Not a member of Pastebin yet?
Sign Up,
it unlocks many cool features!
- tldr - rares & treasures rock, though tanaan day 1 and tanaan day 30 feel the same. This leads to the whole thing being a bit static & leads to apathy. In molten front, argent tourny & isle of thunder the progression gave people something different every X amount of time. This felt a lot less static & motivated more gameplay. Garrison campaign is given & not earned (either 5.1 style progression or server wide). Different gameplay aesthetic to the 5.1 story and 5.2 scenarios - far less effective imo.
- Making Content That Lasts
- Today I’m going to talk about the longevity of content, specifically world content. Why? I’ve been talking to loads of people about Tanaan, and it would seem that loads of people have quickly soured to the whole thing. Today I’m going to try to work out why this happens and come up with some ways to design around it, because lets face it being board of a bit of content is an eventuality when that bit of content is PvE with a 6 month plus expected duration.
- The first thing that really stuck me the most is that day 1 of tannin jungle is the same as day 30 or day 60 of Tanaan Jungle. You progress in terms of rewards, but you dont really progress in terms of content. Looking back at past content patches, you often had a situation where there was some form of progression to them or at least some content variation. So in the argent tournament you did progress in rank, and as you progressed you would gain access to not only more rewards, but also more quests. I think this progression worked quite well, though it’s certainly true that the reward balancing was such that it was to grindy for those who wanted to collect all of the available mounts. But still, day 1 of the argent tournament was different to day 30.
- In the Isle of Thunder there was quite a big difference. You would start off with only a few types of quests unlocked, and as time went on your server would unlock more and more of the island. For the first say month of the patch, there was generally something new with every week. As you unlocked more of the island you also unlocked a new single player story scenario. I think that having the progression of the story be tied into the wider progression of the zone was pretty cool - it perhaps did more of a job of making it feel like there was an invasion going on. The garrison campaign is random and has no connection with the progression of Tanaan since there is no progression. They feel random and throwaway in comparison. In 5.2 you did a scenario to unlock a part of the island and then, once the scenario was done, you’d have a new place to quest in.
- Now that said, 5.2 did suffer from people getting to exalted and stopping the quests. At least I remember Blizzard talking about that problem at the time. Still, fully progressing unlocked a new world boss for everyone. This kept the zone feeling a bit more fresh and meant that there was a new shiny for people to come back for.
- The molten front also had a similar thing going on, and while I didn't play much in that patch the molten front was pretty much the only thing I actually did play. What I do find to be interesting is actually a recent mmo-c thread. Someone posted a comparison between the sizes of the molten front and tannin jungle. Of course Tanaan was far, far larger. What I find interesting is that despite tannan feeling larger, the molten front felt a bit more exciting. As I progressed with the rep I’d unlock more of the zone and would have more to do. Tannin doesn't really have that feeling, and I think it ends up making the zone bit a bit static.
- 5.1 also illustrates something useful. Now in 5.1 the dailies got pretty old pretty quick for me if I'm honest, though unlike the other patches in this list it was a minor non raid patch that didn't add a new bit of land. What I think worked was how the daily quests would progressively unlock more story content. This is quite unlike the garrison campaign, which is A really quite terrible in terms of its content, B is actually very tiny and C is not earned. In 5.1 you earned those story quest lines, thus making them a reward. In 6.2 they are given to you without much real effort, meaning that they feel like less of a reward.
- So how do we apply this stuff to Tanaan Jungle? Well I would have had us invade tanaan. Currently we hop in a boat, pick up 2 objects, click on a pile of bombs and BOOM - the invasion of tannan is complete. It would have been really cool if the content of Tanaan was unlocked as we fought our way through the zone. The opening of the patch could have done exactly what the end of the 6.0 garrison campaign alluded to, in which we would storm the gates of Tanaan and secure footholds in the western parts of the zone. from there we would do quests for the Hand of the Prophet faction - I suppose these could be apexis quests, but I would also have there be more unique quests to go along with it. Progression on a faction wide basis or personal basis would work. Faction wide is nice for the servers community feel, though it being on a personal basis does make the unlocking of more of the zone feel like a reward that you really earned.
- As more of the zone unlocks parts of the zone would change to reflect whatever plot stuff happened in the scenarios covering your factions shindigs. I think it would pretty cool if the Temple of Shanar started out as a Draenei holdout in which you had a few quests to help the people there, but that during the progression through the zone there would be a scenario quest thingy in which Gul’dan blasts the shit out of the place and turns it into somewhere where we have to fight. I think they could do some really fun and interesting things with progression. Back in 5.2 they had a smaller team, and 5.2 came out pretty quickly after 5.0 and 5.1. If resources are truly the limiting faction then there is something terribly wrong going on at Blizzard - sire working on the next expansion earlier than normal is nice, but if it means all expansion patch content feels neutered then I don't think its healthy for the game.
- So overall, I think that much of the feeling of apathy in relation to tannin could have been avoided by having it be a zone that your faction progresses through, unlocking new hubs and story content along the way. It worked well in the past, and clearly the current model isn't inspiring people.
- Of course the good parts of the Tanaan / TI stuff like the rare mobs and treasures would be kept in.
- Once thing that I would change is that I’d have the content from parts of the zone be a bit mixed up as you progress. So when your faction progresses to the next stage and a big bit of plot happens, I’d like those things to be reflected in the zone. Similar to what I said about the temple of Shanar. Storytelling by having the world change is a really powerful thing, especially since the World of World of Warcraft is the main character of the thing.
- Of cou
RAW Paste Data