Your Dungeons are boring. Here's why and how to fix them

First off. Ignore whoever thought a roster of 30 Dungeons per season was a good idea. ARPGs are about dynamics. That’s where they shine and will always do best. Repetition that always feels a little different.

  • Dungeon Objectives
    The issue with these is that you’ve made them mandatory in order to progress the dungeon so it naturally feels like a chore. I know why, because of completion rewards but I’ll get to that soon.

Lets take a side objective I’ve hardly seen as example. There are stones that speak a word. You can find all three of these to open a locked chest or find 2 and have a 50/50 guess or 100% guess. Instead of simply having this open a chest. Have it open a locked door. The result of the locked door is random. It can be a room filled with elites and multiple chests or it lead down into another part of the dungeon taking players on a side adventure.

“Escape Routs” should be added for these side treks leading to a previously hidden room allowing players smooth transition back into the main dungeon.

The key here is Objectives = Bonus. Not mandatory to progress.

  • Why Objectives Lock players Into Chores
    This is rather simple in concept. You’ve given the player completion rewards instead of consistent progress. You don’t need to chore players if there’s no advantage in zooming to completing the dungeon.

Two things handle this well. First. Change Glyph experience gain to a small % of experience you gain while in a NM dungeon. Players simply select the Glyph they want to level. Second and I know some might not like this but completion rewards and bosses dropping ultra good loot is a bad thing.

David Brevik has come out and said he does not like bosses with rare loot and the reasons are clear if you’ve played PoE. They take away from the exploration of an ARPG, diluting it into a boss rush game.

There is a difference here though. Bosses the player cannot spam “can” have better drops. The side trek concept I mentioned can have a boss at the end with improved drops because the player has no way to target farm this. It works for the chores that make you to collect objects to open a boss. This objective is random. Skip if you want.

  • Difficulty Based Drops
    Taking this one straight from Diablo 1. There’s no notable difference in itemization between clicking a chest, corpse or similar and killing a boss. The perks of a boss is their density.

Click on items in this game feels horrible. Diablo 1 uses a very simple system. Interactive objects are -1 level while bosses are +1 level. The level is the dungeon level itself. This means everything is worth doing. Click a corpse, kill a boss, everything. Again, this drastically improve exploration and give reason to players pushing higher levels.

  • Smart Enemy Placement
    This is one reason I feel an AI driven ARPG will eventually be king. Whoever does it first. Imagine a tile with a two ledges on each side and a ground floor leading between the two ledges. There’s one staircase leading up to the ledges.

In current ARPG style enemies would be placed randomly in this tileset. However Smart Enemy Placement will check what difficulty the player is playing when populating the map and decide to put ranged characters on the ledges with more bulky enemies on the bottom. This is how you enhance difficulty of a dungeon without stat inflation and also improve dynamics.

  • On top of all this. The game needs drastically more enemy types, tilesets, bosses more flare when entering a dungeon. Little hops down at the start to make the player feel like they’re descending. It also needs to rely on enemy type over elite affixes. D4 does this better than PoE already so just don’t lose touch of that. Secret passages, like that one you see in Diablo 2 Act 1. More things for players to interact with. One last thing would be to add a natural decent to the next Tier of a dungeon instead of constantly relying on keys. When is a dungeon complete? Well, when you decide to stop, ideally.

This requires tweaks on Dungeon Affixes and how they’re rolled but I feel that’s needed anyways.

There’s room for plenty more improvement but I feel these types of changes will bring the exploration and dark delve feel back to Diablo while reducing/removing the chores feeling.

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Finally, the only good forum post ive seen. +1 bro.

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All I can say is your ideas are so much better than what professional developers are getting paid to design.

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Thank you. I am a developer but it’s not my day job.
I do passion project mods for other games in my spare time.

Most recent was a mod for Divinity OS2. It turns the game into a class-less system so the build diversity is off the charts compared to the original. Like any class-less system, give players a big toolbox of toys and they’ll find something but the playstyle fantasy is worth it IMO.

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The D3 forums were filled with posts wanting the GR dungeon timer abolished so the solution that the devs made was to create the current iteration of NM dungeons.

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I agree with all of your points. :slight_smile:

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This is so well articulated. I love the game, but I really need dungeons to reward objectives, not punish failure to complete them. Diablo 1 and 2, and even 3 for the most part, let you bee-line things and the side objectives were bonuses. This complete reliance on objectives in dungeons makes them tedious, not interesting. I feel like they made the dungeons and then realized without objectives people would just buzz through them, so they made these obscure, meaningless objectives. If they were bonuses, I’d probably do them, but then it would feel like I was rewarded instead of forced. It’s semantic, but meaningful.

