Devs Talk Build Your Own Dungeon Avatars, Rewards, and Offline Creation

When SmokeJumper unveiled Build Your Own Dungeon at Fan Faire, it took the audience about 0.3 seconds to notice that a key item on the announcement Slide: Players would drive Adventurers or avatars through these Player-built Dungeons, rather than playing their own characters.

From the look on SmokeJumper‘s face when he read this line, the collective unrest from the audience was not unexpected. Since the announcement, there has been plenty of discussion on the EQ2 Forums foretelling the feature’s doom, using the abandoned Arena system as an example. Players want to play their own characters in DYOD designed dungeons, but the EQ2 team have expressed trepidation about balance.

Rothgar went into further detail on Friday with the team’s thinking on why Adventurers, which you will pick up and ‘collect’ via quests, rather than player’s own characters will be used in DYOD:

There are several reasons why we chose to use avatars rather than your actual character. And of course, everyone won’t agree with these ideas.

First, a big part of the player made dungeons will be creating dungeons that provide challenges for players to complete. There are leaderboards associated with the dungeons so you can compare your times with other people. Unfortunately there is a huge range of power for a player-character of the same level (like level 90) depending on their gear, AA’s, etc. This makes competition impossible because you aren’t comparing apples to apples. We hope to make the dungeons more about your skill and creativity, and not so much about how much time you’ve invested in your main character.

Second, we wanted to create specific types of gameplay that may be different from what normal characters can do. Avatars will have specific strengths and weaknesses that should play off of the different types of creatures and objects that can be placed in a dungeon. Part of the fun of running the dungeon will be determining the group make up and which avatars everyone will use in order to beat the dungeon. And after running it you might decide to try again with a different avatar because those specific abilities might help you complete it faster and earn a higher score.

Using avatars also allows us to create themed dungeons where we can re-enact historic battles or stories by forcing players to use specific avatars. This is something we will consider expanding around holiday events in the future.

Avatars also provide another collectible mechanic and gives you additional ways to set yourself apart from others if you’re interested in that kind of gameplay.

Commentary

If the Adventurers (avatars) are fleshed out classes with interesting abilities that can be chained together in interesting ways, such that you WANT to play them more often, enough to where you wish you could play that class in the “real” world of EQ2 dungeons, then it will be successful. However, if Adventurers are just basic boiled down archetypes with a few abilities each, then the naysayers will probably win this round.

We play (and chose) our main characters because they’re fun to play. If we have to play un-fun avatars in BYOD, then it doesn’t matter how cool the dungeon is, we will get bored fast!

The vibe I got from SmokeJumper is that EQ2 wants to branch out into different styles of gameplay and quit playing it safe with the usual turn-and-burn mechanics. They want to try new playstyles of classes. Beastlord is just part of this. With Rich Waters stepping aside as Creative Director for EverQuest II, Akil “Lyndro” Hooper returns to the position of Lead Designer, a position he held as recently as Live Update 44 the patch which introduced the popular Shard of Hate raid.

Rewards

Although the EQ2 team are undoubtedly still hammering out the details on what reward will be offered in Build Your Own Dungeon, we know that running a BYOD will result in a certain number of Tokens based on the difficulty of the design. If the creator of the dungeon makes it too easy, you may not get any tokens at all, while truly challenging BYOD’s may spit out a sackful.

Two types of rewards will be offered in exchange for Tokens: Loot and other items for your main character OR materials you can use to jazz up your own BYOD’s. Also, while we won’t be able to equip any “power” or stat gear on our Adventurers, they will accept Appearance gear.

Build Your Own Dungeon — Offline?

Crabbok raised the interesting point that it would be quite nice to be able to Build Your Own Dungeon outside of the EQ2 client, perhaps on an iPad or other tablet device:

I am eagerly looking forward to be able to play around with the Design your own Dungeon tool. I would hope very much though, that that there is a way for me to use it while I am NOT playing Everquest 2. For example, if I’m on a plane, maybe I pull up my laptop and work on my level editor program, which I can then upload into EQ2 the next time I connect, or at work for example, I cannot connect to EQ2, but perhaps I could work on this while I”m on my lunch break if it’s able to be used while off-line.

This might sound Pie-in-the-Sky, but SmokeJumper nonetheless took a swing at it with his thoughts:

Good idea. Very hard to implement.

All your inventory (including DYOD items, housing items, etc.) is stored in the player database currently. You have to be online to access that. So everytime you go to place something, the game normally checks to see if the item is still present in your inventory by talking to the server. Plus we check placement rules on the server also.

What you’re requesting is do-able, but would require you to save all that info on the client-side (your machine), let you do all the editing, and then somehow have a routine when you reconnect to the servers where the server could check that everything you did was valid and cool.

Like I said, it’s possible, but a really large amount of work on top of what we already have planned. A very good future feature request, but definitely outside of what we can get done for initial launch.

Players suggested the possibility of just having a Sandbox program which lets you use any and all of the placeable Items, Traps, NPCs, etc. and then when you load the level into EQ2, it will only place Items, Traps, and NPCs which you have earned access to. SmokeJumper reiterated that any dungeon built offline would have to be checked through the same code that checks the online-built dungeons before it could be Published. But he wasn’t averse to the idea:

I see the attractiveness of the feature. It’s definitely on the list. It just won’t be in for feature launch.