I have a difficult relationship with the archaeology profession. On the one hand, I’m really into archaeology in real life. I used to study archaeology and I’ve been to digsites, held ancient artifacts in my own hands (when appropriate) and have a strong love for museums. WoW’s iteration of archaeology manages to capture a lot of the feelings that I love about archaeology in real life, but almost none of that comes from the actual gameplay of archaeology - and that’s what I want to discuss today, and argue that we need to bring archaeology back in a new, better form!
Archaeology is boring!
Ever since its introduction in Cataclysm, archaeology has been pretty boring, and I think that has been the reason why many players and potentially even devs have lost interest in it. Most of my friends have not put any time into archaeology because of this, even if many of them think that some of the rewards are really cool. In BFA I completely lost interest in archaeology because of no particular new innovations, and I haven’t really touched it since Legion. In my opinion, the main problem with archaeology is repetitiveness and travel time, and to a lesser extent, randomness in rewards.
I find it astounding that the actual gameplay of archaeology revolves so much around a randomised selection of digsites across the entire world, which bloats the archaeology gameplay loop with a lot of travel time when going in between the different digsites. This is particularly bad in the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, the largest continents, where you can be unlucky and have to travel from Stranglethorn and all the way to the Plaguelands to continue digging around. Mists of Pandaria had some very creative and cool solutions to this problem: items letting you teleport to or change the locations of digsites really made the gameplay feel a lot better, and the more condensed continent of Pandaria was much easier to navigate in between digsites than the older ones. The change to having 6 artifacts instead of 3 artifacts per digsite also meant that you spent more time in each digsite, meaning less travel time as well. Draenor, the Broken Isles and Battle for Azeroth didn’t really meaningfully iterate on travel time any further, but as these were also all very condensed areas, it was much less of an issue.
The actual gameplay of archaeology is… okay! I don’t really hate it as much as many of my friends, I’ve always thought of it as a slightly more involved way of farming nodes like herbs or mining veins, and is a great activity to take part in when you want to turn your brain off for a while and watch something on your second monitor while you’re doing it. Yes, this is a very monotonous task, and it gets really boring if you don’t have any means of distracting yourself - and that is not a great way to get people to interact with the profession. There are some rare chances to spawn a ghost in some types of digsites that allows for a slight break in the monotony, but these are often more of a nuisance as they pose no real threat to you and take seconds to kill - but at least they drop fragments!
And so we’re going to have to talk about the randomness, and this is a pretty frustrating form of randomness. The randomness in digsites is particularly frustrating. If you want to get Tol’vir artifacts, you’re going to have to hope that you get a digsite spawning somewhere in Uldum when you complete another digsite anywhere in Kalimdor. You can target Tol’vir artifacts with the archaeology vendors that trade completed artifacts for you, but this is a really slow process. On top of that, the artifacts you’re currently piecing together are completely random. You might want to get Zin’rokh from troll archaeology, but you only have a small chance to discover it after you complete some other troll artifact. If you’re unlucky, you might have to research hundreds or even thousands of other artifacts in order to get the item that you want.
These three problems interact with one another to make archaeology feel even worse. Travel times are long and boring. The actual archaeology is monotonous and boring. The randomness makes it so that you’re likely going to have to do a lot of archaeology to get the digsites you want, and the artifacts you want. Ergo, you need to do a lot of boring stuff to get the cool rewards, and we’re talking hours on hours of mostly flying around and barely interacting with the world around you.
But wait, you might say that other professions suffer from these very selsame problems! Herbalism and mining are notoriously uninteractive and monotonous in a similar manner; there’s a lot of travel time, often in circles, where all you do is look for a dot on the map that leads to a node you can click, not particularly exciting by any means. But I think there are good reasons for this. First of all, having herbs and veins show up on your map means you can pick them up on your way when going to somewhere else, you can play with the profession without actually having to make that the primary purpose of your gameplay. Secondly, herbs and ore are crafting materials, and you can sell them on the auction house to earn a profit - or farm them for yourself in order to save some gold doing so. Farming herbs and ore is literally labour as part of the economy. Archaeology doesn’t really fit into this. Sure, you can get some gold by selling some of these artifacts to a vendor, but all the rewards are BoP or BoA. Archaeology is as much a part of the economy as killing bandits in Elwynn is.
Rediscovering Archaeology
I have some ideas on how archaeology could be made more fun, almost all of which already exist in WoW, but aren’t tied to archaeology for some reason. I’ll split this into two segments, as I first want to talk about what needs to change with the current gameplay of archaeology, and then what should be added to it!
