So I’d been meaning to make this post for a few weeks now, but between a combination of procrastination and trying to let my thoughts materialize onto the forum, it just never happened.
The introduction of dungeons and their design is actively making me not want to play the game. Their maps specifically, are a step in a not-great direction and my issue - even if the intentions were good, and the willingness to experiment is good. I’m not going to talk about the bosses, enemy design, etc, as @McFluffin recently made a video, and he summarized a lot of my issues with the bosses, and also touched on the subject of the maps themselves and other issues, many of which I agree with.
Important for why my issues with the map design creeps up so much, is that dungeons are an important part of the gameplay loop that you can, want, and should interact with on a fairly regular basis. My issues are that:
- The maps are absolutely massive, and can have both doors to the next floor at near-opposite sides of the map
- The map marker showing you where the doors are can take a significant amount of time (sometimes not showing until you’ve explored 50-60% of the map while killing along the way)
- Roadblocks and backtracking
- The enemies within the dungeons never change.
- The dungeons themselves (save Soul Bastion) are meaningless to the reward, disincentivizing anything except getting in and out of the map as quickly
#4 is the least of my concerns. Can that cause issues with the maps getting stale? Yeah, absolutely. But that’s kind of a thing in ARPGS, for better or worse, and just isn’t a massive concern for right now (but should likely be addressed for future dungeons).
The #1, #2, and #3 are the ones that are the most problematic, and all work together to make them feel awful, with #4 contributing to why the others are significant. Recent map reworks/designs have trended towards bigger and sprawling. Which in general is good, assuming you care about being in the maps, and like being there. However, this is problematic when the map design makes you dislike it, and when you don’t have any real incentive to be there for any length of time and explore. This then makes how long it takes for the door-markers to appear even more frustrating, because you’re meandering through a map that you simply don’t care to stay in. You want to be in and out as fast as possible.
The dungeon map design is made worse again with the addition of roadblocks. By themselves, roadblocks are fine in moderation. Right now, the number of roadblocks in any given dungeon map is very significant. Having a roadblock that cuts you off in one direction is fine, but because you still have options. Frequently the roadblock is a dead end, and so you have to go half a hallway back to get around it. In and of itself, that’s okay, except because of the frequency, this situation happens very, very frequently. Further, because of the randomization of the maps, you can have multiple roadblocks lead you along a path that deadends in another roadblock, resulting in 15-20 seconds (or more) of just backtracking through an area you’ve already been, has no enemies anymore just to get going back in the direction you want or need to go - and is otherwise boring and makes the deadend and backtracking feel even worse.
Right now, dungeons primarily feel like a slog rather than engaging and/or fun pieces of content. And because of how important they are to the gameplay loop, they are actively making me not want to play the game, as that would mean running dungeons. They just, overall, feel bad to run, and that makes the game feel bad.