I’m playing World of Warcraft right now, awkward hippo-shaped sort-of-game that it is, spurred by a gift from a friend. Now, most of the time when you return to an MMO there’s a certain contractual acceptance that you’re not going to find it the way it was when you left. In most MMO development, there’s this rock-and-hard-place struggle represented by Star Wars Galaxies, where you can find a way to improve the game but you can’t implement it because doing so would be a change that the players would reject. MMO design has to serve a continuity of experience rather than just an improvement.
I didn’t exactly sign on expecting the game to go back to what I’d loved in Cataclysm, or even minimised its changes from Mists of Pandaria. Time marches on, and in the case of World of Warcraft, ten year old game that it is, they need the freedom to haul some parts of it out into the open and change them. I really do, in an abstract way, look at Blizzard devs making hard decisions to remove things that don’t belong in the game, or that were tried and didn’t work, as good things. They can’t be held hostage to their previous generation of sins. I famously lacked sympathy for people complaining about this in City of Heroes, for example.
Anyway, I log in to a few characters, see what’s changed, nothing too monstrous is going on. Then I pop open my Warlock, Rapace. Rapace was something of a niche build back in the previous expansion. He used a bunch of optional material and stacked it all together so that rather than playing a Warlock who bossed around a demon, he basically used the power to become a demon, to stay in this demonic stance with black wings and horns. It was very cool, and I liked it a lot, and when soloing, he played link a tank, rather than any variety of ranged spellcaster. Cursing people, then outliving them is the kind of thing that I enjoy doing.
The niche options – almost all of them – are gone. Just poof gone. I went back and looked at the patch notes and found that this wasn’t a massive change. It wasn’t like one day a Blizzard dev woke up and said let’s fuck over Talen. They just took away a thing, then a thing, then noticed a problem with a thing, then they noted the low adoption rate of another thing and bit by bit by bit.
Anyway, now my character, Rapace, doesn’t work. And that sucks! And I, in a rare conversation where I told someone how I was feeling, mentioned that I was down because he didn’t work. The response I got – and I want to stress this isn’t a bad response at all, I swear to christ, this works just fine, it was: “Well Demo locks sucked.”
The rest of the conversation flowed around this point but it sat in the back of my mind so I penned down the notes to flesh out into this, while we talked.
My friend was – quite reasonably – approaching this as a game problem. They were examining the entity within its mechanical space, and assuming default expectations of what you’d use a character for. World Of Warcraft is a game with an enormous, nearly mythologised perspective on game balance which is mostly about servicing a small delta of players in a small number of high-level game experiences. Raiding and PVP classically stand juxtaposed as the places the game balance focus is necessary. Developers even said, during Cataclysm that it kinda didn’t matter if characters were overpowered levelling up, because by nature, you were just going to move past those broken times.
The point is, my friend made a very simple, very reasonable assumption about what was default to World of Warcraft.
It was also completely orthogonal to what I liked about the character. It wasn’t an issue of power. It was an issue of style! I liked that I could play my warlock like a tank! I liked the feeling of near-invulnerability that came from fighting big crowds of opponents, cursing them, spreading the curses, then slowly leaching away their health. It wasn’t efficient to fight one person at a time like that – much better to fight nine or ten and bleed them all to death at once. That was cool! I liked that! And I liked it so much that I had spent ninety levels grinding this character up. When that was taken away, those ninety levels are now investiture in an experience I don’t even know if I want.
Now, I intend to play my Warlock a bit more. Maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe it’ll be fun! I don’t know. But what I wanted is gone. And that’s what you want to watch out for as a designer.
Players will play your game for multiple reasons. Some times, that reason is ‘my friends play it’ or ‘I like the art’ or ‘there’s this funny trick you can pull off.’ You need to recognise those things when they come up. It’s very possible to assume that all players are served with decisions that – generally – make the game ‘better.’ Better is a notion that you want to watch out for: Don’t think your game is necessarily crawling along a simple spectrum and the closer and closer you get to that place, the ‘more good’ the game will be.
Watch playtesters. Watch what makes them happy. Then try and focus the game on those experiences.
Whenever you add or remove an element to your game try to avoid thinking this makes the game better and instead try to phrase it as this means players will (have to/get to) do (more of/less of) this thing. Try to think in terms of what opportunities and options you’re giving or taking away. Some game systems want to be simplified. Sometimes you’ll realise you’ve got a system so complex you need to set it aside and maybe make it its own game. Sometimes you’ll realise a bookkeeping point of the game is actually pleasing to the players and you could bring it forward by adding more choices to it.
Don’t just assume there’s one type of player and one way or reason to play.
Oh and as a final caveat: I am not trying to claim I know better than Blizzard in this case. Blizzard’s decision is trying to serve some seven million people. They are going to have totally different needs and demands than an indie card game designer.