Someone could also edit the wiki to mention the creator of the sprites for the 7/8 and 8/8 graves, the Avatar, several cloths, every enemy in the Shatters and the people who worked on the Tomb. Sues and Kiddforce completely designed and wrote the xml for the Hive and Sewers respectively, but you don’t see their names slapped all over the place. This is really not worth getting upset over.
Oryx's Paracosm: An Endgame Dungeon by Puffagod
Puffagod
#126
Just to clarify - I honestly don’t mind, I was just pointing it out! 
… in fact I’m somewhat glad of the publicity it has given the Paracosm, to be quite frank.
Gfdg
#128
Wait so this is an idea right? Is there any chance that deca will read this and possibly make changes and/or add this?
Puffagod
#129
What little chance there is will grow with community support - do like the original post if you enjoyed it! ;3
Puffagod
#131
All four dungeons are on reddit somewhere…
However due to the transient nature of reddit posts, I doubt that they garnered much attention. And in any case, I think the reddit community for RotMG is… different from this one, to say the least :3
Perhaps when the Paracosm gathers a bit more renown I shall attempt to make direct contact.
RMGnoob
#138
Since nobody else wants to play devil’s advocate, I guess I can go full nitpick without being redundant.
#Lore
-It’s never really clear what the Paracosm is. At some point you say this is the inside of Oryx’s mind, but there isn’t really anything indicative of that fact in the dungeon itself. It looks like it’s just another space Oryx either fabricated or twisted from its previous state, like everything else in the game.
There are ways you could push the “voyage inside Oryx’s mind” angle, for example have Oryx speak at the beginning/end of each map to represent his inner thoughts, or have the bosses’ final lines be a reference to a particular state of mind they could represent.
-Speaking of the bosses, they’re just… really bland. You have 3 human-like creatures who are stuck on “perpetually angry bitch” mode, a monster that talks in growls and howls, and a final boss fight where every single line is just stereotypical “final boss saying final boss-y stuff”.
It’s a huge waste to have this many diverse bosses with this many speaking lines and have them all say nothing.
-Still no idea if the Shepherd God is really conscious of the fact that he got trapped by Oryx or if he’s delusional and thinks he’s still protecting the three books.
If we are in Oryx’s mind, wouldn’t it be great if this was just a flashback of his final fight with his own father, replaying over and over in his head? and Vorv’s dialogue would be him desperately trying to reason with Oryx to stop him?
-It says in their descriptions that the three books of the Secrets were actually written by the three previous bosses, which makes no sense. How and why did they even wrote these? especially Khazul, a huge monster that doesn’t even talk? or the Erl-King, apparently a cross between a satyr and a god of nature?
-I can understand fighting something like a god of time or a god of death, but it’s really strange that we’d end up simply fighting the concepts of time, space and death. Killing a god or goddess could mean merely freeing the concept they had power over, but killing the concept itself means destroying reality itself. Doesn’t exactly strike me as the smartest of ideas.
-In the RotMG universe, is there even a reason to be fighting Death? As heroes of the nexus, we get reborn all the time anyway. Seems like getting rid of Death would only make the monsters immortal as well, which, again, sounds like a really bad idea.
-Then you have them summon the Face of the Universe and it’s… just a giant floating skull?
Even if you don’t want to go the easy route and make everything a lovecraftian horror for nerd street cred, there are still ways to make this boss less underwhelming.
For example, have it first spawn as some sort of giant head (kind of like the Star from Furi) then have its sprite slowly degrade as it goes through its phases, until it’s just a huge skull at the end. (kinda like the Mega Satan boss fight in TBOI:Rebirth or the true final boss in Cave Story).
-Another thing you could do with the final boss fight is make the final bosses get weirder and weirder as the fight goes on, have their sprites and animation become increasingly bugged (in appearance, at least) and their lines slowly turn into utter gibberish.
Then they’d finally disappear and a portal to “???” would appear, that would lead to a small map similar to a small peaceful meadow floating on an ocean of nothingness, where you’d meet a child version of Oryx (representing his repressed human side hidden in the recesses of his mind) that would spawn a loot chest for you containing (potentially) all the drops from the final boss fight.
Alternatively, just have Child Oryx spawn inside the final boss room and have some tiles under and near him turn into grass, similar to what happens when you kill Malphas or Limon. That way the game doesn’t need to store another map and you don’t need to go through a loading screen to get your loot (and potentially get stuck in infinite loading before being properly rewarded for finishing that fight).
