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Player made dungeons in Diablo 3

One of the problems I had with City of heroes back in the day was the lack of tile sets for instance zones. What this means is how the layout and design of a map looks. In COH, you often had the same four types of maps, sewer, office building, warehouse and the laboratory.

Now I get it, we are in a modern city, how many unique places can there be? My answer is, have you been around a modern city? Why were we not fighting in grocery stores, sport stadiums, malls, jails? As time went on a few more were added, but nothing near what it should have been.

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In Diablo you have adventures, you can do bounties or rifts and the levels rotate so one moment you are in Hell and when you zone to level 2 you might be in a cave or one of the open zones. In addition, the maps themselves can rotate so it might be the same storage room, but the layout is different enough that it almost feels new.

While this is a nice touch I still feel as if more could have been done. Consider, in previous games not only could you play via LAN, but you could make your own maps. In the original StarCraft people would make some fantastic maps and they were fun to play.

Now there is a bad way to implement maps and sadly City of Heroes did so at first. People would make maps specifically to herd enemies and level up quickly. Little time or design was put in and the result was a flood of bad maps.

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Dungeons and Dragons online did player map maps well, where they are not only approved by the developers but by key players and bad maps don’t make the cut.

Let’s face facts, we are not going to get fast expansions and content, but another fact is we as gamers eat through content. I believe the fix is to allow players to design maps, leave monster and loot placement up to the developers. It is not a perfect system, but I believe it could bring more uniqueness to the maps and improve gameplay overall.

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