Instanced dungeons seem to be in fashion these days: when you or your party enter, you are no longer playing with all the other players on the server; instead you get your own private copy of the dungeon for just you (or y’all). When you exit, then you’re back in the MMO world.
I first ran into this in FFXIV, and I found it rather immersion-breaking. If I just saw another player or party enter a dungeon, and I follow them in, I expect to find them inside, instead of finding a fresh dungeon full of unkilled monsters and no sign of the adventurers who just entered before me. Especially when playing solo, it creates this weird mix of sometimes it’s a multiplayer game, and sometimes it’s effectively a single-player game.
I think the rationale for instancing is to keep players/parties from interfering with each other. Back in my MUD days, there was no instancing, and yes, you could sometimes come upon a dungeon to find it had already been looted. In that case you’d need to go find something else to do, or wait until it reset. But this never felt like a problem to me; it just made the world feel persistent and active. And if two parties happen to be in the dungeon at the same time, they can meet up (often because the one to enter later doesn’t need to fight and so can stroll right up to the first party) and decide to join forces, or race to the end, or take a different path at the fork. Whatever, it’s up to them.
But I feel like if you ship an MMO these days without instancing, players are going to complain. Of course some players complain no matter what you do.
So. What do you think? What are the pros and cons of instancing vs. not?
I think in many cases, instancing is required, especially if you want your players to enjoy playing the game.
In SWTOR, all story “dungeons” are instanced. This keeps you from competing for the NPCs to talk to (who often end up dead after a conversation because they’re the bad guy), and also keeps you from having someone else wait until you’ve done all the hard work and then running up to the prize.
In WoW, all the important dungeons that I remember were instanced. If they had not been, I guarantee that people would have just had their party hang around until someone else cleared the way to the boss for them. Or would have pulled the bosses down on people who weren’t prepared yet. (Heck, I had random party members come in and do garbage like that.)
In the old days of Everquest, you had to camp out and wait your turn. No instancing. It was not immersion building, it was a soul-sucking waste of time. People value their time too much today for a game like that to survive outside of a niche audience of “hardcore” nostalgic types.
Honestly, most things people claim are “immersion-breaking” are things I would not want to play the game without. Instanced areas. Fast travel. Flight points. Shared bank space. The auction house.
Or claims like having a large world where you have to walk everywhere “builds immersion”.
I have a limited amount of time to play games. I want to be actually playing, not waiting for a monster to respawn or my character to finally slog their way to the interesting bits.
Benefits to instancing, players never come into a dungeon that has already been looted and finished…never find all the npcs and mobs already dead.
You are playing with your friends, no dudes breaking the immersion.
You can put more crap and NPCs in the dungeon.
Better performance in games with large populations
Benefits to not instancing, you find others inside the dungeon to help you, It feels more real.
Cons to not instancing Could end up with too many players in a dungeon at the same time.
Best way to do it is to set a population limit in the instance and that way, you will auto create an instance if there are too many. No one wants to play in a crowded dungeon and it is no fun if everything is already done.
As Socrates says…no one wants to wait around for a respawn.
Honestly, I think most players are now used to instancing and it is not so odd or different. I used to hate it, said no instancing in my game. But I have changed my mind and will use it where it works.
you can hide away the immersion breaking with some trick that sections off a party to a “dungeon”.
maybe like a cable car you go into with your party to supposedly reach the top of some mountain but it breaks off the cable.
you can have a stream of parties going on cars and breaking off (hidden after like a turn or something to make it look not flat out stupid) each in a random way to their own dungeons.
And WoW is 15 years old. This was back when you were on a PvP server unless you specially found the one PvE server where you’d be stuck (transfering from PvE to PvP was considered cheating – you leveled up w/o facing the gankers). This was when it could take 10 minutes to run back to your dead body to rez. That’s old. And they figured out the world was already a social area. The dungeons needed to be small group, and that made the game better. Today, a non-instanced dungeon is a Daily zone or a world boss.
I didn’t realize EverQuest had non-instanced dungeons. I think it was made so early on they couldn’t see the “fake” stuff that would make it a better game.
As a counter point, I find it rather immersion breaking when I enter the remote, dangerous dungeon and it’s full of other people. To make sense these places have to be really remote, highly dangerous or relatively secret, otherwise they wouldn’t have any loot or mystery left. We already lean heavily on suspension of disbelief (eg: being only 2 mintes walk from your house), but even that can’t solve arriving at the Long Lost Tomb of the Death God and fining it packed like a theme park.
I really like @SparrowsNest 's concept in principle. It’d be hard to get it working for a lot of the more common types of dungeons, but there are probably ways if you design it in early enough. Portals or airlock-type rooms spring to mind. You also don’t have to get other players down to 0, especially if you also account for that in the design and writing. Two groups of adventurers reaching the Death God’s tomb after some event drew attention to it does make sense. And honestly, accounting for the fact that there are very suddenly lots of adventurers would be a boon to many an MMO.
Its really nothing new, instanced dungeons have been around for at least over a decade. Some games will take the route of having both open world and instanced dungeons to try and appease both parties. However immersion breaking instances may be, there is also a need for them as many people don’t like waiting around for respawns.
Not instancing creates an opportunity to interfere with players already in the dungeon. Swoop in and steal the prize at the end of the dungeon, kill the players when they are at their weakest if it is a PVP game, etc. I personally like that, but I played Eve Online for years, so that’s probably why.
Non-instanced is like one popular quest area. From experience: 1) some high-level jerk will camp it. Even if no PvP, you won’t be able to kill the quest monsters. 2) some “helpful” player will kill the non-quest mobs, making the area far too easy, 3) you will line up by the boss, with 4 other people, attempting to tag it first on the respawn. Someone will offer to form a party but when you accept you’ll see it’s some rando across the continent. The good news is, when you finally do hit it first, it dies in 3 seconds from everyone else.
Rifts and the Warhammer one had some special made group areas. Everyone got a big reward for doing them, at each stage, plus for killing monsters. So they were basically “the more the merrier, no one can ruin it too much, and the guy who comes late doesn’t get too much for free”.
As far an non-instanced screw-jobs, that’s every boss monster. The top guild always kills anyone else trying to get near and downs it for the reward. You may have a shot at the 6AM spawn, maybe. And EVE? EVE is PvP everywhere. People who like that like how simple mining is exciting since you can be ganked at any minute. But most games are going away from PvP everywhere. ArcheAge has it, but it was created for extreme PvP where the PvE part didn’t even matter.