You Can, Actually, Go Home Again

Posted on August 19, 2009 by Scott Jennings| 68 Comments

Kind of busy so no thumb-sucking analysis like I kind of have an urge to do, but a trend seems to be emerging I think is worth looking at: going back and fixing your old stuff instead of/in addition to adding new stuff.

Cases in point: the big one of course being World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm which presumably will be announced this weekend and has been leaked *every*where. The highlight of this, and what anecdotally has everyone I know that plays WoW all aflutter: revamping old world zones with the design sensibility and polish that Blizzard has picked up on since they launched the original game. Or, if you’re more cynical, that since all the top tier people are working on Mysterious Unannounced Project, the B Team is in charge. (Which I find somewhat amusing, if only because for good or for ill, more WoW players know who Ghostcrawler is than who Tigole was.)

Blizzard isn’t the only one to do this: Funcom also just announced their new Age of Conan expansion yesterday, and one of its stated goals is to address the drop in quality seen between the early 1-20 levels of Tortage and the rest of the game instead of just moving the level cap up 10 levels. This caps a year-long effort by the live team to, uh, fix the game. Which, surprisingly (or not), is more popular with players (and former players) than just adding more shiny on a broken base.

Damion Schubert took a contrarian view (to be fair, before the new blizzard (har) of news was released). I know personally I never want to set foot in Molten Core ever, ever again. But really, that’s only because Molten Core was… really bad. I didn’t mind redoing Naxxramas when, after the latest expansion was released, became the new Karazhan (aka the default raiding dungeon for people just starting to raid) because I never really saw Naxxramas the first time. Some content recycling can be good, especially if the majority of your player base never saw it in the first place. It’ll piss off your hard core (for making their achievements less achievey), but so will many other things. Such as, say, your continuing to breath oxygen.

Anyway, it’ll be ironic if after this weekend we find out from Blizzard that the new expansion is really “World of Warcraft: PAINFUL RAID EDITION” which has nothing but 80 man raids, pants that you have to level up to unlock resilience, and a new level cap of 256. But given the general reaction from what’s already been leaked, I don’t think so.

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  • mystery

    Pants? I’d vote for that, if voting was allowed. Pants are everything.

  • BigAB

    Leaked where? (link just leads back here)

  • Athryn

    I seem to be falling into the “disappointed” camp. I really hope that some of the changes that have been leaked aren’t true, because to me it just feels like laziness, and most people that know me know that I’m one of the biggest Wow fangirls out there.

    Aion is starting to look really appealing to me if the expansion rumors are true.

  • Athryn

    BigAB, you can read about the leaked info at mmo-champion.com

  • Vetarnias

    Knowing Blizzard, that leak probably had all the subtlety of a fire hydrant.

  • http://www.brokentoys.org/ Scott Jennings

    Sorry, link fixed!

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    Well, if I ever decided to take another whack at getting ensnared in the phenomenon known as WoW, the revamp of the newbie areas would play well into my hands.

    (In the past, I punched out from the game at 4 weeks of play, and attempts to resubscribe and rekindle my interest fell flat. I’ve probably just thoroughly outgrown the adolescent achievement focus required to enjoy a good grind, and what’s that leave? Socializing? Not for this Introvert, it doesn’t. Exploring? Don’t care what I’d find. Killing? I’ve never been a competitive type. But enough about me.)

  • pharniel

    basically this sounds suspiciously like The Plan that was leaked WAAAAAAAAAAAay back in the day.
    and honestly, this might get me to re-sub. so it’ll prolly do rather well.

  • http://syncaine.wordpress.com Syncaine

    Great minds think alike, huh?

    http://syncaine.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/warhammer-online-after-almost-a-year-does-mythic-finally-get-it/

    I guess the take away here is that for some games, it’s needed (AoC, WAR), for others it’s at best an easy way out (WoW). Then of course there is something to be said about adding TOO much stuff (the lvl 256 example).

  • Doug

    “Leaked where? (link just leads back here)”

    Lum can’t even stick a joke in a post?

