Feldon Last night, Linda “Brasse” Carlson (Director, Global Community Relations), Greg “Rothgar” Spence (EQ2 Lead Programmer) and Akil “Lyndro” Hooper (EQ2 Lead Designer) hosted a Webcast about the upcoming Dungeon Maker feature (previously known as Design Your Own Dungeon) in the upcoming EverQuest II: Age of Discovery expansion.
Note: Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson was not able to make the webcast.
Note 2: For the first ~5 minutes of the webcast, Rothgar’s mic was not working at all. At this point, he and Brasse started sharing a microphone.
Note 3: Throughout the webcast, Rothgar refers to the Avatars you use to play through Dungeon Maker-designed dungeons as “adventurers”. For clarity, I have changed all these references to Avatars.
After the jump, EQ2Wire provides an exclusive transcript of this SOE Webcast…
Lyndro: Dungeon Maker is a similar system to Housing which allows players to place creatures, and decorate dungeons, and then they get to have other players play through them as Avatars that they collect throughout the world.
The system has a few different aspects: Decorating, Building, Collecting creatures and items you can place in your dungeon, Collecting dungeon maps and dungeon layouts, and then taking Avatars that you find throughout the world and going through the dungeons as those avatars. You can play solo, you can play with friends.
Brasse: How much customization will people actually have? Are you stuck with like one or two dungeon layouts that you decorate like the houses that are currently available, or are there different modules you can buy? How does that work?
Lyndro: We’ll have a few different maps and a few different themes. One example is Crushbone Keep. Rooms are done in a Crushbone style. There are 8-12 room layouts.
Brasse: Do you have traps or barriers or doors that you can put in? What are the item limits?
Rothgar: You can put a lot in there. As far as items, everything has a theme. We have a lot of items that you can put into the dungeon, like campfires and weapon racks, statues, casks. Those items also provide buffs… (phone)
Lyndro: Some of the items will provide buffs to the creatures in your dungeons. One of the campfires you put down might increase the attack speed of every creature that’s placed near it. Some of the items out there that you collect will help enhance your dungeon.
Brasse: Now for the Housing system, we know you have a House Rating System. Are you going to have a similar thing for the dungeons?
Rothgar: Yes, in fact we’re using the exact same system. Once you get your dungeon setup the way you want people to experience it, you publish it the same way you would publish your house, including a screenshot that gets included as a thumbnail. Once published, players can browse through dungeons the same way they would browse houses.
When they select a dungeon, then they go in in Adventure Mode and they have to pick the Avatar character that they want to play, then play through it as if it were a regular dungeon that we would have created.
Brasse: What sort of rewards are there? What’s in it for the players?
Lyndro: There are quite a few different rewards. For playing the dungeon, you get Tokens, which you can use to buy rewards. We go from simple consumable items like potions, to really nice Legendary and Fabled items. We’ve actually introduced the concept of glass items which are top-tier or pretty near top-tier Fabled items that you buy from the Dungeon Maker but they’re “glass”, so you can never repair them and they degrade over time. So you’ll get some really great stuff but you’ll have to keep going back. A consumable weapon basically.
Brasse: One of the things that the house decorating crowd is really going to ask first off is — Can you give us an example of what the item limit is? Do you have a separate limit to the number of items and number of creatures or are they both counted towards the same limit? Have you come up with the limits yet?
Rothgar: Those numbers are still sort of up in the air. We do have the ability to put an item limit on the dungeon, mainly for performance reasons. We don’t want people to fill their dungeon up…
Brasse: and make it lag city.
(Rothgar gets an off-camera cue telling him his mic isn’t working.)
Robin (off camera): I think its battery is dead.
Brasse: It’s cause I’m loud. Robin says I’m loud.
(Rothgar borrows Brasse’s mic.)
Rothgar: You do have item limits that we can place on there, but those numbers will be tweaked as we see how this works out.
We haven’t really explained the Challenge Rating yet, but basically once you place creatures and objects in [a dungeon], they have a point value. That point value is based on how powerful they are. Boss mobs will cost* more points than your run of the mill goblins. Objects that have really powerful buffs on them will cost* a little bit more. Those add to your Challenge Rating which is an overall measurement of how difficult the dungeon is to complete. Right now we don’t have a limit on that Challenge Rating. You could fill up a dungeon, or leave it sparse. We’re leaving it up to the player to rate that dungeon. It’s something we’ll look at and can tweak later on if we feel we need to clamp it down for performance reasons.
