GW:EN Sneak Peak: Dungeon Reviews

In Guild Wars: Eye of the North, the designers have done away with the traditional mission structure. Instead, replacing it with a mix of repeatable, instanced storyline quests and mostly optional, underground areas to raid, called dungeons. While some have quests or reasons to exist in the overall plot, most are just there for players to crawl through, hunting for rewards and a memorable boss fight. I think it's an excellent change, one which allows for a lot more freedom on both sides of the player/creator divide.

Once the game is released there are going to be a promised 18 dungeons. Of the ones available during the preview, I saw five. Battledepths is home of the Dwarven Low King, an apparent hub the storyline will revolve around. Raven's Point contains another of the warp gates used to travel to the Far Shiverpeaks as well as the Shrine of the Raven and its associated blessing. Frostmaw's Burrows is the lair of the giant Wurm, Frostmaw. Darkrime Delves, the den of a fierce group of Jotun giant. And the Sepulchre of Dragimmar which houses the Anvil of the Great Dwarf and a tough fight past the Remnant of Antiquities to get to it.

When I ran the Raven, it was instanced. Part of the primary quest cycle, with a repeatable quest making it seem a lot like the missions of old. You had to fight your way to a shrine, gain the form that let you use the skills of the Raven, and then use that to travel further into the dungeon and shut down a monster spewing gate – it was a mission in everything but name. From Factions on, those places have been explorable even without the benefit of running a mission and although I didn't go back to check, I believe the same would hold true of the Raven dungeon as well. Battledepths, I only entered to turn in a quest reward to advance the primary plot. While it wasn't labeled as such on the map, it had all the hallmarks of every other dungeon – underground, mini-map on the world view, Dwarf rep bonuses instead of Norn. There was a master quest to defend the place that I passed on which would no doubt have led me further into its depth and transformed it into a full fledged dungeon the way some quests would transform outposts into missions in Nightfall. The other three were standalone dungeons, you'd be given a quest nearby to explore the various levels of the place, all of which led to a final boss encounter on the final floor. Dungeons being multi-leveled places, like a string of EAs, each connected by a portal. Traveling through is a one-way trip which doesn't remove DP but will remove all your buffs and blessings, as well as recharge your rezsigs. And although you'll carry your DP through the various levels, each dungeon offer the Dwarven title track blessing, which would give you a bonus for every 25th kill. With each bonus was a small morale boost, something like 8% each time, that along with the plentiful killed would allow you to wipe out some of the DP you'd accrue.

Those bosses weren't strictly “bosses” in the game's terms. Like the highend foes at the end of each campaign or a place like the Deeps, they lacked the auras and you couldn't cap from them. But defeating them would spawn a chest with some goodies inside, complete with a nifty graphic, transforming the icon on your map (And giving you some points towards a title track, too.). I was mostly underwhelmed with the rewards that sprung from my chest which were a handful of Diamonds instead of some nifty gold or green items. In the end, that's probably more valuable – I don't know what Diamonds, a crafting material, go for these days but I figure it's a k or two – because of the random nature of those weapons but given how hard they were to get, it was a letdown. The healthy rewards from the associated quests, though, more than made up for it. And the rewards are probably randomized, so trying again or with someone else might yield better results.

A more serious complaint is that although the dungeons showed up on my map with a special icon, I couldn't instant travel to them. Instead, whenever I wanted to visit one, I had to hike across a zone to get there. Which makes a bit of sense, but if I was going to make these dungeon raids a habit would get to be old, fast. A small lobby or some nearby stagging point – a vestibule at the first level of each dungeon, free from harm, like the lobby of a mission - where I could map to and then start my crawl would be much appreciated. That convenience is the biggest loss of doing away with the mission structure, I think.

I spent some time delving into the three optional dungeons, raiding them not only for treasure but to sample the experience. Since each was but a mere dungeon crawl leading up to a final boss, it makes it easy to compare them.

Of the three, the Frostmaw one was probably the best designed. Getting there was a bit too long but the fight at the end was a worthy one. You had to hunt down smaller worms, which were hidden in the ground and would pop up, slaughtering enough of them to cause the Worm to appear, surrounded by a pack of large, nasty worms to rain down pain on your party. It's surprising, it's novel, it's epic, and it really feels like it deserves to be at the end of a five level trip to get there. My criticism that the trip to get there was a bit too repetitive for my tastes. Other dungeons had puzzles or tricks to solve, giving you something else to do besides flood the place with corpses. But with Frostmaw, you had to go through four levels, killing the difficult monsters while dealing with the occasional pop-up from the dungeon's worm infestation. In a not exactly thrilling reversal, on the last floor you have to hunt down those pop-ups and then kill the difficult monsters. And although there's some variation in the layout and the monster types between levels, I feel like one or two floors could have been eliminated without losing anything from the experience – you enter the dungeon, get surprised by the worms, and slog your way to the bottom, and have that huge boss fight, you don't need to keep repeating the middle steps over and over. But, then, my preference in the design of such things is towards smaller, faster, and more convenient packages of experience. I like my dungeons, apparently, how I like my missions, able to be done within the space of an hour or so, when I have the free time. A prepared group who knew the way might well have made better time but I went in blind, clueless, and by myself. There should be a mix of large and small dungeons, though, to provide a variety of experiences to choose from. Some people will enjoy a crawl that will take up their entire evening, after all, that's just not for me. Frostmaw's at the upper limits of what I can comfortably tolerate and, even then, by the end I was getting bored with it and constantly hoping that the next fight would be the last one.

