Random Dungeons

Computers are rather good at creating random "dungeons" or whatever the mission areas in your game are called. They consist of hand-designed tiles, each having one or more connection points where you can move to the next tile. In its most basic form this was already used in some board games, where you had square tiles with each side possibly having a connection point. But in computer games the tiles can be three-dimensional, don't have to be square, and the computer still manages to put them together to some sort of connected area, using relatively simple algorithms.

The weak point of that concept is the number of different tiles. For example in City of Heroes, after reaching level 18 of 40 possible, I have only seen 7 different tile set. One very rare tile set, the lab, I only encountered twice. The other 6 were common, a cave, a sewer, an office building, an abandoned office building, a warehouse, and an abandoned warehouse. With the two abandoned buildings being quite similar to their parents, there is not much variety here. The office tile set seems to have quite a lot of different tiles, but the other sets have around a dozen or so. That is hard to count, as you don't see where one tile stops and the next one starts.

The problem here is, as usual, money. Designing tiles and tile sets by hand requires a number of programmers, designers, and graphics artists. The less tiles you can get away with, the cheaper it gets. But for the players this gets repetitive and boring pretty fast. After less than 1 month of CoH, I have already done between 100 and 200 missions. So I've seen the common tile sets 20 or more times already, and the sense of exploration when entering a new mission tends against zero. In comparison, the 2 mission in the lab tile set were a lot more exciting, just because the tile set was new to me.

Anarchy Online suffered from exactly the same problem. I don't remember exactly how many different tile sets they had, but it was the same order of magnitude as CoH. And I don't think that they added any tile sets since the start, although they added several expansion sets and new zones.

Games that don't have random dungeons, like Everquest, manage to provide changing content to their players by forcing them to move to different zones. You rise a level, the monsters in the jungle you are currently fighting are getting too low for you, you move to a zone where the mobs are of an appropriate level, and that turns out to be an icy wasteland. *Poof* Instant change of scenery. And maybe something similar is implemented in City of Heroes, I've seen the lab for the first time at level 16, so maybe new tile sets open up at higher levels.

But I sure hope that future patches and expansions add some more tile sets to City of Heroes. Because this is the first sign of weakness I can detect in this otherwise great game. Everquest did prove that a game can survive mediocre game play, as long as there is plenty of content. Lack of content, even with great game play like CoH, means that a game gets great reviews, and lots of players at the start, but they don't stay all that long. If players have the feeling that they have seen everything in a game, they are easily lured away by the next game to come out. Even if that game is not actually better than the game they are leaving, it is always offering new content.

But there is hope, NCSoft announced the feature list of their first major patch, and it includes random outdoor zones, which presumably work on the same tile system, just a little bit more open.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:23 PM Permanent Link