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.