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Abandoning Content, With Gusto
By Cameron Sorden | April 7, 2008
I find it absolutely baffling that Blizzard seems to love to abandon older game content. Not all older content, mind you, but specifically the “endgame” instances of each era of World of Warcraft. I’ve talked at great length before about how this happened when Burning Crusade came out, because of the way that Blizzard chose to handle gear upgrades. Instead of having a smooth gear progression from the previous content where a Stratholme rare item would be only slightly less powerful than a Hellfire Ramparts rare item, the designers created an absurd jump in power by making new common items with better stat bonuses on them than classic-era epic quality gear.
I’m not really talking about raid content, either. The other day I mentioned that there’s no incentive to run the old 40-man dungeons anymore, but there’s even less incentive to run the old level 60 5-mans. Why would you ever run Dire Maul, Stratholme, Scholomance, BRD, UBRS, or LBRS when the gear pales in comparison to the commonest items in Outland? You could run them for fun, but good luck finding a PUG. I heard a rumor that Onyxia was broken in a recent patch and bugged for weeks before someone noticed because no one ever does the old content anymore. It’s sad, because some of the most memorable encounters in World of Warcraft come out of those dungeons.
With Wrath of the Lich King on the horizon, it looks like history is about to repeat itself in a sickening way. All indications seem to be pointing toward the fact that Blizzard will continue in the same gear pattern that marked the advent of the Burning Crusade. It’s very likely that the level 68+ greens that will be found in Northrend will make your epic-quality items from Karazhan and MrT old news. I also found this thread on the WoW forums that confirms that Blizzard will be abandoning all of the current dungeons in the same manner that they abandoned the last round. Not only that, but they have no current plans to go revamp any of that older content in the foreseeable future. Lets take a look at a few quotes from the CMs:
We don’t have any plans to update old content for level 80 players. Instead we plan to provide lots of brand new content for our players to go through in Wrath of the Lich King.
Q u o t e:
Any chance of introducing heroic versions of “classic” dungeons? I mean not all of them, Heroic Stockades would be as bad an idea as you could get but:Heroic Stratholme
Heroic Deadmines
Heroic Shadowfang Keep
Heroic Scarlet MonasteryWould all own.
We don’t have any plans currently to do this.
Now, as I said, I am totally baffled as to why they won’t even consider this (or at least something similar). With the way they handle the expansion gear jumps, that means that when Wrath of the Lich King is released, there will be no fewer than 22 five to ten-man dungeons which will never be used again by the vast majority of players (Strat, Scholo, BRD, DM, LBRS, UBRS, SH, MrT, Kara, BM, Sethekk, Steamvault, SL, Mech, Bot, Arc, and the heroic versions of all the lower dungeons: HFR, BF, UB, SP, MT, AC). I’m not even counting the many raid instances being left by the side of the road to rot. This is just the easily accessible and fun small-group content!
You know what the number one complaint I hear from capped-out WoW players is? “There isn’t enough to do. When’s the new content coming out?” Especially if you find WoW’s PvP boring and soul-crushing (like I do), running the same few instances again and again gets old really fast. It’s great to have new instances, but why do we have to leave the old ones behind and never look back? If they aren’t willing to give us heroic versions of the old end-game content, why not spend a little time and effort and fit them gear-wise into the leveling curve (like other dungeons on the path to 70) so that we can at least have a reason to go use the content that Blizzard’s developers spent so much time and effort creating?
As far as I’m concerned, there are several reasonably good solutions they could implement that would fix the problem:
- Create a new heroic version of an older instance once per month - You wouldn’t even have to update the gear, since heroic bosses drop badges and gems. Doing this would allow you to replay some of the best instances in WoW as a challenge at whatever the current maximum level is. Heroic Stratholme? Heroic DM? Sign me up! This would also keep players excited by giving them a steady stream of “new” content to play with between major patches and expansions. This feature works for any instance in the game. Worried that people won’t buy the expansion if they can just play the old content at a higher level? Lock the instances to the new level cap.
