As for the problem of outleveling content when you do a dungeon: if a game has a level curve that makes you frightened of doing dungeons, because you’ll outlevel content even if you try no to, that is quite bad design. Yes, it is that way with low-level WoW, but I think we’ve all seen the arguments and can agree that it is, indeed, bad design. 😉

Finally, dungeons were one of the few things I enjoyed in Rift in the long run, as far as “content” in the classical sense goes. Rifts got old too fast; I’m genuinely worried Trion built part of their fate on what looks like a one-trick pony.

I don’t normally do dungeons, at all. Compared the rest of the PvE experience they are generally…uh…inconvenient. If I want to play through an MMO’s storyline, doing the dungeons generally means overleveling the content of the storyline, and in this way, it ends up putting me in the same boat that canned PvP does.

For all that though, I did some of the dungeons in Rift, simply because it was so easy to get into them – with the push of a button rather than the waste of a half hour ride. Personally, I have wondered – if those finder tools weren’t in place, would the use of dungeons justify the amount of developer time that must go into them to get them creative and balanced enough to be enjoyable?

I agree with you, I loved dungeon crawls. The main trigger for this post was that I returned to LotRO for the time being, and found a dungeon to my liking there (Goblin-Town). In fact, I originally wanted to write about that, but then I got more and more general, and in the end, I cut the whole LotRO story out because it didn’t fit any more.

Maybe later this week. That’ll give me time to get screenshots too.