Letholas made a frank thread regarding current raid/dungeon design vs prior expansions. The message I got from it was that dungeons/raids feel far more linear than in the past and are made irrelevant much more quickly (e.g. CN at this moment), and there’s of course fewer of them in total.
Linear progression doesn’t feel immersive at all and I want to add-on to this by saying the same applies to story/quest progression. SL questing felt/was entirely on rails with story progression effectively made for the player already. It didn’t feel immersive at all. In fact I’d say it felt like Azeroth Auto Pilot was baked into the quest design.
Dungeons/raids are suffering from the linear design, and so is open-world content like questing and I don’t want us to lose sight of that if we want to make a more enjoyable and immersive game.
Linear progression is always bad, especially when the game that has linear progression is taglined “expansive and massive” any “massive” game should not have on rails gameplay
Number of raids isn’t nearly as important as number of bosses.
Like Wrath had the most raids, but half of them were incredibly short, 4/9 being one boss raids, VoA being not dissimilar to the current World Bosses and ToC being well…ToC.
The only raids of any substance in Wrath were Ulduar and ICC (technically Naxx had a good boss count, but it was so woefully undertuned that that barely mattered).
Pseudo-linear raids are nice, but I don’t think that’s really a big deal for most players who go through them in a linear method, either because they’re doing it through LFR or because conventional logic dictates that progressing through Ner’zhul is easier than Soulrender so most people opt for it first.
Ulduar gets hyped up a lot, but functionally the only difference between it and SoD in regards to linearity was that you could straight up ignore some bosses.
There definitely does need to be more dungeons though. Like I’m not expecting 15+ or anything absurd since designing dungeons for M+ is significantly more resource intensive than designing wrath dungeons were, but doing the same 8 for over a year and the only reprieve being Tazavesh adding 2 more dungeons in 2 months or so and then we sit on the 10 for another year is pretty dull.
I really like Legion TW M+, but I think they’re going about it in the wrong way. Instead of the dungeons being up every time there’s Timewalking, they should be up for the WHOLE season. Rotating a couple dungeons from older expansions in and out every season would go a long way to keeping M+ fresh.
I don’t mind the main storyline being fairly linear, as it helps the lore of the endgame. And I also don’t mind doing a quest chain and having a dungeon be the final part of it. That part works for me.
But I do also agree that it should feel more immersive. More side quests and hidden treasures and red herrings and all that stuff. Random NPCs that want you to help them find their lost engagement ring that a ogre took from them in a raid… etc etc. Random stuff like that makes it feel like more of a world.
I think it’s a fairer comparison. For dungeons the # of instances is pretty important since most dungeons tend to be around the same length, barring the occasional mega dungeon like BRD, Kara, etc. Plus trash is a far more important part of the dungeon experience compared to the raid experience.
But raids like ICC aren’t equal to raids like Obsidium Sanctum or Onyxia’s Lair and it isn’t fair to say “X expansion had more raiding content” when it simply had lots of small raid instances.
I know people don’t like to hear this but the design is done specifically around group finding tools.
The design has to be done with the idea that the majority of those who run it will be doing so without much knowledge of either the area itself, or the group they are running with, so the happenstance of anything going wrong needs to be mitigated at the basic level.
You wanted convenience, there’s nothing more convenient than linear gameplay.
Can we stop for a moment and appreciate that Humanbeak made a post without commenting on how much gold he’s made? +1 just for that, op.
On topic, I believe the addition of m+ has probably encouraged linear design, since dungeons are now essentially “race tracks.” I do have fond memories of spending hours in BRD back in the day, but to be fair, I don’t think I’d want to go back to something that open. I just don’t have the time. I’m sure there’s a happy medium somewhere, but it simply won’t be realized as long as MDI is a thing.
Looking at the updated count, considering SL is being cut short, it’s already at a pretty respectable boss count, surpassing Cata and WoD and if they weren’t cutting it short by a tier, it’d come close to MoP in raw boss count depending on how big the missing tier would have been.
Earlier expansions (basically everything before Cata, but especially BC/Vanilla) are pretty heavily padded by the devs approach to raid design necessitating cranking out bulk amounts of content for different skill levels.
It wasn’t until ToC where they hit their stride and worked on multiple difficulties instead of just designing raids that could accommodate both the average/casual playerbase and the cutting edge.
Honestly, I’d just peg it as there only being so many ways to design NON linear raids/dungeons.
Like if you look at the historical “non-linear” content, mostly it’s just the player picking what room they want to tackle first off a loop. DoS is a pretty blatant example of non-linear content where the order doesn’t really matter and non-linearity simply gives you the illusion of choice.
Non-linear dungeons/raids basically boil down to this.
Looking at the list as well, it feels like 40 might be the magic number. Cata and WoD raiding both felt underwhelming in terms of amount of content (BRF is one of the best raids ever IMO)
For me, it always boils down to matching expectations of a group before entering content, and the group finding tools are a big part of that. There are a wide range of player expectations, from exploring every nook and cranny to maximizing activity during play time. Any time you are dealing with a random group, that is the hardest obstacle to overcome.
The trouble with heavy story or exploration content is replayability. I’d venture to guess that most players have a “you can’t put the genie back in the bottle” mentality towards story content, where after you see it once, your desire to see it again diminishes. So, it still boils down to manual group finding of like-minded folks to drive participation in that kind of content. Otherwise, I don’t blame anyone for designing around the common denominators.
There can be, and should be, a clear starting and ending point, but how you get from the start to the end should not always be linear. At times, it does make sense. Raids like ToC, BoDA, DS (to the extent the story was told in the raid), etc, make sense to be linear. But the choice given in raids like Firelands, Ulduar, BRF, & Naxx dont put you on a set route, but get you to the end.
I think we’re on the same page for the most part and definitely agree with this one. My concern is that SL questing design has simply felt like it was designed by someone who leveled their alts with AAP. There of course should be a starting line and a finish line, but the way it was done in SL felt very, very glued to rails with little option do anything else.
Now, perhaps the way unlocks were done via the storyline made things feel more linear than what they were, including level requirements to be able to access a zone to begin with.
For example, the level to unlock access to Revendreth was somewhere around level 58 if I recall. Not only did you have to advance the storyline in a linear manner, but you also had to meet a specific level requirement, just to be able to explore Revendreth.
In previous expansions, if I wanted to go explore a zone, I could go do it. Sure, the zone may’ve outleveled me and I’d be in a high level of danger the entire time, but…that’s fun. Being able to go somewhere where I’m not “supposed” to be was a fun feeling, and coupled with the increased risk of just getting blasted away by high-level mobs, things felt far more engaging. But I couldn’t get that same level of excitement or exploration with the way SL was laid out, and I’m afraid of 10.0 following the same path.
I remember back in my early days of WoW I was questing in Ashenvale and accidentally stumbled into felwood and saw a ?? level wolf and I ran away as fast as I could. But every few levels I would come back to that place to see if I could see what level the wolf was.
The scaling world takes that away. I don’t like the scaling world. I’m in agreement with you, yes a linear storyline is good for lore and general levelling, but I agree that zones should out and under level you and be able to be explored for no other reason than to explore them
The risk wasn’t there. Not the exploration part. Anyone can go anywhere they want.
I think his issue lies with the scaling all the way to max level. Everything is normalized to you and it takes the risk out. But that’s not an SL issue. That’s how the game operates as a whole now.
I do miss having zones set aside by level ranges as well. But I doubt we’ll be seeing that again any time soon. If ever