RMGnoob
#139
#Monsters
-If you want to make an enemy hard to kill, putting a huge Def stat on it is not the right approach. All it does is incentivize playing with classes and/or items with huge base damage or Armor Pierce/Armor Break. Right now there’s no reason to run the Paracosm on anything except Dbows/ST Spell Wizards/melees (and maybe the occasional Priest, at least in the beginning).
Juggling Hp values, invulnerability phases, untouchable phases (like the Headless Horseman for example, when the enemy’s hitbox stops being active for a period of time) and orbitals (which you already have a plethora of), you can make enemies very difficult to kill in a way that feels dynamic and that allows every class to potentially shine.
-Another thing that fucks up dynamism and class balance is the amount of status immunities present here.
Making this many mobs Immune to Stasis means Mystic is either going to be completely useless or will be sitting in the back permaCursing everything. You’d think the most endgame dungeon of all time would be a prime opportunity for one of the most skill-based classes in the game to shine. (not to mention that Orange Drake Eggs still work on Stasis-Immune mobs, so if they really wanted to rush the Paracosm then all the melees would have to do is farm some buffed Liches).
Immunity to Stun also represents a huge wasted opportunity. If the Knights already know the boss is Immune, they won’t have much of an incentive to go deep, and thus will most likely play it safe and rely on their huge Def and something like Csword or A.S.S. , whereas making the enemy stunnable at least on occasions will encourage Knights to take risks and reward them for playing their class well.
Don’t just put blanket status immunities on an entire dungeon or boss fight. Have only some mobs in the dungeon immune to a status effect, and have the boss immune only on certain phases (or at least don’t make the orbitals/trash mobs he summons have permanent immunity, that defeats the entire purpose of Stasis to begin with).
-Why do you put Armor Break on huge projectiles with a ton of base damage? Armor Break isn’t supposed to kill you by itself, it’s supposed to put you in a position where anything else will tear you to shreds.
If you look at most projectiles that inflict Armor Break that are in the game right now, most of them are small and either restrict your movements (like in the 4 main LoD boss fights or Gulpord) or try to be sneaky and catch you off-guard (like Nut hiding her small black arrows in the midst of a fuckton of other projectiles or Bes’s Armor Breaks coming back boomerang-style).
Your Armor Breaks are too easy to notice and straightforward, meaning people can easily dodge them and tank everything else, which is the opposite of how Armor Breaks should work.
RMGnoob
#140
#Bosses
-Based on both this and the Beyond, it looks like the majority of your boss fights look extremely similar: have it kind of wander around at the beginning or even stand completely still, then become increasingly aggressive as time goes on and chasing people everywhere, and then often towards the end add huge desperation attacks that often cover the entire room with bullets.
If you’re going to put this many bosses in a single dungeon, you really need to make each one feel unique in its mechanics. If people feel like they’re fighting the same guy with different attacks 3 or 4 times in a row, they’ll get bored.
-Invisible projectiles still have no business being in this game. Contact damage was never part of RotMG and introducing right at the end is only going to make it feel incredibly cheap. This isn’t I Wanna Be The Guy fan-game number five quadrillion and one.
-Right now Khazul and Vorv are unbeatable. Giving them a huge AoE inflicting a very short Confuse is basically the same as giving them a built-in way to generate lagspikes: it’s impossible to dodge and it’s impossible to confusewalk through. If they can just randomly decide to make you run into every other projectile in the vicinity, surviving the fight becomes a matter of pure luck rather than skill.
-The Bridge of Woe by itself also makes the Vorv fight unbeatable, or at the very least completely uninteresting.
What makes co-op great in RotMG is the freedom to position yourself however you want. Forcing people to stick together leads to the same kind of situation as Shatters: no need for individual skill, just clump everyone together into a wrecking ball of DPS and throw it at anything that moves.
It also means playing fast classes is useless, since you’re likely going to have to stay close to players on classes that don’t break the 50-Speed limit. Again, you’d think the endgame dungeon to end all endgame dungeons would allow for skillful play on the part of some of the hardest classes to play correctly in the game, like Trickster for example.
Due to the delay between clients, keeping everyone together and moving everyone together is going to be an absolute nightmare, and that’s not even accounting for the possibility of the guy holding whichever of the 3 relics lagging, getting suddenly disconnected, having any other kind of problem or simply trolling.