Brasse: Will there be a limit on the number of dungeons one player can own? Or can I be a Dungeon Master and have a thousand dungeons?
Rothgar: Right now we have a limit of 20 dungeons. You’ll be able to create up to 20 but you do have a Publish limit. You’ll start with a base Publish Limit of 1. You’ll earn the ability to publish more dungeons as you unlock more Templates. There are also other ways you’ll be able to earn the ability to publish more dungeons. [The] Design [team] will have to work out those rewards. You’ll be able to create more than you can publish, which gives you that sandbox ability to play with different styles, but we’ll limit the number you can publish so you only put the best ones out there.
Brasse: In terms of the creatures and the items, where do players get these from to stock their dungeons with? I assume the dungeon purchase itself is a StationCash item?
Lyndro: They’ll come from all over. There’ll be dungeons that are StationCash, there’ll be dungeons that drop in the world, maybe you’ll go into Crushbone and there’ll be a map on the floor (I haven’t done this). There might be a map on the floor and you click it and now you’ve got access to another Crushbone map. Some creatures will be StationCash, some creatures will be purchased through the world, some creatures will be purchased through the Dungeon Maker system, some will be dropped. Basically however you can get an item in the game, we can give you a Dungeon Maker item.
Rothgar: You will start with base amounts of all of it. On day one, you’ll have a certain number of Layouts you can play with, a certain number of Creatures, a certain number of Objects. You’ll be able to get in and see if you like the system, and then there will be ways you can go out and unlock more stuff.
Lyndro: The way the objects in Dungeon Maker work is almost anything you can place in your House you can place in a Dungeon. But then there are also a new category of items which are virtual items. If you get a torch, you can place 50 torches without needing to have 50 of them in your inventory. But [virtual items] will only be placeable in dungeons. Most of the initial items you get are going to be virtual items.
Brasse: Is it in Beta yet?
Rothgar: It should be going to Beta tomorrow.
Brasse: (joking) Can I get into Beta now? I’ll make time on the weekends to play it!
(Rothgar heads behind camera to narrate the screenshots of the Dungeon Maker system).
[time index: 10:30]
This is the new Character window with the Dungeons tab shown. This example shows 4 dungeons. This will show not only all of your dungeons but any dungeon you have Trustee access to. You can help friends build dungeons.
Once you click on Create… you get the Create Dungeon screen. This is a work-in-progress and there will be some tweaks to this. You see all the Templates that are available to you on the left, and when you select one of those templates, you’ll see a top-down map. By the way, that’s a sample image — the actual image will look a lot better. But this will show a top-down view of the map that is the Layout of that particular Template, so you can see what the actual room placement is like. You name your dungeon here and then hit the Create button. It will then add that dungeon to your character.
Here we’ve zoned into the dungeon in Edit Mode. The window you’re looking at on the left is the Dungeon Maker Toolbox. This is the main user interface while you’re building the dungeon. The list of items is currently called the Toolbox. It shows all the items that you can place. It shows all virtual items — those items will be in white. The virtual items, you can pretty much put as many as you want into your dungeon without having to have them in your inventory. Some of them will have item limits maybe a max of 4 or 1 in the case of a boss mob.
The list is broken up into Spawners, Objects, and then House Items which are items that you are actually carrying in your Inventory. The cool thing about this window is, since it shows your inventory items, you won’t have to open your bags if you want to place chairs and tables that your carpenter has made for you. They’ll show up right in this list.
This next shot shows a campfire we’ve placed along with a couple of gnolls around it.
[time index: 13:00]
Ok here we’re looking at a Properties window. Note that it’s been changed a bit since this screenshot was taken, the Toolbox is now a single integrated window instead of a separate Properties floating window. This Properties window simply tells you a little bit about the Item you have selected. If you click an item in the Toolbox window, you’ll get a description about what it does before you place it. If you click on an actual item in the world, including an NPC, then you’ll see what that NPC does. You’ll also see a list of buffs that are on it. That’s important for determining whether or not the NPC is getting the benefit from the Objects (buffs) you’ve placed in that room.
