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Dec. 13th, 2010 03:39 pmSince I am non-trivially contemplating a career in video game development, I can honestly claim a degree of professional interest in the amount of time I've spent recently playing the new World of Warcraft content. Ahem. So it is in that light that I've been thinking about the changes Blizzard recently made -- which alter the experience of the game entirely.
I don't mean the interface, which they changed slightly, but the flow of gameplay. To avoid this becoming too abstract, let me get a little more specific. In the "old" way, your character would enter a city or town, where you'd run around and pick up between 5-15 quests at a time. Then you'd venture into the countryside to do these quests, which could require you to go anywhere within a sizable zone. You'd return to town when your quests are done and/or your bags are full and/or you need new training and/or to work on your professions. A few of the quests would have a follow-up or even occasionally you'd encounter a quest chain. When you had done everything there was to do at that town, or at least everything you wanted to do, you'd run about 10 minutes down the road to the next town or zone and repeat the cycle there.
By contrast the "new" way has you start at a minor quest hub where you get two or three quests at a time, go out a short ways and do these and then come back to get two or three more. After doing about 7-10 quests you move to the next minor hub which is a short ways down the road. Some of these hubs are towns. The average quest requires three-five minutes to complete, or 10-15 mins. total for a trio that you're given at any one time. Under the old way, quests could sometimes take an hour or more.
On the plus side, the new way gives gameplay a bit more of a narrative flow. There's a story arc with a lot of episodic asides that pulls you along. They've eliminated many of the most grindy, repetitive or time-consuming quests (the famous "Kill x number of beast y" type quests, which still exist of course, but not to nearly the same extent) and have you doing all sorts of tasks, which can range from rescuing frightened critters from a blazing forest to defending an oil rig against attacks from enraged locals (oh, yes, there's a wide range in how ethical or moral are the things you're tasked with, a large topic unto itself). On the minus side, since every quest is now part of a narrative arc, you have less leeway to pick and choose among the quests as you once had. Even though they've eliminated a lot of the reasons many quests were avoided, it still causes the game to feel like a very carefully engineered, focus-group tested, complex interactive carnival ride.
There are technical reasons for doing things this way. WoW is a massively multiplayer game, which means you can have (I think it is) 20,000 people playing on each realm at one time. If they are all trying to complete the same tasks at the same time, the end result will be not only a nightmare from the technological point of view (server overload, etc.) but also from a fun and enjoyment point of view. Even if it isn't a nightmare, you can end up with bottlenecks if you're not careful. So they've broken things up in a way that ensures that small groups of people are focusing on different small areas for 15-30 minute blocks. They move along to the next area just as the next group comes along. When you roll out new, shiny content that everyone is going to want to play, this way you force everyone to be as spread out as possible. It's very optimized.
So, while I think the new style is on the whole preferable to the old style, and may even be necessary for the technical reasons I just outlined, I think it could be even better if players were given a choice between two or three different possible narrative flows.
I don't mean the interface, which they changed slightly, but the flow of gameplay. To avoid this becoming too abstract, let me get a little more specific. In the "old" way, your character would enter a city or town, where you'd run around and pick up between 5-15 quests at a time. Then you'd venture into the countryside to do these quests, which could require you to go anywhere within a sizable zone. You'd return to town when your quests are done and/or your bags are full and/or you need new training and/or to work on your professions. A few of the quests would have a follow-up or even occasionally you'd encounter a quest chain. When you had done everything there was to do at that town, or at least everything you wanted to do, you'd run about 10 minutes down the road to the next town or zone and repeat the cycle there.
By contrast the "new" way has you start at a minor quest hub where you get two or three quests at a time, go out a short ways and do these and then come back to get two or three more. After doing about 7-10 quests you move to the next minor hub which is a short ways down the road. Some of these hubs are towns. The average quest requires three-five minutes to complete, or 10-15 mins. total for a trio that you're given at any one time. Under the old way, quests could sometimes take an hour or more.
On the plus side, the new way gives gameplay a bit more of a narrative flow. There's a story arc with a lot of episodic asides that pulls you along. They've eliminated many of the most grindy, repetitive or time-consuming quests (the famous "Kill x number of beast y" type quests, which still exist of course, but not to nearly the same extent) and have you doing all sorts of tasks, which can range from rescuing frightened critters from a blazing forest to defending an oil rig against attacks from enraged locals (oh, yes, there's a wide range in how ethical or moral are the things you're tasked with, a large topic unto itself). On the minus side, since every quest is now part of a narrative arc, you have less leeway to pick and choose among the quests as you once had. Even though they've eliminated a lot of the reasons many quests were avoided, it still causes the game to feel like a very carefully engineered, focus-group tested, complex interactive carnival ride.
There are technical reasons for doing things this way. WoW is a massively multiplayer game, which means you can have (I think it is) 20,000 people playing on each realm at one time. If they are all trying to complete the same tasks at the same time, the end result will be not only a nightmare from the technological point of view (server overload, etc.) but also from a fun and enjoyment point of view. Even if it isn't a nightmare, you can end up with bottlenecks if you're not careful. So they've broken things up in a way that ensures that small groups of people are focusing on different small areas for 15-30 minute blocks. They move along to the next area just as the next group comes along. When you roll out new, shiny content that everyone is going to want to play, this way you force everyone to be as spread out as possible. It's very optimized.
So, while I think the new style is on the whole preferable to the old style, and may even be necessary for the technical reasons I just outlined, I think it could be even better if players were given a choice between two or three different possible narrative flows.
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