  • StrokerAce

    I’m sorry Athryn sees it as laziness, but I think this is just the financial justification they need to combat mudflation and dead zones. If the new expansion is 50% new stuff that looks sorta like old stuff and 50% old stuff that is reitemized and supports flying, I’m happy.

  • EpicSquirt

    Not sure WoW or Warhammer or AoC can be fixed.

    Plenty suckers out there doing games and I’d rather spend a couple of weeks playing 2-3 online multiplayer games than get dragged into some MMO-zerg.

  • Vetarnias

    @geldonyetich

    By all means, we should add ourselves to the equation. I know it can get narcissistic when carried too far, but the best design in the world would be for naught if you can’t relate to it. In a way, it’s just being honest to talk about yourself when discussing a game, unless you want to play the ‘objective and absolute truth’ card, which I don’t think is what you try to do (aside from that occasional descent into ‘punditry’). There will always be a gray zone somewhere in the middle where design and personal references collide, and we can’t really pretend it isn’t there.

    And that’s what makes the case of WoW so strange and fascinating, because of all the intangibles surrounding the actual design. For those who despise it, how much of their viewpoint is influenced by how popular it actually is, instead of design limitations? I’m pretty sure most people who find nothing of interest in WoW would just shrug it off if it weren’t for its juggernaut status.

  • Doug

    “Not sure WoW or Warhammer or AoC can be fixed.

    Plenty suckers out there doing games and I’d rather spend a couple of weeks playing 2-3 online multiplayer games than get dragged into some MMO-zerg.”

    Don’t commit the error of confusing the state of being broken with the state of undergoing change. Any process improvement person will tell you that with change comes some uncertainty but if the change is for the better then the net effect is for the better. WOW is certainly always changing, probably for the better. It’s ability to cater to the uberleet cutting edge raid crowd and scale the difficulties back to open the content to the general masses later on is done better than anyone else does it.

    I can’t say that a game with 12 million subs is broken. Maybe you worked on much more successful projects which would lead you to feel that WOWs subs arent that impressive when compared to what you worked on, but people love that game and it’s playable.

    Fixing the old zones up is exactly what WOW needs. The old zones will be as fast leveling as WOTLK now (relatively speaking, I mean faster). Old world resources will be cheaper and there won’t be that odd bell curve in difficulty that peaks right before you get your flying mount. I think this is the best possible move they could make. I can’t wait to see the quality of what they have done.

  • DrewC

    I wonder if they’ll actually revamp the old content (expensive) or just use phasing to overwrite new content on top of the old content (presumably cheaper).

  • http://beafraid.com hellfire

    I used to think the idea of an evolutionary world was good. But in a game like WoW where so much of the experience comes from a shared identity I don’t know how it will fit.

    I guess I now see it as if a new player doesn’t get to go kill Hogger or chase down a Defias Messenger it takes something away from their experience and ultimately everyone’s because there is now a divide between old and new players.

    Each expansion (generation) of content (players) are poorer for the lack of those shared experiences. You may revile it now, but there is something connective about months of grinding in MC or BWL.

    Does that matter? Everyone has to judge that for themselves. From my perspective those shared histories are what makes it a world and not just a Foozle-whacking simulator.

    YMMV. I quit and was glad to have done so after seeing the “good stuff” in 3.2.

  • Iconic

    I have a lot of opinions about the leaks (generally like what I’ve seen) but I’d feel like an idiot writing a long manifesto just to find out that a lot of it was hoax or subject to change.

  • http://www.tacosalad.com Mexican Food

    I’ve glad they are working on ways to bring the “old world” back to the main stream. It’s very lonely in the old zones. I ran through most of the content in Searing Gorge on an alt and never did I see another player the entire time.

    It’ seems like a waste of resources not to mix high level content in with leveling content in the same zones.

  • Bhagpuss

    As usual I feel like I’m reading about a different game. Just representing the viewpoint of an actual newbie (started less than two months ago), and just having made 55 this week and made my first Death Knight (solely for crafting purposes), at least on my server all the zones I’ve played in to date have been what I would call “busy”. Any MMO where I routinely have to change my plans because the mobs/area I was intending to do is already camped counts as “busy” in my book.