You’ll be able to see how the NPCs interact with these objects by looking at those buffs. When it comes to setting up NPCs, you’ll also be able to set their pathing behavior. You can set it as a Static mob that just stands there, or you can set it to Wander around the room that its in randomly, or you can say you want it to be a Patroller, at which point you’ll place a Banner placeholder and he’ll walk between his home position and the banner’s position.
Now we’re looking at the Placed tab in the Toolbox window. When you switch to the Placed tab, it’ll show you a list of all the items that are currently placed in the dungeon, so it gives you quick access to everything you’ve already put down. You can pick the item up directly if you don’t want it there, or you can click the Go To button which teleports you straight to that object so you can go straight to certain rooms if you want to edit them.
This new Radial Menu is a new widget that we put into the game that allows you to more quickly edit your House Items that are placed. The icon on top is a Rotate icon. If you click it, then as you move your mouse, the item will rotate only, it won’t move around like you’re used to, it will just rotate. This gives you more fine control over items. You have the ability to Resize items, Scale items, Float them up or down. The 4 arrows is Free Move Mode which allows you to move items around like you normally do. The chest is a Pick Up icon. So from this menu, you can quickly tweak your items and we think that’s going to be really cool.
EQ2Wire Note: Look for discussion of Pitch/Roll in the Question & Answer session….
When you click on an NPC, again you see the Radial Menu that’s popped up. In the case of NPCs, the float up and down and the scale icons are disabled. We don’t allow you to do that right now with NPCs although that’s something we could look at changing in the future.
[time index 16:04]
This is showing the buffs on an NPC. You can mouseover those buffs to see what they do. A big part of the Dungeon Maker is exploring the interaction between objects. Something we didn’t really touch on yet is that the objects can also combo off one another. When you place multiple objects, they might combine and provide a more powerful ability or a different ability. Part of the fun is experimenting with all that and seeing what you can make out of it.
On the right is an updated screenshot that shows the Properties window actually part of the Toolbox. This is actually how it’s going to look when it goes to Beta tomorrow. The Test Dungeon Spawner has been selected and you can see the pathing buttons at the bottom and what buffs are currently on them.
This is the Publish Your Dungeon window. Pretty self explanatory. Ok the Take a Screenshot window. If you’ve published a house you’re probably already familiar with this. It’s basically the same thing — it lets you take a screenshot of your dungeon and publish it.
Once the dungeon is published, now people can come in and play. When they enter the dungeon for the first time, they are basically “locked” into place until they select an Avatar. Above to the left, you can see the list of avatars that you have unlocked.
- Drolvarg Scourge Knight
- Drachnid Widowmage
- Tidesylph Defouler
- Terrok Assassin
To the right, you can see the Group window that shows what Avatars everyone else in your group has selected. So you can discuss what avatars each of you want to play. Once everyone has chosen their avatars and clicked Ready, then you’ll all “unlock” and be able to start the dungeon at the same time. While you’re clicking through those avatars, it’ll actually change your appearance so you can see what they look like. We’ve added a Description pane below that will tell you about their special abilities of those avatars as you flip through them.
(Rothgar concludes narration of screenshots)
Brasse: Well that was tremendous. I know this is coming in pretty hot. You guys have been working super hard on this over the last few weeks. So now all of you people who have ever complained about how badly the designers make dungeons in EQ2, now you can show them exactly how the pacing should be done, where the mobs should be, and so on, cause we all know you’re the experts.
Brasse: Ok now we want to move directly to questions, actually I have a half dozen questions myself but I can always go to Building 3 and ask them.
Rothgar: Well ask them now!
Brasse: Nah nah we’ll go straight to the player questions cause we have 18 of them.
Josh D: Will the names and encounters be editable or just cut and paste? For instance will we be able to change timers, adds, the effects, etc.?
