WoW Source #3 Reveals PVP and Class Design Iteration

by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

In case you missed it (and who could blame you with the sudden announcement of OMGWTFBBQ BLIZZCON that came essentially five minutes after this video was posted this morning) Morgan Webb returns with another WoW Source video, talking with a modified triumvirate of Blizzard devs about a set of reveals and outsourced questions on Warlords of Draenor. New information is somewhat scarce, but what’s more substantial about the video is what points the devs are trying to hammer home and what concepts they’re trying to distance themselves from.

Today’s contestants on “who can drop the most science to wow the Webb” are Lead Encounter Designer and malicious eyeball Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas, Lead Class Designer and murloc aficionado Kris Zierhut, and Senior Game Designer and minor PVP deity Brian Holinka.

Highlights include the following:

• The PVP zone Ashran will be dramatically different from past PVP zones like Tol Barad and Wintergrasp, and also different from instanced BGs like Alterac Valley and Warsong Gulch.
• A retrospective on how the threat mechanic has evolved through the game’s history, including where it’s hopefully going in WoD.
• A long discourse on the interaction between PVE and PVP in the course of class design (as well as what makes Holinka curl up into a ball in terror.)

Watch the video below, and stick around for some analysis of what we’ve learned.

Let’s go by the numbers.

Ashran

All of the discussion on Ashran actually stayed further away from drawing comparisons to past PVP experiences, which feels like a deliberate move to make Ashran appear like a new animal unto itself. Classic Alterac Valley had a lot of non-combat objectives you could complete within the zone that indirectly contributed to your faction’s success in the BG, but as the years have passed, those have been stripped down to its current rush’n attack format. Ashran’s design seems oriented around providing several different theaters to fight in, allowing players who want big world PVP to get it by going to the right places, while allowing players who want to do some more subtle wetwork to do so with less direct confrontation. It’s really an untested design, but it builds upon every large-format PVP zone they’ve done in the past, and only time will tell if it’s the home run that they’re looking for.

Proving Grounds

Selling Proving Grounds as a gatekeeper for heroic content feels like a concept that sounds great on paper; if the broad argument that triggers player outrage is that “there are too many noobs who don’t know how to play in my random groups” then the concept of an assessment test to make sure players have got the basics down remedies that problem. But there’s a lot of possible breaks in that equation:

• If the Proving Grounds ranking is account-wide, then a player who clears silver on a warrior but then comes on and queues on his rogue might not know to execute his class properly. So the test fails the goal of ensuring players are competent at their class because the gatepass doesn’t require competency in all classes.
• If the Proving Grounds are NOT account-wide, then having to clear Silver on every single character before you can do heroics feels like something that punishes players who alt a lot.
• Because the Proving Grounds ranking is a one-time thing, players who lapse a great deal in their gameplay or otherwise have a long break might still queue up and be inept because they haven’t played in months. The only counter for this is to have the PG gatepass expire, but that will very quickly turn into an aggravation for all players.
• While the devs have said they intend to balance the PGs so that they are equivalent difficulties for all specs of all classes, what the devs intend and how it plays out in-game are not always perfectly aligned. If players feel punished for choosing a spec that has a more difficult time in PGs than another spec, it only aggravates flavor-of-the-month problems and then has an impact on raid compositions.
• Moreover, if the PGs themselves are not a fun and exciting thing to do, such that players are 100% okay with doing that instead of the LFD they intended to do on their lunchbreak, then you’re going to see a lot of tables flipped over Blizzard railroading people through unfun hoops, and that’s going to be louder than all the players who will STILL be complaining about unskilled players in LFD.

Conclusion: Betting hard on PGs has a chance of backfiring just as Blizzard’s gamble on daily quests tanked their patch content efforts post-5.0/5.1.

The Class Fantasy

I loved digging into the concept of the class fantasy, and how trying to preserve that is something that is driving the ability pruning and other class changes that are taking place. While the devs seem to dance around the elephant in the room (i.e. “adherence to a class fantasy prevents homogenization but also hampers new class development”) they also struggle to emphasize that the game has to evolve, and sometimes that evolution is going to take the form of streamlining instead of building up from the foundation.

What were your big takeaways from the WoW Source video?