    And as for levelling speed, as a first-timer I find it just about perfect.

  • Freakazoid

    Not many know this, but I’m one of those people who can hold grudges. I’m still upset that they charged an expansion just to bring paladins back to where they were before the open beta revamp. Nothing short of a $200 check in my hands from blizzard will get me back into the game.

    But, If I wasn’t holding that grudge, I’d say the newbie zone revamp is a good idea. I’ve always felt that MMOs should go back to the old content after a couple years and change shit up. Few people actually like the old content past the first time they grinded through.

  • http://azaroth.org Azaroth

    I’m not really a WoW player-type. WotLK was good, and it hooked me real nice for a few months. If they did that again, I’d be interested.

    Redoing the old zones in an attempt to get me to level up from scratch again on servers where I’m just going to get PKed by a bunch of level 80s/85s/90s/whatever..?

    Ahhh… nah…

    Saying that this is good because it revitalizes the old world is silly. It might do that to some extent, but only until the next expansion.

    Your made your bed with a Diku. At least try to lay in it sexy for me.

  • Gx1080

    You can always trust a bunch of hobbyists to despise the hobby when it beomes mainstream.

    That said, Tigole would NEVER do this, so a piont for the B team.

    When everybody in the start areas are alts with QuestHelper you are doing it wrong. And nobody wants to level to 90 -yet-. And serioulsly, some people will hate WoW no matter what.

  • Tide

    You should also consider LotRO at the same time. The live team has already started revamping all the 1-50 content and IMO in a more intelligent way than Blizz with WoW TBC. With TBC they just nerfed whole swathes of content, elites into norms. Turbine is actually remaking whole zones based on player level progression time. Highlighting this only because LotRO gets overlooked a lot and it’s a pretty polished MMO.

  • SolInvictus

    As mentioned above, Turbine has indeed has been gradually revamping LOTRO’s older lower-level content for the past 2 updates, with more planned for coming patch releases. It seems to be going over well with the player base too. The dev focusing on redoing the content has been quite open with his process, and posts a lot about it on his blog: http://my.lotro.com/orion/ It’s very interesting. I’m quite curious how WoW plans to approach their redo.

  • Lenin

    I definitely think this approach is a great idea. I still meander thru the early worlds from time to time, mainly feeling nostalgic about the exciting experiences I had there when they were more populated. I don’t need endless new vistas for WoW to continue to be entertaining; there’s plenty Blizzard could do to layer multiple generations/levels of players through existing revamped zones to make the game experience even more interesting than it already is. If there’s anything that’s put me off WoW, it’s the kind of grind-y time committment required at the high-end RAID level. Unlike the majority of WoW players…. I have a life. Outside the game, I mean. Complementing that in the way you design your MMO would bring me back.

  • http://www.thisisnotacommunity.org D-0ne

    What ever happened to old sayings like, “You can’t fix stupid.”.

    A grind is a grind is a grind no matter how pretty it is or how well it works.

  • http://bdadv.blogspot.com Bonedead

    I’d love to see a different old world WoW. Similar to how the Guild Wars world changes as you level through the PvE.

    Aside from removing achievements, I don’t see what people have to complain about as the achievements are dated, just like the patches.

  • Tremayne

    @D-One
    Here’s another saying for you: “grind is a state of mind”.
    Whether something is a grind is as much a function of the attitude of the player as it is of the game design per se. If it’s pretty and entertaining then it’s not a grind… unless you are so grimly intent on getting through to the “end game” with the “real content” that anything at all is a just a roadblock between you and the fun.
    Having said which… some game design requires so much repitition of activities that it’s very hard to see it as anything other than a grind, and WoW has been guiltier than most of doing that in the past. Here’s to hoping that their idea of an update is a bit better than “half a dozen new factions, each of which requires you to kill 12,000 mobs to get Exalted rep and earn access to the shinies”.

  • http://weblog.probablynot.com Jason

    One man’s grind is another man’s pleasure.

  • Caya

    EQ2 has been doing that for a year or so, too – revamping the old, really bad zones where nobody ever goes these days and turning them into something you can actually have fun playing in. Has been received pretty well afaik.