Rothgar: So there are definitely going to be some limits. You won’t be able to change the names of the mobs. Times don’t really apply cause there’s no respawn. When you’ve killed a creature in the dungeon, it’s dead. You’re wiping the dungeon out, and you’re earning points as you do so. When you leave, whatever destruction you’ve done translates into what you earn for that dungeon. (after a question from Brasse)
There’s no penalty for death and there’s no penalty for time. We didn’t want to make this a “rush” where you’re encouraged to run through the dungeon as fast as you can and skip to the end. We want people to explore. People are going to spend hours and hours making these dungeons look great, so we want you to go into every room and see what they’ve done. It’s up to you how you want to run them, but you can take as much time as you want to explore the dungeon. You won’t have a lot of control, you won’t have control over the names of the mobs or respawns, you’re basically choosing from the list.
EQ2Wire Note: Pretty sure he was talking about timers on AoEs and other nasty effects, not respawns.
Mike H: I’ve been told that you can’t take your characters into a player-created dungeon. Instead you take an Avatar like a Maj’dul Arena pet. Is this true? If so, what is that?
Lyndro: It’s true. The biggest reason is, there are so many different definitions of character power. A level 10 character with no AAs is very different from a level 10 character with 5 or 10 AAs, a level 50 character is very different. All these different tiers of power would have been very difficult for us to create a system that was balanced and fun given all these different things your character can be. What the Avatars allow us to do is tweak things to get the biggest bang-for-the-buck as far as fun and power.
Brasse: And incidentally avoiding the age old “Balance” argument.
Rothgar: We could scale it by level, but obviously level is really just a small factor to player power. We’re looking at options… We know that players have expressed an interest and want to play as their own characters. We have some ideas and we’re looking into those. That might be something we look at adding in the future. We’re definitely listening to that feedback and keeping it mind.
We really did want the dungeons to be an equal challenge level to everybody that came in. We didn’t want some people saying “oh that dungeon was super hard” and the next guy saying “oh that was cake, what are you talking about?” By doing it this way, and scaling everything to that level 50 range, and having you come in as avatars, we think it’ll come down to skill. How well have you learned to play those avatars and use your abilities together and then everyone will be talking about these dungeons on the same playing field. We hear that people want that (playing your own character) and that’s something we’ll look at doing in the future.
David S.: Will there be quested layouts and items? Will layouts only be attainable through raiding? Or will they be available to groups and the solo crowd? How will players get to the dungeons we create? Can anyone get to them like player housing so long as the access level is set?
Brasse: First, that’s cheating. That’s like 12 questions in one!
Lyndro: At least at the outset, there probably won’t be any layouts available through raiding. Most of them will be available for solo or group players. Some stuff will be tradeable so you can get it off the broker. Some of them on the marketplace. We may even make some stuff tradeskilled eventually. Really, any way that we can give you an item, we can give you any aspect of Dungeon Maker. We can give you Dungeon Maps, we can give you creatures (Spawners), we can give you Avatars. It could be quest rewards.
Rothgar: As for access, the dungeons don’t have a physical location in the world. You create dungeons by accessing your Character window. You enter Published dungeons via a Dungeon window which works just like the House Rating window but only shows Dungeons. You can browse dungeons sorted by Category, by Ratings to choose which one you want to enter. When you group with somebody else, if they attempt to go into the same dungeon you’re already in, they’ll get pulled into the same instance with you. So you just have to discuss with your friends which one you want to run. You could say let’s go run Akil’s Dungeon, it’s got a good rating. Everyone would click Enter on that one and everyone in the group would get pulled into the same one.
Janna W: Will these dungeons be voted on with Star Ratings like the recently introduced Player Housing Leaderboards?
Rothgar: It will be just like that, for now. We’ve been listening to feedback on the forums about the rating system and we know that the Star Rating system is not everyone’s favorite. We’re looking at maybe making some changes to that in the future. But for now it’s going to launch using the same system of stars where you can rate it in two different categories. We’re probably going to look at making some tweaks to that in the future to make it a little more user-friendly for the decorators and the dungeon builders out there.
Debbie H: Will we be able to design dungeons and declare their level? Will people be able to use the player-made dungeons to gain experience?
Lyndro: The level on them is set at the outset, so everything is level 50. We had to pick a level and 50 is as good as anything.
Rothgar: The way experience (in player-made dungeons) works is, you can earn experience for your character. Even though you are playing an avatar, you can earn experience towards the character you’re logged in as. Experience is deferred until you complete the dungeon. You’ll see an experience message as you’re running the dungeon, and then when you successfully complete it, you’ll be awarded Tokens, and you’ll be awarded Experience that’s scaled to your player level. So it will be a method for your to level up your main character.
