Dungeons and Raids should NOT be endgame only [MMOPINION] 

I think the bigger issue is that MMOs are ever expanding, and if only the latest content is relevant it puts new players further and further away from having those experiences. Because of that, one of the biggest things MMOs can do right is not phasing out older content. I remember thinking I would have to go through hundreds of hours of MSQ in FF14 before I could experience raids, only to find out that I could do Extremes and Coils of Bahamut synced as soon as I finished the base game. Managed to put together a static with random people and every few days we would "prog" content that was 8 years old, which turned out to be one of the best experiences I've had in an MMO despite being nowhere near the actual current endgame.

FFXIV has noticed this in recent patches. They've been remaking the early dungeons to have actual mechanics like you'd see in a max level dungeon, just a bit slower and easier to dodge.

City of Heroes had this figured out more than 15 years ago. "Sidekick" (bring lowbies up to high player level) or "Exemplar" (allow high level player to participate in low level content via voluntary nerfs) let players play together instantly, and experience (or re-experience) content far outside their own. This actually led directly into something really interesting: since players had *unique* quest storylines based on their superhero's Origin, they would not experience any of the other Origin storylines without making another character, *OR* voluntarily Exemplaring themselves and helping out other new players through *their* origin storylines.

Early game dungeons from WoW are one of my best memories from any MMO game

This is kinda how FF14 feels right now. Yes you still have to play the MSQ, but you get early game versions of raids and such throughout every tier of play. And it does well at teaching you with the sprout training.

Early raids and dungeons is a good idea, in pretty much any game, making the early game resemble the late game to hook you on a experience is something known and used, it's a good idea to let a MMO have that same concept built in, MMOs are big games, and players need more than the nebulous promise of "eventually".

This was my issue with Lost Ark. All I wanted to do was run dungeons, kill bosses, and get cool loot. Watching ppl play the end game looked so fun. I played probably close to 30 hours and barely experienced any of that before burning out after my 62nd "kill 15 spiders" quest. UGH

What I'd really love to see is having to do a dungeon raid as the end of the tutorial partnered with higher level players offering protection and you both have different targets. Then as you hit a higher level, you do a mission where you "rescue" new players from the tutorial dungeon.

Maplestory was great for early level party quests. Not only was it the best way to level, but they were some of the most social aspects of the game. So many buddies were made in the depths of LPQ, and it prepares you a bit for the boss runs later in the game too. Absolutely no reason not to have them in early.

FFXIV did a lot of right things when it comes to getting people comfortable in group settings. Having players do a dungeon 1-2 hours after starting sets the stage for the rest of the game; group PvE tasks for gear and xp.

There’s an interesting premise here, namely that every player playing an MMO is playing there with friends. My experience is that many MMO players start with no friends playing the game and that making friends in-game is part of their progression. There’s also the assumption that new/inexperienced players will only get a challenge out of ‘endgame’ content, when my experience is that there is challenge at all levels and many new players (without in-game friends) can find many challenges that are every bit as satisfying to them as doing early-stage endgame dungeons, raids or trials. Many MMOs have a heirarchy of challenging content to keep players interested. And in the best of them, both new and experienced players can work together. And while playing with my in-game friends is a big part of why I enjoy my game, it wasn’t a big thing when I started.

My partner and I started playing FFXIV 2 years ago when we were invited by friends who were max-level. They took us through many of the first dungeons and trials, and then when we got comfortable in the mid-level playing style we went through Palace of the Dead (ie Deep Dungeon) together. It was new content for ALL of us which was really fun to be able to do! Now my partner and I are max-level, and are inviting other friends to play with us and being able to do the dungeons and trials with them is SO rewarding and cool. Also wanna mention FFXIV’s “hall of the novice” - I had never played an MMORPG when I started XIV, and those friends told me to go do that before going into Sastasha. Got lots of info that helped, as WELL as a new shiny set of gear! XIV isn’t perfect but it does a lot of these things really well.

I don't know. Way back in the day when I was much younger and still played WoW, I had a lot of fun finding groups to run Deadmines.I never made it to endgame on any of my characters so it's one of my standout memories of playing the game.

To answer the question while sitting back and think "it was awsome", it's when Endwalker came out. I picked up FF14 kinda late and catch up the MSQ to start EW. I've played it day one and being with other players discovering the new places and the dungeons, i think this was the coolest thing/feeling ever

GW1 was great for this. The "endgame" started really early as the low max level of 20 (can easily get in a few days of casual play) meant that the power ladder plateaued quickly and everyone was on the same level for most of the experience, and your progression as a player was more about collecting new abilities to create interesting skillbar combinations with. The story mode instance "dungeons" content leading up to level 20 did a great job of introducing players to the kinds of challenges they should expect later on in terms of enemy group compositions, and the fact mobs used the same abilities as players meant players could learn from how the mobs interacted with each other and how different team dynamics worked, preparing the player for their own role in groups of other players, as opposed to just being damage fodder to grind your way through.

Very well said. Guild Wars 2 does a good job with their zone scaling design to supplement this idea, and FFXIV roulettes and dungeon scaling make a good attempt at this solution too. I hope developers continue to realize the disparity that's slowly grown between the MMO and RPG elements of their games over the years, and remember that we wanted to do this thing together.