- Integrate old end-game instances into the level curve with updated gear - The reason why no one uses the old instances is because as soon as you his 58, the greens that are available become absurdly better than anything you find in the old instances. If you made the gear in the old instances fit the new power-hop that occurs at 58, people would suddenly have some incentive to make a visit to the older zones instead of just skipping them entirely. This idea probably requires the most work for the least payoff, but there it is.
- Ditch the gear inflation that occurs at the beginning of a new expansion - When BC launched, the raiding crowd cried and everyone else rejoiced as purples were ditched for greens across the world. Presumably, this leveled the playing field for the expansion. However, the hardcore people still raced to 70 and immediately began raiding again, so the advantage was rather short-lived. Do we really need to do this? Why can’t gear progression be smooth? Go ahead and let the raiders burn through the first five levels of content in their epic gear– it’s a reward for raiding so long in the first place (and they were going to work through quickly, anyway). Let everyone else continue with the same progression scale they have been. They still get gear upgrades, but all their hard work isn’t invalidated. Doing this accomplishes the same goals as my last point with significantly less work.
I’m sure there are other, far more creative possibilities than these. These are just the ones I came up with off the top of my head. There’s no good reason for Blizzard to totally drop all the time and effort that went into creating all of those fun and interesting encounters! Re-working them to let players play through them again or play them for the first time (in many, many cases) requires far less effort than designing new dungeons from scratch. It’s a travesty!
Come on, guys. I miss the old five-mans. How hard can it be to give me some small reason to run them without feeling like I’m totally wasting my time? As much as it sucks to run Heroic Ramparts yet again, I’m going to do it for the badges (I’ve long since outgrown the gear drops). Why can’t we see some similar treatment for Scholomance or Stratholme, with all of the great in-game lore that surrounds them?
If you agree, I would strongly encourage you to go tell Blizzard how you feel (for all the good it will do– I’m told they largely ignore the forums, and who can blame them?). I already did by posting a large chunk of this post into that forum thread.
Topics: World of Warcraft, game design, mmorpg |
April 7th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Not enough time or money to retrofit the old dungeons. Its all about forward progression and leveling the playing field. If they don’t, people quit playing. You (raiders) are suppose to be happy with Sunwell until WotLK.
Blizzard is sitting on WotLK until some contender steps up (AoC, Warhammer). Then they’ll drop the expansion. Casuals sing their praises. When AoC2 is announced, Blizz will respond with their new next gen MMO.
I’m afraid Blizzard doesn’t need to respond to the the nostalga or innovation. They rake the money in regardless.
I’ve said all that and it’s nothing you didn’t already know.
April 7th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
10,000,000+ subscribers and they don’t have the money? That set off the Bullshit Alarm for sure.
Cam, welcome to one of the reasons I canceled my account after TBC launched! It became obvious during closed beta that rather than adding new content to let players continue the progression like you’d expect to see, it became obvious they were outright obsoleting all old content. The post-TBC “fast leveling” xp bonus just added salt to the wound. They could just as easily have started new characters at 60, put them at the Dark Portal and deleted all of Azeroth for all the good it does anyone now.
They’re going to do it again with WotLK, obviously. I’m actually surprised that anyone is surprised by that.
April 7th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
I just can’t believe that they care that little about their game. I mean, it’s going to be a money maker either way. Can’t it be a money maker AND a rich and diverse game experience?
Given their industry position and the fact that they are making so much money, I don’t see why they’re not doing everything in their power to keep the game interesting for as many people as possible. Now is the time to lay down the framework that will be important in 3+ years when better games are out there– not then, when they’re scrabbling for cash like other older MMOs.
Or maybe they really believe that that will never be a problem.
/hubris
April 8th, 2008 at 11:33 am
Vivendi was near bankruptcy before WoW hit. The money from WoW goes elsewhere. It’s called profit taking.
