True Dungeon Demo Thoughts
ahstoddard
President-kidnapping NinjaHouston-ishRegistered User regular
President-kidnapping NinjaHouston-ishRegistered User regular
in PAX South
Personally I ended up enjoying the whole thing a lot more than I thought I would, so I'm wondering what everyone else's opinions on it happened to be.
Would you want it to come back? Would you be willing to pay extra for the "full" experience or would you want it to maybe be a little smaller and stay free like the rest of PAX?
Also, if anyone else has gone through it at GenCon and did it at South, are the puzzles usually that simple?
Would you want it to come back? Would you be willing to pay extra for the "full" experience or would you want it to maybe be a little smaller and stay free like the rest of PAX?
Also, if anyone else has gone through it at GenCon and did it at South, are the puzzles usually that simple?
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Personally I really enjoyed my experience with True Dungeon, and very much hope the full experience can be at a future PAXen. As the OP asked, love to hear what others of you thought about the experience.
While I personally wouldn't mind about paying separately for a full version (PAX is a vacation to me and I allocate money to spend around it -- Pre-PAX, food, merch, etc.) I completely agree that it would be a unfair practice baking charges into the badge price for the "upgrade". It doesn't have to be True Dungeon, it can be any other event as well that people want upgraded and the same terms apply. This kind of relates to why PC will always reign supreme to me because I really, really, really hate the pay to play online concept. I already paid you a good amount of money for the game itself and now you want to charge me to play online? No thanks. I'll rather have game companies give you the option to host your own server or the ability to purchase a dedicated one (and of course give yourself admin privileges and a reserved slot in the process) rather than them to complain that a paid membership is necessary for good online play.
But I wouldn't like a convention where everything is pay to play. Imagine if a amusement park charged you for admission AND rides rather than one or the other? I highly doubt that a vast majority of people would like that. Touchy subject indeed, but the "easiest" solution without severely turning off people would be to increase attendance to allow for more wiggle room in the budget but obviously that is something the higher up's have little control over. While I do enjoy that I don't have to stalk the interwebs for South passes, it does come at the cost of a smaller budget for the development/planning/coordinating teams.
Something along the lines of: PAX expands to take up a larger portion of the SA Convention Center, then True Dungeon squats in another section. PAX attendees are given first shot at buying tickets and signing up for times, but it is technically open to the good people of San Antonio to also purchase tickets.
They said they needed something along the lines of 200 volunteers to run the whole thing, and did the demo with just 7, so it is certainly a large undertaking (especially with South this year lacking a full number of Enforcers from what I hear)
I think they said in the full version you get double the time in each room, so I would hope the puzzles would at least have more steps, if not also being slightly difficult.
I was both impressed and unimpressed by the experience. Bringing the big rock worm animatronic and the lava room was pretty nifty As were the character reference sheets (hinting at the cool stuff we wouldn't actually be doing). But I was less impressed by the lack of info going in. For example, our whole group was stressing while reading the character sheets, thinking we'd need to memorize things and actually play the game. All of that could have been alleviated if the people seating us had taken 30 seconds to explain things better. Likewise, while I appreciate how labor-intensive breakdown must have been on the last day, shutting it down before noon without warning was quite a disappointment. And mishandling of the tokens that morning only added to the negative experience (they could have given one away per person walking up and being turned away, but instead they gave armloads of them to the last few groups just to get rid of them). These kinds of issues were unique to a first year/demo situation like this one and likely wouldn't be repeated, but they do speak to the lack of organization and customer experience awareness.
I know for GenCon this year everything will be set within the world of Pat Rothfuss' books, so something PAX related would not be out of the question, especially if they were planning on setting up at multiple PAXen.