Warcraft: The Art of Over-engineering
Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs (MMOs) are a highly complex beast when it comes to the design and development of these experiences. They’re not only designed to have that classic RPG feel, being immersed in an online world and socializing with others to progress your character, but also need that delicate balance of systems design depth where players have a reason (and desire) to come back every day without getting burnt out. When it comes to software, this balance is a constant battle – how do you consistently provide new features and content to players, while also not bloating or convoluting the experience of the core game?
As a game evolves over the years, it’s sometimes difficult to understand how you got to where things are today. When designing software as a service, it’s a delicate craft of balancing your vision as the creator with the needs and desires of the community consuming, and funding, that very product. As we approach into the Shadowlands expansion and end our time with the Battle For Azeroth expansion, I think it’s important we take the time to look at where the game is today, how it arrived there gradually over time, and the impact the design shift has created both on the game itself and its players view of the game.
Azeroth’s humble beginnings.
The launch of Shadowlands puts World of Warcraft at a crisp 16 year lifespan to date. It’s no surprise that for a game to thrive for such a long time, it’s forced to evolve, grow, and shift priorities over time – not only to mature with its players, but also with the technology available. The introduction of Classic WoW served as a fairly eye-opening reminder of the core WoW experience and reinvigorated many players in the context of what they want from an MMO. It created a world, dangerous at times to explore, with clear goals which had a definitive end. The systems in the game supplemented the experience and the world the players lived in – something I think is quite the opposite in modern Warcraft.
In its beginnings, a small team set out with a clear vision to create a living world where players could adventure, grow their characters, and enable social experiences you couldn’t accomplish in other games. Then, with that vision, they created systems of progression to help guide and scale the experience in a sustainable way – namely through power and difficulty scaling. As time went on, the game had to evolve to compete in the industry and to attempt to serve its players with new, more challenging experiences that were more substantial and provided more depth.
Evolving players and technology.
As time went on, the Internet and technologies continued to evolve. The impact this had on the game and its players was immediately apparent. What was formerly a world players would explore in-game and by word of mouth, websites, social networks, and chat apps were circulating the moment information was datamined from game builds. While theorycrafting in early beginnings of Warcraft did exist, the scope of those involved and consuming this information multiplied from a small minority of players in Vanilla, to the large majority of players by the time of Shadowlands; This only fueled by the high availability and ease of access of this information in the data-heavy Internet-driven world we live in today.
Not to say that this is a bad thing or should be looked at as an excuse for the way the game is today, but it’s important context as we look forward to why and how the game got to where it is today. Over time, players evolved – we improved. We have more information available now than ever to learn, to critique, to iterate on. Players now are also more competitive than they ever have been, which is of course a relative measurement – but you’d be hard to argue the fact that consumption of services like RaidBots, HeroDamage, WarcraftLogs, Wowhead, etc isn’t something an overwhelming majority of the WoW community consume on a regular basis.
So given those changes in how players consume the game, this created an immediate need for the game to provide ever-increasing depth and sustainable replayability for its paying consumers. Classic WoW was a great example of this, where we saw a massive flux of players join in, providing heavy praise, which fell off considerably after they had consumed the content available – working in production time for new experiences is where the difficult balance of depth, replay value, and sustained engagement becomes difficult. All of this information so far leads me to where I feel the largest problem is with the game – and that’s Blizzard as a business.
Scaling as a business.
As with any organization and any software as a service (SaaS), stable growth is the single most difficult task to successfully maintain. Naturally, as World of Warcraft continued to succeed and bring in more revenue, the investment back into the company and the development of the game increased over time as well. Generally, this is a pretty healthy, positive thing to happen for a game – to be rewarded for its success and to place faith into its future and continued growth. On the flip side, this also creates a situation where those investing in the business also provide more attention and, unfortunately, also sometimes tend to pressure decisions or direction of the product. In my opinion, this is why over the last few expansions we have seen more systems which involve endless grinding and gameplay loops – not because they’re engaging, interesting content that leaves players wanting to come back for more, but because they have to come back for more through systems designed around RNG and time-gating.
To my observation, this is one of the core problems we see with World of Warcraft today. What was once a game designed with a foundation of creativity has devolved into a game driven by analytics. As mentioned earlier, the game’s systems in its early days were built to support the world and the players in it. However in the current landscape of the game, these systems are the rails on which you experience the game and the rest seems designed around those systems. On top of this shift in approach, follows the increasing need to raise analytics and key metrics communicated to leadership and investors as an indication of success and the game’s health. While these analytics are indeed important and quantitative data is important to guiding decisions and reducing risk – the qualitative and instinctual data, feelings, and intuition are just as important.
The path forward.
My biggest recommendation to Blizzard is to double down on getting back to its roots with design-driven culture. John Lassiter once quoted, “Design challenges Technology and Technology inspires Design.” The team at Blizzard is immensely talented, as they prove on a regular basis – but the largest flaw with the game as it sits today is the overall vision and direction of the core experience. Paraphrasing a bit – but Chris Kaleiki said something in a personal update recently that really resonated with me. He said, paraphrasing a bit, “If you want to build a boat, you don’t tell each individual to build a sail, the deck, the wheel, etc. Instead, you teach them to yearn for the vast exploration of the sea and by nature, they will know what to do.” I think this speaks volumes to the core problem at Blizzard, currently, and that is enabling and empowering your team to create something they are extremely passionate about. Bring the core design of the game back to the world and the players in it, creating social experiences and conditions only MMOs can provide.
Article header art by Tooth Wu
