I had a lot on my plate when I wrote Wednesday's post due to my claiming that Hyjal was a better zone than Vashj'ir and the fact that two of the currently three comments on that last post disagree with me. Fidjit claimed "Hyjal felt very 'been there, done that' to me," and Neverender agreed with Fidjit and added, "But all in all, I appreciate what Blizzard tried to do and applaud them for making Vash'jir such a beautiful zone to quest in." I appreciate their comments and can see where they are coming from, but one little blurb in Neverender's comment gave me insight into why I dislike Vashj'ir so much: "...I appreciate what Blizzard tried to do..." [emphasis is my own]. If you look at what Blizzard was trying to do with Vashj'ir, it is indeed a very praise-worthy zone, for their aspirations for this zone were clearly very high (why else would they make it so long?). This much I agree with.
The trouble in considering what Blizzard was trying to do with Vashj'ir is that when we quest in Vashj'ir, we are not playing in the zone that Blizzard tried to create; we are playing in the zone they did create. Considering that both Fidjit and Neverender agreed that my complaints about the zone were legitimate, I supposed that whether you think Vashj'ir is a praise-worthy zone ultimately comes down to whether you want to praise Blizzard for their efforts or their results. Which brings us to the question I ask today: in choosing to praise or criticizing Vashj'ir, should we choose to praise or criticize Blizzard for their ambition or for the end product? Should we praise the potential and innovation of a venture, or the actual quality of the venture when it ships?
To look at Vashj'ir again, the zone was most definitely a step away from familiar territory for Blizzard. It was innovative because the entire zone took place underwater, and Blizzard took quite a few risks is designing the zone that way. I find it telling that most of my complaints about Vashj'ir had little to do with the fact that the zone was underwater, because that means that Blizzard averted all of those risks. My complaints about Vashj'ir were that it was too large and its questline too lengthy,that it lacked a grounding location that allowed us to better comprehend our position within the zone, that creating the kind of tension that Vashj'ir was trying to create was simply impossible due to the game's mechanics, and that the ending was underwhelming and abrupt. Every single one of these flaws could just as easily have been made in the process of designing a land-based zone, though the underwater setting does make it more tempting to try to create the kind of mood Blizzard was trying to create with Vashj'ir. So really, Vashj'ir is a case where the innovation and potential of the zone do shine through, and it's its other flaws that bring it down. Thus it is perfectly reasonable to praise the zone for its innovation.
But that doesn't excuse the zone for having these flaws. In fact, it's all the more reason to criticize the zone, because the fact that these flaws could just as easily show up in any zone means that Blizzard should have known better. Blizzard has had years of practice designing zones, and these are flaws that those years of practice should have prevented. But no one is perfect, and the developers are going to make a few mistakes from time to time; they just so happened to make these mistakes while designing their most ambitious zone yet. It's almost a shame that they did manage to avoid the potential flaws that were directly related to that ambition (i.e. the typical pratfalls of most water levels), because those flaws would have been forgivable due to Blizzard's inexperience with designing entirely-underwater levels. But there's no reason that the kind of flaws that did show up in Vashj'ir should be any more excusable just because Vashj'ir was a water level.
So in the end, Vashj'ir deserves both praise for its successful innovation and criticism for its definite flaws. I guess whichever you prefer to focus on comes down to just how much the innovation amazed you (I was less than amazed once all the environments started to blend together) and was thus able to distract you from the zone's flaws, and how influential those flaws were in detracting from your enjoyment of the zone.
Showing posts with label game design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label game design. Show all posts
Friday, January 28, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Hyjal won't appall
Having already given my opinions on Vashj'ir as a questing zone, I feel it's time I turn my eye towards the other Cataclysm starting-zone: Mount Hyjal (the fact that I promised I would do so in my last post might also have something to do with why I'm looking at it now). Now, Mount Hyjal wasn't my favorite zone of the expansion, but if I were to rank the zones in order of how much I enjoyed them, Mount Hyjal would definitely be in the middle (Twilight Highlands > Deepholm > Mount Hyjal > Uldum > Vashj'ir, if you're interested). I agree with the commenters on my Vashj'ir post that Mount Hyjal wasn't exactly innovating or ground-breaking, but overall, I felt that the zone worked well, and that's where its strength was.
As I said in my last post, Mount Hyjal was similar to Vashj'ir in many ways, but overall, I felt that Mount Hyjal worked in many ways that Vashj'ir didn't. To wit, Hyjal has the enemy that we need to face right on our doorstep in plain view, a pattern done right from the beginning with the earth elementals attacking Nordrassil, and the sense of urgency created by the mountain being on fire could not be mitigated by leaving the zone, creating suspense that remained taut even if you left the zone and came back later (which could not be said for Vashj'ir). It was also not of unreasonable length, which certainly didn't hurt its overall quality.
So what do I have to say about Mount Hyjal that I didn't say in my last post? One thing I was appreciative of about the zone was its liberal use of phasing, allowing the player to have a very real sense of having an impact on the zone. This was another way that I felt Vashj'ir was lacking: it didn't feel like our actions changed the zone at all, even though they would occasionally cause NPCs to spawn where they hadn't been before. There was also a sense that Mount Hyjal was unfolding before our eyes, what with its almost spiral-ish structure and fairly linear physical progression path, giving a real sense of progress, something I feel is lacking in many of WoW's zones. What I mean by "progress" is that was had a sense of how far we were in completing the zone. Most zones send you running around the zone in a seemingly orderless fashion, making it difficult to tell how far you have to go before you have solved that zone's problems. Sure you could check how far you are in the quest achievements to figure that out, but where's the fun in that? With Hyjal, you traversed through the zone in a fairly linear fashion, making it easier to tell how close you were to the end.
As for flaws? One of the major things about Cataclysm that bugs me is how most of the new factions have little to no representation outside of their respective zones, and the Guardians of Hyjal are no exception. Sure, their name may preclude them from doing much outside of the zone, but they are still a very one-dimensional organization. Their tabard claims that, by wearing it, I am "championing their cause", but how can I do that when their sole purpose is to save Hyjal, and I'm running around in an instance that has nothing to do with the zone? I felt this was a problem with many of the factions, but it's especially bad for the Guardians of Hyjal, since their purpose is so obviously one-dimensional and they were my introduction to just how self-contained Cataclysm's factions are.
But that's clearly not a criticism of the quests themselves, and I really don't have many negative things to say about Mount Hyjal as a questing zone, because Blizzard just played it really safe with this zone. There wasn't much innovation, but because it's familiar territory, they were able to pull it off quite well. So overall, my thoughts on Mount Hyjal could be summed up as, very well executed, but not very ambitious. It's nothing new, but that's why it's not so bad; as I said in the title, it "won't appall" because we've seen much of it before. And perhaps my disagreements with the Vashj'ir camp in the Hyjal vs. Vashj'ir debate stem from my prioritizing execution over ambition; in other words, I judge a zone more by what it is than what it could have been. But more on that on Friday.
As I said in my last post, Mount Hyjal was similar to Vashj'ir in many ways, but overall, I felt that Mount Hyjal worked in many ways that Vashj'ir didn't. To wit, Hyjal has the enemy that we need to face right on our doorstep in plain view, a pattern done right from the beginning with the earth elementals attacking Nordrassil, and the sense of urgency created by the mountain being on fire could not be mitigated by leaving the zone, creating suspense that remained taut even if you left the zone and came back later (which could not be said for Vashj'ir). It was also not of unreasonable length, which certainly didn't hurt its overall quality.
So what do I have to say about Mount Hyjal that I didn't say in my last post? One thing I was appreciative of about the zone was its liberal use of phasing, allowing the player to have a very real sense of having an impact on the zone. This was another way that I felt Vashj'ir was lacking: it didn't feel like our actions changed the zone at all, even though they would occasionally cause NPCs to spawn where they hadn't been before. There was also a sense that Mount Hyjal was unfolding before our eyes, what with its almost spiral-ish structure and fairly linear physical progression path, giving a real sense of progress, something I feel is lacking in many of WoW's zones. What I mean by "progress" is that was had a sense of how far we were in completing the zone. Most zones send you running around the zone in a seemingly orderless fashion, making it difficult to tell how far you have to go before you have solved that zone's problems. Sure you could check how far you are in the quest achievements to figure that out, but where's the fun in that? With Hyjal, you traversed through the zone in a fairly linear fashion, making it easier to tell how close you were to the end.
As for flaws? One of the major things about Cataclysm that bugs me is how most of the new factions have little to no representation outside of their respective zones, and the Guardians of Hyjal are no exception. Sure, their name may preclude them from doing much outside of the zone, but they are still a very one-dimensional organization. Their tabard claims that, by wearing it, I am "championing their cause", but how can I do that when their sole purpose is to save Hyjal, and I'm running around in an instance that has nothing to do with the zone? I felt this was a problem with many of the factions, but it's especially bad for the Guardians of Hyjal, since their purpose is so obviously one-dimensional and they were my introduction to just how self-contained Cataclysm's factions are.
But that's clearly not a criticism of the quests themselves, and I really don't have many negative things to say about Mount Hyjal as a questing zone, because Blizzard just played it really safe with this zone. There wasn't much innovation, but because it's familiar territory, they were able to pull it off quite well. So overall, my thoughts on Mount Hyjal could be summed up as, very well executed, but not very ambitious. It's nothing new, but that's why it's not so bad; as I said in the title, it "won't appall" because we've seen much of it before. And perhaps my disagreements with the Vashj'ir camp in the Hyjal vs. Vashj'ir debate stem from my prioritizing execution over ambition; in other words, I judge a zone more by what it is than what it could have been. But more on that on Friday.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Oh dear, Vashj'ir
This post contains spoilers about the storyline of Vashj'ir, as well as a plethora of negative opinions. If you haven't finished Vashj'ir or you prefer to read optimistic and constructive posts, you have been warned.
Apparently, overly opinionated posts criticizing Cataclysm's content are all the rage in the blogosphere these days. Of course, I'm in no position to judge Cataclysm as a whole, which presents a bit of a problem when writing one of those total review posts. I have yet to experience the 5-man content and will probably never experience the raid content, and PvP hasn't interested me in years, so I haven't experienced fighting in Tol Barad, The Battle for Gilneas, or Twin Peaks. What I have experienced is every zone's one-time quests and all of the daily quests (Alliance side, anyway), as well as Archeology, but being that I have already given my thoughts on the latter (though I have taken a decidedly more neutral view on it since then), it is the former to which I shall turn my discerning eye this week. And by discerning, I mean incredibly subjective and opinionated, so get your grain of salt ready before you start reading today.
Got it? Good. Now, I was originally going to write a post about all of the zones, including the daily quests in their own section, but I had so much to say about Vashj'ir that I had to give the zone it's own post, so I plan to put the other zones under the lens on Wednesday. Without further ado, let's get to my very opinionated review of Cataclysm's underwater zone.
It's something of a tradition in video games that if a game contains a water-based level, it's going to be the least fun level in the game. There are many reasons for this: if swimming isn't an integral part of the game otherwise, a physics engine for swimming may need to be thrown together for just that level, which will likely lead to that engine being sub-par due the limited amount of use it will actually get. Breath gauges are also a nuisance, as is the often low visibility in water levels. Blizzard managed to avoid these common pratfalls when they designed Vashj'ir thanks to the fact that WoW has always had swimming, so we are used to navigating water, and thanks to the sea legs buff, which does away with the breath gauge, and the Abyssal Seahorse mount, which largely does away with the limited mobility typical of a virtual aquatic environment. Which is why it's such a shame that Vashj'ir was the zone I liked least out of all of Cataclysm's zones.
Maybe it's the zone's size. Vashj'ir is the only zone in Cataclysm's high level content that had to be split into multiple subzones--and three of them, at that--and moving around in these huge zones became tiresome at times (especially the latter quests in Darkbreak Cove). Maybe it was the lack of any grounding aspect of the zone's storyline. Moving from shelter to shelter without any constant base that could be considered the main outpost of the zone made the whole zone feel very disconnected. Vashj'ir is the only Cataclysm zone (to my knowledge) that will send you to a different part of the zone, depending on where you are in the quest lines, when you use its portal in the capital cities, and that becomes disorienting, especially since the caves all look the same, as do many of the environments, beautiful though they may be. This leads to the zone not having many landmarks that give us a definite sense of where we are, which doesn't help things.
But maybe, just maybe, what makes Vashj'ir so unenjoyable is the impossibility of creating the mood that Vashj'ir is trying to create. From the moment the boat sinks on the ride over, it's clear that Blizzard's intention with Vashj'ir was to create a zone where we are constantly on the run, ducking for cover in an environment where we are out of our element, while being constantly surrounded by foes who would love nothing more than to rip us to shreds. And yet, as they are trying to create that mood, there is nothing preventing me from swimming to the land in the zone, mounting up, and flying out of there, or better yet, hearthstoning back to Stormwind. Was I supposed to be in danger or something?
Now, Mount Hyjal is similar to Vashj'ir in a lot of ways, in that we are constantly moving throughout the zone and the zone tries to create a sense of urgency on the part of the player. I'll go over this zone more in another post, but the reason the creation of tension works in Mount Hyjal and not in Vashj'ir is that Mount Hyjal's tension is much more feasible to maintain. In both zones, the enemy is supposedly right on our doorstep, a threat we need to face immediately. In Mount Hyjal, there are earth elementals right in the front lawn of the zone's main hub, so this sense is created successfully. In Vashj'ir, these enemies are often far away, and though their numbers are supposedly imposing and dangerous, they rarely are if we actually go an have a look at them. In other words, in Mount Hyjal, Blizzard successfully followed the mantra of "show, don't tell", whereas in Vashj'ir, that was not the case.
And as for the sense of urgency, in Hyjal, that sense of urgency is created by the fact that the mountain is on fire. If we leave the zone, it will continue to burn, though we may now be safe. As such, though we can leave the zone and its problems with little difficulty, its conflict still remains. As for Vashj'ir, I get the distinct feeling that the zone is trying to create tension by implying that you yourself are in danger by being stranded in the zone, but if you hearth or fly out, oh look, problem solved! Sure, the soldiers of your faction and the Earthen Ring might still be in trouble, but again, the zone depends too heavily on telling us that our allies are in danger without ever showing us how they are in danger. Do these naga that we need to be afraid of ever storm the caves we get our quests from? Do they send out scouting parties to see if we have become a threat yet? Nope, they just leave us alone, and whatever tension that could be drawn from this situation is diffused by the fact that the zone just tries too hard to create it, breaking the tension by exceeding the capabilities of text-based tension creation.
Then there's the zone's length. It's bad enough that the zone doesn't create the kind of tension that can keep me interested in the storyline, but it then drags me through that tension-less chore for longer than any other zone in the game expects me to stay within its boarders. If Cataclysm's one-time quests werre like a novel with five chapters, the only one that wouldn't have any kind of suspense or tension would also happen to be the longest one. A lack of tension compared to other parts of the story can make anything seem to drag on, even if it isn't longer than the other parts of the work in question, but Vashj'ir has the double wammy of seeming to drag on due to its lack of tension and actually dragging on because it is so much longer than the other zones. For members of the Horde to get the quest achievement for Vashj'ir, they need to do 25 more quests than they need to to get the achievement for the next longest zone. The Alliance have it even worse, needing to do thirty five more quests to get their achievement, making Vashj'ir almost a third longer than any other zone in Cataclysm for the Alliance. Unbearably long, and boring, to boot. Oy vey.
And then there's the ending of the zone's storyline. I'm not even going to bother talking about that submarine ride that made Crime and Punishment feel like a haiku and forced you to watch the battle as your sub-mates narrated the fact that you were losing because the battle itself was so uninspired in its design that you really can't tell who's winning and who's losing (there's that "telling instead of showing" problem again). Or the inexplicable hole in the bottom of that submarine (or maybe it was a different one; I can't differentiate between the submarines when I remember them) that invites you by its very presence to go for a swim, only to deposit you in the ocean if you should swim too deep, with the submarine moving too quickly for you to catch up and get back in. No, let's just get right to the ending.