I agreed with this for so many years, and I still do. The moment I found out in SWTOR I could level through raids, I was like "Yes, this is awesome!" If they were literally at the same level bracket as the first flashpoints/dungeons, they would be as awesome as epic bgs in WoW. Mass multiplayer content has been something I personally enjoy and only a few MMO's let you do this from the get go. GW2's eternal battle grounds is one of the best experiences i've ever had in an MMO, opening it to low levels was one of the best things they could have done for that game. Even if you don't have all the crazy equipment and skills/levels in it, you still feel you can help, you still feel you can make a difference in some way. You are still playing that core part of the game, and you can just do that with your friends. More MMO's should embrace this idea, because the best bits of an MMO is what keeps people there. I have barely ever recommended an MMO to someone I know in RL because I know for a fact there is no fun in the early game, and time is valuable.

Some of my favourite memories from EverQuest 2 are from the early game. Level 20 had raids. There were more available too. These days you can just solo them, which gives a bit of that memory, but really nothing compared to grouping up with 11 other people in a spontaneous raid. (That was an x2 raid, x4 raids were available too.)

Back when I played Guild Wars 2 one thing I loved was how the game auto-scaled the player. It wasn't perfect, but it meant that low level content never became irrelevant, and grouping with someone far above or below your level wasn't the huge power gap as it can be in other games.

Ironically, I forgot the early game experience of WoW to 90%, but the moment that stuck with me was the day the day didn't work. There was a bug that made the blue fiends in the Valley of Trials one-shot everyone. So, to progress in this mandatory quest you were forced to share work with other people. One taunted and got killed, the other attacked. I had honestly one of my most memorable player interactions when the game was broken.

While it could still be better, I really like how FFXIV incorporates dungeons and trial bosses into the main story progression. Even the solo questing isn't really obnoxious. "Kill or collect X quests" usually have us only kill 1-3 enemies or gather 1-3 items on average and report back. The dialogue before and after is usually long, but interesting while the request from the NPC is usually over within a few minutes. Doesn't really feel like I'm wasting much time in comparison to the "kill or collect X quests" I did in TERA in which the amount needed was usually 10 and might not have guaranteed drops from every kill; or I had to wait for the enemies to respawn to farm the amount needed. Instead in FFXIV we kill the mobs or gather the items at a predetermined spot that spawns (or a highlighted radius on the map) exclusively for the quest.

In the ESO social guild I'm in it takes a fair bit of coaxing to get people to sign up for Trials. The 12 player raids. The usual thing is that they're nervous of doing such "big" content and don't want to fail it. To mess up for the group. I tell them Trials are just basically dungeons with bigger groups and the ones that are willing to come always end up enjoying it. So they encourage others. It's the initial hurdle. Once you get players over that hurdle they're always happy to run.

It's a question I've asked ever since I first saw the "Level Boost" purchase option, why would you encourage players to skip thousands of hours worth of development just to get to the "Good bit" isn't that a HUGE design flaw? or is it just because the formula is so old the developer feels they need to follow it?

I think FFXIV does a good job of bringing older raid content to the leveling experience. Even if a lot of it is optional and lot part of the leveling itself, I had a ton of fun doing Coil, Alexander, and Sigmascape with my friends when we played.

I do think dungeons should be spread across the leveling experience and have some High end Dungeons for late game but when i think of raids i do think of something that is Late/ End game

So FF 14, you have to play your first dungeon at level 15. Outside the dungeon is an NPC who will take you through the basics of your role Tank, Healer, DPS and will reward you with gear. You can then join the dungeon with either a team of players which can include endgame players or friends. Or you could join with NPCs which will help guide you through the dungeon. FF14 is not the only example of giving you a glimpse of what you will be doing throughout the game SWTOR and ESO are two other good examples of this type of early game hook into multiplayer mechanics in MMOs. This is the reason why it took me 4 time to get into wow, because id start at the beginning and not know where to start or boost and be confused on what I had to do next.

I'm happy with how FF14 does it. I had 15 levels, which didn't take long, to get used to the game and its controls, get introduced to the story, and learn my class. The trust system hadn't been added yet, but I think that makes it even better as those nervous about their first dungeons can play solo and not be stressed about messing up.

One of the biggest problems I find every time I want to convince a friend to join me in my adventures throughout the world of MMORPG's is exactly this. The fact that I can't join them until they have played solo for a long time, which goes against the main reason they joined the game in the first place: to play together.

I never realized but FFXIV does all of this pretty well, you have first of all the Hall of the Novice where they teach you, although kinda slowly, all of the basics based on your rol and general stuff like avoiding telegraphed AoEs, etc. Then you have the dungeons and your character progression which complement each other really well because both grow in difficulty as you level up, giving you time to learn the rotation of your job as you do increasingly difficult and fun mechanics, and you may play leveling dungeons with any of your friends given they have it unlocked, doesn't matter if they are max level already, thanks to FFXIV's scaling system which puts you at the level of the content you are doing with every ability you had only at that level. And then you reach 50, your first endgame, which is not at max lvl as some may think (There are endgames with raids and dungeons every 10 levels after 50, marking each expansion), here after hours of MSQ and dungeons you get your first set of raids both 8 and 24 man and a basic kit for your job including most of your utility and a toned down rotation from what max level endgame is, which thanks again to FFXIV's level scaling system let's you play with your friends each endgame.