Puffagod
#141
I shall preface this response with my view that very few people actually play Realm for its lore.
That being said, [quote=“RMGnoob, post:138, topic:3484”]
have Oryx speak at the beginning/end of each map to represent his inner thoughts
[/quote]
This is a cringe-fest waiting to happen, I haven’t the skill to render this in any meaningful way.
Good, speculation drives potency.
It would!
It is implied; ‘his/her passages’ can easily be a simple possesive. But point taken.
I wouldn’t personally call challenging a god ‘the smartest of ideas’ either - see the myth of Eurytus or Diomedes’ aristeia in Iliad book V. On another note, I always found it quite amusing how much the game downplays godhood… although I totally understand the logic behind it.
Is there a reason to be fighting rabbits? Is there a reason to be fighting Dr. Terrible, whose inventions supposedly give us the ability to fuse pets, and whose only true crime was creating Bella Donna? It would prove tremendous difficult to integrate ‘deep’ lore in what is a fundamentally crunchy light-hearted game.
The build-up corridor has this, with the intermissions and white noise. TIME has this, with the Zalgo text. But, the more the merrier, I suppose!
I actually like this rather a lot; I must say I did intend something similar when I began creating the dungeon, but eighty-seven pages later I wasn’t quite so keen.
I will vary them.
Because I don’t exactly want armour break flying around in such a projectile-dense environment, but still feel the potential for it needs to be present.
I actually think the Paracosm has some rather unique mechanics per boss.
- Erl-King with Xoana and debuff inflicting movement trails.
- Laidly Wyrm with liquids and a two-part boss, the latter part with rock-dragon mechanics.
- the Lord of Rot with shockwaves.
- the God Shepherd with the whole relics business.
- TIME, SPACE and DEATH functioning similar to the tomb bosses, but with infectious rage.
- The Face of the Universe whose shotgun spawns lava.
Manor bats are a decent introduction.
Understood, changes coming.
I think it would be rather fun.
I am loath to change the design of something because of unintended technological shortcomings or defects in the community. The Bridge will be difficult, and it will be different to the flow of the rest of the dungeon. That was the function I had in mind for it.
edit:
see: Pfiffelonomicon
RMGnoob
#142
#Items
-The Orb can either be very interesting or complete garbage, depending on the order in which its effects work.
If the Stasis has priority, then it could be useful. If the Teleport has priority, then the Stasis is already a lot less useful and this is just a reskinned Prism since there would be no difference in the way it is used.
-I have a sneaking suspicion no one would actually use the Skull and it’d only get put on Necros for the passive stats bonuses.
-I don’t like the idea of giving a healing ability to a ranged DPS class like Archer. Seems like it would reproduce the Jugg situation and create a character that’s too powerful both defensively and offensively. (especially when the Quiver has no cooldown).
-The Prism is too powerful. Being Invulnerable half the time while teleporting wherever you want? Unless you’re in a situation where a hail of Quiet shots are being fired everywhere, chances are you’ll be able to survive anything the game throws at you, whereas an Oreo Pally could still get fucked over by his own lack of Speed or a Slow or Paralyze.
-The Mask of the Bellico is useless compared to the other two. First of all it rewards you for getting hit rather than rewarding you for playing well and dodging stuff, second of all the effect is just 20% increased damage against mobs nearby.
#Final thought
I think the main problem is that you’re trying too hard to make big things. Always grouping several dungeon ideas together to make megadungeons, always trying to aim for the title of “Most Endgame Dungeon of all time”…
I’d say this is more of a shackle placed upon your creativity (which otherwise seems to have very few limitations by itself) rather than a catalyst for it. You’re trying to cram as much stuff into your ideas as possible instead of focusing on a few key concepts.
It also just… doesn’t fit the way RotMG works. Nobody is going to run a dungeon that takes 1 or 2 hours to complete, and if they tried they’d get stuck in loading between maps or disconnected before the end.
I think separating the dungeons while still keeping them somewhat linked (both by a narrative thread and by mechanics) would work much better in the context of RotMG.
You could have the first dungeon be accessible first, have it drop a way to open the second dungeon, then have the second dungeon’s bosses drop a way to access the third, and so on. Or have the 3 first dungeons all accessible separately, then have each of them drop a different crafting ingredient and have the key for the 4th and 5th parts require these 3 ingredients to be put together.
RMGnoob
#143
You’re making 5 dungeons strung together on the same narrative thread, with half a dozen extremely talkative bosses (and 3 that don’t really say anything).