The Sepulchre was short and sweet, although I was stymied by the end boss. Getting there only takes going through one level but it's one you'll have to backtrack across as you try to find the levers to open different gates in the correct order, a bit of a cliché but it didn't feel too long or too forced, to me. Not that I was in a hurry to run through it again after failing, but that's a different story. Compared with the overly long Frostmaw, which the Sepulchre is probably only slightly less lengthy overall, it just felt right. And, like Frostmaw, it's a nicely designed boss battle. The Remnant of Antiquities is an Elementalist boss, one who packs a lot of water spells like Deep Freeze and Frozen Burst and Shatterstone. He also has a special ability which causes an environmental snare, and one that will create a ward-wide area of death every so often, dealing 140 damage and causing bleeding good for another 40. And he's located on a small island area, across a narrow bridge, perfectly designed for his snares and AoEs to cause the most problems. The difficulty, though, is pitched just a little too high for my tastes. It's a bit too hard for someone with a DPed pack straight off the AI short bus. Running out of the death wards that pop up and positioning to avoid clumping up are important against a boss like that. Henchies don't do positioning well (And I was too busy scrambling trying to keep everyone alive and micro-controlling their knockdowns to chain them together to bother with the flags. Wouldn't have helped with the non-Heroes, anyway.). But even if I was with a group that knew how to spread out to avoid the AoE, it would still have been tough. It's the environmental constraints, that channel you into that AoE kill zone in that small area and the suicide run across the bridge to get there (The range on the death wards is insane.). And the Remnants stats and level are really high, making him do immense amounts of damage and wipe out a party. I feel the damage knob just needs to be cranked down from a 9 - dude can one-hit even a fully morale boosted caster with 60AL if he lands both hits from a Shatterstone, meaning I was constantly scrambling for the hex removal or a RoF to throw up, and instant-death if you're DPed, forcing me to keep up PS on myself and the other Monk constantly – to an 8 or a 7, that's all. A full team headed into the party prepared to deal with him – carrying elemental defenses and a load of caster shutdown, say – are probably going to find him a walkover, though. It's a careful balancing act. However, the problem with a tough boss at the end like that is that players can get through all the easier bits leading up to him and then run into a brick wall. Which is exactly what I did. With no way of recovering my DP, I got weaker with every wipe. With that DP, the boss hits even harder and your team can't last long enough to deal damage to him before being finished off. With the boss regenerating away any damage, I had no choice but to just run from the nearby rezshrine to get right back into the fight and preserve the small sliver of his health I'd managed to chip off, hopefully to add to it, but mostly to prevent him from getting back to full health. Imagine doing that ten or fifteen times before realizing it's a fight you just can't win, because that's about what I did. It's a frustrating moment and one the designers need to work to avoid.

The worst dungeon of the three was probably the last one I tried, the Jotun one. The puzzle involved to get to the boss wasn't much interesting at all. You had to blow up some clearly marked walls, kill a boss, hunt down a few keys, and then you were on to the boss battle. The quest description was a bit misleading, as well. Heading to the boss's lair, it was all too easy and I was expecting something more. So when the quest log told me I need to “find a way to kill the (boss)”, I took it as a clue that there was some other objective I needed to fulfill before taking on the boss. That my foe would be invulnerable or something until I found the switch or the blessing or the MacGuffin elsewhere on the map. But, nope, there's nothing to the fight but walking in there and paving the ground with your enemy's blood, although you can spend a lot of time running around figuring that out. The Jotun boss itself, Havok Soulwail, is also pretty unmemorable. It's nothing but a high-level Jotun Warrior. No special abilities, no unique tricks. And considering how many Jotun you'll slay getting to that point, it's almost a letdown how easy that fight is. Especially if you can pull the roaming guards in that room away, which is exactly what I did. If the Remnant was too hard, then the Soulwail was too easy. I just expected more from a fight that took so much to get to. Again, it might have been that I was particularly well set-up to deal with that fight, though, since I'd come to loathe the Jotun and consider them the worst foe to encounter and build my team accordingly. And there should definitely be a scale of toughness for these dungeons, just as there should be a spectrum of lengths to suit individual tastes. There need to be introductory dungeons, ones that inexperience and tentative players can enjoy just as much as the hardcore will consider them beneath them while moving on to something bigger and better. This dungeon, though, fell on the weak side of that curve for me and could easily be made a bit better.

Overall, I was impressed by the various dungeons. Not only the design of the encounters, which is by and large well done, but the visual design itself is impressive. All of them are cold, underground caves, but each has its own distinct look and flavor. Along with its own unique pattern of monsters and threats to overcome. There's some commonality, some similarities, but you could be blindfolded and lead into a random dungeon and immediately tell which one it is.

My worry, though, is whether or not these dungeons are really worth it. The same problem happens with the missions, of course, because there's very little reason to rerun them once the plot is done. With dungeons you can always head back for another shot at the chest at the end. It seems a lot more likely to create ongoing opportunities for groups and players to play them through. But with so many dungeons available, I'm sure that eventually players will figure out which dungeons are the most lucrative – the right combination of length and difficulty balanced against the rewards which makes plowing through them again and again an efficient way to spend ones time. Which would leave a few dungeons as the place to be while the rest languish, unattended. Instead of a better situation where the players interested in the raiding are evenly distributed amongst the dungeons and it's a matter of personal preference.