Biggest problems I have are not with the actual dungeon per se—it seems fine, not too tough, although perhaps a bit harsher for newbs than the old one?—but the way the reworking was handled, to all intents it is simply a whole new dungeon, literally everything was changed, except for the loosest connection of theme, being still ‘five dragons in a dungeon’. Entirely unlike how the Ice Cave rework was handled, which I thought was almost the ideal way to do such a thing, keeping most of the original concept but fixing the duff parts.
There wasn’t even an attempt at fixing the old Lod simply by doing things like replacing chests with direct loot (to compel players to participate), tweaks to Feargus to be more melee-able (since without Csword it was really tough), and the DPS method of choosing order. That should’ve been done first, let it run like that for a bit and see how it worked. But instead Deca threw it to the player designers seemingly saying “just do something with this, whatever you like”.
Don’t get me wrong the dungeon itself seems alright from the few I’ve done, the designers clearly have skills and a vision for what the dungeon should be, and I do like some of it! But if the simple fixes had been done, and the energy that went into the rework applied to a new dungeon, we’d now have two good dungeons to enjoy instead of only one.
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Anyway back on topic with specifics:
I am not a fan of the sprites changing, too ‘cartoony’ now?’. Ivory in particular looks like a fat dinosaur or something. Which isn’t to say it’s bad, only what’s the point in changing it. Same as when they kept messing about with item sprites. Just leave the old things as they are (unless broken) and use new designs for new enemies. (The fact they had to change the design of the Mark should’ve raised a little question in their head whether they were taking it too far from the existing design, IMO, though I like that it matches at least).
The spinny animation effects seem a little jarring and intrusive vs the rest of Realm’s design, but that might be just because it’s new.
Them changing back into statues at the end of each fight, and the loot appearing away from their death site doesn’t feel satisfying somehow, like “have we actually killed them?”.
I don’t like the teleporting thing, the original had at least some (very) mild sense you were within in a dragon lair going along the tunnels to fight them, then portal upstairs (or down) to the wyvern lair sited above/below to disturb Ivory. Now Ivory is trapped in the altar, so wouldn’t it be a good thing to be let out? “Thanks for releasing me! Now I’ll kill you!” huh?
And I don’t really like how the focus has changed to have them be fire/water/earth/air, that seems a bit bland versus their names “Plague Bearer”, “The Defiler”, “The Demented”, “The Wicked” that weren’t really tied to the elements like that, and the classic thing is for the green dragon to be poison not earth, and obsidian/black fear, not air. Though maybe I’m just brainwashed by D&D style mythology here.
Anyway! The whole thing a bit reminds me of a movie that’s been through too many rewrites so the plot doesn’t make sense. It would all have been better being a new dragony dungeon IMO.
Thanks for making it through this mild rant and sorry if I got any details mixed up, I didn’t do many yet because why wouldn’t you release it as its own special update, instead of bundled in with Motmg when we’re off farming other things, sigh! Here’s a dragon fighting a wizard. :