What Epic Dungeons do right is creating large hunting maps.
What they do wrong is basically everything else, the worst being is the content is not very fun and gets less fun the more you do it.
Sure the rewards are not quite good enough, but simply buffing the rewards does not fix the enjoyment issue to the content itself.
Something I highly enjoyed and was a ton of fun, which had no right to be fun, was the Abyssal Expedition Event.
~ The enjoyment of building up your army over time and making them more powerful.
~ Customize the abilities each character has, with a hard limit of 3 skills, and divided into 1 weak spammy skill, 1 moderately strong skill, and 1 ultimate skill.
~ Being relaxing content of seeing your army you customized and trained up to fight monsters around your location. This allowed the player to then be able to just talk to others while their army is whacking away slowly at the monsters, especially when the daily timer was shorter and the player was not AFK the whole with longer daily time requirements.
How to improve on this and make it permanent daily and weekly content?
~ Simultaneously reduce the amount of time the player needs to interact with the content to progress it and get their rewards for the week.
~ Make the content slightly more active so the player can engage with the content, while still emphasizing the chill "AFK" aspect about it at the same time.
~ Have a progression aspect to the content that has players looking forward to coming back to it to see their army get more and more powerful over time!
~ Create fun hangout spots within the map while seeing others out hunting monsters, bringing back the good aspects of old Henesys Hunting Grounds days.
Something along these lines is how things could be:
~ Create one very large map with multiple different points of interest and having very interesting and unique map layout design all throughout.
~ Make this map feel like a mini world to explore, with small interesting details to stop and look at, and really get the player to want to explore every little aspect about this one gigantic map. Really make the map feel like it is a living breathing world, both with places where it looks like people lived in and are living in, scattered all throughout the map.
~ The first map begins at level 260, every 10 levels will roll out a new map, so level 270 you can access the second map, level 280 you can access the third map, etc. and so forth.
~ There will be multiple different kinds of monsters on each map, including the intermingling of multiple different kinds of monsters within the same hunting area, and areas where only one kind of monster dwells.
On rare occasion, even a raid boss monster (damage sponge) will spawn in a random location as a fun event for players to work together to take down. This will grant everyone that participated a bunch of bonus rewards after the content's weekly reset with a successful takedown.
~ Monster respawn is a very long 60 seconds, promoting players to move around the map if they want to speed up their time hunting these monsters.
~ The player character cannot directly interact with the monsters, just like Abyssal Expedition Event, and only the army that they raised up can slowly kill the monsters.
~ The content to be both daily and weekly, but rewards are handed out after this content's weekly reset day.
Everyday beginning with the first day after its weekly reset will allow the player's army to hunt up to 1,000 monsters per world within the account, but this can stack for each day that goes by if you did not kill any monsters or not all of the monsters and adds on another +1,000 monsters the next day, up to a total of 7,000 monsters to hunt per week by day 7, resets back to 1,000 after weekly reset.
This allows players to have something to do every day while giving players that only have a few days to play in a week the ability to do more in that day to not feel like they have to log in everyday in the week to progress this content.
~ Your army starts with one character. After 1,000 monsters, you unlock your second character. After 3,000 total monsters, you unlock your third character. After 6,000 total monsters you unlock your fourth character. After 10,000 total monsters, you unlock your fifth and final character.
Your army has no character level, but an army level so all characters are equal in power.
Your army levels up with the amount of monsters they kill and how much army exp the monsters give. For the first level 260 map, every monster offers 1 army exp per kill, future maps the monsters will offer more exp as your army will carry over into future maps with you.
The army level starts at level 1 and caps out at level 300, which also will be raised when the real level cap gets raised, exp requirements for each level will be radically different to your character's exp requirements to level.
~ Starting out damage will begin at 1 and the damage cap will be 9,999 (which could be raised in the future), bringing back the value of each and every number being meaningful. Of course the monster HP in these types of maps will properly reflect the amount of damage the armies can deal.
~ Controlling your army:
Your army will only fight within the boundaries of a certain area of where you summoned them to fight.
To move your army to a new location, simply use the Interact / Harvest key and your army will teleport to your new location and fight monsters around there.
~ Each character in the army can be visually customized. Both free and paid options would be available (only way to monetize Heroic Worlds this way).
~ You can assign each character to be a Warrior, Mage, Archer, Thief, or Pirate - this will determine what passive skill they can get and an unique aspect about the class.
- You can have multiple characters be the same class.
Each character can have a maximum of one passive skill they can have. The starting map only has one passive skill, but each new map unlock will offer one new passive skill to choose from for each class.
Each map has a "hero" character, i.e. the level 260 map would be Mitra, and has three weak skills with tiny cooldowns, three moderate skills with longer cooldowns, and three powerful ultimate skills with long cooldowns, all being themed around that map's "hero" character.
- You can choose one of each skill type for each character (so every character has three active skills they use). The deeper you get into the game, the more fun with customization options you can have for army building!
Each class' special aspect:
Warrior: Basic attacks do the most damage, but they have the slowest movement and weakest spells.
Mage: Spells are the strongest and they have ranged attacks, but basic attacks are the weakest.
Archer: They have ranged basic attacks, but spells are weak and movement is slow.
Thief: They attack and move the fastest, but their basic attacks are weak and spells have longer cooldowns.
Pirate: They alternate between melee and ranged basic attacks, and their spells can have cooldowns anywhere between 50% to 150% of the spell's base cooldown.
~ Rewards for the content would be the following: EXP, Sol Erda Fragments, and Sol Erda Energy being based on how many monsters you killed for that week, what map the monsters were killed on, and for EXP is also based on your character's level. Other rewards could be handed out as well, but we stick with these for now.
Total monsters you can kill for the day and week is shared between all maps, higher level areas equate to better rewards.
~ You can further boost your rewards for the week through a "work together" aspect.
There will be points of interest areas, almost village-like areas, that monsters do not spawn in and instead has a few key spots that you want to stand in. One spot will be highlighted at a time for each point of interest with some kind of animated activity that plays i.e. if there are three main points of interest on that map, then there will be three locations active at any point on that map.
Standing within the realms of this activity will allow you to acquire a small portion of additional rewards of any and all monsters that other players' armies are killing on that map.
This will allow players more options to progress their character.
Do you go and train or do something else after you finish your army's hunting for the day / week? Or do you stick around and gain a little bit of passive gains while chatting with others?
The activity area will change locations every 10 minutes to a predetermined random location.
I believe this was the blunt of my idea (in before I left out something important i needed to mention) for cool new content to come to the game that has the hopes of:
1. Increase player activity.
2. Increase social aspects to the game.
3. Have a fun gameplay loop, as simple and easy as this content would be.
4. Grant players something to look forward to every week.
5. Try to fulfill the joys of old MapleStory in a modern way.
