New early-game portals


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Temple Termagant

Posts: 13

Joined: Monday, 16th February 2015, 07:16

Location: Siberia, Russia

Post Saturday, 29th August 2015, 16:29

New early-game portals

In the late game there are different Wizard's labs which bring a variety of walkthroughs. But in early game portal vaults are repeat and you explore the same tombs and sewers, volcanos and ice caves over and over again. Thats why I decided to propose some ideas of new portals.

1)Limbo. It represents a grey-coloured location with form of cross, square or ellipse, mostly open except edges designed as a close galleries. Limbo dwelled by a tier-5 demons and sometimes hell rats. In the design there's dead grass, constantly appearing or disappearing fog, bones of weak creatures.

2)Hive. Location with floors and walls made of the dirt. Looks like a the incide of the formicary. Dwelled by different arthropods, principally ants and bees. Usually contains a bee or ant queen as a miniboss, sometimes they have bodyguards - pair of formicides.

3)Cave of Monster. It contains just one enemy but it is much stronger than monsters from the level where generated a portal.

4)Menagerie. Place filled with bars forming cages. Inside the cages are different animals. Outside there are humanoids such as people armed with whips.

5)Housetops. This plase contains air-themed monsters like flying creatures and air elementals. Also contains many gargoyles.

Ziggurat Zagger

Posts: 3037

Joined: Sunday, 2nd January 2011, 02:06

Post Saturday, 29th August 2015, 17:57

Re: New early-game portals

I think there's a general policy that anybody who wants to write vaults is probably going to be approved, at least if their vaults are any good. This includes portal vaults, although rather than resulting in there being more portal vaults they'll probably all just get reduced generation to keep xp and loot averaging the same. I don't think any of the current devteam is likely to divert their current efforts to making more vaults, though, so you might as well try your hand at vault design yourself. A large percentage of vaults added to the game are from non-devteam writers.

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Brannock

Dungeon Master

Posts: 3618

Joined: Thursday, 23rd December 2010, 12:43

Post Saturday, 29th August 2015, 20:15

Re: New early-game portals

Cthulhu: Of the proposed list, I like the hive best. The beehive vaults can make levels quite interesting, if they spawn early enough. Of course, I don't know what you mean by "early game"... anything that contains a number of killer bees is unlikely to be fair on the Sewer/Ossuary depth range.
I like about bees that they are fast, but consumables are very effective against them.

Limbo is alright, it's a demon pit like you said. I don't care very much for the aesthetics (for one, I'm a console player and secondly, that's generally the easy part). It seems not so easy to come up with interesting monster sets, so proposals for that would be interesting: what combination of 5 demons could make a cool, early fight, in your opinion?

Menagerie is not interesting: you'd pop into the portal vault, check the monster and either go for it or leave right away. You could say the Purgy sewer map is a bit like it, but not quite and it's only one in a larger set. I don't think that's good for an actual portal vault on its own.

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Brannock

Crypt Cleanser

Posts: 724

Joined: Tuesday, 29th November 2011, 11:04

Post Sunday, 30th August 2015, 05:43

Re: New early-game portals

Cthulhu_55 wrote:2)Hive. Location with floors and walls made of the dirt. Looks like a the incide of the formicary. Dwelled by different arthropods, principally ants and bees. Usually contains a bee or ant queen as a miniboss, sometimes they have bodyguards - pair of formicides.


Not the bees again! Aaagh!
"Damned, damned be the legions of the damned..."

Dungeon Master

Posts: 3618

Joined: Thursday, 23rd December 2010, 12:43

Post Sunday, 30th August 2015, 11:08

Re: New early-game portals

kuniqs: Not sure if you're serious or not, but the bees will be alright for a portal vault. The Hive branch of yore suffered from the following problems: (1) you could enter as late as you wanted to, e.g. when you have obtained rPois; (2) if the bee masses overwhelm you, you can slowly grind the Hive levels using stairs; (3) while not necessary, you can even address the main purposes of the bees (poison and high speed) by waiting and kill holes.

A portal vault addresses all of these. And can cough up decent loot, too. (I've been mistaken for a long while in campaigning for a bee-related portal vault with food as prize. That was a bad idea, but bees as enemies on a resonably small, one-off map is not, in my opinion.)

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