After losing the battle, Erunak is pulled into the breach by a mysterious tentacle and your commander follows. Without actually giving you a definite prompt to follow your commander into the Abyssal Maw, the quest simply leaves you outside of the rift, with no one around, abandoning you in the deepest, most desolate part of the most disconnected-from-the-rest-of-the-world zone in the game. It's about as lonely as WoW can possibly make you feel, and that's how this chore of a zone ends: an empty ending to a tension-less story. And if you do follow your commander into the Maw, you have to enter an instance to continue the story. So you are left with an exceptionally unsatisfying ending: you have been defeated in battle, your allies are nowhere to be found, and you have to do an instance to finish the story. If you wanted to move on to the next zone's quests after finishing Vashj'ir, too bad; go into that dungeon and find out what happens!
And speaking of moving on to the next zone, I think I should do that mentally, because all of this accentuating the negative isn't good for my psyche. So let me conclude by saying that if you are still working through Northrend, Outland, or even the remade vanilla content and you still have to make the "Hyjal vs. Vashj'ir" choice, choose Hyjal. The only reason to go to Vashj'ir is for the extra gold, Earthen Ring rep, and quest rewards to disenchant. On Wednesday, shall I move on to Mount Hyjal, and perhaps another zone or two if I don't have enough to say about Mount Hyjal alone.
Apparently, overly opinionated posts criticizing Cataclysm's content are all the rage in the blogosphere these days. Of course, I'm in no position to judge Cataclysm as a whole, which presents a bit of a problem when writing one of those total review posts. I have yet to experience the 5-man content and will probably never experience the raid content, and PvP hasn't interested me in years, so I haven't experienced fighting in Tol Barad, The Battle for Gilneas, or Twin Peaks. What I have experienced is every zone's one-time quests and all of the daily quests (Alliance side, anyway), as well as Archeology, but being that I have already given my thoughts on the latter (though I have taken a decidedly more neutral view on it since then), it is the former to which I shall turn my discerning eye this week. And by discerning, I mean incredibly subjective and opinionated, so get your grain of salt ready before you start reading today.
Got it? Good. Now, I was originally going to write a post about all of the zones, including the daily quests in their own section, but I had so much to say about Vashj'ir that I had to give the zone it's own post, so I plan to put the other zones under the lens on Wednesday. Without further ado, let's get to my very opinionated review of Cataclysm's underwater zone.
It's something of a tradition in video games that if a game contains a water-based level, it's going to be the least fun level in the game. There are many reasons for this: if swimming isn't an integral part of the game otherwise, a physics engine for swimming may need to be thrown together for just that level, which will likely lead to that engine being sub-par due the limited amount of use it will actually get. Breath gauges are also a nuisance, as is the often low visibility in water levels. Blizzard managed to avoid these common pratfalls when they designed Vashj'ir thanks to the fact that WoW has always had swimming, so we are used to navigating water, and thanks to the sea legs buff, which does away with the breath gauge, and the Abyssal Seahorse mount, which largely does away with the limited mobility typical of a virtual aquatic environment. Which is why it's such a shame that Vashj'ir was the zone I liked least out of all of Cataclysm's zones.
Maybe it's the zone's size. Vashj'ir is the only zone in Cataclysm's high level content that had to be split into multiple subzones--and three of them, at that--and moving around in these huge zones became tiresome at times (especially the latter quests in Darkbreak Cove). Maybe it was the lack of any grounding aspect of the zone's storyline. Moving from shelter to shelter without any constant base that could be considered the main outpost of the zone made the whole zone feel very disconnected. Vashj'ir is the only Cataclysm zone (to my knowledge) that will send you to a different part of the zone, depending on where you are in the quest lines, when you use its portal in the capital cities, and that becomes disorienting, especially since the caves all look the same, as do many of the environments, beautiful though they may be. This leads to the zone not having many landmarks that give us a definite sense of where we are, which doesn't help things.
But maybe, just maybe, what makes Vashj'ir so unenjoyable is the impossibility of creating the mood that Vashj'ir is trying to create. From the moment the boat sinks on the ride over, it's clear that Blizzard's intention with Vashj'ir was to create a zone where we are constantly on the run, ducking for cover in an environment where we are out of our element, while being constantly surrounded by foes who would love nothing more than to rip us to shreds. And yet, as they are trying to create that mood, there is nothing preventing me from swimming to the land in the zone, mounting up, and flying out of there, or better yet, hearthstoning back to Stormwind. Was I supposed to be in danger or something?
Now, Mount Hyjal is similar to Vashj'ir in a lot of ways, in that we are constantly moving throughout the zone and the zone tries to create a sense of urgency on the part of the player. I'll go over this zone more in another post, but the reason the creation of tension works in Mount Hyjal and not in Vashj'ir is that Mount Hyjal's tension is much more feasible to maintain. In both zones, the enemy is supposedly right on our doorstep, a threat we need to face immediately. In Mount Hyjal, there are earth elementals right in the front lawn of the zone's main hub, so this sense is created successfully. In Vashj'ir, these enemies are often far away, and though their numbers are supposedly imposing and dangerous, they rarely are if we actually go an have a look at them. In other words, in Mount Hyjal, Blizzard successfully followed the mantra of "show, don't tell", whereas in Vashj'ir, that was not the case.
And as for the sense of urgency, in Hyjal, that sense of urgency is created by the fact that the mountain is on fire. If we leave the zone, it will continue to burn, though we may now be safe. As such, though we can leave the zone and its problems with little difficulty, its conflict still remains. As for Vashj'ir, I get the distinct feeling that the zone is trying to create tension by implying that you yourself are in danger by being stranded in the zone, but if you hearth or fly out, oh look, problem solved! Sure, the soldiers of your faction and the Earthen Ring might still be in trouble, but again, the zone depends too heavily on telling us that our allies are in danger without ever showing us how they are in danger. Do these naga that we need to be afraid of ever storm the caves we get our quests from? Do they send out scouting parties to see if we have become a threat yet? Nope, they just leave us alone, and whatever tension that could be drawn from this situation is diffused by the fact that the zone just tries too hard to create it, breaking the tension by exceeding the capabilities of text-based tension creation.
Then there's the zone's length. It's bad enough that the zone doesn't create the kind of tension that can keep me interested in the storyline, but it then drags me through that tension-less chore for longer than any other zone in the game expects me to stay within its boarders. If Cataclysm's one-time quests werre like a novel with five chapters, the only one that wouldn't have any kind of suspense or tension would also happen to be the longest one. A lack of tension compared to other parts of the story can make anything seem to drag on, even if it isn't longer than the other parts of the work in question, but Vashj'ir has the double wammy of seeming to drag on due to its lack of tension and actually dragging on because it is so much longer than the other zones. For members of the Horde to get the quest achievement for Vashj'ir, they need to do 25 more quests than they need to to get the achievement for the next longest zone. The Alliance have it even worse, needing to do thirty five more quests to get their achievement, making Vashj'ir almost a third longer than any other zone in Cataclysm for the Alliance. Unbearably long, and boring, to boot. Oy vey.
And then there's the ending of the zone's storyline. I'm not even going to bother talking about that submarine ride that made Crime and Punishment feel like a haiku and forced you to watch the battle as your sub-mates narrated the fact that you were losing because the battle itself was so uninspired in its design that you really can't tell who's winning and who's losing (there's that "telling instead of showing" problem again). Or the inexplicable hole in the bottom of that submarine (or maybe it was a different one; I can't differentiate between the submarines when I remember them) that invites you by its very presence to go for a swim, only to deposit you in the ocean if you should swim too deep, with the submarine moving too quickly for you to catch up and get back in. No, let's just get right to the ending.
After losing the battle, Erunak is pulled into the breach by a mysterious tentacle and your commander follows. Without actually giving you a definite prompt to follow your commander into the Abyssal Maw, the quest simply leaves you outside of the rift, with no one around, abandoning you in the deepest, most desolate part of the most disconnected-from-the-rest-of-the-world zone in the game. It's about as lonely as WoW can possibly make you feel, and that's how this chore of a zone ends: an empty ending to a tension-less story. And if you do follow your commander into the Maw, you have to enter an instance to continue the story. So you are left with an exceptionally unsatisfying ending: you have been defeated in battle, your allies are nowhere to be found, and you have to do an instance to finish the story. If you wanted to move on to the next zone's quests after finishing Vashj'ir, too bad; go into that dungeon and find out what happens!
And speaking of moving on to the next zone, I think I should do that mentally, because all of this accentuating the negative isn't good for my psyche. So let me conclude by saying that if you are still working through Northrend, Outland, or even the remade vanilla content and you still have to make the "Hyjal vs. Vashj'ir" choice, choose Hyjal. The only reason to go to Vashj'ir is for the extra gold, Earthen Ring rep, and quest rewards to disenchant. On Wednesday, shall I move on to Mount Hyjal, and perhaps another zone or two if I don't have enough to say about Mount Hyjal alone.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Zone replay in WoW?
I was hit by a sudden realization today regarding WoW's solo content. In contemplating the "daily grind" I have returned to (a term I coined a bit over a year ago to describe the repetitive ritual of doing the same daily quests every day), I thought about methods that other games have used to remain interesting after being completed out of hopes that the lessons learned from these other games could be applied to WoW. Thinking about this took some time, for my stingy-ness regarding buying new games and my recent penchant for open-ended games (the last four games that have held my attention for any extended period of time were WoW, Rock Band 3, Minecraft, and Rock Band 2) means it has been some time since I played a typical game that could be "beaten" in any conventional sense. But when I looked back upon the games I have played which I was able to "beat" and continued playing, I realized that most of the time, I was simply playing these games multiple times all the way through, occasionally with some sort of "New Game Plus" bonus.
Thinking back, I realized that this was how I milked most of my old games for more play time once I had finished them; I simply played them again. Yet when I looked at WoW, I realized that there is no such simple "play the game again" feature. There is no way to replay entire zones that you enjoyed, unless you level an alt and do the whole level grind over again, a daunting thought for such a huge game (especially when some zones are horribly behind others in terms of their design philosophy). Outside of rolling a new alt, there is simply no way to experience WoW's solo content more than once.
And the truth is, I see the option to roll and alt and experience the whole game again as a less-than-optimal way to give players the option to replay the game. Why? An argument for this method would say that it is equivalent to starting a new save file in a console game, but that analogy doesn't really work, because WoW is no longer equivalent to one game. It is now equivalent to several, and forcing players to start from the beginning if they wish to re-experience a part of the game is equivalent to making them play multiple games in order to replay the one they like. Let me elaborate. In the beginning, there was vanilla WoW, which was equivalent to one game (we'll call that game WoW 1). Then Burning Crusade was released. Because we had to pay extra money for Burning Crusade, it was equivalent to another game (WoW 2), and ditto for Wrath of the Lich King (WoW 3). Cataclysm is an interesting case, because we got all of the new 80-85 content (WoW 4), as well as the remake of old-world Azeroth (a remake of WoW 1).
To provide an analogy, look at the side-scrolling Metroid Games. You had Metroid, released in 1986 on the NES; Metroid 2: The Return of Samus, released in 1991 on the Game Boy; Super Metroid, released in 1994 on the SNES, and Metroid Fusion, released in 2002 on the Game Boy Advance, all of which were chronologically related to each other in terms of story and all of which were great technological improvements over their predecessors, much like WoW and its expansion packs. But after Metroid Fusion was released, a game called Metroid: Zero Mission was released, which was a remake of the original Metroid that brought it up to speed with the technological advancements made after the original Metroid was released. Cataclysm is the equivalent of a game that packages Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission together, in that we have an advances fourth entry in the series, as well as an advanced remake of the first entry, while the second and third are still behind the other two in terms of how technologically advanced they are.
Why do I make this analogy? I make it because I think forcing WoW players to play through the updated Vanilla content, Burning Crusade's content, and Wrath of the Lich King's content before they can replay Cataclysm's content is equivalent to forcing a Metroid fan to play through Metroid: Zero Mission, Metroid 2: The Return of Samus, and Super Metroid before being able to replay Metroid Fusion, which just wouldn't be fair. Now, when you apply this analogy practically, it makes it seem like I am suggesting that people should be able to skip entire expansion packs when they roll a new character, which is not what I mean to suggest at all (although Death Knights can already do that, but they start out right in the least-advanced content, which is hardly an ideal skip). What I am saying is that the precedent set by other games makes it seem unfair that we should have to play through all of that old content just to replay the new content we enjoy.
It was at this part in my thought that I was hit with an idea: what if we could replay entire zones? What if we could go through a zone again and play through it's one-time quests a second, third, maybe even fourth time, and the longevity of the solo content could be extended that way? The precedent for it exists with the Caverns of Time; major villains could be replaced with members of the Infinite Dragonflight with similar abilities, and occasionally, a quest giver could be replaced by a member of the Keepers of Time. Or perhaps there could be one quest-giver from the Keepers of Time who gives a bread-crumb quest that starts you off in each zone. These quest-givers could be set up near the portals in Stormwind and Ogrimmar, and they could get their own portals that would lead to past versions of each zone. Thus these "replay zones" would be their own separate zones, allowing Blizzard to put in quests that wouldn't award items (to avoid flooding the dust/essence/shard market) or reputation (to avoid making faction rep too easy to farm), both of which would make sense due to the fact that you aren't actually doing anything to help any of the zones you play through again. To keep the sense of shared questing, the game could also show other players replaying the zones alongside you, preventing it from becoming a lonely experience.
What purpose would these replay zones fulfill? Aside from allowing players to play through a zone again without needing to level a character through old content, the quests in these zones could also award money, making them an alternative to the "daily grind" we have now. Because there are countless more one-time quests than there are dailies, this would probably be a more interesting experience than the dailies we have now, and would make it take longer for players to get bored with Cataclysm's high-level solo content (of course, the dailies would stay around to help players earn reputation). Perhaps they could also award reputation with a new faction comprised of members of the Keepers of Time, giving solo players something else to work towards. They would also allow players to re-experience key moments in the evolving storyline of WoW (in case they missed them the first time around), as well as give Blizzard an idea of what works in questing and what doesn't by allowing them to see which zones players replay the most.
But really, the important point is that these replay zones would allow players to experience the best of currently available content without needing to replay the old content. Raiders who roll a new character don't need to run Molten Core, Black Temple, Ulduar, etc. with that character before they can run Cataclysm's raid content, so it seems a bit silly to force us to experience old solo content more than once when we just want to re-experience the relevant, not-behind-the-times-in-design-philosophy content.
Thinking back, I realized that this was how I milked most of my old games for more play time once I had finished them; I simply played them again. Yet when I looked at WoW, I realized that there is no such simple "play the game again" feature. There is no way to replay entire zones that you enjoyed, unless you level an alt and do the whole level grind over again, a daunting thought for such a huge game (especially when some zones are horribly behind others in terms of their design philosophy). Outside of rolling a new alt, there is simply no way to experience WoW's solo content more than once.
And the truth is, I see the option to roll and alt and experience the whole game again as a less-than-optimal way to give players the option to replay the game. Why? An argument for this method would say that it is equivalent to starting a new save file in a console game, but that analogy doesn't really work, because WoW is no longer equivalent to one game. It is now equivalent to several, and forcing players to start from the beginning if they wish to re-experience a part of the game is equivalent to making them play multiple games in order to replay the one they like. Let me elaborate. In the beginning, there was vanilla WoW, which was equivalent to one game (we'll call that game WoW 1). Then Burning Crusade was released. Because we had to pay extra money for Burning Crusade, it was equivalent to another game (WoW 2), and ditto for Wrath of the Lich King (WoW 3). Cataclysm is an interesting case, because we got all of the new 80-85 content (WoW 4), as well as the remake of old-world Azeroth (a remake of WoW 1).
