Q: How's the "random" element?

[Nystul]

Not much randomness at all so far, maybe more later. Monster drops are somewhat random, but it's hard to tell how much of a factor that is later in the game. It may not matter that much. To simply do every quest in the game, we may be talking about thousands of game hours (keep in mind that the races have different starting areas, there are class specific quests, and there at least could be quests that are only available depening on factions based on previous quests). And you would probably also spend quite a bit of time just hunting whatever monsters you think are fun, or working on a trade to help yourself and others get equipment. And by that time there will be expansions of some sort or another. As Occhi says, "Fun is where you find it," and this will be a huge game world which offers several different approaches to having fun.

The way monsters spawn in MMORPGs will drive you insane as a dungeon crawler. It is not random, and I could rant for hours about how bad it is. At least the instanced dungeons should be a welcome relief from some of the big problems that the persistant spawning systems cause.