(question about Dungeon level and scaling to the Designer or Player)
Rothgar: All of the Avatars you can discover out in the world are level 50, and all of the Dungeon Maker dungeons are level 50. When you zone in, you become a level 50 Orc or whatever.
So talking about Scaling, we’re not scaling the dungeons in terms of level, but we are scaling their difficulty based on the number of people that enter. These dungeons could be soloed or played all the way up to a group of six. The tiers of the mobs all change dynamically as people enter and exit the dungeons. So you can actually have someone come in later and everything that’s remaining gets a little bit harder. The levels will still be the same but everything will be tiered up. If somebody were to go linkdead or leave, the difficulty level should adjust down to the people who are remaining. The goal is to have a challenge for any number of people. We want this to be solo play, duo play, all the way up to groups of six.
Brasse: So I’m looking at the clock and it says we have 2 minutes left. How are you guys for time, can we ask some more questions?
Rothgar: We can go all day if you want.
Lyndro: Maybe not all day…
Ron P: Will the builders be able to set lockout timers? Will there be a need for them? Will SOE control them?
Lyndro: There’s no need for lockout timers since the amount of points you get is based on the amount of stuff you kill. We don’t really feel there’s a need for a lockout timer. You can go back through the same dungeon, you can go on to the next dungeon. It’s all based on what you kill. It’s based on how long you spend to go through the dungeon.
Tommy M: Will we be able to design (not the textures) the actual walls, floors, and ceilings with the Dungeon Maker ourselves, or will we get prebuilt dungeons that we merely fill with various furniture and enemies?
Rothgar: Currently, we’ve decided to go with sort of a prebuilt system. We are giving you as many different permutations of these themes as we can. We don’t want players to immediately know when they zone in “oh, we’re in Dungeon 1, if you go down this hall, make a right there’s going to be a room there”. There are several permutations of the same dungeon. In addition to that, players that build the dungeons can customize the Entrance and Exit points. That gives you some control over where they come in and where they have to go.
We hope that’s enough variability to the dungeon that it will seem exciting to you, but avoids the difficulties that would be involved with lining up art assets and making sure you don’t have holes in your floors and making sure people aren’t falling through the world. We felt that was going to add a layer of complexity. We really wanted this feature to be usable by the vast majority of the decorators and people who really weren’t interested in that sort of art side of things.
Brasse: Not to mention people like myself who would put holes in the floor to fall in and get stuck just cause I find that amusing.
Rothgar: We’ll have to add pits to the dungeons.
Marshall A: What kind of gear will we be able to buy with Tokens from Dungeon Maker?
Brasse: You already mentioned the “glass” gear. What else can you get?
Lyndro: There are going to be expendable items…lots of Legendary items, Fabled items. We’re talking about, (to Brasse:) I heard you talking to the FreeRealms guys about this, the ability to put in some Gift Boxes. The Gift Boxes will give you a chance to earn some permanent Fabled items. We haven’t fully decided how that’s going to work yet. Odds are pretty good that will make it in for launch.
Tommy M: How is Dungeon Maker different from the development tools you have now?
Lyndro: It’s completely different. It doesn’t look anything like it. It uses the Housing system. The tools we use don’t look anything at all like Dungeon Maker.
Rothgar: You probably won’t find them very intuitive.
Brasse: I’ve seen them. It looks like Greek. It’s just crazy stuff.
Claire B: Can you create Solo dungeons as opposed to Group?
Brasse: We talked about this before. Whenever you enter a dungeon solo, everything scales to solo?
Rothgar: It’ll scale down a tier. We’ll have to adjust things when they go to Beta as some of our first playtests are showing that at Solo right now it’s a bit challenging, but we can make adjustments to those.
Brasse (to the camera): Robin’s holding up a sign that says “Questions From the Audience”. Do we look like we have time? (picks up stack of submitted questions and waves them around).
Robin: We really need to address this.
Brasse: Ok ok. This better be good.
Robin: Can we add Qho to these?
Rothgar: Oh gosh. (together with Brasse) As a killable mob?
