World of Warcraft 4.0.1: A hunter's-eye view, part 1
Now that my preliminaries are done, what do I think of the new update? Oh, I like it. I like it a lot.
A synthesis and antithesis within game design
There are two aims that pretty much every game designer holds, which are always in tension to some degree: to provide room for dedicated players to exercise system mastery, that is, to use their superior knowledge of the rules and world to get distinctively good results; and to make it difficult for any player to hose themselves unintentionally via choices that seemed good at the time but add up to catastrophic impairment. You could write a history of game design's evolution with these as the poles of the celestial sphere within which creative ventures orbit, and get somewhere interesting with it, likely.
Eric Heimburg of the Elder Game blog had an interesting post recently on the subject of genre conventions, and the desirability of game designers knowing what they're waving in or out. He lists some that prevail in the current moment:
Lots more good stuff in his post, by the way.
He goes on to say:
Why can’t you tab-select things behind you, and have your character automatically rotate to face any enemy they attack? In other words, why should players ever have to see a “You are facing the wrong way!” error message? WoW implemented it the way they did because they were following a pre-existing genre convention set by EverQuest. But EverQuest was a first-person game. Having a first-person camera spin suddenly without your direct control will make you seasick fast. With WoW’s third-person camera, there’s much less reason for players to micro-manage which way their character faces - and unless it’s somehow fun in your game, you should consider removing it. (And yes, this has been done before: both AC1 and AC2 auto-turned your character to face your opponent, and it worked fine. But EverQuest was much more popular, so its system became the permanent genre convention, even though it was originally designed for first-person camera schemes!)
Similarly, game engineers have known how to let characters edge-slide along cliffs for at least fifteen years now… there’s no particular reason that players should be allowed to accidentally plummet to their doom because they pressed the arrow key a bit too long. Prior to EverQuest (a first-person-perspective game, remember), any MMO that let you trivially walk off a cliff to your death would have been considered pretty hardcore. Now even the most “casual” games have this “feature”. It’s kind of dumb and unnecessary.
If you feel anger rising in the back of your throat now, and have a strong urge to denounce these suggestions - “of course turning to face your opponent is necessary! It’s ”, then you are probably feeling exactly how I did about abstracted arrows in AC2. But resist your urge to defend the status quo… at least without doing some serious consideration and introspection first. People who choose to become MMO designers tend to be pretty hardcore, and the hardcore can have a hard time seeing beyond genre conventions. Game designers aren’t super scientific by our nature, but we can sure make up scientific-sounding reasons for why things are the way they are. If I had a buck for every MMO feature that was “required to ensure a plausible world feel” that is now missing from WoW, I’d have like… $20. Which isn’t a lot of money, but is a lot of examples.
That last paragraph is important. Game designers do tend, as a group, to be fairly hardcore about whatever it is we're doing, and one of the keys to wide-ranging success is to design games that work for people who aren't quite like us. And that in turn requires respecting the goals of players who aren't quite like us, and sometimes that's been in short supply. It hasn't been uncommon for game designers to come in with personal animosities toward particular character classes, or combat roles, or whatever, and then build a game that nominally supports these things but in fact hammers them hard.
A big part of what makes WoW a success in its field is design support for stuff the designers aren't personally wild about but understand to fit within their world and milieu. This patch builds on that in really big ways.
WoW characters get two different categories of ability: spells (and their equivalents, like warrior maneuvers, hunter specialty shots, and so on; in terms of structure these are all spells) and talents. Spells apply to everyone in a class: your character gets to level 10, she can learn this, and at level 12 she can learn that, and so on. Talents are more variable. You get points that you can allocate in a variety of ways, divided among three trees for each class, and there's room for substantial customization. 4.0.1 includes major changes to both.
Spells
There's been a significant consolidation in spells. It used to be that you'd learn the first rank of a spell at a particular level, and if it did damage or healing or some other numerical value applied to the game it'd have its base value and then a multiplier based on some of your character's stats - 100 points plus half your character's Agility, or whatever. Then, in a few (or a lot of) levels, you'd learn a higher rank, with a better base value and maybe also a better multiplier. Some spells had as many as a dozen ranks, from start to finish. Well, now they don't. You learn a spell and that's it; all its numbers adjust smoothly as your character levels up, getting better and better as you go. So there's a category of fiddly bits gone away.
Talents
Talents, like I said, are a more wide-ranging bunch of goodies. Some make a thing possible at all, like a high-ranking demonology talent for warlocks allowing them to summon the felguard demon along with others they get as regular spells, or the beast mastery hunter's talent to tame exotic families of beasts. If you pick one of those up, your character can do it, simple as that. Others enhance spells in various ways: making it more likely to get a critical hit, or reducing the time it takes to cool down so you can cast it again.
