Friday, October 20, 2006

Shorter dungeons

The instanced dungeons of the Burning Crusade expansion are a lot shorter than the dungeons of WoW 1.0. Tigole said that "Our goal was to keep most 5-man instance runs to 1-1:30 with a few exceptions." That is certainly true for the first dungeon I played in the Burning Crusade beta, Hellfire Rampart. And I really like the idea that you can join a group for a dungeon run without being forced to stay with them for 3+ hours.

Now I wonder what length the raid dungeons of the Burning Crusade will have. I appears that there are a lot of them, which suggests that they as well will be shorter. Wouldn't it be nice to have raids of 2 to 3 hours? With the raid cap being lowered to 25 players, shorter raid dungeons would make sense. You get raids that are easier to organize and don't last 4-6 hours. If you absolutely want to raid for more hours, you can always do several raid dungeons in series.

I can't help the feeling that the "raiding guilds" of next year will look and feel considerably different than the classic raiding guilds of today. The transition will be challenging, and I'm a bit afraid of the possibilities for guild drama. But in the end I think I'd like raiding which is easier to organize and shorter.

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