  • Votan

    This is just more of the same. I have had it with copy and paste concepts and game play from WoW. But then again today’s MMO’s are not targeted at me; they are targeted at the overly medicated ADD generation.
    *
    It was fun the first time around and has gotten less and less fun with each content patch and expansion to the point now the game is just plain boring, not a bad game just no longer fun. By then end of my 100th clear of Naxx and reflecting on my 100th or more clear of everything in WoW since launch I just let me sub run out. The new content they just added is more of the same thing I have done for 4 years and they have destroyed pvp and turned into some lame e-sport.
    *
    You can only go to the well so many times but it is hard to argue continuing to do the same thing when they have seen almost no decrease in subs world wide. Sadly.

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    @Vetarnias
    I try not to play the “absolute and objective truth” card too often these days. I still come off looking a tad arrogant though because apparently my writing style is downright overbearing.

    @D-One, Tremane, Jason re: the Grind

    The way I look at the grind, I break it down into the parts of what actually bring about the phenominon. As far as I can figure, it’s less to do with the activity in itself and more to do with if a person is bored of doing that activity. This is game design 101, and MMORPGs are not immune to it: if you’re bored of the activities a game offers, it’s boring. MMORPGs do, however, make it difficult to walk away – you’ve got friends, achievement, ect that makes you want to keep playing even after you’re bored of the game. This is a masochistic thing to do, and where “the grind” really comes from.

    Every once in awhile, I like to point out the obvious, just in case we’ve dealt with the beast so much that we’ve streamlined the important details out of out mind.

    The reason why WoW didn’t manage to ensnare me is that I’ve done all the activities it offered to a great degree. It’s an EverQuest clone. It’s extremely well wrought: with the typical bugs greatly eliminated; with graphics focusing on efficiency instead of realism; with a bit of Blizzard pizzaz in the game mechanic. But it’s still an EverQuest clones. If you’ve already bored of several, it’s remarkable you can find anything of value at all in WoW.

  • Oz

    EQ1 did this back in the day (remember Splitpaw?) and it was generally a hit. Having been involved a bit with testing of some of the revamps and chatting with devs, it was easier for them since they didn’t have to build the geography, just work on ensuring the population of monsters was right, and that the mobs did what they were supposed to. Plus tuning of boss fights, loot, etc, but it sure seemed to save a lot of time.

    Not sure if EQ1 still does that, but there was at least 3 versions of Splitpaw, then there was Castle Mistmoore, whatever the dragon town in Velious was called, Velk’s Labrinth, the Karanas (several times), Erud Isle, Freeport, Neriak, and I’m forgetting others.

  • Sullee

    Meh. Not really a trend and certainly not new.

    @Oz, yes EQ1 still revamps. They also redo old zones to take advantage of new graphics. They have also put expansions back in the “old world” (LDoN being one of the early ones). Some revamps are only available a few months of the year and are tuned to max level (they’ve redone guk and blackburrow this way).

    As a game ages it makes sense to do this type of stuff. Especially if you botched some things like flying mounts early on.

  • JRave

    Didn’t DAoC do this as well? I think it was with their Dragon storyline where they redid the entire level progression through the old world zones. I haven’t played since well before then, but I recall an old guildie telling me that the further south you went in Hibernia the higher lvl the mobs got.

  • JMonty

    If it becomes World of Paincraft, I’ll be staying in Northrend for the rest of my paying days. Or maybe I’ll leave and go back to Diablo 2, or, perhaps, go outside. =?

  • Naladini

    Revamps take on a few different flavors, so really every title has experimented with the concept. Its just a question of scale and intended audience, the longer a game has been around, the more flavors it has tried.

    EQ1 recently tends to take old zones and jazz them up (sometimes temporarily) for the active high level playerbase. There’s a lot of give and take on this topic, as there are some die-hard alt-o-holics around who like keeping the lower level versions of zones.

    EQ2′s Lavastorm revamp was really well done actually, enhancing what was originally a level 50 zone, than tacking on some level 80 content, so you’ve got a pretty decent mix of players and playstyles in a zone.

