Disclaimer: This is something I've been thinking about on and off for a while. It's something that even if I decide should be done, I may never actually get around to doing. This is a topic that is surely ripe to ignite old flame wars; I'm going to ask y'all nicely not to do that.

It's probably pretty obvious that I tried to do something fairly different with the first draft of the Silent Tower. I always liked puzzle-y stuff, and I thought it would be cool to have an area in the game that you could approach as you would something like Hell, with an oversized group trying to mow down everything for shinies, or, that you could approach with more of an explorer mindset, trying to figure out puzzle-y things, and that going at it that way, maybe there would be cool things that even a level 1 character (had they been able to get to the area) could do and survive, yet, could still kill a tough hero done wrong.

In practice, the area didn't see much in the way of groups trying to kill stuff and more drew the explorerish types. We all know what happens after that: some disgruntled yahoo posts everything he's figured out, I close the area, I change stuff, I reopen the area, repeat.

Zulg's said that in his opinion an area like this can't work in today's CF, and though it really, really pains me to admit it, I've come to think that he's right. I really, really liked the Shadow cabal, too, and the secrecy aspect of it (such as it is) couldn't survive for crap in today's CF, either. Sometimes that's just the way it goes.

You can see the evolution in my thoughts about area design in the dragon lairs. To be fair, Rayihn did nearly 100% of the area writing work for them, but the general concept and many of the more particularly cruel ideas are born out of a lot of my experience with the older explore areas and thoughts of how to build a better mousetrap. For those that haven't experienced them, they each are, in essence, very small, very aggressive areas with (relatively) smart NPCs. There's a certain small amount of knowledge to be gained as you explore them, in terms of the layout, what hazards to expect, how to deal with them, the "smart" way to go about killing these dragons, etc., but the long and short of it is, even with perfect knowledge of one of the areas, getting in and out alive with the loot is not trivial for anything but a huge group.

The thing I have been pondering, then, is this: what if the next time I decided to revamp/reopen the Tower, I did so with an eye towards eliminating or de-emphasizing the explore/puzzle aspects somewhat and turning it more into an always-aggressive/dangerous area that you'd more or less have to fight through with a decent-sized group? In a lot of ways, making it a little more like the lairs and/or the Inferno.

In some sense, it feels to me like I can save 90% of the work on the area and make it useful again by giving up on the other 10%, even if some of it are my favorite bits.

The question is, is this interesting? Or does this toss the only thing the people who did like the area found cool about it?