An extended idea for Dungeons in Boundless

@Jirodyne I can agree with player-made dungeons and jumping puzzles. This is something I’ve talked about with a few members of Forgemasters and I believe at least one is going to be created. We’ve talked a bit about charging for entry, making a prize pool, things like that. Those sorts of creations are only natural for the “economy game” and have a place, kind of similar to carnival games where t hey can be curated and run by players, but only with the current resources in the game.

The thing about player-made game content dungeons is that when you give players that kind of choice, they also get to choose the reward. I don’t mean in the way we see rewards right now, I mean things like the “dungeon” is a pit that’s filled with 1000 elite roadrunners and you just go to town. One problem we saw with City of Heroes was that people made uberdungeons like this that invalidated a lot of other content. Even if you properly scale the reward based on the difficulty, the amount of cheese available for this sort of system is immense. That’s why I’m in favor of curated dungeons that provide similar resources to other activities so they are “a new way to play” rather than “a thing you have to do”

@shap3d I agree, people would just constantly grind them and there would be no reason to do anything else. That’s why I think the dungeon keys and possible cooldown mechanic are important, they can have a resource cost that make the dungeons more balanced reward-wise (you end up trading the “creation” resources for the “reward” resources, effectively from an economic standpoint).

The cooldown mechanic isn’t the best solution for sure, but here’s another option for you: If you do a corrosive dungeon, you become “attuned” to corrosive worlds and dungeons. The more often you do corrosive dungeons, the more attuned you become. This is bad, as you become more attuned, you become weaker against those enemies and they will become harder and harder until you’re simply unable to damage the related monsters. Attunement is cleared over time, and can be sped up by doing dungeons or existing on a planet of a different element. This encourages players to do different things and not just endlessly grind, since they will reach a breaking point where they won’t be able to continue. A soft-cap of the number of dungeons you could do per day, basically.

Also remember part of the idea for this was “Ease of implementation” so I made an effort to consider how much in the way of new features we’d have to get implemented for these things to happen.

We already have portals
We already have “loot chests”
We already have procedurally generated worlds
We already have atmospheric protection.
We already have scaling difficulty

A lot of the work for these is already done, and for a small indie dev team that’s SUPER important. Obviously some things would need to be brought in, like the portal keys, limiters on number of people through a portal, etc, but from what I’ve seen doing some hunts solo and in groups, we’re a good way there.

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Oh, and the reason I’m kind of against giving players the ability to spawn portals and stuff is kind of similar why I’m against giving players the ability to make their own dungeons. Everyone would just make kill rooms where it’s super easy to control the creatures coming out of the portals. Even if they break some of the blocks, when you have a kill room that is 5-10 blocks thick, you just have to repair it after each “summoning”

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a stacking debuff that penalizes players for grinding too much in the same dungeon
interesting

yes, i agree.
the spawn portals will ultimately convert them in gold farmers and they will destroy the economy
unless the mobs don’t drop any loot at all
or the cost to craft them is 10x the reward that they can get
like
cost: 100 oort stones
average loot: 50 oort stones
or even a cooldown
player made dungeons in a mmo will be a unique mechanic ever made afaik
if this is implemented in boundless i’m sure it will become pretty popular

why not just create a system to allow players create their own dungeon ?
like they need to prepare the rewards, and they can charge the entrance feed for people who wants to enter the dungeon.
This will become the other business type, and old player can set up the difficulty to easy mode and still drop something good to help new players. Or create a hell mode for the other old players to have more challenge.

Of course, people who wants to host the dungeon need to craft dungeon beacon, and also the dungeon block to summon monsters and boss. (Business cost)

Two words: Dungeon Conduits

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i know this is a double post from another thread, but i think it is relevant here:

I’m with this, dungeon conduits seems like a good idea, used in conjunction with the keys

I feel like to avoid the issue of feeling like we’re fragmenting the universe too much, these should be exceptionally challenging, to really force either a solo tank to have to play super careful and likely go too slow to be efficient, or force a group to work together which is the goal

I do think @james has said he wants temporary worlds so this isn’t far off from his potential thoughts on that? Do we have any update on that front @james?

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Bump. Very interisting idea and would make exploring much more fun

@Steggs101 @james What are your thoughts on this concept? I’m sure a lot of us would love to hear them. :slight_smile:

Reading through this makes me wish we had craftable monster spawners that would only be placeable within a personal beacon.

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I like it! Very nice! Maybe these keys could be part of the Titan set up or just its own system. Very nice way to add a new element and gameplay I think!

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I think one massive problem people don’t seem to realize for being able to make a personal dungeon is the ability to exploit it.

Sure, you can set limits diminishing returns grinding the same dungeon, but who’s to stop someone making a whole row of portals leading to the same dungeon design (but different location) to simply grind the other dungeon when the first one looses value?

Im 100% for the idea of dungeons, but they should definitely be randomly generated, unminable until its cleared, and not player made. (or, if you must, allow early backers or something to design dungeon templates that are used in generation)

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u get nothing from a catacomb than material for ur own catacomb, like traps, spawner, bait… and some mobs loot. the stuff u get from a catacomb should somewhat scale with the size of the catacomb, so a big one will have better treasures than a small one. what is to exploit there? to limit the catacomb plots u can implement exponentially raising soul cost and u can setup the whole system to allow a grind … a risk/reward system to balance the “difficulty” of a catacomb and of course it should be not too easy to get a ton of material…

Necro’d for relevant post is still relevant…