It used to be that characters got a talent point every level, starting at 10, when the crown talent in each tree requiring 50 prior points in that particular tree. The thing is that there weren't always that many actually good ideas on hand in terms of stuff that would be significant and fun in play. Most talent trees ended up having some things you pretty well had to take to get the best out of your character, and also some talents that were pretty boring, like a 1% bonus to something important for each point you put in the talent, up to a limit of 3 or 5. The sheer size of the trees plus the gap between very noticeable-in-play effect and very-important effect made it easy to accidentally hose your character but good. Relatively hardcore players would go look up recommendations from even harder-core analysts, but players at large could and very often did find themselves not doing as well as they could for no obvious reason at all.
They've overhauled talents in a couple of key ways, and I really like the results.
There are fewer talent points - just one every other level now. And there's an altogether new emphasis on helping players understand what it is they're choosing, when they choose a talent tree: to get some neat goodies that reinforce the nature of that tree right off at level 10, and then to channel their spending a while. Take a look at the talent tree presentation for hunters, for instance, and mouse over the icons for spell and ability names. Even if you skip all the numbers, you can get a pretty decent sense of what kinds of things a character with that specialty does. (Likewise with, to pick a few of my other favorite classes, warlocks and druids and shamans.)
There's an interesting - and delightful - early consensus about the optimal specifications for various trees, too. I'm seeing a lot of comments to the effect of "these 10/12/however many points are really crucial...and, well, spend the others on any of these, whatever best suits your personal style and needs." There are so few choices that you'd want to steer anyone from that there's a much wider scope for customization and just plain messing around. I love that very much.
Focus, grasshopper
Every WoW character has two crucial stats measured in graphical bars on screen: their health, and their power stat. Health is health: a character gets hit, she loses some; a character gets healing, from whatever source, and she gains some back. The power stats are all kind of the same in that you spend some to power neat effects and do other things to get it back, but the details vary.
Spell casters use mana. Spells consume it; drinking mana potions and invigorating drinks restores it (as do a variety of special effects). Casters start off a session in the field with full mana, usually, wear it down in one or more fights, and build it up in rest stops between fights. Warriors, and druids in bear form, use rage. Attacks consume it; being hit drives it up. They start off empty, most of the time, and build it up in the course of each fight, spending as they go, and having the unused portion bleed off when fighting's done. Death knights use rune power, which is kind of complicated and I'm not going to say anything about it here. Rogues, and druids in cat form, use energy. It regenerates rapidly, so that they start off most fights full, spend it on maneuvers, and regain some between special attacks and then at the end of each fight. These considerations shape how each kind of character fights, obviously, and how they adventure - do they need downtime, and if so, when and under what conditions.
Hunters have always used mana, and I've never been entirely wild about that. Just not thoroughly convinced it was ideal. Hunter pets have always used focus, which behaves a lot like rogues' energy in terms of regenerating rapidly and getting spent equally rapidly. Well, now hunters also spend focus. It changes the feel of my hunter in play I really like. Most special shots and commands to pets consume some focus; the Steady Shot attack speeds focus regeneration, and it bounces back on its own at a pretty good clip. It simplifies my characters' luggage (healing potions, yes, mana potions, no more!), knocks out a category of downtime need, and the shared power source between hunter and pet seems right, given the bonds they form.
There's more, but that's enough for now, don't you think?
A synthesis and antithesis within game design
There are two aims that pretty much every game designer holds, which are always in tension to some degree: to provide room for dedicated players to exercise system mastery, that is, to use their superior knowledge of the rules and world to get distinctively good results; and to make it difficult for any player to hose themselves unintentionally via choices that seemed good at the time but add up to catastrophic impairment. You could write a history of game design's evolution with these as the poles of the celestial sphere within which creative ventures orbit, and get somewhere interesting with it, likely.
Eric Heimburg of the Elder Game blog had an interesting post recently on the subject of genre conventions, and the desirability of game designers knowing what they're waving in or out. He lists some that prevail in the current moment:
- Game activities are mostly location-based. For instance, you have to go to an auction house to bid on items, which means you can’t be fighting monsters while you shop.
- Players move at a relatively sedate and “realistic” speed. (In earlier games this wasn’t necessarily true; in Asheron’s Call 1, players with the right character configuration could run at about 35 mph, sustained forever. This would seem weird and stupid in a modern game.)
