have. Rant over.
No more doors, no more backtracking because you missed anima / prisoners / 2 mobs during the “kill all” objective. In my opinion they should unironically remove all objectives other than “kill this bad boy”
The fact that I have to SEARCH for living enemies during a “helltide” is also honestly just comical.
D4 could be good
Now the funny thing, all of us in the closed end game beta said the same thing to them, not enough variety, the dungeons are really lacking and get tedious to run.
They changed nothing, all closed beta feedback was ignored… not sure what the point of it even was.
triple, or at the very least double the mob density, remove every single objective that could potentially cause backtracking, open all closed doors in every single dungeon, have clear pathing through the dungeons without “you have already been here therefore there are no more mobs here” windows. That’s all they need to do
Doors, how I hate this, you walk 2 metres and a door, open the door, walk 3 metres and a door again. Some dungeons just salvage because they’re filled with doors.
And exactly, collect aminus is also annoying or layouts like heathen keep, whoever thought this up I would kick somewhere…
Not to mention “slay all” when you miss a few mobs and they don’t TP to you… why can’t there be a ‘kill 80% enemies’ if blizz wants to have such a great affix…
I just want 90 percent of objectives removed and for the love of god fix the kill all enemies when more spawn in the dungeon and the number keeps going up. Also id love a dungeon where the area is just all open, no maze bs and the boss is in the middle.
Sirocco Caverns and Old Stones are my least favorite T100s just because there’s so much poison. Hope you like mashing Q and kiting until an immunity comes off CD.
I agree a gazillion times. I wanted to open a new topic, but since yours is here, let me vent here.
I just read that there will be a version of challenge rifts in S3 and reading that made me realize what killed this game for me. And it did kill it, I couldn’t even get to lvl 50 in season 2. And it’s the dungeon design. And if it doesn’t change, gauntlets will not be like challenge rifts, but boring tedious annoying dungeons.
I agree very much, the point of a Diabloesque game is to kill minions and build your character while doing so through loot and leveling. Anything that doesn’t do that gets in the way. I can already imagine entering a gauntlet, seeing the objective, kill all enemies and 10 minutes later still running around looking for that one last red spot on the map to kill before the times runs out.
Please Blizzard, bring back D3’s rifts where you enter and whatever you do, even if you stand still mobs come to you, you kill them, then the boss appears right next to you and you kill it, loot, rinse, repeat. I would much prefer leveling this way from the start even if it sound repetitive and boring on paper, because that’s the distilled fun of the game. You can add whatever other activities you want for players who want them or even for me as a distraction should I get bored with the core gameplay, but add it in a way that doesn’t get in the way of having fun. Running back and forth in the same dungeon over and over again without having to do anything is just not fun. Riding a horse from one location to the other for minutes is not fun. Looking for hidden objects is another game genre and I’d wager, not that much fun for people who like action rpgs.
Betas are mostly just about server stability these days. They don’t really care about any input on the game itself.
I’ve beta tested many, many games over the decades. The last game I beta tested where the devs actually listened to player input during the beta, and implemented changes, was SWTOR. That was years ago.
Sounds boring as heck to me. I like objectives and I like a bit searching and hunting with my dungeon crawling. For me the game isn’t simply about skipping 90% of a dungeon and mob’s just to kill the boss and then do it again.