Jason Ford, Mission Designer
Design Changes to Magma Caverns in Tabula Rasa
May 2008

We're working hard to add brand new maps and missions to Tabula Rasa, but we are also taking the time to polish and add exciting new content to our existing maps and missions as well. The re-work we've done for Magma Caverns is a little bit of both of these things combined, so we thought it might be interesting to talk about the revamping of Magma Caverns.

For several reasons, we decided to completely re-do the level design and create brand new missions for Magma Caverns. The current live version will be replaced in the Deployment 8 update with this newly redesigned version.  While the ideas in the original were good, we felt that the implementation was not realizing its own potential.

First, a little bit of background. Magma Caverns is currently built for players around level 45, and the level of the instance will remain the same in the reworked version (level 44 ¨C 46). You can access the instance by traveling to the Western edge of Torden Abyss on Planet Arieki.  Both the original instance and the new version are based on an ethical parable where the players are given a choice that affects the mission line and story progression for the rest of the map. Initially, the players were instructed to enter Magma Caverns to find a renegade science team and bring them back for court martial, or execute them if they resist. The player was then given the choice to either fight or help them. When we redesigned the map, we ripped out all of the old missions and designed entirely new missions from scratch, including a brand new type of choice mission for groups.  As a result, the new storyline is differs slightly from the original.

Magma Caverns was originally designed in such a way that players were unable to play through a large portion of the instance, because only certain areas of the map were available depending on the choice players made near the beginning of the map.  For example, the spawning of creatures in the map was dependent upon the choice players made in the choice mission previously mentioned.  If a player skipped this part of the mission for any reason, there wouldn't be anything for players to fight against.  Also, since the choice mission wasn't repeatable players couldn't try the other choice, and there would be nothing left for players to do if they chose to revisit the map after completing it the first time.  Lastly, if a group of players went into Magma Caverns together, the choice in this mission would be decided by the first player to make a decision, regardless of the opinions of his/her group.  All in all, we felt that there were fundamental issues in both the mission and level design that needed to be addressed.