Robin: Yes. That’s what they’re asking. They’re dying. They’re spamming the channel.
(giggles)
Lyndro: No promises. I’ll look into it. Maybe.
Robin (reading from chat): Down with Qho. Let us kill Qho. Haha! I’ll do anything! Death to Qho!
Brasse: You know, it’s a bloodthirsty bunch out there!
Rothgar: Yeah. Nathan Ironforge is really happy that everyone hates Qho now.
Lyndro: Maybe I should put Nathan Ironforge in as an Avatar.
Robin: Oh now they’re talking about Nathan Ironforge.
Brasse: Alright, are we done with the whole child killer concept? I’m really worried about the mentality of our players now.
Robin (from chat): I’ll pay you 10,000 StationCash!
(chuckles)
Rothgar: Get their name.
Susan G.: Will the player-created dungeons be levelless?
Brasse:I think we have confirmed now that it doesn’t matter what level… Is there a minimum level for entering? Could you be a level 5 player and enter these dungeons?
Rothgar: Yeah, there’s no limit.
Brasse: That’s kinda cool cause it gives them kind of a taste of what it’s going to be like at level 50.
Rothgar: Maybe a little bit. Keep in mind that you’re playing an Avatar and each of the Avatars have their own custom abilities. I don’t know how much it will pertain to their character at level 50. We want everyone to be able to play regardless of level so you can play with your friends even if you’re not anywhere near each other.
Cyliena: I know you’ll have to own Age of Discovery to make a Dungeon. Will players also need the expansion to play in the Dungeon Maker dungeons?
Rothgar: You won’t have to own the expansion to actually play in (player-made) Dungeons, but you will to create them.
Brasse: Wow, that’s really generous of you guys.
Lyndro: And to spend tokens, you’ll need to own the expansion.
Cyliena: Any chance of us being able to make our own quests, or something akin to it, or at least set up narratives and dialogue that can give our own Lore of the dungeon?
(silence)
Lyndro: Uh, not right now…
Brasse: They hadn’t even thought of it!
Lyndro: I was thinking if there was any way to do it. I guess you could write books and place them in your dungeons.
Rothgar: That question has come up. I know I’ve talked to a couple of people about that. Since we allow you to place any house item in there, you can place the new customizable signs that we have, or the user-placeable books, so you’ll be able to drop some hints around. You’ll be able to tell stories if you want, but it won’t be in the form of a quest.
Brasse: That’s actually interesting because some of the quest series that we have now are based on finding books and reading through them and figuring things out. By the way, I’m just stoking up on knowledge here so I can build my own uber dungeon. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it.
Slizz (Crushbone): Will players eventually be able to incorporate their own scripts to handle how dungeon entities react?
Lyndro: So… Perhaps eventually, and let me put a caveat on that… So, Greg (Rothgar) was talking earlier about the Buff items you can place in the dungeon. In the initial pass, the Buff items will just be Buffs, but as we develop the system more in the coming months, there’s definitely a possibility that we can do things like: You place a buff item down, and if you place it next to the boss, he memwipes every 10 seeconds, or he’ll spawn an add. The potential with the system is there. We can expand it and give you some more tools to play with.
Rothgar: It won’t be through scripting. We don’t want you to have to have to learn a scripting language or have to open up Notepad and start writing. We want this to be fun and visual, so it’ll be through the Object system.
Brasse: So for those of you who really want to do scripting and programming, apply for a job working with these guys. Although you guys might be out of a job soon enough! With this [Dungeon Maker] tool you’re putting in here.
Slizz (Crushbone): Will the dungeon creators have any control over what items drop as loot or will it be random based on difficulty and challenge of the dungeon?
Lyndro: There’s no loot dropping in there, just the tokens.
(question about House Rating system)
Marila from Antonia Bayle: Can the new tools from Dungeon Maker be used for Housing and decorating?
Brasse: Right now if we want to rotate something 90 degrees or more, we have to edit the house layout file. It would be much easier if we could use in-game tools to do this.
Rothgar: That was the goal of that new Radial Menu, to also improve the Housing system, so it will go in. We know that not everybody’s going to want every item, when you click on it, to pop that Radial menu so we’ve introduced a new concept when you’re in a house of being in Edit Mode. When you put yourself in Edit Mode, house items become targetable. That means they’ll blink when they’re under your cursor and when you click them they’ll target.