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Here’s how you fix nightmare dungeons:

No gimmicks, just elites you can snipe on the way to the boss, who can drop great loot. There, game fixed.

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These are very good ideas.

I agree with the dungeon objectives but I do not see advanced AI “enemy placement” as being a net positive for the genre. The RNG needs to lie more in the dungeon encounters than your itemization, this is where the future of ARPGs should be directed. MMO-style item progression with deeper crafting, and lay into the dungeon RNG hard. I shouldn’t know what to expect with 99.9% accuracy when entering a dungeon in an ARPG. Thematically, yes. Encounter wise, no. Mix up the bosses at the end, throw in some oddball elite packs. This is where your side-objectives come into play.

Their dungeon design is meant to encourage playing with a group of 4 players.
The spread objectives and kill-all quests heavily favor an environment with 4 player characters to split up and efficiently clear the dungeon. It’s not truly encouraging group play mechanics, however. There isn’t a reason for anyone to fight together when clearing the dungeon, you split up and complete the objectives to get on to the next one as fast as possible.

Side objectives that are more of a supplement to the dungeon experience would add a lot of value, and another layer of RNG. Completing side objectives to unlock the vault room that could be filled with treasure, a scary pack of elites, or a mini-boss encounter.

Remove the standard events from dungeons altogether and make the side objectives drop the obols. The dungeon clear should be akin to the open world whisper objective where you kill things and collect souls, or just killing a keywarden like elite.

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Greater Rifts were… Okay. I didn’t see the purpose in a timer outside the Leaderboard rankings. In the end it was adding to that arcade feel D3 had which doesn’t respect the ARPG feel or RPGs in general.

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This is what they do in WoW. It’s their way of selling you old content as new. It’s lazy af and not surprising they incorporated it into this game. It allows them to recycle and never have to create nothing new.

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I fully agree. As my opening. Dynamics are where ARPGs shine.

The AI Enemy Placement is something I’m not sure we’re quite there on in gaming. It requires a massive database to pull from and it would never be static as a result. Ideally it would go far as the game itself being just slightly different in some way every day.

AI is prime for making slight shifts in the already randomized conditions you find in an ARPG.
But yea… Probably not there yet. I’m fine with a good seed of randomization for now.

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I read it once, then skimmed it. Seems utterly inconsequential to me.

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Gotta say I really see no reason for the middle room in D4.
That room where you get “ambushed” with spikes on the floor making it difficult to activate the 2 switches. Coupled that with the stormbane nonsense that keep smacking a large area.

Why can’t they let me flip the switch in peace? The hero of sanctuary that killed Lilith is finding it hard to flip 2 switch and constantly needing to avoid stuff on the floor.

The most common switches in ARPG I see are the ones that activates the boss or give a premonition of intense fight up ahead. Not one where it sequentially divides the dungeon into part 1 and part 2.
Like people would just say “just do part 1 and repeat”

Think of D2 Chaos Sanctuary and Act 2 entering Tal Rasha.
POE ascendency trial with lots of switches. One of the craziest dungeons stuff. And the boss had some mechanics that is linked to what you do in the dungeon.

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Probably to deter bots. Also why the whole dungeon has mini objectives.

Send in a resume anyway. Need somebody on the team that knows how to design engaging content.

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The replay-abilty with this game is very low and it’s lower than D2. All these frictions they added made this game into single player game with low online experience.
I hope that they are going to do something about the dungeon captchas, account bound items, rares being more useful than legendary items, and how there is zero excitement from legendary drops.
The game is still very young and I am hopeful.

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Dungeon captchas made me chuckle.

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These are good points. I was saying a while back that the dungeons are too cookie-cutter, and that one thing that all the other Diablo games had that this one doesn’t is multiple levels/floors. How is it that every location in the entire game is on a single floor, minus the mines where Neyrelle’s mum goes? It totally breaks the immersion, and I don’t feel like I’m actually exploring anything. The first game was fun because you felt like you were descending into Hell, and the second game it was fun trying to find the stairs down to the next level of the dungeon. I think D3 was similar. In D4, your character kind of just enters, does some random tasks, and walks or teleports back to the front. :confused: