Dungeon, Lair or Scenario?

I’ve not been able to test the new Skaven dungeon “Thanquol’s Incursion” yet. Unfortunately real life has clashed with PTS events and given me slim windows of opportunity to get on and when I did manage to sneak, both times there were issues that prevented me getting in the instance. Bloody sods law.

Reading the feedback on the forum from the first test events gives a rather bleak outlook on the dungeon and the direction taken. However since then I’ve also heard some feedback directly from people I know and trust that went to last night’s PTS event. Their feedback was more mixed with a generally positive outlook, but tempered by many major things that need sorting out.

I’m not going to post the details of what was said; since I’ve not got in the dungeon at all I’m bound to get things mixed up. But in general people seemed to have had a good time and are hopeful that if Mythic continue to tweak things (considerably) then it could work out to be a lot of fun.

Bit of vague post I know, but that’s what I’m left with. There’s too much blind sycophantic or mindless hatred opinion being posted for me to trust much of what’s out there right now. With luck I’ll get a chance to test it out sometime before it goes live.

I do think though that from what I’ve seen so far it doesn’t seem to be what I think of as a dungeon (big place, stuff to explore and fight over), more like a scenario with mobs in the middle, or perhaps a RvR enabled instanced Lair would be a better description? Not that that is necessarily a bad thing, but I’m trying to get my head round what this place really is.

I think people will have very set ideas about what the word dungeon means, particularly when you put RvR near the word. Memories of Darkness Falls leap to the forefront of your mind and while I think much of them will be rather rose-tinted (particularly on the PvE vs PvP balance), the sense of scale associated with those memories is pretty damn epic and accurately so. The RvR dungeons in DAoC are not dungeons, they are DUNGEONS!

But then new Lair or Scenario isn’t exactly going to set the world alight and perhaps is far underselling what the new Skaven instanced thing is. Maybe its somewhere in between. I’m really not sure yet.

To be honest if it’s fun I won’t care too much and it’s important to note there are both positive and negative things being said about the PTS events, but I do wonder how much the negative stuff is being influenced by expectation related to the word dungeon. If true though I don't think that is a reason to write those negative comments off, since managing player expectation is a big part of running and evolving a MMO. You could probably find all sorts of debate over what RvR means too. Opinions... such a pain.