To provide an analogy, look at the side-scrolling Metroid Games. You had Metroid, released in 1986 on the NES; Metroid 2: The Return of Samus, released in 1991 on the Game Boy; Super Metroid, released in 1994 on the SNES, and Metroid Fusion, released in 2002 on the Game Boy Advance, all of which were chronologically related to each other in terms of story and all of which were great technological improvements over their predecessors, much like WoW and its expansion packs. But after Metroid Fusion was released, a game called Metroid: Zero Mission was released, which was a remake of the original Metroid that brought it up to speed with the technological advancements made after the original Metroid was released. Cataclysm is the equivalent of a game that packages Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission together, in that we have an advances fourth entry in the series, as well as an advanced remake of the first entry, while the second and third are still behind the other two in terms of how technologically advanced they are.
Why do I make this analogy? I make it because I think forcing WoW players to play through the updated Vanilla content, Burning Crusade's content, and Wrath of the Lich King's content before they can replay Cataclysm's content is equivalent to forcing a Metroid fan to play through Metroid: Zero Mission, Metroid 2: The Return of Samus, and Super Metroid before being able to replay Metroid Fusion, which just wouldn't be fair. Now, when you apply this analogy practically, it makes it seem like I am suggesting that people should be able to skip entire expansion packs when they roll a new character, which is not what I mean to suggest at all (although Death Knights can already do that, but they start out right in the least-advanced content, which is hardly an ideal skip). What I am saying is that the precedent set by other games makes it seem unfair that we should have to play through all of that old content just to replay the new content we enjoy.
It was at this part in my thought that I was hit with an idea: what if we could replay entire zones? What if we could go through a zone again and play through it's one-time quests a second, third, maybe even fourth time, and the longevity of the solo content could be extended that way? The precedent for it exists with the Caverns of Time; major villains could be replaced with members of the Infinite Dragonflight with similar abilities, and occasionally, a quest giver could be replaced by a member of the Keepers of Time. Or perhaps there could be one quest-giver from the Keepers of Time who gives a bread-crumb quest that starts you off in each zone. These quest-givers could be set up near the portals in Stormwind and Ogrimmar, and they could get their own portals that would lead to past versions of each zone. Thus these "replay zones" would be their own separate zones, allowing Blizzard to put in quests that wouldn't award items (to avoid flooding the dust/essence/shard market) or reputation (to avoid making faction rep too easy to farm), both of which would make sense due to the fact that you aren't actually doing anything to help any of the zones you play through again. To keep the sense of shared questing, the game could also show other players replaying the zones alongside you, preventing it from becoming a lonely experience.
What purpose would these replay zones fulfill? Aside from allowing players to play through a zone again without needing to level a character through old content, the quests in these zones could also award money, making them an alternative to the "daily grind" we have now. Because there are countless more one-time quests than there are dailies, this would probably be a more interesting experience than the dailies we have now, and would make it take longer for players to get bored with Cataclysm's high-level solo content (of course, the dailies would stay around to help players earn reputation). Perhaps they could also award reputation with a new faction comprised of members of the Keepers of Time, giving solo players something else to work towards. They would also allow players to re-experience key moments in the evolving storyline of WoW (in case they missed them the first time around), as well as give Blizzard an idea of what works in questing and what doesn't by allowing them to see which zones players replay the most.
But really, the important point is that these replay zones would allow players to experience the best of currently available content without needing to replay the old content. Raiders who roll a new character don't need to run Molten Core, Black Temple, Ulduar, etc. with that character before they can run Cataclysm's raid content, so it seems a bit silly to force us to experience old solo content more than once when we just want to re-experience the relevant, not-behind-the-times-in-design-philosophy content.
Friday, January 14, 2011
The lonely journey to the top
About five days ago, I earned Loremaster of Cataclysm, thus, for all intents and purposes, beating Cataclysm's solo content. I have done every quest I could find in Mount Hyjal, Vashj'ir, Deepholm, Uldum, and the Twilight Highlands, and in doing those quests, I noticed a particular absence, something missing that was once an integral part of the questing landscape. I noticed it in the way that I progress swiftly and almost effortlessly (comparatively, at least) through Cataclysm's zones. I noticed it in the way that I didn't need much help as I went through doing the quests. I noticed it in the way that I said nothing in general chat other than occasionally answering other players' questions about the new quests. That absence was the absence of group quests.
You remember group quests, I'm sure--those quests that recommended you bring an ally or two along with you to take down the baddie in question. They peppered the landscape throughout WoW's history, especially in Icecrown, and we had to group up with other players to do them. Yet it seems, if memory serves me correctly, that outside of the first few months of any given content's lifespan, there weren't many groups to do these quests with. In any given zone, I might have gotten lucky and found someone else willing to do them with me, but for the most part, I remember either trying to do those quests on my own (and learning ways to push each class to its limit as a result), or just skipping over them entirely. Thus these quests weren't, for me at least, group quests, so much as they were really challenging solo quests.
Now, this wasn't really a tragedy, because some of my proudest moments while leveling have been taking down the elites required for these group quests without the help of a group. Those were the true epic moments of my solo play, the moments that rivaled my memories of raiding in terms of satisfaction and challenge. Those battles were long and difficult, like raid fights, and required me to use all of the tricks that I could to take down these elite opponents. In the way that raids require raiders to maximize their awareness, their damage, their efficiency, these group quests required me to maximize my survivability, and I quite enjoyed them for that.
But while Cataclysm may lack group quests, it is not lacking in elite quests--quests where you take down an elite opponent--but these elite quests are a little different. Unlike the elite quests of yore, which were synonymous with group quests, these quests are fully designed to be accomplished on one's own. Yes, you do fight an elite opponent with a ridiculously large health pool, and these battles often go on for a good deal longer than most other battles, but unlike most elite enemies, these enemies will not kill you before you've taken away even a chunk of their health. Some of them are designed to have avoidable attacks, while others are fought while an NPC ally acts as the tank, thus you yourself take little damage. These kinds of quests peppered the Cataclysm questing landscape, and I'm pretty sure they were designed with the specific intention of taking the place of group quests.
Do they succeed in this regard? The answer to that question depends on whether they can accomplish the same thing group quests were originally designed to accomplish. Group quests, when I could actually get a group together for them, had an epic feel to them because I was taking down an enemy who was many times bigger or more powerful than me, and they also gave a bit of experience with the dynamics of grouping (tanking, healing, threat, etc.). Do Cataclysm's elite quests hold up to those parameters? They certainly feel epic, and they provide a very satisfying conclusion to whatever quests they end. But what about teaching group dynamics? You may not learn tanking or healing from these quests, but they do have some pretty sneaky ways of teaching you other important aspects of group content. In killing Skullcrusher the Mountain, you are encouraged to run around activating various relics which give you and your allies buffs to help you fight Skullcrusher, and you also have to right-click your fallen allies to revive them. This teaches you that you do need to do things other than attacking your target in order to succeed in a group environment. The fight against the Obsidian Colossus in Uldum teaches you how to not stand in the fire, as does the fight against Barron Geddon in Hyjal. These are things the old group quests didn't often teach, so I'd say that Cataclysm's elite quests teaching them to new players is an improvement.
But where these two kinds of quests differ most, and where Cataclysm's elite quests are much stronger than the previous expansion's group quests, in my opinion, is that two or three years from now, when most of the players are off questing in whatever new zones we find ourselves in in the next expansion pack, if you decide to level an alt and you find yourself in one of Cataclysm's zones, you will be able to complete these elite quests in spite of the fact that you will be one of three of four people in the zone (and probably the only person in the phase you are currently in). As it stood in the days of group quests, if you couldn't complete a group quest on your own (which, if you were the appropriate level for a zone, theoretically, you shouldn't have been able to), you would simply be unable to complete that quest, and if that quest should happen to advance the story of the zone, too bad; you'd just have to make up the rest. With Cataclysm's group quests, though, since they never required a group in the first place, players will be able to complete them well after Cataclysm's zones have been abandoned.
When you consider Cataclysm's linear quest-design structure (a structure which I don't mind and actually support), it really is a necessity for the elite quests to not require groups. If these quests did require groups and you couldn't complete one due to being unable to form a group, you would either be stuck in a zone's progression and be unable to continue, or you would have to leave the quest undone as you enter a new phase. The former possibility makes the solo content unplayable, and the latter makes certain quests become unavailable to players, something which they wouldn't be very appreciative of. So instead, we are left with group quests becoming something seen very rarely in Cataclysm. The only group quests we have now are dailies, which people will probably continue to do for a very long time (due to their being level-cap dailies), but can still be solo'ed pretty easily, and the Crucible of Carnage chain, which was probably added more out of tradition than anything else. Thus we are left with the conclusions that there really are no proper group quests in Cataclysm other than the Crucible of Carnage, which is it's own stand-alone quest-line and thus doesn't pose the potential issues brought up above, and for the reasons I have mentioned in this post, I don't mind that fact.
You remember group quests, I'm sure--those quests that recommended you bring an ally or two along with you to take down the baddie in question. They peppered the landscape throughout WoW's history, especially in Icecrown, and we had to group up with other players to do them. Yet it seems, if memory serves me correctly, that outside of the first few months of any given content's lifespan, there weren't many groups to do these quests with. In any given zone, I might have gotten lucky and found someone else willing to do them with me, but for the most part, I remember either trying to do those quests on my own (and learning ways to push each class to its limit as a result), or just skipping over them entirely. Thus these quests weren't, for me at least, group quests, so much as they were really challenging solo quests.
Now, this wasn't really a tragedy, because some of my proudest moments while leveling have been taking down the elites required for these group quests without the help of a group. Those were the true epic moments of my solo play, the moments that rivaled my memories of raiding in terms of satisfaction and challenge. Those battles were long and difficult, like raid fights, and required me to use all of the tricks that I could to take down these elite opponents. In the way that raids require raiders to maximize their awareness, their damage, their efficiency, these group quests required me to maximize my survivability, and I quite enjoyed them for that.
But while Cataclysm may lack group quests, it is not lacking in elite quests--quests where you take down an elite opponent--but these elite quests are a little different. Unlike the elite quests of yore, which were synonymous with group quests, these quests are fully designed to be accomplished on one's own. Yes, you do fight an elite opponent with a ridiculously large health pool, and these battles often go on for a good deal longer than most other battles, but unlike most elite enemies, these enemies will not kill you before you've taken away even a chunk of their health. Some of them are designed to have avoidable attacks, while others are fought while an NPC ally acts as the tank, thus you yourself take little damage. These kinds of quests peppered the Cataclysm questing landscape, and I'm pretty sure they were designed with the specific intention of taking the place of group quests.
Do they succeed in this regard? The answer to that question depends on whether they can accomplish the same thing group quests were originally designed to accomplish. Group quests, when I could actually get a group together for them, had an epic feel to them because I was taking down an enemy who was many times bigger or more powerful than me, and they also gave a bit of experience with the dynamics of grouping (tanking, healing, threat, etc.). Do Cataclysm's elite quests hold up to those parameters? They certainly feel epic, and they provide a very satisfying conclusion to whatever quests they end. But what about teaching group dynamics? You may not learn tanking or healing from these quests, but they do have some pretty sneaky ways of teaching you other important aspects of group content. In killing Skullcrusher the Mountain, you are encouraged to run around activating various relics which give you and your allies buffs to help you fight Skullcrusher, and you also have to right-click your fallen allies to revive them. This teaches you that you do need to do things other than attacking your target in order to succeed in a group environment. The fight against the Obsidian Colossus in Uldum teaches you how to not stand in the fire, as does the fight against Barron Geddon in Hyjal. These are things the old group quests didn't often teach, so I'd say that Cataclysm's elite quests teaching them to new players is an improvement.
But where these two kinds of quests differ most, and where Cataclysm's elite quests are much stronger than the previous expansion's group quests, in my opinion, is that two or three years from now, when most of the players are off questing in whatever new zones we find ourselves in in the next expansion pack, if you decide to level an alt and you find yourself in one of Cataclysm's zones, you will be able to complete these elite quests in spite of the fact that you will be one of three of four people in the zone (and probably the only person in the phase you are currently in). As it stood in the days of group quests, if you couldn't complete a group quest on your own (which, if you were the appropriate level for a zone, theoretically, you shouldn't have been able to), you would simply be unable to complete that quest, and if that quest should happen to advance the story of the zone, too bad; you'd just have to make up the rest. With Cataclysm's group quests, though, since they never required a group in the first place, players will be able to complete them well after Cataclysm's zones have been abandoned.
When you consider Cataclysm's linear quest-design structure (a structure which I don't mind and actually support), it really is a necessity for the elite quests to not require groups. If these quests did require groups and you couldn't complete one due to being unable to form a group, you would either be stuck in a zone's progression and be unable to continue, or you would have to leave the quest undone as you enter a new phase. The former possibility makes the solo content unplayable, and the latter makes certain quests become unavailable to players, something which they wouldn't be very appreciative of. So instead, we are left with group quests becoming something seen very rarely in Cataclysm. The only group quests we have now are dailies, which people will probably continue to do for a very long time (due to their being level-cap dailies), but can still be solo'ed pretty easily, and the Crucible of Carnage chain, which was probably added more out of tradition than anything else. Thus we are left with the conclusions that there really are no proper group quests in Cataclysm other than the Crucible of Carnage, which is it's own stand-alone quest-line and thus doesn't pose the potential issues brought up above, and for the reasons I have mentioned in this post, I don't mind that fact.
Monday, January 3, 2011
To the dungeons with you!
Over a year ago, during the era of Wrath of the Lich King, I wrote a post about how to get exalted with every faction in the expansion (minus the Ashen Verdict, of course) without championing. In other words, this was a post about how to hit exalted on every faction by yourself, without needing to enter an instance. I was pretty proud of it, if only for the idea, and was looking forward to writing a similar post for Cataclysm's factions. Then Cataclysm came out, and as I plodded my way through the new zones' quests, I was hit by a sad realization: there would be no Cataclysm version of that post, because some factions are impossible to reach exalted with without donning their tabard and entering a 5-man instance. As such, if I should desire to obtain the Wrap of the Great Turtle to tank 5-mans, or if I want the Signet of the Elder Council to boost my stats while I'm out solo-ing, I can't get them by solely by solo-ing. And this doesn't sit right with me. Why, after letting us get exalted with every faction in Wrath of the Lich King by solo-ing, would Blizzard regress in its accommodation of us solo players?
Now, this is nothing new. Many of the factions in Burning Crusade required players to enter dungeons in order to earn reputation with them beyond a certain point (Honor Hold/Thrallmar come to mind), as did many of the factions in vanilla WoW. Wrath of the Lich King, however, moved away from this model by giving every one of its factions (minus one that was clearly designed around a specific raid) a way for players to earn reputation with that faction on their own. This was a good move on their part, in my opinion, for though those ways of earning reputation on one's own were often slower than championing, they gave solo players something to work for, as well as something to do, and they gave players a way to earn faction reputation that wasn't dependent on the competence of other players.
But there is one other major difference between the two expansion packs, one which may explain Blizzard's shift in design philosophy. In Wrath of the Lich King, the gear earned through reputation was the same ilevel as the gear earned through heroics, the primary source of reputation. The gear dropped by the last boss in all of the pre-3.2 heroics and the gear awarded at exalted status with Wrath-era factions were both ilevel-200 epics, and the gear dropped by all other heroic bosses and awarded at revered with the factions were ilevel-200 rare gear. In other words, factions awarded gear that was on par with what was awarded by heroics at the time, so by running heroics to earn reputation with various factions, players would be getting gear that was just as good as the gear they were trying to earn. What this meant was that it was quite possible for players, in the process of trying to earn one specific piece of gear, to earn another piece of gear that would render the reputation-awarded piece unneeded.
This has changed between Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm, and in my mind, that change justifies some factions requiring dungeon runs if we wish to reach exalted with them. It is this one change that prevents this post from being one in which I merely complain about how this change to the faction design philosophy is unfair to those who don't wish to run dungeons. You see, heroics no longer drop epics. Heroics in Cataclysm drop ilevel 346 rare gear, while reaching exalted with a Cataclysm faction gives you access to ilevel 359 epics. This means that running heroics doesn't give you better gear than the gear you are trying to earn by hitting exalted with whatever faction you are trying to get exalted with. In fact, outside of crafted epics, the epics awarded by reaching exalted with a faction are currently the best gear one can get outside of raids. (With the exception of the epics that you can get if you save up enough valor points doing your daily random heroic, but it takes a couple of weeks of running a random heroic each day in order to earn enough points for just one piece of gear, so that's by no means a practical way to deck yourself out in epics.)