This will help you if you have a table and bunch of little items sitting on the table, it’ll be easier to know what you’re clicking on cause it’ll be blinking. When you select it, that Radial menu will pop up so that you can rotate the table without moving it in its X-Y or X-Z position. This will work in a house when you’re in Edit Mode. When you get out of Edit Mode, everything will have normal behavior where you can double-click to use items. You’ll still be able to right-click and choose Move like you can now, so that people who don’t want things changed can keep things the way they are. We think this will help when you’re building large layouts and you want to move stuff around.
Robin (audience question): Are you going to add Pitch and Roll to Edit House mode?
Rothgar: Right now, we haven’t added that to the Radial menu, but I’ve seen a question about that on the forums already, so we know that that’s something that you guys want to see. We have no problems with adding it because we know it’s something you can do right now with third-party tools for tweaking your layouts. We have no issues with that, it’s just something that we need to work into the schedule.
Robin (audience question): Are you going to have volumetric triggers that you can place in the zones so that if players get near a torch, gnolls will rush them?
Lyndro: We don’t have anything like that going in at launch, no. The system supports stuff like that, sort of. It’s all stuff that we can look into as we expand the system and develop the system further.
Brasse: So we’re done with player questions but I actually have a question myself.
Rothgar: Time for us to go, Akil!
Brasse: Yeah yeah. I’ve locked the door by the way, and I have people leaning up against the outside of it too.
Brasse: I have a question about the Avatars we’re going to be able to choose from. How many are there? Is there one for every class?
Lyndro: There’s more than that. I don’t remember the exact number, but there are quite a few. More than 1, less than 50.
Brasse: Are they all available for you to choose from?
Lyndro: You have to earn them. There will be some available right from the get-go. Some of them you’ll buy from playing Dungeon Maker with your tokens, some from StationCash, some will drop from bosses around the world.
Brasse: Is there any dead sexy bearded female dwarven mystic in the group?
Lyndro: You’ll have to play and find out.
Rothgar: You’ll have to buy AoD to find out.
(goodbyes)
Thanks for the transcript. Not interested in the feature, but it’s always nice to be able to read instead of watch video to get info. 🙂
Hm… interesting to see that the avatars are ‘monster’ races. If there’s a gnoll avatar, I may spend some time on this feature after all.
“We’ve actually introduced the concept of glass items which are top-tier or pretty near top-tier Fabled items that you buy from the Dungeon Maker but they’re “glass”, so you can never repair them and they degrade over time. So you’ll get some really great stuff but you’ll have to keep going back. A consumable weapon basically.”
How long until glass mythical weapons reach the SC Market?
“Lyndro: You’ll have to play and find out.”
“Rothgar: You’ll have to buy AoD to find out.”
This made me roll my eyes so very, very hard. Keeping your eyes on the ball there, champ.
The dungeon designer isn’t a bad concept really. To bad they are restraining the crap out of it just like they’ve done with their UI system. If it would of been a full on map builder with scripting for advanced users and drag and drop for novice users, then this could of had great possibilities.
I certainly got the impression after seeing the 2 images posted at Fan Faire that we’d be, you know, DESIGNING the dungeon. Instead it’s decorating the dungeon.
As for the Avatars, here’s what I said at Fan Faire:
If the Avatars are just boring classes with a half dozen spells, people are going to miss playing their own character and won’t want to play them, no matter how good the dungeons are. It will be like the torturous solo shard quest from The Shadow Odyssey or Sentinel’s Fate where we have to “possess” a creature which has just a few spells.
The one upside I see is, duo/trio will be able to get good gear, but it’s gonna be this “glass” stuff. Foiled again!
Thanks for the transcript Feldon!
Also perhaps worth noting–legendary/fabled gear that will break in a couple of days? I don’t expect silver players will be jumping at the chance to pay to unlock those, so in practice only subscribers will really benefit from them.
This means that some of the ‘draw’ for this feature is missing for non-subscribers, which means fewer people using it, which means more trouble finding a group for it if you want one… Part of me says this sort of design incongruity is part of the formula that causes features to be deserted shortly after their introduction.