This is why I feel XIV is in such a good place. I invited someone recently and they haven't even finished the base game but we've done plenty of FATEs, dungeons, trials and stuff like Palace of the Dead and having a blast as they slowly learn what to do in content that isn't "right click NPC to read text". All the while getting me currencies and EXP too. On the flip side it was so, so hard to get friends to play WoW with me back in the day, even with the super expedited EXP of recruit-a-friend. I honestly gave up inviting people to it. Even the way the game works now, I don't think I'd want to foist into them the quick(er) but still mostly solo leveling experience so we can play at the end.

DDO was the game that made this "playing dungeons together with friends" the best for me. Unfortunetly it's not that popular game and now it's a bit outdated. Also predatory payment system doesn't help. It's a pitty because it had fully narrated (yes, there's narrator talking as you progress), story driven dungeons, that were really fun to go through, especially with a permament group. The dungeons were usually short (although there were longer ones as well) and often you'd want to replay them (there were optional parts to them, that you might not have noticed/known about in the furst run for example), so catching up by other guys absent for a day or sth was not a problem.

Solving this issue can be huge for a game. Destiny 2, for all its faults, actually does this pretty well provided you have a friend to play with. Because after an expansion is no longer current, the content of said expansion (including dungeons and raids) essentially have their item level requirement lifted. This is how my friend got me into the game. After i got done with the tutorial + a tiny bit of grind to show me the rest of the game and get some gear, she took me into the Shattered Throne dungeon and it was awesome. It was challenging and fun to take on something hard together. It showed the game from its best side and if not for that I dont think i'd have stuck with the game for much longer, if at all.

I loved DDO because the entire game was dungeons, and most you couldn't solo even starting from level 1. You always had to use the group finder and actually whisper someone "Hey I'm a rogue looking to run x dungeon, can I join your party?" Nothing automatic, super social, and you often found groups you would stay with for the entire evening running dungeon after dungeon after dungeon... unlike recent MMOS where you just queue up, do the dungeon without speaking, then queue back up and find a new group to run the next dungeon

Something Dark Age of Camelot added for their low levels, well before they were able to participate in the grander Realm vs Realm battles, were smaller Realm vs Realm experiences called Battlegrounds. These battles over a singular, centralized keep, were some of the most memorable and enjoyable times I had in DAoC. And it was a perfect reflection of what to look forward to in the endgame!

Issues I see with the implementation of dungeons/raids/group content in early game are: 1. The genre has an issue with anything not endgame slowly drying up over time. Games don't update their early or midgame experiences that often because the content has to be focused on the growing population of players at endgame who want fresh things to do. 2. Building off point one, a game that doesn't maintain a near constant stream of new blood will in turn have the early content severely underpopulated. This makes the new player experience worse and games tend to opt to charge boosts to just skip the old content instead. 3. The linear nature of most level/gear progression systems encourages players to race to max level because any sort of gear or reward from early game group content will be outclassed by simply leveling up, possibly within a matter of hours. This makes harder content less appealing if easier content can get you leveled up faster. FFXIV tries to fix this problem by the daily roulette system that groups endgame players with leveling players. The issue I have with this system is that the downscaling feels horrible as you lose many of your skills. What an MMO needs to keep early game content healthy and productive is a few things: 1. Encourage late/endgame players to be participants from the start. Could be through cosmetic rewards, reputation experience, gold, etc. Give them a reason to interact with newer players and help train them on the relevant game content. Downscale them so they don't stomp their way through, but don't remove skills that make the experience unfun. Let people play their class in the state they have achieved, just with lower numbers. 2. Update the early game experience more often. If you integrate endgame players into this content, then the changes are to their benefit as well. 3. Provide some kind of reward from doing group content that isn't just gear. Encourage players to pause their level journey and get something cool rather than just a mad dash to max level. 4. Add some level of variability to group content. Endgame players repeating old content will get boring. If the content has some amount of randomness to it, then you can provide some spice that makes it less of a chore and more fun for everyone.

New to MMOs, here's a quick summary of my experience from creating a character to getting into the first dungeon: Guild Wars 2: got to level 25 mostly doing mundane quests in the open world and some shared quests with other people. It was decent but kinda boring. First dungeon was a bit hard as I was underleveled. Wasn't an amazing experience overall. Elder Scrolls Online: quick and decent tutorial area, levelled up doing a whole quest arc in an island, it was pretty fun and engaging, there were plenty of different side quests and activities like fishing and crafting. Probably took around 5 hours and got to level 10 which unlocked the first dungeon. Everyone in the group played pretty fast so I had to catch up but exploring said dungeon was fun. Final Fantasy XIV: dunno how much I've played at this point, probably 10 hours or so doing main quests and some side quests, including a two professions (classes) quests. Haven't got to dungeons yet lol, but it's been fun so far. I think this game has the best atmosphere out of all the other MMOs. World of Warcraft: finished the tutorial island (it was alright) and got into a big quest right away. Got into the first dungeon maybe around 3 or 4 hours in (via group finder). Choose healer and got immediatly called out by another member of the group for not healing enough, two seconds later the group disbanded and couldn't join another dungeon for 30 mins. Pretty bad experience overall. New World: completed the tutorial zone, explored some settlements and did a bunch of repeatable, side and main mission quests. Gathering is pretty fun and so far it's been the most social MMO I've played. There's funny conversations in the global chat, there's always people playing the instruments minigame or fishing, and there's even voice proximity chat which has led to some funny moments to. Anyway, got to level 25, which took quite some time, and did my first dungeon. Was kinda fun but it was pretty slow paced compared to ESO or GW 2 dungeons. The visuals are great but the enemies were rather tanky, there's also some floating spirits which were pretty boring to fight.

This reminds me a lot of Dungeons and Dragons Online (which I still hope you will play for 'wordt mmo ever' one day). There are raids from as early as level 6. And because a lot of the game is based on restarting a capped character at level 1 with some benefits, the low level raids were run quite often.

In a hypothetical game where leveling is the majority of the experience and is designed to take a long time, I can definitely see a rich "midgame's endgame" experience working well. In the games that currently exist where 1% of your playtime is dedicated to leveling, it would be a severe waste of development time.

The biggest issue I have when trying to get my friends to play a MMO with me is that they claim "the genre is dead" or "the game is dead". I play games like League of Legends and Apex with my friends but I also play lots of MMOs when I don't feel like those games. Recently I got back into GW2 and when trying to convince them to play I was just met with "all MMOs are the same and I already played WoW as a kid, plus I heard the genre/game is dead". I try to convince them otherwise but I guess they just go off what they have heard other content creators or gaming new sites say. It's a shame and I wonder how much the outside perspective of "genre is dead, all MMOs are WoW clones" negativity effects new MMO players from trying them out.

One of the few MMOs I've sunk substantial time into was Vindictis, and I appreciated that. I had a high level friend, and we'd do raids or the normal combat missions together, which made the game a lot more fun

I remember TERA one time implemented a way for high level players to queue on low level dungeons to help low level players. Ofc the high level players would get equilized level and gear, but the catch was the gear was weaker than the gear the low level players had, so high level players could easily die if the weren't careful. It ultimately died because the rewards for high level players wasn't very appealing and you couldn't queue together with your low level friends.

Most epic moment for me was taking down the Lich King for the first time in Wrath. Did it with a group of friends, not just a random guild. Was an incredible experience after hours of trying and it was 3 am.

FFXIV does this really well with its class quests , forcing you to tank DPS or heal depending on your class x this paired with the trust system allowing you to do most dungeons with an AI team so you can learn dungeons/how to play your class without the pressure of other players

I remember going Krayat Dragon hunting back in SWG with a character that was less than a week old. My combat skills were zero, but I was grinding up my medical skill and no hunting party - regardless of their own level - ever refused adding another medic to their team. So I took a backpack full of medkits and dashed around healing up the actual hunters. Anyway point being here was a system where veterans and newbies could work hand-in-hand with no issues.

This is why Project:1999 (Everquest), will never die. The game's design of dungeons that can also be cleared further to a raid is somehow never seen in most other games. It's why Black Rock Depths and LBRS and UBRS are so fondly remember in WoW.

This is something my dad has talked about before; he wants something he calls "Raid level" where the raid has a total level requirement not a minimum level requirement. Raid level to be something like 300 while player level cap is like 90. So then you can take 10 lvl 30s and clear it as long as you have the right roles, or 5 lvl 60s or 4 lvl 90s or 1 lvl 30 and 3 lvl 90s or 2 lvl 30s and 4 lvl 60s - etc. then people can make groups more easily as well while still feeling a sense of progression. Then the gearing would be mainly based on crafting / hordes tied to lore. - eg. Bob the dragon is known for attacking a king who was a holy knight - bobs loot table has holy heavy armor, priest armor, a harpbow of light and obviously dragon items to make dragon gear.

I'm new in the mmo genre and one thing that really hooked me was that ice shaman boss showing up at shiverpeaks in gw2. That made me look forward to what the game has to offer.

You absolutely nailed it. One of my favorite MMOs, Dungeons and Dragons Online does this well. It's a flawed game, but every quest has a unique dungeon where multiple players and classes and roles are encouraged from the get go. Ton of fun, and you can get into raiding by like... Level 7, if I remember correctly (with level cap having just been raised to 32).

The problem I have seen with plenty of MMORPGs is that they go "We have these RAIDS for you to do" and you then ask, "is there something more?" Often the answer is no, there isn't much more than Raids because that's where you get the best gear, armor, special items and what not. I don't like to do the same raid 20+ times. This is why I liked Ragnarok Online and it is my all time favorite MMORPG. Sadly Gravity the owners of it killed it with a patch in 2009 that drastically changed core parts of the game to a more linear gameplay. Which just made it worse. Anyway in that game, vast majority of the areas in the game would have at least 1 enemy that would drop something useful for you. Because the game did not have progressively stronger gear as you leveled up you actually had to get your end game weapon yourself. This is by getting the weapon drop with the correct amount of slots and then farm for the Cards of a monster that'll boost damage to a certain enemy type/race/element/Size and slap them onto the weapon. The weapon then would only be useful to those enemies with lets say you have 3 cards that give 20% more damage to Wind element and then 1 for Demi human. You would now need to find a monster that is Wind based and Demi human to get the most damage out the weapon. So you could make several of these weapons which would have certain cards in them to deal with certain areas. This made the most of the areas useful because good cards where spread out all over the world and they would only be dropped by a certain monster. The most used card was the Hydra Card. This card gave you 20% more damage to Demi Humans which is what the player character race is. The Hydra monster is a low level trash mob that just annoys you because it attacks on range and dying to it with a high level character is only possible by afk in the area with a large amount of them in. So the best PvP card in the game is dropped by a weak enemy that anyone past level 15 can kill without a problem. Max level is 99. At higher levels you can slaughter these weak monster with any AOE ability. There where plenty of more cards that are good for you to get and they would be located in various areas. Forcing you to gear up properly which would mean farming lower level areas or medium level areas. Higher level areas sometimes contained really good items but for most parts it was to power level and feel good about doing so which it was. But Gravity decided to screw over that system and now all of those damage cards are utterly useless. As it will only boost the weapon damage and not the end damage. So much else changed too.

I will forever think and say, that Guild Wars 1 was the best MMORPG. Sure it's not like modern day where everything happens at once, GW1 had every zone instanced. But the fact they gave you things like mercenaries to do quests/missions in helped a lot in understanding what a character's role was. Mage was good at AOE, necromancer was a great support and warriors were tanks. The class quests were phenomenal, teaching you what your class was capable of doing. Quests would give you skills that you'd NEED to use to complete the quest. And for finishing it, you got to keep skills. GW1 didn't necessarily have dungeons per se, but to advance in the story you did missions that you initiated from towns. These missions themselves felt like dungeons, you needed a good group make up in order to get through smoothly. And they rewarded you for exploring/doing extra tasks but giving more skill points. Man I really wish I had friends to play Guild Wars 1 with again. Guild Wars 1 will always be the perfect MMORPG for me, even if it did focus more on the RPG than MMO part.

This is one of the reasons I love FFXIV so much, the party content is all integrated into the main story of the game and are used throughout the levelling process (less so raids, but they have trials which are basically just mini 1 boss raids).

this is what i loved about maplestory. party quests were set to certain levels. from 20-30 you'd be in kerning, and from like 35-50 you'd be in ludi, etc. this created these hubs where the entire playerbase was centred around and you could party up and make friends and the game really felt like a community, or rather several interspersed communities. you COULD go and grind somewhere but that's boring, and there were really valuable drops you could sell from the party quests. this imo really made the game

Thanks Josh. Wish you had mentioned games that you felt did this right.

I think FFXIV does this extemely well. Having a story mode for the Raids, moving into Hard Mode, and then Extreme's for each tier, with each one expanding on pre-existing mechanics learnt from previous fights. It allows for game knowledge to be built over the course of the levelling journey, which for an MMO, in my opinion, is key to the survival. If you have to wait for it to "get good" at end game, you'll probably end up losing the interest of many players. Especially in a world that caters to immediate gratification.

This is where Phantasy Star Online 2 shined for me. Being able to do raid bosses in urgent quests, according to my level at the time, made me want to keep playing because they were fun, but not the end all for content

I think this is something Destiny 2 does very well. All the older raids and dungeons have a (power) level requirement that's exactly what you have when you come out of the games tutorial, so basically you're raid-ready after that - of course you won't have good armor stats and guns, but you'll have enough power level to do it if you have friends or LFG to help you. And since those raids and dungeons are still worth farming as endgame since only the stats of the loot matters and not the level which can be upgraded after the fact.

Basically FFXIV with ARR, that is the whole tutorial.

Medium heat take: By designing a tedious beginning for players, developers can trigger the sunk-cost fallacy deliberately, thereby setting up a captive audience.

agree with title. Befallen dungeon in EQ was for lev 4+ and was Awesome! unrest in EQ started at lev 10+ and was amazing

On if the things I enjoyed about "the old republic" you can start raiding as soon as level 10. Which is where you spec your class and get relevant abilities to run a raid/ dungeon

It’s very jarring when you play through the whole story of an MMO and not have to really worry about any kind of mechanics and then you hit the endgame and everyone expects you to know every single mechanic as soon as you unlock it. Why would I assume the endgame dungeons have complex mechanics if I haven’t experienced anything like that in the entire game?

Final Fantasy 14 has something like this. I mean the early dungeons aren't super exciting, but they introduce you to your job roles slowly and without too much stress. At level 15, you actually need to do 3 dungeons, 1 right after the other. So you get plenty of practice with your chosen role.

I’ve just taken my friends through both Dungeons and their FIRST RAID on only their second/third days on Destiny 2 :) we just had a really fun time

i remember that city of heroes has something like Josh describe and was avaible for all players, and was super fun to do it multiple times

WoW succeeds by having you do “gather X items and kill Y enemies” quests even at max level, so you are being trained even from the beginning of the game. Cough.

I believe Elders Scrolls Online does this well; dungeons are available as soon as you hit level 10, and players of all levels are scaled and can do the dungeon together.

I miss when maplestory had the party quests back in the day of Version 83, I still play private servers based on V83/84 because it made the community come together and work together and meet new friends! I also love DDO still because its dungeons and raid content throughout the game!

