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Vaal side areas are really cool with their own little bosses. They also give good rewards such as sacrifice fragments and vaal gems.
GGG please.
External link →Vaal side areas are really cool with their own little bosses. They also give good rewards such as sacrifice fragments and vaal gems.
GGG please.
External link →Actually the biggest hurdle to this is simply the sheer amount of level design work required. Vaal side areas are not something that we can easily enable for any area or map - they require hand-crafted integration for every variant of the map/area by a level designer.
This is mostly a relic of the past (Sacrifice of the Vaal was released over 5 and a half years ago, after all); we don't generally create content that requires so much custom work per area any more. But back then, we only had 3 Acts of content, so it wasn't such a big deal at the time.
To illustrate, when a Vaal side area spawns, we don't just swap in the entrance tile somewhere - we create entirely new corridors, rooms, valleys, paths, bridges, etc. leading up to the entrance. It can actually make the area noticeably bigger, and usually means more monsters/chests/etc. to fill the extra space.
The type of entrance also affects which Vaal side you get. So a sewer grating entrance always leads to a side area with the Sewer tile set, a forested/tree covered entrance always leads to a forest tile set, etc. This is why certain Vaal side areas can only be found in certain Act areas, because only certain entrance tiles can fit into any given parent area.
So doing this for 140 odd endgame Maps is actually quite a large task, and it's hard to justify such an effort. The alternative is to create some kind of new system that is more modular and easier to fit into every map, but if we're making a new system anyway, it's hard to justify only using it for old content when we could use it for something fancy and new.
I think this is one of those features that is basically fine in its current state, if a little dated, but has potential for future development. Maybe one day...
Having a portal system would remove the need for custom design. Have a rare monster spawn in maps that spawns a portal on death, a mechanic that surprisingly isn't yet in the game (although it would probably be better used for new content regardless).
Having some kind of generic portal may well be the most straight-forward approach, but even that still has some overhead, drawbacks and subtle weirdness, and would require refactoring a few things, etc.