What this all means is that in order to obtain the best gear you can obtain outside of a raid, you will have to do the hardest thing you can do outside of a raid, i.e. running dungeons. This wasn't the case in Wrath of the Lich King, where gear awarded by factions wasn't the best gear available outside of a raid: you had the drops from the last bosses of each heroic, the emblem of heroism gear, and the crafted gear. But those first two sources of epics outside of a raid no longer award epics, so we players are left with factions and professions as avenues to earn epics without raiding. And since ilevel 359 epics are the best gear one can earn outside of a raid, it makes sense that to earn them, you should need to do the hardest thing you can do outside of a raid: running dungeons. (And the fact that crafted epics require Chaos Orbs, which are bind-on-pick-up and are dropped by the last bosses in heroics, further fits this trend.) To me, that seems like a fair trade.
Now, this is nothing new. Many of the factions in Burning Crusade required players to enter dungeons in order to earn reputation with them beyond a certain point (Honor Hold/Thrallmar come to mind), as did many of the factions in vanilla WoW. Wrath of the Lich King, however, moved away from this model by giving every one of its factions (minus one that was clearly designed around a specific raid) a way for players to earn reputation with that faction on their own. This was a good move on their part, in my opinion, for though those ways of earning reputation on one's own were often slower than championing, they gave solo players something to work for, as well as something to do, and they gave players a way to earn faction reputation that wasn't dependent on the competence of other players.
But there is one other major difference between the two expansion packs, one which may explain Blizzard's shift in design philosophy. In Wrath of the Lich King, the gear earned through reputation was the same ilevel as the gear earned through heroics, the primary source of reputation. The gear dropped by the last boss in all of the pre-3.2 heroics and the gear awarded at exalted status with Wrath-era factions were both ilevel-200 epics, and the gear dropped by all other heroic bosses and awarded at revered with the factions were ilevel-200 rare gear. In other words, factions awarded gear that was on par with what was awarded by heroics at the time, so by running heroics to earn reputation with various factions, players would be getting gear that was just as good as the gear they were trying to earn. What this meant was that it was quite possible for players, in the process of trying to earn one specific piece of gear, to earn another piece of gear that would render the reputation-awarded piece unneeded.
This has changed between Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm, and in my mind, that change justifies some factions requiring dungeon runs if we wish to reach exalted with them. It is this one change that prevents this post from being one in which I merely complain about how this change to the faction design philosophy is unfair to those who don't wish to run dungeons. You see, heroics no longer drop epics. Heroics in Cataclysm drop ilevel 346 rare gear, while reaching exalted with a Cataclysm faction gives you access to ilevel 359 epics. This means that running heroics doesn't give you better gear than the gear you are trying to earn by hitting exalted with whatever faction you are trying to get exalted with. In fact, outside of crafted epics, the epics awarded by reaching exalted with a faction are currently the best gear one can get outside of raids. (With the exception of the epics that you can get if you save up enough valor points doing your daily random heroic, but it takes a couple of weeks of running a random heroic each day in order to earn enough points for just one piece of gear, so that's by no means a practical way to deck yourself out in epics.)
What this all means is that in order to obtain the best gear you can obtain outside of a raid, you will have to do the hardest thing you can do outside of a raid, i.e. running dungeons. This wasn't the case in Wrath of the Lich King, where gear awarded by factions wasn't the best gear available outside of a raid: you had the drops from the last bosses of each heroic, the emblem of heroism gear, and the crafted gear. But those first two sources of epics outside of a raid no longer award epics, so we players are left with factions and professions as avenues to earn epics without raiding. And since ilevel 359 epics are the best gear one can earn outside of a raid, it makes sense that to earn them, you should need to do the hardest thing you can do outside of a raid: running dungeons. (And the fact that crafted epics require Chaos Orbs, which are bind-on-pick-up and are dropped by the last bosses in heroics, further fits this trend.) To me, that seems like a fair trade.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Don't you know there's a Shattering on? Redux
The last time I asked the question, "Don't you know there's a Shattering on?", it was because I was struck by the nonchalance the citizens of Stormwind seemed to have taken towards the recent destruction of their world, and I was able to formulate a reason as to why they were so calm after a gigantic dragon had just ravaged their city. Now I am forced to ask this question again, this time by the Hero's Call board. Allow me to copy a line from the Hero's Call quest for each Cataclysm zone (the Alliance versions of those quests, that is) that succinctly sums up your purpose going into each zone:
Vashj'ir: "Recent attacks by the Horde on our trade ships must be met with swift and just force!"
Mount Hyjal: "Our brothers in the Cenarion Circle report that Deathwing's minions have launched a destructive offensive against the world tree and threaten to burn it to the ground!"
Deepholm: "The Earthen Ring requires our aid! They report that the elemental plane of Deepholm threatens to overtake our world and destroy all life on Azeroth!"
Twilight Highlands: "King Wrynn requires a trustworthy and proven hero for a mission of the utmost importance."
Uldum: "Be one of the first to enter glorious Uldum and claim its treasures in honor of the Alliance!"
One of these things is not like the other... I mean, what's up with Uldum? The way that your motivation for going into Uldum stands out from your motivation for going into all of the other zones becomes even more clear as you accept the introductory quests for each zone:
Vashj'ir: "As you may have heard, the Horde's attacking just offshore. The fighting's been fierce and relentless. We need every able body out there repelling the enemy!"
Mount Hyjal: "It is good that you've come here just as Azeroth finds itself in a time of great need. Deathwing's minions are attacking Hyjal and seek to bring the destructive Ragnaros back into our world."
Deepholm: "Deathwing's return to our world left a rift open between Azeroth and Deepholm. If we don't mend the breach, this land will be torn asunder."
Twilight Highlands: "Great burdens have been placed on my son's shoulders in his short lifetime, and I fear his responsibilities are only going to grow. He will never learn leadership confined to the keep, but I am loathe to send him forth without escort.[Name], your deeds in the wake of this cataclysm are already legendary. You would be an excellent mentor for young Prince Anduin."
Uldum: "The ancient region of Uldum has been exposed! Treasures beyond your wildest dreams, free for the taking! We just need a bit of an escort, what with the bandits and all..."
Let's look at each zone individually. In Vashj'ir, the Horde has attacked Alliance ships out near an island that has recently surfaced, and we need to go out and defend ourselves, lest we loose even more lives to the conflict. On Mount Hyjal, the mountain threatens to burn if we don't do something about it, and Ragnaros might be brought back, which would be an even greater threat upon the world. In Deepholm, the world threatens to tear apart if the world pillar cannot be reconstructed. For the Twilight Haghlands, though Varian doesn't exactly make it clear what is wrong in that zone, the tone of the quests give the impression that it is important and consequential. In Uldum, there are treasures to be found! Yes, one of these things really isn't like the other.
In other words, it seems as if our actions in every zone in Cataclysm minus Uldum are motivated by the basic need to save the world or ourselves, or at the very least, some grander purpose. We are out there to do things for other people, as is our character's motivation for much of the game. But when we get around to going to Uldum, we suddenly find ourselves motivated purely by the treasures we can find. Sure, the quests may try to gloss over that by saying that we are looking for these treasures "for the glory of the Alliance" or that we are really helping this caravan get into Uldum, but at the end of the day, rather than being there to help, we are there for fame and glory. In every other zone, we are there to make a difference, to help the innocent, to save the world, but in Uldum, we are there for easy treasures... what.
This dichotomy was especially apparent to me because I only quested through Hyjal and Deepholm before starting Uldum, and in both of those zones, we narrowly avert widespread destruction though swift and timely action. In Hyjal, we narrowly avert the destruction of the mountain by fighting back those responsible; in Deepholm, we narrowly avert the destruction of the whole world by resembling the world pillar. Between these two zones, the mood of the expansion is set as one where the world is constantly teetering on the brink of destruction, and only by acting quickly can we save it. That's why it's pretty jarring to spend two zones saving a world that is very close to destruction, then to be lead to a zone where our only reason for being there is to see what treasures we can find. As the people in that caravan asked me to escort them into the desert, I couldn't help but ask myself, don't you know that there's a world out there that could be lost if we don't go help? Don't you know there's a Shattering on?
The one possible reason I could think of for Blizzard to put in a zone with such a different mood is that they wanted to show that our characters are not the spotless paragons of good they might otherwise seem to be. They may be heroes, but perhaps Blizzard wanted to show that they are by no means perfect, and they can get excited about personal gain just like anyone. I can understand why they would want to do this. After all, they are trying to tell a story, and we are simply playing the part of the protagonist of that story. If the protagonist of a story is too perfect, he becomes a Mary Sue, and the story becomes unbelievable. But our characters do have flaws, the most prominent of which might be their gullibility. The way we help Tyrus Blackhorn, Drakaru, Teron Gorefiend regain their power in Mount Hyjal, Grizzly Hills, and Shadowmoon Valley, respectively, show just how easily our characters trust others, a trust which is often taken advantage of. But being that that is the only flaw that comes to mind (for me, at least), perhaps they are a bit too close to being Mary Sues, which is why Blizzard wants to add self-centered greed to the list of their flaws by sending them to Uldum to look for treasure.
Does it work? I suppose this is a matter of opinion, but I'm of the opinion that it doesn't. Our characters spend so long being near-perfect heroes (with gullibility as their only flaws) that for them to show this interest in more selfish motivators so suddenly feels more like character derailment than character development, even if there isn't much character to derail in the first place. Now, maybe I need to level an alt through the old content so I can see that our characters really can be pretty self centered, because the truth is that I haven't leveled a character past level 14 since the start of the expansion. Hell, it probably isn't out of character at all for goblins. But I can say that two large zones' worth of setting our character up as a grand world-saving hero is enough to establish our characters suddenly taking on the role of a treasure hunter as decidedly out of character.
And even if this concept did work, it would completely ignore the fact that the world is teetering on the brink of destruction, as was made clear to us in Hyjal and Deepholm. No amount of character development or any other such justification can mask the fact that Hyjal and Deepholm probably aren't the only areas in need of being saved by our characters, and to be forced to go treasure hunting when the world is teetering on the brink of destruction forces our characters to show an uncomfortable amount of disregard for the world at large.
Vashj'ir: "Recent attacks by the Horde on our trade ships must be met with swift and just force!"
Mount Hyjal: "Our brothers in the Cenarion Circle report that Deathwing's minions have launched a destructive offensive against the world tree and threaten to burn it to the ground!"
Deepholm: "The Earthen Ring requires our aid! They report that the elemental plane of Deepholm threatens to overtake our world and destroy all life on Azeroth!"
Twilight Highlands: "King Wrynn requires a trustworthy and proven hero for a mission of the utmost importance."
Uldum: "Be one of the first to enter glorious Uldum and claim its treasures in honor of the Alliance!"
One of these things is not like the other... I mean, what's up with Uldum? The way that your motivation for going into Uldum stands out from your motivation for going into all of the other zones becomes even more clear as you accept the introductory quests for each zone:
Vashj'ir: "As you may have heard, the Horde's attacking just offshore. The fighting's been fierce and relentless. We need every able body out there repelling the enemy!"
Mount Hyjal: "It is good that you've come here just as Azeroth finds itself in a time of great need. Deathwing's minions are attacking Hyjal and seek to bring the destructive Ragnaros back into our world."
Deepholm: "Deathwing's return to our world left a rift open between Azeroth and Deepholm. If we don't mend the breach, this land will be torn asunder."
Twilight Highlands: "Great burdens have been placed on my son's shoulders in his short lifetime, and I fear his responsibilities are only going to grow. He will never learn leadership confined to the keep, but I am loathe to send him forth without escort.
Uldum: "The ancient region of Uldum has been exposed! Treasures beyond your wildest dreams, free for the taking! We just need a bit of an escort, what with the bandits and all..."
Let's look at each zone individually. In Vashj'ir, the Horde has attacked Alliance ships out near an island that has recently surfaced, and we need to go out and defend ourselves, lest we loose even more lives to the conflict. On Mount Hyjal, the mountain threatens to burn if we don't do something about it, and Ragnaros might be brought back, which would be an even greater threat upon the world. In Deepholm, the world threatens to tear apart if the world pillar cannot be reconstructed. For the Twilight Haghlands, though Varian doesn't exactly make it clear what is wrong in that zone, the tone of the quests give the impression that it is important and consequential. In Uldum, there are treasures to be found! Yes, one of these things really isn't like the other.
In other words, it seems as if our actions in every zone in Cataclysm minus Uldum are motivated by the basic need to save the world or ourselves, or at the very least, some grander purpose. We are out there to do things for other people, as is our character's motivation for much of the game. But when we get around to going to Uldum, we suddenly find ourselves motivated purely by the treasures we can find. Sure, the quests may try to gloss over that by saying that we are looking for these treasures "for the glory of the Alliance" or that we are really helping this caravan get into Uldum, but at the end of the day, rather than being there to help, we are there for fame and glory. In every other zone, we are there to make a difference, to help the innocent, to save the world, but in Uldum, we are there for easy treasures... what.
This dichotomy was especially apparent to me because I only quested through Hyjal and Deepholm before starting Uldum, and in both of those zones, we narrowly avert widespread destruction though swift and timely action. In Hyjal, we narrowly avert the destruction of the mountain by fighting back those responsible; in Deepholm, we narrowly avert the destruction of the whole world by resembling the world pillar. Between these two zones, the mood of the expansion is set as one where the world is constantly teetering on the brink of destruction, and only by acting quickly can we save it. That's why it's pretty jarring to spend two zones saving a world that is very close to destruction, then to be lead to a zone where our only reason for being there is to see what treasures we can find. As the people in that caravan asked me to escort them into the desert, I couldn't help but ask myself, don't you know that there's a world out there that could be lost if we don't go help? Don't you know there's a Shattering on?
The one possible reason I could think of for Blizzard to put in a zone with such a different mood is that they wanted to show that our characters are not the spotless paragons of good they might otherwise seem to be. They may be heroes, but perhaps Blizzard wanted to show that they are by no means perfect, and they can get excited about personal gain just like anyone. I can understand why they would want to do this. After all, they are trying to tell a story, and we are simply playing the part of the protagonist of that story. If the protagonist of a story is too perfect, he becomes a Mary Sue, and the story becomes unbelievable. But our characters do have flaws, the most prominent of which might be their gullibility. The way we help Tyrus Blackhorn, Drakaru, Teron Gorefiend regain their power in Mount Hyjal, Grizzly Hills, and Shadowmoon Valley, respectively, show just how easily our characters trust others, a trust which is often taken advantage of. But being that that is the only flaw that comes to mind (for me, at least), perhaps they are a bit too close to being Mary Sues, which is why Blizzard wants to add self-centered greed to the list of their flaws by sending them to Uldum to look for treasure.
Does it work? I suppose this is a matter of opinion, but I'm of the opinion that it doesn't. Our characters spend so long being near-perfect heroes (with gullibility as their only flaws) that for them to show this interest in more selfish motivators so suddenly feels more like character derailment than character development, even if there isn't much character to derail in the first place. Now, maybe I need to level an alt through the old content so I can see that our characters really can be pretty self centered, because the truth is that I haven't leveled a character past level 14 since the start of the expansion. Hell, it probably isn't out of character at all for goblins. But I can say that two large zones' worth of setting our character up as a grand world-saving hero is enough to establish our characters suddenly taking on the role of a treasure hunter as decidedly out of character.
And even if this concept did work, it would completely ignore the fact that the world is teetering on the brink of destruction, as was made clear to us in Hyjal and Deepholm. No amount of character development or any other such justification can mask the fact that Hyjal and Deepholm probably aren't the only areas in need of being saved by our characters, and to be forced to go treasure hunting when the world is teetering on the brink of destruction forces our characters to show an uncomfortable amount of disregard for the world at large.
