Warhammer's Dungeon Design

The first day back from a vacation is always busy and this is certainly holding true for me today. I haven't really had time to read any MMO news in depth, but a cursory glance at my blogroll has revealed a lot of new Warhammer information. The release date has been confirmed and the fans who pre-ordered are jumping at the chance to download the open beta client. I'm just excited that I'm starting to get more details on the PvE content in Warhammer. In some of the MMOs I played over the last year I was very disappointed in what they offered for traditional small group content. While I'm sure the RvR will be the big selling point for Warhammer, I know that dungeon running holds a special place in any nerd's heart.

That's why I was glad to find information on at least three of Warhammer's dungeons in an article done by Gamesradar. I had just assumed that Mythic would instance everything, but it looks like they are going to include a couple open world dungeons to spice things up. Mythic even spent some time modifying the old open world dungeon design by incorporating factions into it. Some open world dungeons will only be accessible to Destruction and others to Order. Some players might complain about faction specific content, but I think most people will just level up characters on a different server. It's a unique idea and avoids some of the problems Funcom had with public dungeons on its PvP servers. The only problem I see is that Mythic may be forced to patch new open world dungeons in pairs or risk alienating one faction.

It seems like all of the dungeons in Warhammer will be multi-wing in the same style as the Scarlet Monastery. Blizzard went the same route for the Burning Crusade and most players seemed to prefer that over the long sprawling dungeons like the Wailing Caverns or Blackrock Depths. That's not to say there isn't a place for sprawling dungeons as Karazhan was very popular with players, though poorly positioned for raid progression. On the other hand the multi-wing dungeons in Warhammer seem more friendly to casual players. The level range is smaller then the Burning Crusade dungeons, which often had a level 70 wing. Also the final boss for each dungeon is defeatable by a single group instead of requiring a raid.

Even though Mythic isn't doing anything revolutionary, they still managed to tweak some of the things that most bugged me about Blizzard's dungeon design. I never got to fight the final boss of Hellfire Citadel since it required a guild and mine always avoided him since he was an unnecessary and difficult encounter. It's also nice to see open-world dungeons brought back in limited form. I always thought Blizzard should experiment with a public or open-world dungeon since they had such a horrible LFG tool. Maybe if people could just roam around in dungeons it would be easier to grab a replacement when someone had to drop. At least trains shouldn't be a problem since modern mobs tend to have a limited chase range.

The only problem I have with Warhammer's dungeon design is that the article mentioned that the level 23 dungeon was the first one in the game. It seems weird not to introduce a dungeon until players are more then half way through the game and I hope it was misinformation. World of Warcraft had five dungeons before it's half way point at level 30. I know this is primarily a PvP game so it makes sense that it has less dungeons then World of Warcraft. However, this isn't going to stop people from making a lot of direct comparisons between the two games. I just hope the lower level range is well polished to make up for the lack of dungeons. The NDA should be dropped this week with the start of open beta and we'll have more information then.