If there’s anything I’ve noticed on this board is that we have STRONG OPINIONS on MMORPG game design and WoW in general. That’s good. If there’s something I like to do, it’s discuss game design with other people.
One of the things I think most of us (?) agree on is that in vanilla, the world was larger and more compelling. The question is: why?
I have my own thoughts in this video. https://youtu.be/BxYpkefWFII I tried to keep it pretty narrow, and focus on only a single aspect: how having many peoples in a world makes it feel bigger. I would like your feedback on my thoughts, and I would also like to hear your thoughts.
So, why was Vanilla WoW a larger and more compelling world compared to modern wow
It wasn’t larger, but what was there was more important as it was more difficult to bypass. You didn’t teleport everywhere through UI elements or bypass terrain with a personal flying mount.
Cross-Realm zones, sharding and phasing also did not exist and therefore the world was whole and immersive as opposed to fragmented and illusory.
you like discussing game design, do you?
did you know that Kevin Jordan streams on weekdays during EST day shift hours on twitch? his username is FailureAnalysis
anyway, without having watched the video yet, vanilla WoW was a larger and more compelling world than modern WoW because levelling seemed to matter, most things were taken seriously, the lore wasn’t raped, the gameplay was good, the gameplay was good BEFORE you hit the level cap, most of the game was largely a mystery to you, epic items were actually epic(for a time), item level scaling wasn’t wonky like in TBC and onwards, the math wasn’t ripped to shreds and then stuffed into its stitched-up taxidermied corpse so that its just good enough for the endgame, the art style was better(not worse, but better), the atmosphere was better than in modern WoW, you aren’t both the chosen one and an ascended demigod who went SSJ4 and has all 7 chaos emeralds and gets to boss REXXAR around too(while everyone else is also that strong and gets to boss him around), decision-making with items was actually a factor, gold actually mattered, socialization actually mattered, every enemy had 1 difficulty level(which, unlike the opposite, doesn’t subtract from immersion, among other things), specialization actually mattered, beating the final boss of the hardest raid actually meant something, getting blue items actually felt good, getting GREEN items actually felt good, getting WHITE items actually felt good at low levels, it wasn’t filled with cutscenes that only work for single-player games, it didn’t try to shove any story in your face most of the time and opted for passive storytelling, which is far, far superior to non-passive storytelling for every single MMORPG period(but its okay for when you first make your character), and travelling actually mattered, which caused the world to feel bigger
and I could go on
Watched the entire video, and I mostly agree with the points made.
Classic has some great story, but players have to read the quest text to understand what is going on. For that reason, I don’t recommend questing addons for players leveling up for the first time. The criticism of Classic story telling that I think is fair is that it is easy to get caught up in the quest log full of collecting bear butts and murloc heads and forget there is a story at all.
The Alliance Onyxia’s Lair attunement quest line might be one of the best examples of peoples and factions in the game. After all these years it is still probably one of the best quest lines ever put in the game in my opinion; assuming the player actually reads any of it.
Coming off the heels of Warcraft III the did a good job of putting players in a world that feels like the events of that game happened.
As for player characters, the secret sauce is that the level of difficulty is tuned so that in many situations a group is required. Player cooperation and coordination is a strong element of Classic. Not to the extreme of old Everquest, but far more group oriented than modern expansions of World of Warcraft. As low as the 10-20 zones there is a need for players to group and preferably some form of the holy trinity will perform best - tank/healer/dps.
For reasons I haven’t really looked into, the story stopped being interesting to me after Wrath of the Lich King. I really didn’t care what the Dragonmaw or the Guardians of Hyjal are up to, for the first time ever I just grinded out my quests to level up.
I once explained to my father, early on in wow, with enthusiasm, how long it had taken me to run from xroads to tb.
I’m not a game designer, but I did make a couple of mods for nwn. One core building theory I upheld was that if the player needs to go from point A to point B, you want the player to experience the effort of travel in order to preserve the illusion that the world is a wide and large one. The faster transportation becomes, the smaller the world gets. So I tried to include only the minimum of portals (sometimes portals can be used to make the world seem larger).
Having a large world, a world that is in fact (in the player’s mind) larger than the actual playable content, is vital to rpg immersion. Stemming from this, the larger the playable world, the more immersive the game.
Thus, as wow added flying and portals, the world shrank dramatically, and became much less immersive, and shifted from an rpg into either a battle royale or a mobile game.
Cause we waz noobs mayne!
That and back then mmorpg’s were designed to be a literal 2nd life. Wow took that idea and made it accessible to the masses without the grueling punishments. Now today players complain that the devs are artificially extending playtime to pad their MAU metrics. Hint: that was built into mmorpg’s design from the get go.
Southpark pulled the veil back. Lol.
I can agree with that. Reading the quest text certainly helps provide context that is quite valuable and improves the experience of vanilla questing. I wonder if a Vanilla WoW, if it was being made for the first time today, would opt to use more voiceovers as a way to deliver the same thing that’s in text now.
Literally everyone and their mother will have their own differing opinions on what made “the magic” of Vanilla work. But this is a good video, regardless. I actually sat and watched all of it, which is rare for me. I usually see a video that’s more than a few minutes long and decide I feel like spending that time elsewhere.
I think there are some common threads though, and certain things that contribute to the magic for many, but maybe not all of us. That’s why I tried to only focus on the world and the magic of the setting, rather than many other things that often get discussed, like the magic of the classes or the community.
I appreciate your kind words on the video. Were you talking about the video in the OP or the one I just posted?
I always found full voice over kind of frivolous. Like, it’s nice and it does add to immersion. But I feel like it takes too much away that it’s not worth the trade-off. Take Star Wars The Old Republic for example. The storyline was great and incredibly immersive. But since everything was fully voiced, they only had the budget to give each class a single on-rails storyline.
Yeah, it can add an expense and add development time as well, and limit the total amount of content developed overall. And in RPGs total content is actually pretty important.
No flying lent well to the mystique of and attachment to your environment as well as made PvP more exciting.
Content felt as if it had meaning at all times where the story of the surrounding world was concerned.
The familiarity of players, whether they were friend or foe, was nice when either in the open world or in BG’s because you knew they were part of your realm. Part of your own closed world, separate from the other realms with its own identity, politics, events, alliances, drama, etc…
No dungeon/raid finder made for great moments of pre-instance setup before even going inside the instance. Honestly some of my most memorable moments were had in these moments.
Smack talking when you stole someone’s herbs or ore because the other payer’s action was canceled by a mob attacking them.
Some quest lines took DAYS to complete just because they would take you EVERYWHERE sometimes. Lots of them felt truly epic and made you feel like an honest adventurer, braving the dangers of the world.
Class quests were amazing.
The Vanilla world took lace in Azeroth; Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. The game made FULL use of EVERYWHERE in the base game. But fast forward to retail and it’s content is all centered primarily around the regions which are specific to BfA. Good bye, Eastern Kingdoms. Smell ya later, Kalimdor.
on MMORPG game design and WoW in general. That’s good. If there’s something I like to do, it’s discuss game design with other people.