It’s a bit late to try and downplay the lore-heaviness of it all.
Sounds weird coming from the guy who puts more speaking lines into his ideas than there are in the entire base game (and probably more than there are in most of the dungeons in the Ideas sub-forum combined).
Only when the speculation can be built upon foundations laid by the game’s narrative, not when you have a character that’s a huge glaring self-contradiction.
What’s the consequence for killing gods and goddesses in most video games? You become the ultimate badass and everyone inside the fictional universe respects or fears you.
What’s the consequence for destroying an important concept like Space or Time? Well, nobody knows because that never happens in video games, so the only perspective we could have on that would be a more “realistic” one, namely that it would fuck up our reality beyond repair.
Yes, because, again, they fit the basic template we have in our minds for what a video game opponent should be.
If you tell me to go fight Death, it’ll probably start some weird half-philosophical discussion (and mostly lead me to question how much sense it makes to make us fight Death in a game that’s entirely based on the idea of death being something you can never truly defeat, only learn to cope with).
If you tell me to fight Bellico, God of Death, I’ll just think it’s another RPG villain and won’t think twice about it.
But… why? If you look at situations like the Tomb boss fight or Oryx Castle, you have environments with a lot of projectiles being thrown at you constantly and small Armor Breaks hidden inside of them, and nobody has ever criticized those for being unfair because they’re still perfectly noticeable and can be dodged with some practice.
4 of them (5 if you also count the Bridge of Woe) rely on turning terrain tiles harmful to limit the player’s movement, which isn’t even original to this dungeon since it’s an idea that’s already being used in the Woodland Labyrinth boss fight, Deadwater Docks (both the dungeon and the boss), Shaitan and Pyrr’s boss fight in LoD.
Laidly Wyrm being in two parts with a different sprite and different attacks is just a more complex version of the Rock Dragon/Eye of the Dragon event fight or the Woodland Labyrinth boss fight.
The Erl-King is a mix of the Woodland Labyrinth boss fight, the Forbidden Jungle boss fight and the first Haunted Cemetery boss fight.
So no, I would argue these bosses, for the most part, aren’t unique in this game. However, that doesn’t necessarily make them bad or poorly designed: for example Khazul’s shockwaves make Trickster/Plane Rogue/Mystic with the new UT Orb from the Erl-King very interesting to play against him, and could be used as counterbalance against Stun (since it’s a change of tiles, not a projectile attack, you could have a phase where Khazul could be Stunned to remove his projectiles and give more leeway to the group while still throwing shockwaves to keep you on your toes).
There only two boss mechanics I’m really not a fan of: the Bridge of Woe and the relics, for reasons explained above, and the infectious rage in the final boss fight, which I feel is a downgrade when compared to the Tomb.
At least in the Tomb you can control how close to rage each boss is and in what order you want them killed. Forcing players to keep all bosses at the exact same level of aggressiveness and to kill them more or less at the same time removes a whole layer of depth from the fight.
If we were talking about swarms of small enemies, maybe. But putting it on a huge boss, when every other huge boss in the game can (in theory) be walked through without any consequences? Players aren’t going to understand it.
I’m not saying you have to do it (actually, in a sense it’s more interesting to keep it as is just to keep discussing it in the thread), but I am saying it will have to be done if this ever gets an actual release.
Puffagod
#144
Thanks for the suggestions here; some rebalances are in order.
I’d say it’s worked alright so far, my more ‘controlled’ attempts at dungeons have been less popular. I also quite enjoy making the huge and convoluted dungeons, it is a niche. As for their overall value/realism, well, that is a different story.
Maybe so.
I consider my lore emphasis an anomaly.
The thing is, killing DEATH has no effect on the nature of death in game. Conceptually it would, but it does not. The example is paradoxical; but if we take Oryx’s Paracosm as his own universe (for that is, truly, the definition of a Paracosm), destroying the concepts which govern it can only be purgative.
If we stuck to basic templates for everything, I’d probably be living in a hole.
Here I more or less have to stick to the ‘basic template’, there is only so much that can be done. The balance between ‘oh, this is too mechanic heavy/complex/new/different’ and ‘oh, this is fun’ is hard to strike; and in my view the cleanest way is to synthesise and amalgamate previous successful experiences, perhaps with a twist or two.
It also increases tension, and possibly reliance on communication/co-operation in a different sense.
Agreed.