Friday, December 24, 2010
Failure to adjust: whose fault is it?
Being that I am still level 84, I have not yet had the "pleasure" of stepping into Cataclysm's heroics, but if Allison Robert's look at the unbearable suckhood of pugging is anything to go on, I'm not missing much. I can't say I'm all that surprised that in the wake of Blizzard making some pretty significant changes to heroics in Cataclysm--crowd control is necessary, DPS can't be healed through avoidable damage, triage is more important that fast healing, kill order and interrupts are important again--it seems the playerbase has been less than willing to adapt to these changes. Now, we are still in the first few weeks of the expansion's life time, and given time, players might learn and change their ways (especially when their current ways deny them their epic loot). But if Allison's post and other horror stories I have heard from other players and other bloggers are anything to go on, people really aren't do well in adapting to the changes made to heroics in Cataclysm. But does the fault really lie with those who "refuse" to adapt to the times and the demands of a new era? Or might the fault lie elsewhere?
When heroics were introduced in Burning Crusade, they were difficult, and wiping was common. When Wrath of the Lich King came out, that changed. Heroics were not all that difficult, especially as the expansion wore on, and the fact that we kept running heroics long after we outgeared them lead to players developing some pretty bad habits for running them. It was bad enough when Wrath heroics allowed us to ignore kill orders, not interrupt spells, and AoE down trash at the beginning of the expansion; once the emblem system allowed us to get amazing gear without leaving heroics, it was all downhill from there. Runing heroics took the same amount of skill as doing old-world quests for Loremaster; that is to say, it took none, but people still did it, and as a result, they developed some pretty low expectations for how difficult heroics should be. Players who try to run heroics now using the strategies that they used in latter Lich King era heroics are like level-80 players who try doing Cataclysm quest content using the strategies they use to do low-level quests for Loremaster (which, if you've ever killed low level enemies for any reason, you know would end in disaster). I don't know for a fact that those players exist, but if they did, they'd be comparable to today's heroic runners.
But let's look at Wrath's heroic dungeons more closely. You had heroics, which took almost zero effort and a minimal investment of time and awarded great gear, and raiding, which took a great deal of time and effort and award superb gear. Considering that heroics took infinitely less ability and commitment to run and awarded gear that wasn't much worse than what raids awarded, it's no wonder players flocked to them, even those without the skills that are usually necessary to succeed in group content. And when they went there, they obtained gear that trivialized the very content that awarded it, but they kept playing because they liked these shiny epics they could earn. Because of this design, players associated heroics with zero-effort rewards and started playing under the assumption if their zero-effort approach did not yield victory, it meant someone was playing badly, an assumption which hampers their ability to adapt to today's heroics. The expectation of reward for zero effort also keeps players in heroics who have no business expecting to succeed in a cooperative environment, further hindering our efforts. And whose decision was it to design Wrath's heroics to start out easy, become even easier when the gear they awarded trivialized them, and thus create this mess in the first place? Blizzard.
Now let's fast forward to the development stages of Cataclysm. Wrath of the Lich King is coming to a close, and many non-raiders (a category which includes a startlingly large players, if a poll I ran a while ago on my blog is anything to go by) continue running heroics because that is the only thing they have left to entertain themselves, thus further cementing the bad habits they have developed over the course of the expansion pack. Meanwhile, in all of their interviews and press releases, Blizzard makes clear their intention to make heroics challenging again, to make them require crowd control, kill order, interrupts, strategy, etc. They make this clear at BlizzCon, in miscellaneous interviews, and as a result, us players who keep up with WoW news online are well aware going into Cataclysm that things are going to be different, that the strategies we used for old heroics won't work in this new expansion, and that we're going to have to change the way we do things. We knew this, but the players who don't follow WoW news online didn't.
I don't know exactly when I started following WoW news online, but if I had to put a guess to it, the earliest I would be willing to guess is November of 2008. Now, I started playing WoW in September of 2005. That's sixty three months I have been playing, and I have only been following WoW news online for, at the most, twenty five of them. That's less than half of my time spent playing WoW, and it means it took me more than three years to realize that WoW had an online community. Now, I'm sure the community has grown more robust as the game's popularity has grown, meaning someone who started playing after I did would probably have an easier time discovering WoW's online community than I did. But I bring up the duration of the time during which I was oblivious of WoW's online community to illustrate that not every player is privy to the information we often take for granted. For anyone who did not keep track of news about Cataclysm, the sudden rise of difficulty in heroics is something they had no way of anticipating.
So, we have Blizzard creating a situation that leads to players developing really bad habits in heroics, and then doing nothing to convey to players who don't follow news about WoW online that they are increasing the difficulty of heroics come Cataclysm. It's beginning to look like the fault for these players who didn't adjust to Cataclysm's heroics is resting on Blizzard's shoulders. The question is, was it Blizzard's responsibility to prepare players for this change?
Blizzard hasn't exactly been transparent when it comes to information about their game. When they expanded the armory to include a wowhead-like database of items, it was a big break from convention, to say the least. They have put other detailed information, like boss strategies or walkthroughs, on the official website, the kind of thing you would get on other sites. Sure, they'll release general information about the game, like overall descriptions of the classes and zones, but they've never been one for revealing specifics. This is especially the case in-game, where we go into most situations blind without any of the information we take for granted because we know so much information about the game that we acquire online. We may pick up on general patterns that can help us in entirely new situations (such as, one should generally not stand in the fire), but those assumptions are formed in response to general patterns of game design; they do not influence the game design itself. In other words, we know not to stand in the fire because developers usually make fire harmful; they don't make fire harmful because we usually don't stand in it.
What this means for heroics is that just because we players grow accustomed to certain facts in game (fire is bad, heroics don't require strategy) doesn't mean Blizzard owes it to us to keep those facts consistent or to warn us when they change. They can design the game however they like--within reason, of course, or else they'll lose subscribers--and its our responsibility to adapt. Part of that adaptation process is assembling information in online databases with boss strategies, item statistics, etc., which results in websites like wowhead and WoWWiki, as well as blogs that detail changes to the game, like heroics being made more difficult) This is all part of the process of adapting to changes made to the game, and knowing heroics were going to become more difficult by following Cataclysm news was part of that adaptation process. By taking that knowledge for granted, we took our adaptive abilities for granted, but some players haven't learned the process of adaptation as well as others. Those are the players who struggle in heroics now, and while it might not seem fair that we have to suffer for their inability to adapt, that's just the nature of group content.
When heroics were introduced in Burning Crusade, they were difficult, and wiping was common. When Wrath of the Lich King came out, that changed. Heroics were not all that difficult, especially as the expansion wore on, and the fact that we kept running heroics long after we outgeared them lead to players developing some pretty bad habits for running them. It was bad enough when Wrath heroics allowed us to ignore kill orders, not interrupt spells, and AoE down trash at the beginning of the expansion; once the emblem system allowed us to get amazing gear without leaving heroics, it was all downhill from there. Runing heroics took the same amount of skill as doing old-world quests for Loremaster; that is to say, it took none, but people still did it, and as a result, they developed some pretty low expectations for how difficult heroics should be. Players who try to run heroics now using the strategies that they used in latter Lich King era heroics are like level-80 players who try doing Cataclysm quest content using the strategies they use to do low-level quests for Loremaster (which, if you've ever killed low level enemies for any reason, you know would end in disaster). I don't know for a fact that those players exist, but if they did, they'd be comparable to today's heroic runners.
But let's look at Wrath's heroic dungeons more closely. You had heroics, which took almost zero effort and a minimal investment of time and awarded great gear, and raiding, which took a great deal of time and effort and award superb gear. Considering that heroics took infinitely less ability and commitment to run and awarded gear that wasn't much worse than what raids awarded, it's no wonder players flocked to them, even those without the skills that are usually necessary to succeed in group content. And when they went there, they obtained gear that trivialized the very content that awarded it, but they kept playing because they liked these shiny epics they could earn. Because of this design, players associated heroics with zero-effort rewards and started playing under the assumption if their zero-effort approach did not yield victory, it meant someone was playing badly, an assumption which hampers their ability to adapt to today's heroics. The expectation of reward for zero effort also keeps players in heroics who have no business expecting to succeed in a cooperative environment, further hindering our efforts. And whose decision was it to design Wrath's heroics to start out easy, become even easier when the gear they awarded trivialized them, and thus create this mess in the first place? Blizzard.
Now let's fast forward to the development stages of Cataclysm. Wrath of the Lich King is coming to a close, and many non-raiders (a category which includes a startlingly large players, if a poll I ran a while ago on my blog is anything to go by) continue running heroics because that is the only thing they have left to entertain themselves, thus further cementing the bad habits they have developed over the course of the expansion pack. Meanwhile, in all of their interviews and press releases, Blizzard makes clear their intention to make heroics challenging again, to make them require crowd control, kill order, interrupts, strategy, etc. They make this clear at BlizzCon, in miscellaneous interviews, and as a result, us players who keep up with WoW news online are well aware going into Cataclysm that things are going to be different, that the strategies we used for old heroics won't work in this new expansion, and that we're going to have to change the way we do things. We knew this, but the players who don't follow WoW news online didn't.
I don't know exactly when I started following WoW news online, but if I had to put a guess to it, the earliest I would be willing to guess is November of 2008. Now, I started playing WoW in September of 2005. That's sixty three months I have been playing, and I have only been following WoW news online for, at the most, twenty five of them. That's less than half of my time spent playing WoW, and it means it took me more than three years to realize that WoW had an online community. Now, I'm sure the community has grown more robust as the game's popularity has grown, meaning someone who started playing after I did would probably have an easier time discovering WoW's online community than I did. But I bring up the duration of the time during which I was oblivious of WoW's online community to illustrate that not every player is privy to the information we often take for granted. For anyone who did not keep track of news about Cataclysm, the sudden rise of difficulty in heroics is something they had no way of anticipating.
So, we have Blizzard creating a situation that leads to players developing really bad habits in heroics, and then doing nothing to convey to players who don't follow news about WoW online that they are increasing the difficulty of heroics come Cataclysm. It's beginning to look like the fault for these players who didn't adjust to Cataclysm's heroics is resting on Blizzard's shoulders. The question is, was it Blizzard's responsibility to prepare players for this change?
Blizzard hasn't exactly been transparent when it comes to information about their game. When they expanded the armory to include a wowhead-like database of items, it was a big break from convention, to say the least. They have put other detailed information, like boss strategies or walkthroughs, on the official website, the kind of thing you would get on other sites. Sure, they'll release general information about the game, like overall descriptions of the classes and zones, but they've never been one for revealing specifics. This is especially the case in-game, where we go into most situations blind without any of the information we take for granted because we know so much information about the game that we acquire online. We may pick up on general patterns that can help us in entirely new situations (such as, one should generally not stand in the fire), but those assumptions are formed in response to general patterns of game design; they do not influence the game design itself. In other words, we know not to stand in the fire because developers usually make fire harmful; they don't make fire harmful because we usually don't stand in it.
What this means for heroics is that just because we players grow accustomed to certain facts in game (fire is bad, heroics don't require strategy) doesn't mean Blizzard owes it to us to keep those facts consistent or to warn us when they change. They can design the game however they like--within reason, of course, or else they'll lose subscribers--and its our responsibility to adapt. Part of that adaptation process is assembling information in online databases with boss strategies, item statistics, etc., which results in websites like wowhead and WoWWiki, as well as blogs that detail changes to the game, like heroics being made more difficult) This is all part of the process of adapting to changes made to the game, and knowing heroics were going to become more difficult by following Cataclysm news was part of that adaptation process. By taking that knowledge for granted, we took our adaptive abilities for granted, but some players haven't learned the process of adaptation as well as others. Those are the players who struggle in heroics now, and while it might not seem fair that we have to suffer for their inability to adapt, that's just the nature of group content.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Food for thought on remake and genre designation
Just a week ago, I found myself defending WoW from the accusation that it has become too linear of a game, yet as time has gone by and I have consumed more of Cataclysm's content, it has become apparent to me that WoW really has changed in terms of how linear it is. I remember in my last post before Cataclysm came out, I considered whether Cataclysm could really be called WoW 2, as it has frequently been called, since the setting hadn't changed much. If only I had known just how little change was really wrought by patch 4.0.3, and how much awaited me once the switch was flipped on Cataclysm itself.
Suffice it to say that questing in Cataclysm has more linear than it was in expansions past, especially compared to questing in vanilla WoW. It has become so linear that WoW really has become a different game, at least in terms of its questing, so I would say the title of WoW 2 is not undeserved. In fact, it really deserves the title of WoW 2.0, rather than WoW 2, because Cataclysm is really an updated version of the old WoW. See, when I heard everyone calling Cataclysm WoW 2, I assumed they meant that it would be like a sequel to the game, like the way Metroid 2: Return of Samus was a sequel to the original NES Metroid game. It continued the story of Metroid (which Cataclysm does) and provided some updates to the gameplay and the player's arsenal (which Cataclysm also did). However, considering how greatly Cataclysm has changed WoW, it now seems to me to be more analogous to Metroid: Zero Mission, a remake of the original Metroid released almost twenty years after the original. Zero Mission completely updated the original Metroid, adding all of the new features, weapons, and abilities fans had grown accustomed to over the years as new games had come out, while also expanding the game's universe to add new areas to the remade ones. Cataclysm, to me, seems to be more of a remake of WoW than a sequel to it, which is why I say it deserves the title of WoW 2.0 more than that of WoW 2.
Yes, WoW feels like a very different game now. In fact, after doing enough quests to see just how much WoW has changed, I can say that it reminds of another game I spent a lot of time playing: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I never got into the other entries in the series as much as I got into San Andreas, so I don't know whether they all have this same design or not, but in San Andreas, you often had a few missions you could do at any time, and once you finished those, a new segment of the story would open up. Maybe it would involve one mission that would progress the story to its next stage, or maybe you'd have more missions to do, but the story missions were very linear, and the game itself was very story driven. However, that wasn't to say you couldn't do other things. There were a plethora of side missions you could do, items you could collect, and there was always the option to just go out and cause mayhem. A game with linear story-driven missions in addition to side missions you could complete if you wanted to? Sounds a lot like the way I described WoW but a week ago.
Yet San Andreas was not an RPG by any stretch of the imagination; it was a sandbox game, a genre which shares many elements with the RPG genre, including an open world and many things to do, yet it was not nearly as open and non-linear as WoW was in its earlier incarnations. Could this mean that WoW is moving away from its MMORPG categorization and becoming something new? Not likely. Linearity or lack-thereof is not a defining feature of an RPG, though RPGs tend to fall closer to the non-linear side of the spectrum, but this is more by convention than by definition. No, what defines in RPG is really stats, numbers, leveling up, and things of that nature, game aspects that are reminiscent of the table-top RPGs of yore. What this means is that WoW is still definitively an RPG, not a sandbox game; it is simply and RPG with sandbox elements, which could always be said about it to some extent.
But with that said, WoW is most definitely very different from its vanilla days; the newfound linearity of the quests is enough to prove that is true. If anything, this is the culmination of changes to questing that have been made with each expansion pack, for each continent's quests became more and more linear as time went on, until we got to the point where we are now, where questing has become much more linear than is typical of an open-world RPG. Is this a sign that WoW is moving away from the conventions of the open-world RPG genre and taking on aspects of other, more mainstream genres? And if so, what will that mean for MMOs as a whole? It's probably too early to tell at this point in the expansion, but it's something I'll be keeping an eye out for as the saga of World of Warcraft continues.
Suffice it to say that questing in Cataclysm has more linear than it was in expansions past, especially compared to questing in vanilla WoW. It has become so linear that WoW really has become a different game, at least in terms of its questing, so I would say the title of WoW 2 is not undeserved. In fact, it really deserves the title of WoW 2.0, rather than WoW 2, because Cataclysm is really an updated version of the old WoW. See, when I heard everyone calling Cataclysm WoW 2, I assumed they meant that it would be like a sequel to the game, like the way Metroid 2: Return of Samus was a sequel to the original NES Metroid game. It continued the story of Metroid (which Cataclysm does) and provided some updates to the gameplay and the player's arsenal (which Cataclysm also did). However, considering how greatly Cataclysm has changed WoW, it now seems to me to be more analogous to Metroid: Zero Mission, a remake of the original Metroid released almost twenty years after the original. Zero Mission completely updated the original Metroid, adding all of the new features, weapons, and abilities fans had grown accustomed to over the years as new games had come out, while also expanding the game's universe to add new areas to the remade ones. Cataclysm, to me, seems to be more of a remake of WoW than a sequel to it, which is why I say it deserves the title of WoW 2.0 more than that of WoW 2.