I've always wanted to make a webseries with WoW (classic) in the style of SAO (back when it actually came out and it hadn't been done to death) I like the idea of "floors" in that MMO. Zones that can only be accessed when a hidden boss in the zone is defeated in a raid. Something like that in a modern MMO would be interesting. A very large starting zone, with a slower leveling system, focusing instead on a variety of gameplay systems, and a hidden boss somewhere that a large number of players would be needed to defeat, in order to open the next zone on the server. Combine that with a Path of Exil style system of "seasons" where each server lasts maybe a year and then a new "season" is released with new events, challenges, mechanics and the boss locations are changed or even the bosses are mixed up to prevent metagaming from having players speed run zones, and you might have something pretty cool. I always wondered what it would be like, if Hogger needed 100 players to beat, and Westfall didn't open up as a zone on the server until he was beaten, and so on for every other zone

I enjoy that in GW2 I'm currently leveling my first character and can still join in massive boss fights with veteran players. Not perfect but it is better than a lot of games

When you think about it, it's actually quite interesting how we value the early game experience to give you an idea of what the rest of the game experience is gonna be. My favorite single player game, Breath of the Wild, does this where it teaches you the basics of how the game works and how you interact with it in a very small section of the map that introduces just about every important mechanic needed to beat the game. I think it has a great experience. FFXIV is my favorite MMO, has this weird situation where technically speaking the first few hours are actually quite representative of what the next dozens, if not hundreds of hours will be for the average player. Lots of story, going from A to B, doing X and Y. Even the raids and dungeons themselves are just as much vehicles for telling a story as they are a form of challenging your mechanical understand of your class. One could argue that the end game is really the story, and the raids and dungeons are just bonus challenges for fun and not necessarily the point of the game. Hell, if the Island Sanctuary thing is any indication, the devs are open to adding as much variety in to the game as possible so that what the end game is what you want it to be more than specifically raiding and dungeoning.

I used toplay a Korean hack n slash mmo. Each of the six classes had a special perk to help with the grind. The mage was a glass canon who could cc, the archer had great mobility, the healer was also an assassin, the tank could have more enemies aggroed to him, the summoner had a compagnion and the knight had a wide variety of play styles. We all intuitively learned our roles in a party by seeing what we did other than damage. We eventually got a multi-party dungeon/weekly event. It had cons but a great feature was that it had tiers (every player experienced the exact same dungeon but the enemy levels were adjusted, the good stuff was always there) and rewards that everyone appreciated (huge exp and if your party won, your teammates and you would get a good pile of cash or an upgrade item (max 1 per party)). I believe the dungeon was well done, you got the main reward from advancing in the dungeon, every player got to do the same dungeon as long as they fit in a level bracket

Respect. Here's to hoping the font has to be size 2 to fit on one page for your supporters!

I remember an MMO called Global Agenda where right from the start you went on raids with other players. And i remember rightly, this was so you could level up and gear up for the PVP. No idea if the game still exists. I dont think it even had an open world actually.

one thing i like about lost ark is that early dungeons "prepare" you for endgame ones (for example similar but harder to dodge mechanics, battle items usage etc)

thats why i loved tera when it came out. new combat system + early dungeons already got amazing boss fights... i miss it. the first pvp map, where you had to attack/defend a castle is till now my favorite pvp mode.

Everquest 2 had raids beginning at level 20 and every 5 or 10 levels there-after. Most were over-land raid bosses just wandering around, until level 50, where full raid dungeons began. It was a great way to introduce raids and pretty funny when someone, usually myself, were leveling an Alt and an early game raid monster wandered up and blasted me in one hit.

FFXIV definitely goes a long way towards teaching newer players the basics and working them up to knowing what they need to do in group content. Some time ago WoW added the Exile's Reach starting zone as well, which sadly started with the same fetch nonsense at first, but culminated in teaching you how to queue for a dungeon and walked you through simplistic fight mechanics to give you a general idea of how things would be. Raiding from the onset might be rather overwhelming but early dungeons if presented in a way that actually informed the players of what to do and how to do it could be great for bringing in new players and refreshing older players on whats actually what. Throw in active tutorials baked into the questing/gameplay that teach you how your class works in general, then move on to how to work in groups and you got the beginings of a recipe for something potentially great already.

Josh, I agree! MMORPGs really should have a standardized solo-friendly NPC dungeon at the earliest levels that allow you to test Tank/Healer/DPS roles with NPCs and/or friends and these dungeons should scale with the players and allow for experimentation and testing of roles and characters classes and skills. It could be kept relevant easily by dropping some resource that is traded to NPCs connected to that dungeon!

