Browsing the archives for the game design tag

Wrath Emblem Design Revealed

world of warcraft

Hid­den in an oth­er­wise bland post on the next sea­son of pvp rewards, game designer Kal­gan let slip how emblem pro­gres­sion is going to go for the rest of Wrath! Here’s the rel­e­vant quote:

it won’t be quite as easy to get deadly items via emblems of con­quest as hate­ful items cur­rently are via emblems of valor

Well, that’s inter­est­ing. So what have we learned?

First, unlike some well-meaning folk have recently advised, don’t horde your tokens. Hey, I guessed wrong. It happens.

Emblems are intended for that level of con­tent, and there likely won’t be new rewards trick­ling down. I actu­ally like this sys­tem bet­ter; raid­ing Naxx every week won’t be “manda­tory” the way that raid­ing Kara was.

So, from this one sen­tence, we can derive that there will be an Emblem for each tier of content:

  • Heroic/Naxx10 : Emblem of Heroism
  • Naxx25/Ulduar10 : Emblem of Valor
  • Ulduar25/ThirdWrathRaid10 : Emblem of Conquest
  • ThirdWrathRaid25/FourthWrathRaid10: Emblem of Zomgepics
  • and so on

Thus main­tain­ing the steady pro­gres­sion of both 10 and 25-man raid­ing, and also stick­ing with their stated design objec­tive that man­ag­ing twenty-five play­ers in a raid should yield higher rewards than man­ag­ing ten.

This also elim­i­nates any save/spend strat­egy regard­ing emblems, which is prob­a­bly for the best any­way. If you see some­thing you like at that tier, grab it.

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If, If, Wait, Wait

world of warcraft

My 10-month-old daugh­ter is sick, cough­ing, con­gested. Con­fused. She doesn’t under­stand why my wife and I don’t just fix it. It’s impos­si­ble to explain that we would use this awe­some con­ges­tion power on any­one but her. So, lots of sooth­ing, lots of grumpy dia­per changes, lots of naps inter­rupted by vicious chok­ing on mucus. She finally goes to real sleep late in the evening.

Par­ent free­dom time! How­ever, said par­ents are absolutely exhausted. Need to do some­thing before sleep, though. We’re not parent-bots.

“Hey, you know what would be great?”

“No, what’s that?”

“Want to do some dailies? Just to relax for a few min­utes. Get you closer to that rep sword.”

“That sounds good!”

Ok then! Let’s log on for fif­teen min­utes or so and do some dailies.

Position in queue: 429
Estimated time: Calculating...

The cal­cu­lated time ended up being twenty-four minutes.

Back in the days when we were sit­ting down for a three or four hour block, a twenty-four-minute delay was just a minor irri­ta­tion. But now, we’re (try­ing to) log on for a half-hour or even ten-minute ses­sion. A twenty-four minute wait? It’s the whole thing.

This got me thinking.

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Ghostcrawler is Awesome

world of warcraft

In ref­er­ence to Adam Holisky’s recent WoW Insider’s post The Ghost­crawler Exper­i­ment, where the ques­tions are:

  1. Is the GE (Ghost­crawler era) of WoW bet­ter than the BGE?
  2. Does Ghost­crawler do a good job?

I just wanted to post some­thing quick in response. I’ve writ­ten about Ghost­crawler before, although I per­haps wasn’t as blunt as I could have been. So, I will speak more plainly now: Yes, and I can’t believe that we’re even talk­ing about this.

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WQ: Grizzly Hills Stink

world of warcraft

I recently wrote some gush­ing praise on Wrath quest­ing–about how Bliz­zard finally has it fig­ured out, how it’s great fun, blah blah blah. All that was before my wife and I moved into the Griz­zly Hills.

Now, I’m eat­ing my words.

What a mas­sive come­down this zone is after Dragonblight!

Let’s run down really quickly the change in tone and con­tent from the pre­vi­ous zone to this one:

Drag­onblight

  • ride siege machines
  • res­cue vil­lagers from an undead-ridden city on a snow gryphon
  • fight drag­ons from dragonback
  • sub­vert the lieu­tenants of Naxxramas
  • pal around with the leader of the Emer­ald Dream
  • invade a horde city along­side your fac­tion leaders

Griz­zly Hills

  • grind elk meats with a hor­ri­ble drop rate
  • grind bear flanks with a hor­ri­ble drop rate
  • grind wolves
  • grind troll mojo with a hor­ri­ble drop rate, do it five times in a row, with only the loca­tion of the troll camp chang­ing each time
  • grind some herbs because some ran­dom npc stubbed his foot and needs foot balm
  • grind the same wolves again for some­one else
  • travel all over the zone by horse­back because there are only two flight points (poorly located)
  • dou­ble back con­stantly because dif­fer­ent quest hubs tar­get the same areas

Basi­cally, every­thing I said in my pre­vi­ous post on quest qual­ity was undone in this zone.

Admit­tedly, I’m not inter­ested at all in the pvp quests, so maybe I’m miss­ing the point. Are those quests any good? More impor­tantly, are they so good that they redeem the rest of the zone?

I’m so glad to be mov­ing on to Zul’Drak. I’m going to skip the Griz­zly Hills entirely on my alts.

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WQ: Better Questing!

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The bread-and-butter of lev­el­ing, quest­ing, is bet­ter than ever in Wrath. Quest­ing is more fun from both from a nar­ra­tive and mechan­i­cal perspective.

The nar­ra­tives are stronger. A scourge-ravaged vil­lage where many peo­ple have been lost, where you ulti­mately rally the peo­ple to flush the zom­bies out. Some ani­mal activists work against overzeal­ous ani­mal hunters, you start off help­ing trapped ani­mals, learn­ing about the hunters, and even­tu­ally lead­ing an attack to stop their oper­a­tion. A gnome encamp­ment try­ing to learn what hap­pened to their lost peo­ple and how the miss­ing are con­nected to the grow­ing pol­lu­tion. They’re like short sto­ries that you play out in the WoW uni­verse. In orig­i­nal and TBC, you’d have a mix of good story pro­gres­sion with ones that seemed tan­gen­tial or designed to be filler. A much higher pro­por­tion of the quests are tied to these short sto­ries. There’s setup, there’s a cycle of activ­ity and con­tin­u­a­tion of story, and finally a con­clu­sion with per­haps a leader to the next chap­ter. And this story usu­ally ties into the over­all theme of the zone, or the neigh­bor­ing quests.

The mechan­ics of actu­ally doing a quest are the same–there are col­lec­tion quests, deliv­ery quests, smack ene­mies quests, and some oth­ers. It’s the con­di­tions sur­round­ing these quests that has improved. Most quest hubs have neigh­bor­ing regions where those quests are per­formed, and now a quest chain log­i­cally pro­gresses within that region with lit­tle ran­dom leaps to other parts of the world. No more won­der­ing if you’re going to be back in the same loca­tion for a dif­fer­ent quest. My wife and I used to tour the entire zone upon entry, pick­ing up absolutely every quest in the fear that two seem­ingly unre­lated hubs were going to ask us to per­form a task in the same loca­tion; it’s not fun when the Smelly Yeti Extinc­tion Soci­ety ask you to kill ten smelly yeti and then two ses­sions later, the Aro­matic Leather Crafty­mak­ers ask you to col­lect ten smelly yeti hides. No more of that, from what I’ve seen. Now we just come upon a quest hub and do what we like.

Both of these points are sub­tle, but clearly Bliz­zard has put a lot of effort into improv­ing the qual­ity of quests. I’m really enjoy­ing them.

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