Part 1: Restoring Archaeology
First and foremost, I think the core idea of digsites needs to change. It does not really make sense that they randomly pop up out of nowhere once you’ve dug up six items from another one. Digsites should instead be locked to certain areas. They should never actually move, never run out of artifacts for you to dig out, and there should be much fewer of them. In turn, they ought to be larger and actually designed around doing archaeology within them. If you want to dig out troll artifacts, you go to one of the known troll digsites. If you want Tol’vir artifacts, you go to Uldum’s digsite. There doesn’t need to be a digsite in every zone, either, but at least having them where they make sense.
I don’t think the actual excavation part of archaeology needs to change much, I think it’s okay if it is a little monotonous, as long as there are breaks from that monotony. If digsites are now stationary and endlessly excavatable, you can now turn it into a playground where you do excavation with other things to do in between. This should also be made into a social experience, much like how fishing can sometimes be a social experience. Perhaps you’ve unearthed an ancient rare boss that everyone can gather to fight, or a magical relic that boosts everyone’s movement speed in the area for a short amount of time. The environment in the area might also give you some interesting hoops to jump through in order to dig around successfully, requiring you to climb walls, jump over pits of lava, avoid traps and so on as you try to continue digging.
Now that you can target the digsites you want for specific relics, I think it’s okay that the rewards are randomised… but I’m not a huge fan of how archaeology works. You can assemble a relic by collecting fragments from multiple different digsites right now, fragments are really just a catch-all currency that works for any relic. I think it would be cool if instead of simply digging up fragments, we dug up fragments for specific artifacts, and we’d only be able to complete these artifacts once we have all the fragments we need to that particular one. This would require some updates to the UI as well, of course, but it feels more realistic and natural than the current way it’s done.
Rare relics should also be more interesting to find, and properly unlock. Randomly digging up Zin’rokh is a little weird, it was just lying in the dirt all the time in its pristine form? I propose that rare relics should instead be uncovered through a quest item that you can either randomly dig up while excavating, or form normally like you do with the rare finds now. These quests can be as simple as delivering the item to the right person, or could even have involved quest chains that lets you dig deeper into the mysteries of whatever you’ve found. Let us go on adventures!
Restored Artifacts are great, but I wonder if there could be better ways to use them if you’re now able to target the specific digsites you want. Perhaps giving us more helpful tools to help with archaeology, or cosmetic rewards could be a great step in the right direction!
Part 2: Expanding Archaeology
So, the first thing I think we should add to archaeology is one that we’ve been pretty accustomed to for the past few expansions: treasure chests. Simply put: treasure chests could be archaeology’s version of gatherable nodes out there in the world, whether they are repeatable or one-use only. Actual treasure chests won’t have to change much, I don’t think they need to contain archaeology fragments and I don’t think you should be required to have archaeology learned to loot them. Instead, they will give you archaeology skill-ups when looted, archaeology lets you track them on the map, and higher archaeology skill levels allows you to access secret treasures around the world as well!
The Archivist’s Codex in Korthia gave me really strong archaeology vibes: you collected fragments and discovered ancient relics that you got to display in the archivist’s cave. How was this not part of archaeology in Shadowlands? Let us get more of this, you could even replicate the way you earn reputation for similar factions, simply by collecting fragments or completed artifacts that then grant you a little bit of reputation. The Explorer’s League and the Reliquary already exist in-game, and the Hearthstone universe has greatly expanded on the Explorer’s Leauge’s cast and adventures as well. Let us build our reputation with these accomplished explorers and climb in their ranks, go on adventures as we get to become their best friends, and recruit new explorers as we enter new expansions and new cultures!
We’ve already got some places to display our pristine artifacts from Pandaria and onwards, but what if we could gather all our displays in a larger museum with room for expansion over time? There could even be multiple different iterations of it, one in Ironforge, one in Silvermoon, and perhaps a neutral one, too! If we’re ever getting player housing, it would be great to let us display all these artifacts as decorations in our houses, too!
I’ve cut out this particular segment on what I’ve called the Exploration Guide as Xhelann made a thread on a topic so similar that it feels wrong to write about it in this thread. TL;DR: the Exploration Guide, as I envision it anyway, is an in-game library of lore, stories and other information you can expand on by playing the game, particularly through archaeology! Go read that and leave that discussion there!
All in all, I would honestly be happy if archaeology just made a return in 10.0 in its current form, but I believe it has the potential to become so much better, even just with a few little tweaks added to it. I want all professions to have something great attached to them, and I want to write more about those in the future too. Now I’m curious to see if anyone else cares about archaeology, and what they think should happen to it!
(All puns intended :>)