The first MMO I ever played was Forsaken World. It was finally retired earlier this year in June I believe. I stopped playing years ago but would pop on randomly from year to year to see what changed. But the one thing I remember starting out was how the first very dungeon was opened at Lv10, and it was hard as frick. The max level at the time was Lv60, for the early days of the MMOs. Max by the end was like 160. But even when someone that was Lv40 would come in and help a friend and you'd be fortunate enough to be in that part with them, it was still a hard dungeon. The one up from that was the Lv20 dungeon which was even worse. And up from that was Lv30, which people would start skipping bosses just to reach the end since not all were mandatory. And then Lv40....people came in with the mindset of not even dreaming of reaching the end. It was an arena-battle style dungeon, where you were in a pit and would fight a different boss for each wave, up to 10 waves. Almost no one ever beat the last one. As crazy as all these were, they were also a ton of fun to play on and challenge yourself. And it made beating them feel soooo rewarding when you finally did it right and got through to the end. In my opinion, that's how every MMO should be. Just have different leveled dungeons that open up as you progress through the game, each one being difficult for your starting level, and even still offering a bit of a challenge later on if you don't have the right party. Sadly, as you might expect, years down the road when the level cap kept being raised and the game was out for much longer, when they started making it easier for new players to get gears and level up, it made the early dungeons irrelevant and no one would run them anymore, not that they would be a challenge for a late game player anyway. What really axed the game for me was when they removed most of the early maps where everyone would stand around and mingle at. I remember most of our favorite things to do was to drag a World Boss to a safe zone and just watch him kill everyone, haha. Good times... What actually killed the game was their overbearing punishment to PvP on a PvP server, though. Made it so no one wanted to fight anymore, despite them being on the server for that reason when there's other PvE servers to play on for those that don't want that life. Also the mass bans they rolled out for people exploiting an event and some updates with server time issues.

I completely agree, and feel like a "training dungeon" could even go a step further: If you're an experienced player who's returning to a class they haven't played in a while, it could act as a way to retrain you in that class, or give you training in a class that starts at a higher level. As an example, last night I did some leveling stuff with friends in XIV, and decided to run Samurai, since it was the highest-level DPS I had behind my full-leveled Ninja and my friends were already playing as Tank & Healer to level those classes. I had no idea what my buttons did, and didn't realize I had a whole second set of moves I could be using until we hit the boss (I play on controller, so all of my options aren't always visible to me). This is the same for every class; I haven't touched anything besides Ninja in months because it's the only class I've played as significantly, so playing as anything else requires a bit of relearning every time. If there was a way to go through a no-risk dungeon with NPCs where they explain what your buttons do (and maybe the dungeon expands depending on how many moves you have to explain what each of them does), that would be helpful to someone who only plays when new content comes out, then leaves the game for months until the next new content arrives; they could take a day to go through the dungeon and relearn the different classes instead of going into leveling roulettes and not knowing how to run a class because they haven't touched the game in months. Alternatively, I think MMOs should also be able to do the opposite of this: make end-game content available to characters of any class once it's unlocked through in-game acquisition. This is sort of done by purchasing level skips, but I think it should also be a thing that can be done through gameplay. Going back to XIV, as it's my only MMO experience, I've beaten everything in MSQ up to the current 6.2 storyline, meaning I can see all of the dungeons, trials, and raids available across the entire game. However, I can't access all of that content on anything except my main class, and since I hyper-focused the entire MSQ around running a single class through everything, I now have one class at level 90 and about 15 others at around 30-40, with the only ones higher being ones that you get at higher levels from the start, like Dancer or Gunbreaker at 60. If I want to get these other classes leveled up, I'm limited to dungeons & raids within the level range of those classes, meaning I'm stuck in ARR content when I know there's four whole expansions' worth of content I could be playing. What they could do is have a way to create scaled-down versions of those end-game dungeons to make them more accessible to low-level characters so that they can level-up classes they haven't been playing faster while continuing to allow them to learn the mechanics of both the class and the content. Maybe create level-gated versions that go up by 10 levels per version, where there's a level 20, 30, 40, 50, etc version of each dungeon where the mechanics are the same, but enemy levels are reduced to be manageable for characters in that level range. Once you've reached level 30 in a class, you can't play the level 20 version of any dungeon again, and maybe the loot dropped in those reduced-level dungeons are level-appropriate loot, possibly even loot from other dungeons in the MSQ at the same level as the reduced-level dungeon so that the devs don't have to make different-leveled versions of the same gear just so its stats match the dungeon level. That way, when you're finally at level cap, you can have run through the end-game content at a lower level and understand the mechanics of it, and when you do play with your higher-level friends who've been playing end-game content at high-level for months, you know what you're doing. Additionally, the reduced-level dungeons could also be a way to gain a ton of experience very quickly, to help you level up a class much faster than you normally would, which would help you fill roles for friends at end-game content much quicker as well.

Vanilla World of Warcraft had a solo leveling experience that was fun on it's own and that also encouraged spontaneous grouping up with strangers, because you can kill a gnoll on your own but the further you go into the gnoll camp the more of them there are. The main problem is that the leveling areas become empty after everyone is max level.

This made me think of TERA. You started with dungeons pretty early on (level 18 or so), which gives you plenty of time to learn your skills, combos, and how to actually work with other players. Initial dungeons had also fairly simple mechanics, so you were slowly introduced to more and more complex scenarios as you levelled. Good times 😊

I think having early dungeons and raids would be a great idea. It would surely grab more player’s attention to try the game stick with it hopefully. Plus it grants some confidence in a players own ability to do group content.

