Tower of Necromancy - general thoughts, suggestions and more

I don't expect much out of it, especially with how slow-paced and spread out main saga releases have been. One month, the focus is on Darkovia, then the focus shifts to Lolosia, then it shifts to Arcangrove, then Greenguard, then Yokai Isle, then Doomwood, and it's just not cohesive at all. Especially now, their storywriting is filled with a bunch of gaps in the plot, and every time we wait for a new story, we don't even remember what occurred previously in the story or the story lacks excitement and only serves the purpose of filler. It's no wonder why people habitually skip cutscenes at this point. Some parts of Doomwood have been scrapped out purposely, like the character Sargoth the Necromancer, so I really doubt that he's going to appear in any upcoming Doomwood releases.

 

Just something to point out, this current battleon siege event involving undead could be something to do with Tower of Necromancy. We have had such occurrences before where a war event leads to a release and this could be one of them or... just undead being undead, you know?

 

It certainly is very close and the first parts of ToN should arrive soon and this war event does suggest towards that a little bit at least.

 

But it could also be AE rehashing old content. They don't really have a variety of monsters to add to any new events, when you think about it. When I think of monsters in AQ3D, the two that generally come to mind are dragons and undeads, especially as they're the most overused monsters. Undead could cover just about anything.

 

Well the thing with monsters, especially with undead monsters, is that AE has been able to get away with reskinning or reusing those monsters for just about any release. For instance, Frostval has skeletons with ice spikes, Mogloween has skeletons, Doomwood has skeletons, Ashfall has charred skeletons, Darkovia has skeletons, the Underworld has skeletons, and various areas have some reused variant. There just isn't a lot of variety, and it's really due to the lack of resources on AE's end.

And I think the monotony is a problem with the game itself, because the biggest complaint people have about the game is the lack of themes and variety. When people say that there isn't new content, they're not saying that "AE is incapable of putting out new releases", which they've been doing mostly weekly for years now; they're pointing out that AE isn't doing enough to innovate itself and move away from their current state of monotony. In their perspective, why be busy with designing new content, when rehashing old content and making it work somehow suffices?

Like when you really think about it, the reason why Sargoth the Necromancer was scrapped was probably due to the lack of resources. They had the story planned out, but didn't have the rest of the resources. For instance, they didn't have a Necromancer model at the time, and the closest thing they had was Dage's "Death Knight" model and the "Legion" helm (skull with the blue flames), so they combined those two things to create the Necroknight, and they made that the original Doomwood boss. And to give the content a bit of justice, they gave the Necroknight forms (e.g. Necrohen) though they were mostly reused models from the game's data.

Well now they have a Necromancer model, so they could technically proceed with the Tower of Necromancy, but is it enough to reuse all of the content they currently have? Personally, I'd like to see new monsters and new designs at this point, especially to differentiate each saga. I don't want to see the world of AQ3D as a place filled with mostly undeads or mostly dragons. I'd like to see things like a boss that'll actually feel like a boss, not just a Necromancer model repurposed to create a boss. In a lot of other video games, bosses are generally unique (with their own models and everything) and their models are almost never reused; the least that video games do to repurpose bosses is make the character itself a recurring character that appears in different parts of the story, and that's something we don't really see often in AQ3D (like how many times have you seen Malek appear in the story?). But that's just something I don't expect with the Tower of Necromancy, or any foreseeable release; AE just doesn't have the resources or the proper management.

 

Would probably end up being a 10-20 minute release then, at least for completion, since three levels doesn't seem like much. Personally I'd like to see Tower of Necromancy have 100 levels and be more like a roguelike dungeon where you have to survive all of the levels and reach the top, but I don't think the game is at that point yet. And really, that would probably deter casual players, but one thing they could do is have 100 levels for the main plot as just a regular map, and have a post-content objective where you could survive through 100 levels as some dungeon. It would definitely offer a different take on dungeons in the game since there aren't dungeons like that.

 

I think they have the capability to do it, but there are things to be concerned about with what they have; like perhaps the biggest issue is the possibility of getting disconnected mid-way through the dungeon. It would have to be a different implementation of dungeons to not end up being frustrating, especially with save points so players aren't spending 10 hours grinding through every level. And that sort of implementation might make it so dungeons have to be one player, so it might not be feasible.

Though instead of dungeons, maybe they could just create a Tower of Necromancy with 100 rooms, and those rooms would just act like areas. And maybe you'd have to complete a certain set of quests to advance. That could be a more plausible idea.

 

I want more doom weapons to come out

 

There does seem to be an ongoing theme involving guardian towers. They linked the Heartwood Guardian Nature Tower with the one in Battleon. The tower of Necromancy was hinted at being a former guardian tower. Where do you see this going?