Laura's idea boiled down to "make tons of dungeons". While I agree that would be much better than instances, it's a problem of logistics and man-power. If they could churn out enough quality(that's the key word here, I think) dungeons to satisfy whatever the player base may be, then I would prefer it not be instanced. I just don't know if it can be done. It couldn't during original EQ and if this game is a success, I don't see how it wouldn't again be an issue.
Vanguard did it.
Something people always forget is that the original EQ was a really small team and small budget and indie style game. I can't remember the exact number but they expected it to have about 70,000 players. It ended up with something like 550,000 which is roughly 6 times more than they intended. So of course places like Lower Guk were busy, they probably had multiple times the number of people in than they were ever designed for.
Vanguard was a completely different story. They had a bigger budget (yet still not as big as most triple A - MMO's), and that game actually did have 100 dungeons or more. At almost any level range, there were at least a few good dungeons that you could go to. Some of them were not exactly massive, but many of them were as big and interesting as anything from EverQuest.... and they also tended to have a theme too. For example Riftseekers Torrent was all about portals, you had to overhear a phrase and repeat it in /say to get in. And then once inside you fought down different paths and teleported yourself to the next level. Khegor's End was just gigantic and had a bunch of different areas, one overrun by spiders, and then the royal area etc. The ant dungeon had crystals that drained your mana if you stood near them, so you had to plan your progress carefully and pull all the mobs up ahead to your current safe area, then run past all the crystals and repeat.
There are dungeons today that NEVER get used, because the game is just too big for the population. The average player is a fucking moron and they follow "the golden path" of least resistance. Entire regions of the world get no visitors and some of my favorite dungeons are in those regions. But at release, and in the open beta, Vanguard had a lot of players and you could see how the dungeons worked and it was great. There was no instancing at all, but it worked fine because the world was just so big, everyone was spread out. There were occasions when groups would be treading on each others toes in a dungeon, but that was never too much of a problem and if you cared enough to travel, you could go to areas where there was not a single other player in sight.
Personally I think Vanguard's solution was a bit too brute force for my liking. I think the perfect solution would be partly like that, but partly using instancing and some of the latest technology like Rift and GW2 uses. For example I remember fighting a huge raid type mob in GW2 and more and more people kept joining, eventually it was like 20 people fighting it. But the mob put a serious fight, we all kept dying all over the place and having to revive each other. We eventually won but it took ages and it was a really good, really challenging fight. Apparently encounters like that would scale to suit the number of people attacking. That way one key mob can serve any number of people. If just one group attack it, fine, or if 3 groups all happen to show up at the same time, that's fine too. That way, you don't even need instancing.
But I actually liked the "story" instances in that game. It was in fact the only thing I did like... But I loved being able to take a break from the usual adventure grind to go and do your personal quests sometimes. This is something I suggested on the EQ2 forum while it was being made, before most of us had even seen an instance.
I have to admit the past few years seeing people on a game's official forums bitching about having to level , having to get new gear , having to travel , etc etc , on a fucking mmo game made me want to rage at times. Why the fuck are you playing an mmo to begin with ?
I know
But to be fair... there really aren't many good alternatives. The Neverwinter Nights series died out unfortunately, games like Dark Messiah never caught on (even though it was fucking awesome), and nor did Two Worlds 1/2 which had a multiplayer component to it. I think a lot of MMO players would love a good action RPG like that but which at least lets them talk to people online. When you get used to multiplayer games, it can feel very weirdly solitary to go back a to completely single player game.
Games industry desperately needs to expand. Hopefully kickstarter will help it. Stuff like Star Citizen is the first step imo.