Yes, WoW feels like a very different game now. In fact, after doing enough quests to see just how much WoW has changed, I can say that it reminds of another game I spent a lot of time playing: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I never got into the other entries in the series as much as I got into San Andreas, so I don't know whether they all have this same design or not, but in San Andreas, you often had a few missions you could do at any time, and once you finished those, a new segment of the story would open up. Maybe it would involve one mission that would progress the story to its next stage, or maybe you'd have more missions to do, but the story missions were very linear, and the game itself was very story driven. However, that wasn't to say you couldn't do other things. There were a plethora of side missions you could do, items you could collect, and there was always the option to just go out and cause mayhem. A game with linear story-driven missions in addition to side missions you could complete if you wanted to? Sounds a lot like the way I described WoW but a week ago.
Yet San Andreas was not an RPG by any stretch of the imagination; it was a sandbox game, a genre which shares many elements with the RPG genre, including an open world and many things to do, yet it was not nearly as open and non-linear as WoW was in its earlier incarnations. Could this mean that WoW is moving away from its MMORPG categorization and becoming something new? Not likely. Linearity or lack-thereof is not a defining feature of an RPG, though RPGs tend to fall closer to the non-linear side of the spectrum, but this is more by convention than by definition. No, what defines in RPG is really stats, numbers, leveling up, and things of that nature, game aspects that are reminiscent of the table-top RPGs of yore. What this means is that WoW is still definitively an RPG, not a sandbox game; it is simply and RPG with sandbox elements, which could always be said about it to some extent.
But with that said, WoW is most definitely very different from its vanilla days; the newfound linearity of the quests is enough to prove that is true. If anything, this is the culmination of changes to questing that have been made with each expansion pack, for each continent's quests became more and more linear as time went on, until we got to the point where we are now, where questing has become much more linear than is typical of an open-world RPG. Is this a sign that WoW is moving away from the conventions of the open-world RPG genre and taking on aspects of other, more mainstream genres? And if so, what will that mean for MMOs as a whole? It's probably too early to tell at this point in the expansion, but it's something I'll be keeping an eye out for as the saga of World of Warcraft continues.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Guild perks and guilds "for guild's sake"
After putting it off for a week or so, I have finally broken down and joined a guild. I didn't join one to raid or anything like that; as you learned in Monday's post, I am a happy solo-er and have no desire to change that fact. So rather than join a raiding guild which would level up quickly and need to live a lie every time I log in, I posted the following message to my realm's trade chat:
Solo-er looking for guild. I'm not looking to raid or PvP, but if you let me into your ranks, I will help your guild level and earn guild achievements. PST, but please don't just send an invite; I want to get to know you before I join.
And so, the serially guild-less player has joined a guild, all because he couldn't resist that 10% mounted speed increase or those items awarded by the guild achievements. What have I done differently since joining this guild? Well, I've killed a lot more critters and had a conversation about archeology... so really, not all that much has changed. As I said in my post on Guild perks and the death of the independent player, I was happily guild-less until Cataclysm came out, so when I joined a guild, I didn't plan on changing much about my playstyle. Still, considering that I have enjoyed the conversations I have had since joining the guild, I suppose this change to my playstyle has been, overall, positive, and also fits my prediction as to why Blizzard seemed to be targeting us solo players with these guild perks.
See, in my post that I mentioned above, I theorized that part of Blizzard's motivation for putting in these guild perks was to get willingly guild-less players like me to join guilds (or, at the very least, it was an unintentional positive side-effect). This would be good for Blizzard because being guilded makes a player less likely to quit should he/she get bored. If it's a raiding guild, the player risks losing his spot or falling behind in the progression if he/she takes a break. If it's just a social guild, that social element could be what keeps the player playing after he/she has stopped finding the game itself interesting. But in my searching for a guild, I found many people who had come up with some ways to obtain these guild perks that didn't really mesh with Blizzard's seeming intentions in putting in these guild perks. I found people who had created guilds comprised of only their characters. I heard tell of people who had created guilds for the sole purpose of avoiding being asked to join guilds, guilds which didn't even have a chat channel, and which would now also serve the purpose of giving members the guild perks, but served absolutely no other purpose.
These guilds seem to me to be a sign that some people would rather work around the encouragement Blizzard is providing to join guilds and would rather just go for the rewards. In other words, Blizzard is encouraging players to play one way and giving them incentives to do so, but players would rather work around the system put in and try to get those incentives without conforming to Blizzard's pro-guild ideals. If these perks were put in to encourage players to join guilds, the fact that these "for guild's sake" guilds exist shows that not all players are willing to play as socially as Blizzard wants them to.
Now, I'm sure that encouraging guild-less players to join guilds wasn't the only purpose of these guild perks. The fact that it takes a long time to level up a guild means that these perks reward guild longevity, as well as discouraging players from reacting to guild drama by breaking off and starting their own guild, instead encouraging them to actually work through their issues. The fact that leveling up a guild actually requires the members to do something (questing, PvP, raiding, etc.) means that the guild perks rewards guilds who seek out members who are active participants, rather than seeking out large numbers of players just to have an impressively sized roster. And if nothing else, the guild perk and guild achievement systems breathe some life into what has long been a very stagnant and simple system. Still, one can't deny that those perks also discourage players from remaining guildless; the fact that these "for guild's sake" guilds are popping up prove that they do. Whether these other benefits to the perks system actually materialize remains to be seen, but if, as I theorized, Blizzard wants players joining guilds because it will discourage them from quitting, than the "for guild's sake" guilds show that they haven't exactly been successful in that goal, because those guilds don't provide any incentive to keep playing after the game has gotten boring.
All this makes me think that the guild perk system has failed in its purpose of bringing guild-less players into guilds, simply because it hasn't meaningfully changed their playstyle or made them more likely to keep playing when they get bored. What does this say about the system as a whole? Well, it's entirely possible that it was never Blizzard's intention to change the playstyle of us serial solo-ers, so perhaps it hasn't failed because it was never trying to do that in the first place. It also says something about us players, something which I don't think will surprise anyone: some of us are quite stubborn. You can see this stubbornness in the refusal of some people to adapt to the new methods of play required by this expansion (crowd control, triage, etc.), but if these guilds for guild's sake have shown us anything, it's that that resistance to change applies outside of combat as well.
But if it was indeed Blizzard's intention to use these perks to make us guild-less players join guilds, then the fact that they have failed shows that some of us aren't going to change that easily. We players who don't look to play WoW socially may be rare, but we do exist, and we don't like being told how to play. It's bad enough when other players and our friends try to "convert" us to a more social playstyle ("Raiding is fun, you just haven't found the right guild yet!"), but when Blizzard does it too, that's especially infuriating. But perhaps that's just Blizzard's way of saying, "This is our game, and we get to tell you how to play it. Now be social!" Fine, Blizzard; you have won this round, because I have indeed joined a guild and started being more social. Just don't think you can push this much farther.
Solo-er looking for guild. I'm not looking to raid or PvP, but if you let me into your ranks, I will help your guild level and earn guild achievements. PST, but please don't just send an invite; I want to get to know you before I join.
And so, the serially guild-less player has joined a guild, all because he couldn't resist that 10% mounted speed increase or those items awarded by the guild achievements. What have I done differently since joining this guild? Well, I've killed a lot more critters and had a conversation about archeology... so really, not all that much has changed. As I said in my post on Guild perks and the death of the independent player, I was happily guild-less until Cataclysm came out, so when I joined a guild, I didn't plan on changing much about my playstyle. Still, considering that I have enjoyed the conversations I have had since joining the guild, I suppose this change to my playstyle has been, overall, positive, and also fits my prediction as to why Blizzard seemed to be targeting us solo players with these guild perks.
See, in my post that I mentioned above, I theorized that part of Blizzard's motivation for putting in these guild perks was to get willingly guild-less players like me to join guilds (or, at the very least, it was an unintentional positive side-effect). This would be good for Blizzard because being guilded makes a player less likely to quit should he/she get bored. If it's a raiding guild, the player risks losing his spot or falling behind in the progression if he/she takes a break. If it's just a social guild, that social element could be what keeps the player playing after he/she has stopped finding the game itself interesting. But in my searching for a guild, I found many people who had come up with some ways to obtain these guild perks that didn't really mesh with Blizzard's seeming intentions in putting in these guild perks. I found people who had created guilds comprised of only their characters. I heard tell of people who had created guilds for the sole purpose of avoiding being asked to join guilds, guilds which didn't even have a chat channel, and which would now also serve the purpose of giving members the guild perks, but served absolutely no other purpose.
These guilds seem to me to be a sign that some people would rather work around the encouragement Blizzard is providing to join guilds and would rather just go for the rewards. In other words, Blizzard is encouraging players to play one way and giving them incentives to do so, but players would rather work around the system put in and try to get those incentives without conforming to Blizzard's pro-guild ideals. If these perks were put in to encourage players to join guilds, the fact that these "for guild's sake" guilds exist shows that not all players are willing to play as socially as Blizzard wants them to.
Now, I'm sure that encouraging guild-less players to join guilds wasn't the only purpose of these guild perks. The fact that it takes a long time to level up a guild means that these perks reward guild longevity, as well as discouraging players from reacting to guild drama by breaking off and starting their own guild, instead encouraging them to actually work through their issues. The fact that leveling up a guild actually requires the members to do something (questing, PvP, raiding, etc.) means that the guild perks rewards guilds who seek out members who are active participants, rather than seeking out large numbers of players just to have an impressively sized roster. And if nothing else, the guild perk and guild achievement systems breathe some life into what has long been a very stagnant and simple system. Still, one can't deny that those perks also discourage players from remaining guildless; the fact that these "for guild's sake" guilds are popping up prove that they do. Whether these other benefits to the perks system actually materialize remains to be seen, but if, as I theorized, Blizzard wants players joining guilds because it will discourage them from quitting, than the "for guild's sake" guilds show that they haven't exactly been successful in that goal, because those guilds don't provide any incentive to keep playing after the game has gotten boring.
All this makes me think that the guild perk system has failed in its purpose of bringing guild-less players into guilds, simply because it hasn't meaningfully changed their playstyle or made them more likely to keep playing when they get bored. What does this say about the system as a whole? Well, it's entirely possible that it was never Blizzard's intention to change the playstyle of us serial solo-ers, so perhaps it hasn't failed because it was never trying to do that in the first place. It also says something about us players, something which I don't think will surprise anyone: some of us are quite stubborn. You can see this stubbornness in the refusal of some people to adapt to the new methods of play required by this expansion (crowd control, triage, etc.), but if these guilds for guild's sake have shown us anything, it's that that resistance to change applies outside of combat as well.
But if it was indeed Blizzard's intention to use these perks to make us guild-less players join guilds, then the fact that they have failed shows that some of us aren't going to change that easily. We players who don't look to play WoW socially may be rare, but we do exist, and we don't like being told how to play. It's bad enough when other players and our friends try to "convert" us to a more social playstyle ("Raiding is fun, you just haven't found the right guild yet!"), but when Blizzard does it too, that's especially infuriating. But perhaps that's just Blizzard's way of saying, "This is our game, and we get to tell you how to play it. Now be social!" Fine, Blizzard; you have won this round, because I have indeed joined a guild and started being more social. Just don't think you can push this much farther.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
How linear is Cataclysm, really?
Larisa has a post over on her blog in which she remarks on how linear Cataclysm's quest design is. Rather than allowing movement between the various parts of the zones, we are restricted to a set path by which we can progress through the quests. She compares it to "the moving walkway in the room where they keep the royal jewels at The Tower of London. The only way you can see them is by standing on that walkway, and it passes those jewels at set, nonnegotiable pace." And though I have only just completed the quests in Mount Hyjal and am thus ill-equipped to judge the expansion as a whole, I have to agree that the quest design in that zone was indeed very linear. It could have been worse, though; there were sometimes two quest hubs one could choose to go to, and you could choose which order you did the quests in each "round" of quests at each hub. Yes, it could have been a lot more linear, but for an MMO, a genre supposedly defined by an open world, it was indeed pretty straightforward.
Why did it take me so long to get through one zone, you might ask? As I mentioned in Friday's post, questing is not the only thing I have been doing since Cataclysm came out. I have done the fishing and cooking dailies every day, fished in Hyjal's lakes and rivers, searched the world for archeological fragments, and even taken some time just to fly around the old world (oh the flying, oh how I love it) and see the changes wrought by Deathwing's return. After all, questing isn't the only thing that has been changed or added in this expansion, and it would be a pretty poor way to experience it to focus solely on that aspect of this new Azeroth. But what's this? Choice in what I play when I play WoW? But I thought this game was supposed to be linear? (That's not a personal jab at you, Larisa; just a jab at the idea of WoW being linear.)
This is where I take issue with the idea that WoW has become "too linear", an idea I have heard elsewhere, aside from Larisa's blog. Yes, the questing has become more linear, but as the commenters on Larisa's post that I linked to earlier have pointed out, that's a necessity for phasing to be as prevalent as it is, and phasing is a necessity for us to think that our changes are having any effect on the world around us. But questing isn't all there is to World of Warcraft. There's PvP, dungeons, professions, secondary professions, and even just exploring the world to see what can be found. And even if some of these things themselves are pretty linear (professions especially; gone are the days of searching the AH for recipes or the world for vendors who sell them in a limited stock; we get our recipes from a pretty limited selection of sources these days), we are completely free to choose which ones we engage in and when. There's no "negligence punishment" mechanic put in to keep you in one part of the game when you'd rather be doing something else, outside of the fear of falling behind your guild.
Now, this does mean that in order to experience the true non-linearity of WoW, you need to take the initiative to do something other than what the game will direct you to do; the quests won't tell you to take a break and go try out archeology or PvP or fishing. The best you'll get is an occasional quest that will direct you to a dungeon of the appropriate level. I bring up this little detail because, in the past, I talked about the decline of Wrath of the Lich King heroics and the players' reacting to this decline by being more creative about how they ran heroics. In that post, I concluded that the player's running the heroics in unconventional ways was indeed a sign that the heroics had gone into decline, because players were running them in ways they weren't intended to be run. The implication of the conclusions I came to in that post was that if the game doesn't tell you specifically to do something, and you have to do that something to make the game interesting, then the game is a failure. If we apply this logic to Cataclysm's design, then that would mean that the fact that game can only be non-linear if players do something of their own accord to make it so--rather than because the game told them to--then the game fails at being nonlinear.
But the reason I concluded that players doing things in Wrath's heroics to spice up their heroic runs was a sign that heroics had declined was that the heroics weren't designed for that kind of play. Wrath's heroics were designed to be run in particular ways, and that fact that players weren't running them in those ways meant that they had failed. Cataclysm, however, is designed to support players doing things other than questing. If it weren't designed that way, archeology and all of the other things we can do aside from questing wouldn't be in the game. Cataclysm-era WoW is designed so that it can be played in a non-linear way, if the player chooses to do so. And therein lies the crux of the problem: WoW's linearity is inversely proportional to how much initiative you take to seek out other things to do within the game. Someone without that initiative will probably limit themselves to questing and the occasional dungeon run, and in doing so, they'll find WoW to be a very straight-forward game.