Sure, money goes into WoW development and maintenance, but money is moved to Sierra and the other Vivendi products.
Money is also funnled into SC2, the new next gen MMO from Blizzard and the 3rd unannounced Blizzard project.
WoW is the cash cow that’s being milked.
It really is time to move on…
April 8th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Lessee…. 10,000,0000 subscribers without any content updates.
Let’s say they undergo a massive development effort and revamp old content.
Now they have 10,000,000 subscribers and they are out a lot of money for nothing, because WoW players can be relied upon to keep p(l)aying no matter what.
Makes the old EQ addiction look like a sugar craving compared to the freebase heroin that is WoW.
But hey, it’s heroin, it feels good!
April 8th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
The only thing that those 10M subscribers do for Blizzard is that they aren’t short of money when designing new games and taking their time with their release. You have only limited amount of game designers that are able to design games with Blizzard-quality,you can’t just create them and those people don’t usually fancy working 12 hours a day.
Think about it this way: Would you rather have an instance in Northrend with updated graphics or a heroic in old world ? Because of the level difference, you have to pretty much redo the whole instance from scratch, trash and bosses included. And remember that not even all of the outland heroics are regularly visited, which could very well mean that the “new” heroic would be ran once or twice for the novelty factor andt hen abandoned.
Think about it for a while, designing an instance isn’t as easy as it sounds.
April 9th, 2008 at 10:14 am
I don’t think the labor involved in retooling the levels is the big deal, I think the reason they don’t tool up older dungeons for Heroic is that they don’t want a bunch of level 80’s slumming around level 50 lowbie areas ready to mash into paste the first 50 from the wrong faction to wander across.
Even in PvE servers, the dynamic would be broken by scattering bored 80’s across the Olde Worlde. That doesn’t make the problems unsolvable, but any solution needs to keep the high-level guys mostly compartmentalized.
April 9th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
A question for you then. Given that developer time is not infinite, which would you prefer? Should the time be spent rebalancing old content, or creating new content?
Would you be happy to go back to a heroic Deadmines or Stratholme knowing that you wouldn’t get a new instance in the expansion pack because the designers were working on the heroic instead?
–Rawr
April 9th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
[…] that if it did, it would be any more successful. But a larger issue, in my opinion, is the one that AimedShot brought up in my comments the other day: Blizzard (and Vivendi) are very likely using World of […]
April 9th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
Would you be happy to go back to a heroic Deadmines or Stratholme knowing that you wouldn’t get a new instance in the expansion pack because the designers were working on the heroic instead?
Look at Turbine. They’ve always put out new stuff as well as re-tooling stuff in their free content updates for each game. Now they have a new expansion coming for Lord of the Rings while still putting out content updates which include re-tooled instances, and they recently re-tooled an entire zone.
LOTRO doesn’t have 10 million players funding Turbine’s unannounced mystery project either…
But then, Blizz has always done whateverthefuck they want to do, and we just lap it up like dogs…
April 10th, 2008 at 8:16 am
Zaphid has the right of it, in my opinion.
People who really want to run things because they like to see it, already do. There are BT clearing guilds that run BWL on off nights. There are casual players who don’t get enough for Gruul who go to MC instead.
On the other hand, even though I’ve leveled 4 characters to 70, I’ve never run Auch Crypts. I’ve only run Mana Tombs twice on one character. Mind you, I am primarily a PvE 5-man pug player. But no one runs these instances. The EXISTING level 70 instance selection is too large. Adding about 5 heroics would just be overkill.
I’d much rather the situation be changed so that the total number of instances available at any given time was smaller. Maybe each week only have 5 heroics to choose from (in addition to the normal 70 instances). Then each week the heroics available would rotate. Heck, I’m sure some sort of lore / event could make such a thing even “make sense” within the game world.
April 12th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
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