In WoW there used to be a design philosophy that dungeons were part of the world, even though they were instanced. So even though you didn’t camp bosses or random PVP in them as you might in Everquests non-instanced dungeons, there were reasons to go inside other than the loot the bosses could drop.
Last night I helped out my partner by sneaking into the Zul Aman heroic 5 man dungeon on my druid (with his rogue). He had been sent a load of the Amani Hex Sticks, dropped by mobs in that raid which are used, primarily, to hunt for a rare companion pet frog.
The sticks are used on normal frogs near a specific pond in the instance, each frog is transformed into a random NPC (you free them from a witch doctor’s hexx). The NPC might give a little story before disappearing, might turn out to be a vendor selling a small set of unique items or if you are very lucky you end up with mojo the pet.
This kind of unrelated activity, within a dungeon is or at least was very common in WoW. There were special mount quests, rare crafting recipes that spawned on shelves in corners, rare materials to gather or even seasonal NPCs to visit for a festivities quests. They help tie the open world to closed world of dungeons, and give you reasons to return to older content beyond just farming items for twink alts.
I believe that Blizzard moved away from this as they simplified the game, especially with the Wrath and Cataclysm. I haven’t really encountered this much in other games actually, though I haven’t set foot in many dungeons in EQ2 the most likely candidate otherwise for alternative use of dungeons. Are there other examples?
Loot and XP, but not much else?
Certainly the more modern games, like Rift and SWTOR (and I presume Tera) are pretty narrowly focused on dungeons being solely there as group-oriented loot and XP piñatas. I can’t help but think this is a pretty big reason why I haven’t stayed interested in them in the longer term because they’re so one-dimensional.
I haven’t played EQ2 in almost 2 years now, but when I left the dungeons were a semi-mixed bag. From the beginning of the game, most dungeons were “open,” so you’d be competing with other groups for spawns, clickies, and whatnot. A lot of quests would send you into the dungeons to kill certain mobs, click on certain items, etc.
Over time, more dungeons became instanced, though, and the instanced ones tend to be the loot pinatas that you mention. Quests would still send you into them, but generally the quest would now be “complete the dungeon” not “go in and do this thing while you’re there.
I guess you could say that the “open” dungeons were part of the world, while the instances were more of “group-sized raids.”
OTOH, EQ2 has kept adding open dungeons as well, with plenty to do in them. The Hole was a pretty fascinating one, I though, with 3 different “wings” and plenty of quests in each direction and content for he entire breadth of 80-90. I know a lot of people didn’t like it, but I thought it was pretty wonderful. I loved buying the illusion that let you wander through and do quests without necessarily needing to kill mobs, or if you did kill them it wouldn’t kill your faction standings with the mobs in that section since they thought you were a mob, not yourself. That was a fun little meta-game in its own right.
Interesting that EQ2 appears to have made the divide between open and instanced dungeons on this. I’ve only stepped foot in one (open world) dungeon in the time I played the game sadly. It doesn’t have to be something limited to open world dungeons though, as WoW used to prove. Our guild would do runs of Black Rock Depths just to collect the engineering or blacksmithing recipes for new characters – there were some great recipes in there. Having a reason to go to dungeons beyond just loot or XP is always a bonus!