But in a way, I don't mind WoW being designed this way. It reminds me of the way that the story was told in the GameCube game Metroid Prime. In that game, you collected bits of the story (similar to the way we collect bits of lore through archeology) with your scan visor, including logs by space pirates and stories told by those who inhabited the planet where the game takes place before they were wiped out. You can also find vanity text aplenty by scanning various things in the environment, which adds even more to the atmosphere of the game. The beauty of this system was that it allowed players to experience exactly as much of the story as they wanted to. If they wanted a straight shoot-em-up, they could eschew the scan visor completely and just go in with gun ablazing. If they just wanted the background story but didn't want to hear all of the little details about the world itself, they could keep an eye out for the red scan nodes which would indicate a lore entry that would reveal the background of the world, while ignoring the other ones that just added to the atmosphere of the present situation. And if they wanted as many details as they could sink their teeth into, they could scan everything, which would tell them a lot about the story and about the world itself.
In a way, the non-linearity of WoW's design is like the depth of the story in Metroid Prime; both are at the control of the player. Just as players of Metroid Prime chose how much of the story they cared to experience, players of WoW choose how linear they want their experience to be. Are you looking for a game with a wide variety of things to do? Go out and find them; they're there for you. Are you just looking for a straightforward quest-based adventure? Fine, just follow the quests and do what they tell you. You'll miss out on a lot, but if that's how you want to play, who are we to say no? And if you don't want a linear experience, but you haven't taken the initiative to check out the other things there are to do in WoW? If that's the case, then who's really to blame?
Why did it take me so long to get through one zone, you might ask? As I mentioned in Friday's post, questing is not the only thing I have been doing since Cataclysm came out. I have done the fishing and cooking dailies every day, fished in Hyjal's lakes and rivers, searched the world for archeological fragments, and even taken some time just to fly around the old world (oh the flying, oh how I love it) and see the changes wrought by Deathwing's return. After all, questing isn't the only thing that has been changed or added in this expansion, and it would be a pretty poor way to experience it to focus solely on that aspect of this new Azeroth. But what's this? Choice in what I play when I play WoW? But I thought this game was supposed to be linear? (That's not a personal jab at you, Larisa; just a jab at the idea of WoW being linear.)
This is where I take issue with the idea that WoW has become "too linear", an idea I have heard elsewhere, aside from Larisa's blog. Yes, the questing has become more linear, but as the commenters on Larisa's post that I linked to earlier have pointed out, that's a necessity for phasing to be as prevalent as it is, and phasing is a necessity for us to think that our changes are having any effect on the world around us. But questing isn't all there is to World of Warcraft. There's PvP, dungeons, professions, secondary professions, and even just exploring the world to see what can be found. And even if some of these things themselves are pretty linear (professions especially; gone are the days of searching the AH for recipes or the world for vendors who sell them in a limited stock; we get our recipes from a pretty limited selection of sources these days), we are completely free to choose which ones we engage in and when. There's no "negligence punishment" mechanic put in to keep you in one part of the game when you'd rather be doing something else, outside of the fear of falling behind your guild.
Now, this does mean that in order to experience the true non-linearity of WoW, you need to take the initiative to do something other than what the game will direct you to do; the quests won't tell you to take a break and go try out archeology or PvP or fishing. The best you'll get is an occasional quest that will direct you to a dungeon of the appropriate level. I bring up this little detail because, in the past, I talked about the decline of Wrath of the Lich King heroics and the players' reacting to this decline by being more creative about how they ran heroics. In that post, I concluded that the player's running the heroics in unconventional ways was indeed a sign that the heroics had gone into decline, because players were running them in ways they weren't intended to be run. The implication of the conclusions I came to in that post was that if the game doesn't tell you specifically to do something, and you have to do that something to make the game interesting, then the game is a failure. If we apply this logic to Cataclysm's design, then that would mean that the fact that game can only be non-linear if players do something of their own accord to make it so--rather than because the game told them to--then the game fails at being nonlinear.
But the reason I concluded that players doing things in Wrath's heroics to spice up their heroic runs was a sign that heroics had declined was that the heroics weren't designed for that kind of play. Wrath's heroics were designed to be run in particular ways, and that fact that players weren't running them in those ways meant that they had failed. Cataclysm, however, is designed to support players doing things other than questing. If it weren't designed that way, archeology and all of the other things we can do aside from questing wouldn't be in the game. Cataclysm-era WoW is designed so that it can be played in a non-linear way, if the player chooses to do so. And therein lies the crux of the problem: WoW's linearity is inversely proportional to how much initiative you take to seek out other things to do within the game. Someone without that initiative will probably limit themselves to questing and the occasional dungeon run, and in doing so, they'll find WoW to be a very straight-forward game.
But in a way, I don't mind WoW being designed this way. It reminds me of the way that the story was told in the GameCube game Metroid Prime. In that game, you collected bits of the story (similar to the way we collect bits of lore through archeology) with your scan visor, including logs by space pirates and stories told by those who inhabited the planet where the game takes place before they were wiped out. You can also find vanity text aplenty by scanning various things in the environment, which adds even more to the atmosphere of the game. The beauty of this system was that it allowed players to experience exactly as much of the story as they wanted to. If they wanted a straight shoot-em-up, they could eschew the scan visor completely and just go in with gun ablazing. If they just wanted the background story but didn't want to hear all of the little details about the world itself, they could keep an eye out for the red scan nodes which would indicate a lore entry that would reveal the background of the world, while ignoring the other ones that just added to the atmosphere of the present situation. And if they wanted as many details as they could sink their teeth into, they could scan everything, which would tell them a lot about the story and about the world itself.
In a way, the non-linearity of WoW's design is like the depth of the story in Metroid Prime; both are at the control of the player. Just as players of Metroid Prime chose how much of the story they cared to experience, players of WoW choose how linear they want their experience to be. Are you looking for a game with a wide variety of things to do? Go out and find them; they're there for you. Are you just looking for a straightforward quest-based adventure? Fine, just follow the quests and do what they tell you. You'll miss out on a lot, but if that's how you want to play, who are we to say no? And if you don't want a linear experience, but you haven't taken the initiative to check out the other things there are to do in WoW? If that's the case, then who's really to blame?
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Don't you know there's a Shattering on?
When I logged in to my server for the first time after patch 4.0.3 dropped, I was struck by many things, not the least of which was just how much the world had changed. Though I was excited to see those changes, I decided to wait on giving them a really good look until I could fly around old-world Azeroth, since that would be much more efficient and freeing than walking around on foot. So plopped myself in Stormwind, waiting in the main city until Cataclysm came an unlocked that very basic amenity. From there? Who knows. Maybe I'll focus on Archeology, maybe I'll try to level my fishing and cooking skills, maybe I'll go right for the quests in the new zones, or maybe I'll just fly around a lot and see just how much our world has changed. But as I walked into Stormwind, I knew there would be no time for these considerations; there's a dragon on the loose! And he has torn our world asunder! We must rush to assess the damage, to rescue the innocents, to... wait, why is everything so quiet?
Yes, as I walked in to Stormwind for the first time after the Shattering, what struck me the most was not the damage to the city or the upgraded design of the city or the newly unlocked areas; what struck me the most was just how quiet everything was. The world had just been ravaged by the aspect of death, and everyone's walking around as if it is just old news. The guards aren't rushing to help anyone, the citizens aren't running for safety; people are just going about their daily lives. Were I in this world myself, I wouldn't be able to help but say to these people, "Look, I know it takes a lot of courage to see the world destroyed and not even bat a lash, but this is kind of a big deal. Why aren't you panicking? Don't you know there's a Shattering on?"
The answer as to why they were not panicking came to me while I was in the middle of catching some supposedly hard-to-catch fish for Catherine Leland just to prove I was up to the challenge. ("Really, Catherine? The world has just been torn apart by a dragon who could end all of our lives if he wanted to. I should be going out and helping people recover from this calamity, and you want me to go catch you some fish... for the sake of catching you some fish?") The answer as to why these seemingly brave citizens were not panicking lay in the fact that this World of Warcraft we inhabit now is not an immediately post-Shattering WoW; it is a WoW that we will experience now, that our alts will experience a year from now, and that future players will experience a few years from now, unless Blizzard decides to change the old-world again. All of these theoretical players will experience the same WoW I am experiencing now, because though the time when I logged in was immediately after the Shattering in real-world time, it was not immediately after the Shattering in in-game time.
As I have said before, WoW is really a very static game, and the lack of panic I saw in the citizens of Stormwind that day proves it. We are not playing a game whose timeline is moving as time itself moves in the real world; we are playing a game shown to us as a snapshot of one moment of its universe's timeline. By playing, we advance that moment a little bit, but if we roll a new character, we start from the beginning. The fact is that what those citizens are doing now, they are going to keep doing for a very long time, until Blizzard sees fit to change the old-world again. So suppose they were panicking; because that snapshot would continue to define the world of WoW for the next few years, players years from now would run in to Stormwind and see citizens running around, shouting that it's the end of the world, when that end came and went eons ago. It would seem silly, really.
What this means for us and the seeming bravery that these citizens show in the face of the end of the world is that we can explain their seeming stoic-ness with the simple fact that we are not experiencing an immediately post-Shattering WoW. We are playing in a world where some time has passed between the Shattering and the present time. Though the recovery process is by no means complete, things have started to settle down. Those who need to go out to help have done so, and will soon call upon the heroes of Northrend (us) to assist them in their tasks. Everyone else who isn't in immediate danger has gone back to trying to make the best of what has happened and live out their lives as best they can. And for some of them, that means inviting daring adventurers to try their hands at fishing in a nearby lake, to see if they can catch a rare elusive fish.
So yes, Catherine, I am up to the challenge of catching some Hardened Walleye, and I shall prove it to you. Sure, Robby Flay, I'll swim in the Stormwind canal and pick up some crabs so the King can have is crab legs. It's good to see that you both have found a way to keep on keeping on, ever since that... well, you probably don't want to talk about it, do you? I understand. The past is the past, and we have to move on.
Yes, as I walked in to Stormwind for the first time after the Shattering, what struck me the most was not the damage to the city or the upgraded design of the city or the newly unlocked areas; what struck me the most was just how quiet everything was. The world had just been ravaged by the aspect of death, and everyone's walking around as if it is just old news. The guards aren't rushing to help anyone, the citizens aren't running for safety; people are just going about their daily lives. Were I in this world myself, I wouldn't be able to help but say to these people, "Look, I know it takes a lot of courage to see the world destroyed and not even bat a lash, but this is kind of a big deal. Why aren't you panicking? Don't you know there's a Shattering on?"
The answer as to why they were not panicking came to me while I was in the middle of catching some supposedly hard-to-catch fish for Catherine Leland just to prove I was up to the challenge. ("Really, Catherine? The world has just been torn apart by a dragon who could end all of our lives if he wanted to. I should be going out and helping people recover from this calamity, and you want me to go catch you some fish... for the sake of catching you some fish?") The answer as to why these seemingly brave citizens were not panicking lay in the fact that this World of Warcraft we inhabit now is not an immediately post-Shattering WoW; it is a WoW that we will experience now, that our alts will experience a year from now, and that future players will experience a few years from now, unless Blizzard decides to change the old-world again. All of these theoretical players will experience the same WoW I am experiencing now, because though the time when I logged in was immediately after the Shattering in real-world time, it was not immediately after the Shattering in in-game time.
As I have said before, WoW is really a very static game, and the lack of panic I saw in the citizens of Stormwind that day proves it. We are not playing a game whose timeline is moving as time itself moves in the real world; we are playing a game shown to us as a snapshot of one moment of its universe's timeline. By playing, we advance that moment a little bit, but if we roll a new character, we start from the beginning. The fact is that what those citizens are doing now, they are going to keep doing for a very long time, until Blizzard sees fit to change the old-world again. So suppose they were panicking; because that snapshot would continue to define the world of WoW for the next few years, players years from now would run in to Stormwind and see citizens running around, shouting that it's the end of the world, when that end came and went eons ago. It would seem silly, really.
What this means for us and the seeming bravery that these citizens show in the face of the end of the world is that we can explain their seeming stoic-ness with the simple fact that we are not experiencing an immediately post-Shattering WoW. We are playing in a world where some time has passed between the Shattering and the present time. Though the recovery process is by no means complete, things have started to settle down. Those who need to go out to help have done so, and will soon call upon the heroes of Northrend (us) to assist them in their tasks. Everyone else who isn't in immediate danger has gone back to trying to make the best of what has happened and live out their lives as best they can. And for some of them, that means inviting daring adventurers to try their hands at fishing in a nearby lake, to see if they can catch a rare elusive fish.
So yes, Catherine, I am up to the challenge of catching some Hardened Walleye, and I shall prove it to you. Sure, Robby Flay, I'll swim in the Stormwind canal and pick up some crabs so the King can have is crab legs. It's good to see that you both have found a way to keep on keeping on, ever since that... well, you probably don't want to talk about it, do you? I understand. The past is the past, and we have to move on.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Should we have competition for quest items/kills?
Whilst doing part 2 of the elemental invasion quests today, I was hit by a sudden thought, a thought which came out of nowhere, yet was blindingly obvious when it came to me. I starting to think about one specific aspect of the design philosophy behind the solo-ing part of WoW. It is something so integral to the MMO landscape (or WoW's landscape, at least) that I have never even thought to consider whether it might really be necessary. As I was looking around for elementals to subdue, a hunter was doing the quest in the same area as me, subduing elementals before I could get to them. It was a manifestation of something very basic to WoW's design: competition in questing. This facet of WoW's questing design manifests itself all the time in ways we barely notice. When a quest requires you to kill a specific enemy, there will be other players in the same area killing that enemy. When a quest requires you to collect an item off the ground, there will be other players around collecting that item. And every time another player does one of the above things, questing becomes a bit harder for you. Maybe it's because of the break I've taken from the game, but when I saw that hunter subdue an elemental I had my eye on, I didn't dismiss it as something that's to be expected, nor did I get annoyed at him, but instead, I asked myself: should quest credit be a limited resource? Should we need to compete with other players while questing?
It's a difficult question for me to ponder, for it is something so integral to the way questing works in WoW that in the more than five years I have played, I have never considered it until today. I suppose the best way to start thinking about it would be to think about it from a realism standpoint, and from such a standpoint, it makes sense that having competition while doing a quest should make that quest harder to do. If there are other people in a forest killing wolves, there will be fewer wolves for you to kill; it's basic math. But then again, many quests often imply that, by doing what you are doing, you are taking care of the problem for good; by killing those wolves, you have solved the wolf problem completely, yet wolves still spawn for other players to kill. Sure, some quests acknowledge that you are just culling the threat a bit, but then, how do you explain the quests that ask you to kill a specific enemy? From a realism standpoint, once that enemy is dead, he's dead for good, and no one else can kill him; of course, this isn't the case. What this means is that we can't examine the issue of competition in questing from the perspective of realism, since any realism-based justifying of WoW's quest design falls apart pretty quickly.
With realism out of the question, the next simplest perspective I can think of to look at this issue from is that of practicality; is it practical for us to need to compete with other players for quests? From the players' perspective, it seems like it isn't; after all, wouldn't questing be faster, and thus more fun, if we had our own enemies to kill, our own items to collect, and other players had their own enemies to kill and items to collect? Archeology is a good example of this kind of game design in action, for everyone who takes archeology will have their own set of phased dig sites to find and explore. From the players perspective, it seems like the game would be better it quests, too, were designed this way.
But there must be reasons that Blizzard hasn't adopted a style of quest design similar to the way players look for artifacts with archeology. Perhaps it has something to do with system limitations. After all, as Wintergrasp showed us, putting a lot of players in one area can reek havoc on WoW's servers. Now think of what would happen if we had a lot of players in one area--say, in Mount Hyjal or Vashj'ir after Cataclysm launches--as well as individual enemies, quest items, and phases for all of those players. Though I don't know much about the hardware behind WoW's servers, I can imagine this would be a huge load for them to bear, probably more than they could.