    The golden rule though: its hard to change anything in an MMO without pissing someone off…

  • Sceptrum

    I’m a lorenut when it comes to most games. I’ve played Warcraft since the very first RTS in 1994. While Cataclysm probably will be cherished by most people, I myself just feels something is lost when almost every race can roll every class there is. Having a setting and trying to stick to it is something I value.

    To me Cataclysm just proved that I will not play WoW again.

  • EpicSquirt

    Funny you mention this Sceptrum, I think Blizzard stopped making good games after Warcraft II and Diablo II.

  • http://bdadv.blogspot.com bonedead

    @JRave- Yes DAoC did change their world a bit for the Dragon thing. Vasudheim was completely iced over with the occasional Dragon flyover.

  • http://beafraid.com hellfire

    I didn’t even consider the achievement angle, but that only reinforces my opinion. There’s no way they can craft a setup where they disallow *new* players from ever having a chance to get certain non-world-exclusive achievements that doesn’t also piss on the folks who’ve been grinding them out since day-1.

    Just gonna throw this out there, since they’ve already got the building blocks in place to execute. Phase the content OR provide items that allow you to, in effect, step back in time to how the zone(s) were originally. The newbie areas would be GREAT for this type of approach. Revamp them the same way they engineered the DK starting areas. Best of both worlds. You provide new and old players access to new and old content without significant extra work.

  • Gx1080

    Hey they got a trailer of the new stuff in wow.com and it looks SO COOL.

    http://www.wow.com/2009/08/21/blizzcon-2009-cataclysm-zones-video/

  • sinij

    I think your remark on B Team is spot-on. So far everything that coming out this development team is some form of regurgitation. I even heard Onyxia going to get retuned.

  • http://luminance.org/ Kevin Gadd

    I think what we’re seeing here is that the B Team has the overwhelming desire to “fix” everything that they think is wrong with the original WoW, now that its creators have left the building. In many cases, this can be a disastrously bad decision, but I think that in this case it might actually be the right one – not because the original WoW was broken, but because in the time since its release Blizzard has collectively learned how to build a better game. If they’re unafraid to fix what’s broken they might end up with a vastly superior game as a result, just as long as they don’t alienate their existing playerbase – and it doesn’t seem likely that they’re going to do that.

  • fatbutt

    I don’t really get this attitude of “they didn’t do X in the very beginning, now they can’t ever do it!” that pops up from time to time. I’ve seen people discussing very reasonable game changes/updates, and there’s always some guy talking about how even the smallest tweak would completely wreck the lore (and, by extension, the game) and send the world into chaos. And those guys who complain to no end when something’s changed, because back in my day…

    Especially in a case like Cataclysm, which seems like it’ll bring back lots of now-obsolete content and improve what’s already there.

  • EpicSquirt

    I think content revamp is fine, while they’re at it they could remove the silly american-cartoon-style.

  • sinij

    We all know how well “fixing” SWG went, and that wasn’t even B Team that did it. Chances of getting it right and improving are very slim, meanwhile you are gambling existing player base against potential new comers that may or may not come.

  • fatbutt

    In SWG’s case they pretty much tried to turn it into a whole new game, though, that didn’t have much to do with what it used to be. Besides, hadn’t they gone through lots of separate dev teams by that point?

  • Gx1080

    Oh the NGE fiasco? Dude, they rewrited the ENTIRE GAME SYSTEM. Putting lava in the Barrens is not that.

    Anyways you can always check the trailer.

    http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/cataclysm/media/

    They got freaking werewolves!!

  • faefrost

    But the thing is, this isn’t the “B” team. What we think of as the “B” team is the current and fairly new Live team. Who handles the current day to day stuff and the ongoing patches etc. They are the ones doing the things like the recent 3.2 content and the forthcoming Icecrown Citadel raid. Cataclysm is an X-pac. Which means it has its own development team dedicated to it, as it is being developed as a retail product. It is safe to bet that a sizeable portion of the old “A” team or at he very least the TBC and WotLK teams are involved in it.

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