(Now, on the flip side, if they pre-unlocked that gear for free since it’s temporary anyway, the appeal for non-subscribers would be quite high indeed…)
Not having to buy AoD to run the dungeons will probably get more people in there, but probably not in the long run since you can’t use the rewards without buying.
The example scripting things he can think of is mem-wiping, and the mob spawning a add… how uninspired. If that’s the advanced stuff that won’t even make it into the game till later then I worry that the feature will become very boring with mobs that barely do anything special.
Unless the avatars are awesome like Feldon said, the only reason I see people using this feature is for the rewards.
Meh. Something else to do, I guess.
I hope they launch with a few professionally made examples, and that they keep them coming, too. I would hate to rely on 100% player-made here.
Thanks for the transcribing. Brasse’s larping & voice acting wants me to punch something in the face.
They should have called it a Dungeon Decorator feature and not a Dungeon Builder, because to me, building implies infrastructure. It sounds like you will get a dozen Crushbone maps with rooms moved around, and a bunch of stationary mobs you have to defeat by puzzling out buffs to use. I can see this getting very boring very quickly and trying to nickel and dime the hardcore decorators with SC Avatars and Spawners. No doubt will dangle a ton of garbage achievements like they did for their “video feature” to try to get players to run these. If there are no quests involved, items to choose from can be to build your own dungeons, and useful items are glass, I am not sure why I would ever step foot into one.
I’m really starting to think that SOE and EQ2 will go down in history as the greatest troll ever to exist on the Internet.
This is for sure the biggest USELESS feature I’ve seen in this game.
Wasting time to develop such a poorly designed feature is a shame.
I for sure won’t be using it and I hate copied and pasted dungeons.
This is exactly what’s going to happen, with already well known zones player will just be able to decorate, not even sure if it’ll be possible to script …
I’ve seen more than 10 players in my Guild, leaving the game after AoD announcement and after being bored with DoV and his too short content.
There are many things to bring to this game, but not this.
@Melanore My guild has lost several members due to the F2P and AoD announcement. While, the argument could be countered that F2P will bring in so many potential new recruits, it hurts us when we loose some of the best veteran raiders in our guild. At this point we are taking players whom are not as skilled or geared as we would like, just to keep our raid force afloat.
Over-hyped and under-delivered.
You’d think with the imminent releases of SWTOR and GW2 the guys over in the EQ2 team would be digging in and pumping out the best they can to not only keep their current sub base but increase it. All they are doing is driving their customers away in disgust and disappointment and tarnishing an already sullied reputation.
Hmm, maybe this is the best the current team can scrape together.
@Mel
I’ve seen more than 10 players in my Guild, leaving the game after AoD announcement and after being bored with DoV and his too short content.
DOV has a lot of content yet to come, if they left due to short content I doubt you guys raid much , Aside From Npu and Equi, hardly any guilds touch End game content Sufficiently to say short content 🙂
The Avatars that you can use in the Dungeons. Will the player be able to choose avatars they have collected? Or will they have to choose avatars that the Dungeons designer have / allow.
Would be cool to have a Rare or powerful avatar to impress and awe 🙂
Also since the DYOD is level 50 and you get Xp for killing the mobs and completing the dungeons. Will this be some super-fast way of levelling a character up to level 50?
@Panther
It says right in the transcript “you’ll be awarded Experience that’s scaled to your player level.”
So if you are on your level 5 and take an avatar into a DYOD and kill 15 solo mobs, when you leave your level 5 will get the experience as if they killed 15 level 5 solo mobs.
This seems to be an iteration of an EQ feature that I can’t remember all that clearly — where you went in a dungeon and played an in-game character — people played the heck out of it for a while and then everyone quit doing it. Someone help me out to remember what this was — remember, you could play the dragon in one scenario? It’s late and I have just cleaned all day and made a bunch of thanksgiving food and I am tired, otherwise I would recall what I am talking about!
Anyway, that was kind of fun to play an avatar in that feature. I remember running the goblin one a bunch of times…but can’t remember what it was called… =(
This DYOD doesn’t seem all that fun to me, but I hope to be pleasantly surprised. I won’t build one, but I might try one.
Monster Missions KWILL