Pacing also factors into this issue, for having competition for quest objectives works well to adjust the pace of the game to an appropriate pace for different players. When Cataclysm comes out, players are probably going to be rushing to the level cap, flooding those zones as they try to gain experience as quickly as possible. But Blizzard put a lot of effort into designing those zones, and they probably don't want players rushing through it as quickly as possible, which will not only prevent them from appreciating Blizzard's work, but also cause them to get to, play, and exhaust the raid content Blizzard has added at launch, reducing the longevity of the expansion. Artificial as it may be, having quest competition slow down players while playing through solo content does increase the game's longevity. But now, suppose someone has started leveling through the new Cataclysm zones after everyone else is already at the end-game, or someone decided to level an alt to raid with. Both of these players will find themselves with much less competition than the players who quested through those zones at launch found themselves with, and they'll be able to level faster for that reason. Thus the lack of competition will give them an edge in catching up with everyone else.
But perhaps the most important reason for there to be competition for quest credits--and also easiest to overlook--is that this is, in the end, an MMO. We are supposed to inhabit a living, breathing world, but considering how stagnant WoW really is, the only way for that world to be living and breathing is through the players. It is our interactions with other players and the way they influence our play that brings WoW to life. In group content, this influence is easy to achieve, for players' cooperation is necessary to make such content work. But how to bring that influence to solo content? Group quests help, but there can only be so many of them, and once there aren't as many players leveling through a zone as there used to be, they become more of an annoyance than anything. So how can players influence one another's playing if they are off doing their own thing? If they aren't working together to make their questing easier, then the only option left is to have one player's actions have consequences for another player in a way that the first player might not be consciously aware of. And that's exactly what the competition inherent in solo questing accomplishes.
So, in short, annoying as it may be from time to time, the competitive aspect of questing has a reason for being there. To remove it would take some of the second M out of what makes WoW an MMO, and would effectively go one step towards making it a very different game. While change isn't always a bad thing, change in that direction would not be good for the social dynamical that helps keep WoW interesting and alive, that puts it firmly in the MMO genre, and that probably drew many people to the game in the first place.
It's a difficult question for me to ponder, for it is something so integral to the way questing works in WoW that in the more than five years I have played, I have never considered it until today. I suppose the best way to start thinking about it would be to think about it from a realism standpoint, and from such a standpoint, it makes sense that having competition while doing a quest should make that quest harder to do. If there are other people in a forest killing wolves, there will be fewer wolves for you to kill; it's basic math. But then again, many quests often imply that, by doing what you are doing, you are taking care of the problem for good; by killing those wolves, you have solved the wolf problem completely, yet wolves still spawn for other players to kill. Sure, some quests acknowledge that you are just culling the threat a bit, but then, how do you explain the quests that ask you to kill a specific enemy? From a realism standpoint, once that enemy is dead, he's dead for good, and no one else can kill him; of course, this isn't the case. What this means is that we can't examine the issue of competition in questing from the perspective of realism, since any realism-based justifying of WoW's quest design falls apart pretty quickly.
With realism out of the question, the next simplest perspective I can think of to look at this issue from is that of practicality; is it practical for us to need to compete with other players for quests? From the players' perspective, it seems like it isn't; after all, wouldn't questing be faster, and thus more fun, if we had our own enemies to kill, our own items to collect, and other players had their own enemies to kill and items to collect? Archeology is a good example of this kind of game design in action, for everyone who takes archeology will have their own set of phased dig sites to find and explore. From the players perspective, it seems like the game would be better it quests, too, were designed this way.
But there must be reasons that Blizzard hasn't adopted a style of quest design similar to the way players look for artifacts with archeology. Perhaps it has something to do with system limitations. After all, as Wintergrasp showed us, putting a lot of players in one area can reek havoc on WoW's servers. Now think of what would happen if we had a lot of players in one area--say, in Mount Hyjal or Vashj'ir after Cataclysm launches--as well as individual enemies, quest items, and phases for all of those players. Though I don't know much about the hardware behind WoW's servers, I can imagine this would be a huge load for them to bear, probably more than they could.
Pacing also factors into this issue, for having competition for quest objectives works well to adjust the pace of the game to an appropriate pace for different players. When Cataclysm comes out, players are probably going to be rushing to the level cap, flooding those zones as they try to gain experience as quickly as possible. But Blizzard put a lot of effort into designing those zones, and they probably don't want players rushing through it as quickly as possible, which will not only prevent them from appreciating Blizzard's work, but also cause them to get to, play, and exhaust the raid content Blizzard has added at launch, reducing the longevity of the expansion. Artificial as it may be, having quest competition slow down players while playing through solo content does increase the game's longevity. But now, suppose someone has started leveling through the new Cataclysm zones after everyone else is already at the end-game, or someone decided to level an alt to raid with. Both of these players will find themselves with much less competition than the players who quested through those zones at launch found themselves with, and they'll be able to level faster for that reason. Thus the lack of competition will give them an edge in catching up with everyone else.
But perhaps the most important reason for there to be competition for quest credits--and also easiest to overlook--is that this is, in the end, an MMO. We are supposed to inhabit a living, breathing world, but considering how stagnant WoW really is, the only way for that world to be living and breathing is through the players. It is our interactions with other players and the way they influence our play that brings WoW to life. In group content, this influence is easy to achieve, for players' cooperation is necessary to make such content work. But how to bring that influence to solo content? Group quests help, but there can only be so many of them, and once there aren't as many players leveling through a zone as there used to be, they become more of an annoyance than anything. So how can players influence one another's playing if they are off doing their own thing? If they aren't working together to make their questing easier, then the only option left is to have one player's actions have consequences for another player in a way that the first player might not be consciously aware of. And that's exactly what the competition inherent in solo questing accomplishes.
So, in short, annoying as it may be from time to time, the competitive aspect of questing has a reason for being there. To remove it would take some of the second M out of what makes WoW an MMO, and would effectively go one step towards making it a very different game. While change isn't always a bad thing, change in that direction would not be good for the social dynamical that helps keep WoW interesting and alive, that puts it firmly in the MMO genre, and that probably drew many people to the game in the first place.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
The druid resto tree: she's not broken, she's just a baby
Though I've been trying to keep myself spoiler free when it comes to the story of Cataclysm, one thing I have not denied myself is news on the mechanics of the game and how those will be changing. New spells, changes to the professions, changes to the stats, etc--I have been keeping up with all of these changes, mostly because I want to be prepared when Cataclysm drops to make the best decisions and not spend my time undoing or regretting a bad decision I made due to lack of information. It was only through the reflection brought on by this news hunt that I decided that my inevitable Worgen alt would be a rogue (Before that choice, I had considered a mage, warrior, and hunter, but it was upon reviewing the talents and ability distributions, as well as the abilities themselves, and some personal reflection on why I enjoy playing my druid, that I decided on the rogue.)
But there is a darker side to that news hunt, and that darker side is that we see classes in the middle of the great balancing act that is game design. We grow attached to abilities or talents that never make it to the live servers, or we languish in worry as we see that our class just isn't doing well in the design process. That latter point is affecting us resto druids on the beta right now. The comments I've seen from druids on the beta trying out resto healing consistently say that it needs work, and now the math has shown that our mastery bonus is the worst thing since pre-nerf Oculus. It's fair to say that this isn't a good time for resto druids, and that has lead to a lot of worrying on the part of the druid community. Will it be fun to heal in Cataclysm? Will mastery, this new and exciting stat, be of any use to us? Will we all just roll/switch to shamans/priests/paladins when we find out that we can't really heal anymore?
I used to worry about these kinds of things, but I now realize that it's better to think of resto druids on the beta as a work in progress, rather than a broken class that Blizzard needs to fix. After all, we're going to go through quite a shift in game design when Cataclysm comes out, and with Blizzard actually trying to keep all of the classes balanced, it can't be easy designing us druids to fit that philosophy, so I'm happy to not cry foul until a week or two before the game ships.
Let me elaborate on that point about game balance. Back in the day (I'm a player who grew up during vanilla WoW but came of age in Burning Crusade), the game was much less balanced than it is now. Once upon a time, warriors were the class that could tank, and any class that could heal was expected to do so (they couldn't do much of anything else; the game just wasn't designed to support them doing so). To put it simply, Blizzard didn't really care all that much about the classes being on par with one another. This mentality allowed the classes to evolve in their own special way, since they Blizzard wasn't all that worried about balancing them, and each class gained a unique feel to it. However, as the expansions went on, Blizzard started to care more about class balance, to the point where Wrath of the Lich King has been the most successful class balance in WoW history.
Of course, by the time Wrath rolled around, the classes had all developed their own unique feel to how they play. We druids, for example, specialize in healing with HoTs (heal-over-time spells) and tanking by absorbing damage, rather than avoiding it (this was especially true in Burning Crusade). This worked fine in Wrath of the Lich King, where the rapid damage spikes of raid bosses and our HoTs somehow worked well to make us good healers without us being overpowered (to my knowledge). However, come Cataclysm, that damage model will change. When Cataclysm rolls around, damage will be much more consistent, and healing won't be a race to top off every player's health bar. Healing will be more about using the right spell at the right time than using your most powerful spell as quickly as possible. Because of this, players will spend more time with their health below the maximum.
In an environment like this, HoTs would have dominated. The biggest weakness of our HoTs right now is that players are likely to snipe our healing by healing a target to full health before our HoT has run its duration, leading to wasted mana (though that was never really an issue). In a world where players won't be healed to full health immediately after they take damage, this would not have been the case. Our HoTs would have been able to do much more healing than they can now simply because players will be at less-than-full health more often, giving our HoTs ridiculous mana efficiency. After all, their current mana costs are balanced around the idea of them not healing for the full amount because of other healers bringing our targets to full health almost immediately. If those mana costs stayed the same while HoTs were able to heal for much more, they would have been ridiculously mana-efficient.
Of course, in a world where mana is supposed to matter and where Blizzard wants us using most of our spells, this just couldn't be. They would need to balance us around the ridiculous efficiency of our HoT's, making our direct heals much less appealing and effectively gimping us when we needed to use them to add extra healing to our style, like when we are the only healers in a five-man or when we are tank healing and our HoTs aren't doing enough. We would have been stuck in a style reminiscent of Tree of Life healing circa early Burning Crusade, when Tree of Life limited us to casting heal over time spells, meaning we could never use our only pure direct heal at the time, Healing Touch. It was this limitation that lead to the creation of the Dreamstate build, which forewent Tree of Life in favor of buffing Healing Touch. This was a viable build in heroics, where our HoTs might not have been enough to heal everyone there, but it petered out in raiding once the efficiency of Tree of Life HoT healing was revealed.
But I digress. We have been a HoT-centric class ever since Burning Crusade, and that needs to change in Cataclysm for us to remain balanced with the four other healers. In order to do that, Blizzard needs to effectively rebuild the druid class from scratch, taking our old abilities and reworking them to fill new niches, allowing us to retain some of what makes us unique (our HoTs) while still allowing us to fit into their new philosophy of healing design without being overpowered. Blizzard really had to overhaul our class to make us fit into this new game design, so it doesn't surprise me that they haven't perfected us yet. And considering everything else they have to do on the beta, I'm going to be patient as I wait to see what they do to make us good again.
In other words, the druid's resto tree and resto playstyle as they stand in beta aren't a failure, or a disappointment, or a sign that Blizzard isn't giving the same level of attention to us as they are to the other classes; they're just an indication of just how much work Blizzard has to put into designing it. While all of the other trees started mature and didn't need to change too much, Blizzard had less to work with when it came to designing the resto tree, so our tree is, if you will, younger than the rest. It isn't broken; it's just a baby.
But there is a darker side to that news hunt, and that darker side is that we see classes in the middle of the great balancing act that is game design. We grow attached to abilities or talents that never make it to the live servers, or we languish in worry as we see that our class just isn't doing well in the design process. That latter point is affecting us resto druids on the beta right now. The comments I've seen from druids on the beta trying out resto healing consistently say that it needs work, and now the math has shown that our mastery bonus is the worst thing since pre-nerf Oculus. It's fair to say that this isn't a good time for resto druids, and that has lead to a lot of worrying on the part of the druid community. Will it be fun to heal in Cataclysm? Will mastery, this new and exciting stat, be of any use to us? Will we all just roll/switch to shamans/priests/paladins when we find out that we can't really heal anymore?
I used to worry about these kinds of things, but I now realize that it's better to think of resto druids on the beta as a work in progress, rather than a broken class that Blizzard needs to fix. After all, we're going to go through quite a shift in game design when Cataclysm comes out, and with Blizzard actually trying to keep all of the classes balanced, it can't be easy designing us druids to fit that philosophy, so I'm happy to not cry foul until a week or two before the game ships.
Let me elaborate on that point about game balance. Back in the day (I'm a player who grew up during vanilla WoW but came of age in Burning Crusade), the game was much less balanced than it is now. Once upon a time, warriors were the class that could tank, and any class that could heal was expected to do so (they couldn't do much of anything else; the game just wasn't designed to support them doing so). To put it simply, Blizzard didn't really care all that much about the classes being on par with one another. This mentality allowed the classes to evolve in their own special way, since they Blizzard wasn't all that worried about balancing them, and each class gained a unique feel to it. However, as the expansions went on, Blizzard started to care more about class balance, to the point where Wrath of the Lich King has been the most successful class balance in WoW history.
Of course, by the time Wrath rolled around, the classes had all developed their own unique feel to how they play. We druids, for example, specialize in healing with HoTs (heal-over-time spells) and tanking by absorbing damage, rather than avoiding it (this was especially true in Burning Crusade). This worked fine in Wrath of the Lich King, where the rapid damage spikes of raid bosses and our HoTs somehow worked well to make us good healers without us being overpowered (to my knowledge). However, come Cataclysm, that damage model will change. When Cataclysm rolls around, damage will be much more consistent, and healing won't be a race to top off every player's health bar. Healing will be more about using the right spell at the right time than using your most powerful spell as quickly as possible. Because of this, players will spend more time with their health below the maximum.
In an environment like this, HoTs would have dominated. The biggest weakness of our HoTs right now is that players are likely to snipe our healing by healing a target to full health before our HoT has run its duration, leading to wasted mana (though that was never really an issue). In a world where players won't be healed to full health immediately after they take damage, this would not have been the case. Our HoTs would have been able to do much more healing than they can now simply because players will be at less-than-full health more often, giving our HoTs ridiculous mana efficiency. After all, their current mana costs are balanced around the idea of them not healing for the full amount because of other healers bringing our targets to full health almost immediately. If those mana costs stayed the same while HoTs were able to heal for much more, they would have been ridiculously mana-efficient.
Of course, in a world where mana is supposed to matter and where Blizzard wants us using most of our spells, this just couldn't be. They would need to balance us around the ridiculous efficiency of our HoT's, making our direct heals much less appealing and effectively gimping us when we needed to use them to add extra healing to our style, like when we are the only healers in a five-man or when we are tank healing and our HoTs aren't doing enough. We would have been stuck in a style reminiscent of Tree of Life healing circa early Burning Crusade, when Tree of Life limited us to casting heal over time spells, meaning we could never use our only pure direct heal at the time, Healing Touch. It was this limitation that lead to the creation of the Dreamstate build, which forewent Tree of Life in favor of buffing Healing Touch. This was a viable build in heroics, where our HoTs might not have been enough to heal everyone there, but it petered out in raiding once the efficiency of Tree of Life HoT healing was revealed.
But I digress. We have been a HoT-centric class ever since Burning Crusade, and that needs to change in Cataclysm for us to remain balanced with the four other healers. In order to do that, Blizzard needs to effectively rebuild the druid class from scratch, taking our old abilities and reworking them to fill new niches, allowing us to retain some of what makes us unique (our HoTs) while still allowing us to fit into their new philosophy of healing design without being overpowered. Blizzard really had to overhaul our class to make us fit into this new game design, so it doesn't surprise me that they haven't perfected us yet. And considering everything else they have to do on the beta, I'm going to be patient as I wait to see what they do to make us good again.
In other words, the druid's resto tree and resto playstyle as they stand in beta aren't a failure, or a disappointment, or a sign that Blizzard isn't giving the same level of attention to us as they are to the other classes; they're just an indication of just how much work Blizzard has to put into designing it. While all of the other trees started mature and didn't need to change too much, Blizzard had less to work with when it came to designing the resto tree, so our tree is, if you will, younger than the rest. It isn't broken; it's just a baby.
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