Don't like it, sorry. (Just skip to the end for summary).
The chance to open portal means games will be spam-created just to get bishiboshi and when he doesn't spawn a portal it's off to a new game. Anywhere from every 10-30 seconds (or not much longer), per person doing it. You could mitigate this by making several different target bosses able to open portals, bishiboshi in act one, dark elder in act two, rotgaze in act three, etc. That may be your intention anyway. However, it's still likely we will all prefer to run one particular area over and over for simplicity's sake rather than try all the areas per game.
The good thing about an idea like this would be to detract from the inevitable tundra runs we all end up doing. Unfortunately the reason for that is because it is the last area per difficulty with the right ratio of clear-rate/density of mobs - where we get the best stuff for least effort. It's a shame but no amount of special quests, dungeons or whatever is likely to succeed frozen tundra in terms of facility and popularity until something is done about that place first - which has been attempted if I recall.
Lost my train of thought for why else I thought this a bad idea. Probably just afraid of change: I'm human.
I think making the existing unused areas more attractive deserves your time and attention more. There's one in nearly every stage of every act. Some of them, like spider cavern, flayer dungeon and kurast sewers should be necessary to progress through an act, but unfortunately they're mostly skipped. Some of them, like cave, stony tomb and collapsed escape tunnel contain glyphs needed for cursed equipment, and I think they're fine. But the rest never pay host to any action because there is simply nothing down there.
So, if I had to offer my own counter-suggestion for criticism when shooting down someone else's ideas, it would be to make those unused areas more enticing. I don't know how, I'm not very creative.
Maybe do it like vanilla and select one area per act to hold a treasure-level slightly below the maximum. To use vanilla as an example, it was the pit in act one, drifter cavern in act 5, and I can't remember the others but you would of course choose your own and may even keep them secret to allow us to discover them by ourselves.
If I'm not mistaken, each of those areas contains a named unique similar to bishiboshi anyway. Why not use those bosses to spawn the portals, except not as a random thing because the effort has already been made to clear and find that boss. And then... well then I should go make my own idea thread because this is going on too long.
Tl;dr I'm not keen on new stuff for new stuff's sake when there's already other stuff nobody bothers to do because tundra is too good.
|