As someone who jumped into MMO's in very early 2000's ( Runescape specifically and then WoW as well as some smaller ones that are shut down these days ), I've grown up with exactly the idea of doing quests and dungeons to eventually get to raids, so I admit I felt a bit skeptical of the point presented in the title - and in the video itself - but.. I must say you made very good and fair points and I am indeed convinced. Having raids and dungeons to help prepare you for playing your class and your role in the dungeon now sound like an awesome idea and as a nervous tank ( sometimes ) this would have been greatly helpful.

I think what is missing in the mmo is precisely the "Adventure", to be walking and discover an unmarked cave on the map where a raid starts I don't think it's fun to just press a button and be teleported to the dungeon/raid

I wonder when Josh is gonna come out with his perfect MMO! Can't wait!

I hate to bring up Maplestory 2 as an example of an MMO doing something right, but I did love that the progression involved 'raids' at every level of gameplay.. From level 1 to max, there are raids that people were joining often enough to solely level through those if that was how you wanted to play. Or you could wander around and quest your way through the game, only doing raids when they were brought up in quests.

The most fun I had in MMOs was vanilla and tbc wow leveling, and dungeons were a big part of that. I don’t even remember how many times I did scarlet monastery to get the staff for my mage. That wasn’t a sensible thing to do, let’s be honest grinding for a lvl 30 staff isn’t exactly an efficient use of time. But it was so much fun and I was so happy when I finally got it. But then again these were simpler times where most people didn’t know all that much about the game, finding a group and going to the dungeon was an actual social experience, I probably wouldn’t do that today anymore. Probably also the reason I don’t play MMOs anymore.

I think ESO had a good idea with the dungeons making both a normal and veteran dungeon system. I just feel that, at times, going Random (more specifically normal) is a problem when you get queued up with high level folks who speedrun the dungeon when you are sub champion. I think there should be a level scaling like arena does.

I like how warframe goes about it. You can carry players to interesting bits, and since you can basically completely respec every "class" and weapon in a matter of seconds, you can also play at a lower level so as not to completely overpower your friends

One thing I loved about City of Heroes was the sidekick system. A high level character sidekicks you and you get a level boost so that you can go hero-ing together so long as you stick close. You weren't quite as good as a character who was actually that level due to having fewer buff spots etc., but good enough to play together for normal instances.

back in the servers i played WOW i liked to do the early dungeons with parties of randoms,it was fun and interesting and you could get good loot to help you in your earlier journey,heck wow is one of the games that have a lot of earlier dungeons you could do with random newbies or friends,and another game is aura kingdom,i remember doing ealier dungeons with randoms people and it was fun,thanks to those dungeons i meet 2 persons that became my friends and we used to raid a lot dungeons,one of them was way high level from me,but he still joined and he was kinda nerfed for the dungeon. those are the only 2 games i have played with ealier dungeons for everyone.

honestly FF14 does this the best, the raids you get to do at the end of expansions are a great tool, and i think even enjoying the story together with friends is amazing too. There are many facets to this that I don't think anyone has quite hit spot on. But we can hope and dream!

I think a really good way an MMO did this was back with Perfect World International. I see other examples in the first few comments, but PWI had dungeons ever major level point; I remember the first was at level 21, if I remember right, and then every 10 or 20 levels after that. They were also incredibly difficult, so if you had two options to clear them; either ask a high level person to piggy-back you through, or manage to get a team of like-leveled people together and get through with teamwork and strategy. It was far easier to find a high level person willing to bring you through low level dungeons, but it was also cool if you could find others to go through it with. On that note, if it isn't, I'd love to see you review PWI- it's fairly old, and I don't know how much longer it'll be around seeing as it's mostly dead as of the last time I checked. There's lots of options for races to play, but for a review it'd probably be most interesting to be an elven cleric- unlike other races elves start with wings, and as cleric you'll have more mana to play with- meaning you can get to far more places and look at them, even if you aren't of level (wings on the elves take mana to fly). They are slow, but you can set a spot you want to go to on the world map, set the character to fly high up, and go make a cup of tea while it flies there. edit: I almost forgot to put this bit in, but I love when games do dungeons in progressively more awesome levels; for instance, at the start maybe the dungeon is fighting just some orc chieftain or lord, not nearly as impressive end game- but then later dungeons near the end get the crazier enemies with more extreme reasons you're there and far more impressive battles.

Elder Scrolls online had 4 player dungeons that become available every 10 levels starting from level 10. Playing through the game with my friends we loved them. We had to sort out roles within the builds we were working towards and work together to suceed.

There’s 2 games produced by Ankama (Dofus and Wakfu) which has early level dungeons, basically there’s dungeons and group activities at every level brackets, hope you will try those someday

Absolutely. I love the raids in Lost Ark, but asking a brand new player to level a character all the way up to i1415 is just.... not fun. There were WAY too many quit moments before the really fun endgame raiding begins, it's tiring trying to convince all of my friends that it gets better after 100+ hours

This reason is why I love recommending rotmg to friends. The game has a ton of issues, but getting to max level takes less than an hour and you can be having fun doing dungeons in the same night that you started downloading the game.

Speaking about the mechanics in endgame, ffxiv have actually worked to make mechanic markers uniform throughout the entire game. Things used to be mixed up back in ARR and HW, but now it's all reflective of what that marker will mean in endgame content, which I think is pretty cool.

We will definitely need a video on the Dune MMORPG once there is more information about it