- Attacks do not use real physics - you cannot sidestep a projectile; it either hits you or it doesn’t, and that’s determined before the arrow even enters the air. (This is another thing that games experimented with earlier, but would feel weird now.)
- You cannot tab-select creatures that are behind your character. You must manually orient your avatar towards whatever you’re attacking or you can’t attack it.
- Players can trivially die by falling off of cliffs. It’s accepted that avatar movement is purely a player skill, not a character skill.
Lots more good stuff in his post, by the way.
He goes on to say:
Why can’t you tab-select things behind you, and have your character automatically rotate to face any enemy they attack? In other words, why should players ever have to see a “You are facing the wrong way!” error message? WoW implemented it the way they did because they were following a pre-existing genre convention set by EverQuest. But EverQuest was a first-person game. Having a first-person camera spin suddenly without your direct control will make you seasick fast. With WoW’s third-person camera, there’s much less reason for players to micro-manage which way their character faces - and unless it’s somehow fun in your game, you should consider removing it. (And yes, this has been done before: both AC1 and AC2 auto-turned your character to face your opponent, and it worked fine. But EverQuest was much more popular, so its system became the permanent genre convention, even though it was originally designed for first-person camera schemes!)
Similarly, game engineers have known how to let characters edge-slide along cliffs for at least fifteen years now… there’s no particular reason that players should be allowed to accidentally plummet to their doom because they pressed the arrow key a bit too long. Prior to EverQuest (a first-person-perspective game, remember), any MMO that let you trivially walk off a cliff to your death would have been considered pretty hardcore. Now even the most “casual” games have this “feature”. It’s kind of dumb and unnecessary.
If you feel anger rising in the back of your throat now, and have a strong urge to denounce these suggestions - “of course turning to face your opponent is necessary! It’s ”, then you are probably feeling exactly how I did about abstracted arrows in AC2. But resist your urge to defend the status quo… at least without doing some serious consideration and introspection first. People who choose to become MMO designers tend to be pretty hardcore, and the hardcore can have a hard time seeing beyond genre conventions. Game designers aren’t super scientific by our nature, but we can sure make up scientific-sounding reasons for why things are the way they are. If I had a buck for every MMO feature that was “required to ensure a plausible world feel” that is now missing from WoW, I’d have like… $20. Which isn’t a lot of money, but is a lot of examples.
That last paragraph is important. Game designers do tend, as a group, to be fairly hardcore about whatever it is we're doing, and one of the keys to wide-ranging success is to design games that work for people who aren't quite like us. And that in turn requires respecting the goals of players who aren't quite like us, and sometimes that's been in short supply. It hasn't been uncommon for game designers to come in with personal animosities toward particular character classes, or combat roles, or whatever, and then build a game that nominally supports these things but in fact hammers them hard.
A big part of what makes WoW a success in its field is design support for stuff the designers aren't personally wild about but understand to fit within their world and milieu. This patch builds on that in really big ways.
WoW characters get two different categories of ability: spells (and their equivalents, like warrior maneuvers, hunter specialty shots, and so on; in terms of structure these are all spells) and talents. Spells apply to everyone in a class: your character gets to level 10, she can learn this, and at level 12 she can learn that, and so on. Talents are more variable. You get points that you can allocate in a variety of ways, divided among three trees for each class, and there's room for substantial customization. 4.0.1 includes major changes to both.
Spells
There's been a significant consolidation in spells. It used to be that you'd learn the first rank of a spell at a particular level, and if it did damage or healing or some other numerical value applied to the game it'd have its base value and then a multiplier based on some of your character's stats - 100 points plus half your character's Agility, or whatever. Then, in a few (or a lot of) levels, you'd learn a higher rank, with a better base value and maybe also a better multiplier. Some spells had as many as a dozen ranks, from start to finish. Well, now they don't. You learn a spell and that's it; all its numbers adjust smoothly as your character levels up, getting better and better as you go. So there's a category of fiddly bits gone away.
Talents
Talents, like I said, are a more wide-ranging bunch of goodies. Some make a thing possible at all, like a high-ranking demonology talent for warlocks allowing them to summon the felguard demon along with others they get as regular spells, or the beast mastery hunter's talent to tame exotic families of beasts. If you pick one of those up, your character can do it, simple as that. Others enhance spells in various ways: making it more likely to get a critical hit, or reducing the time it takes to cool down so you can cast it again.
It used to be that characters got a talent point every level, starting at 10, when the crown talent in each tree requiring 50 prior points in that particular tree. The thing is that there weren't always that many actually good ideas on hand in terms of stuff that would be significant and fun in play. Most talent trees ended up having some things you pretty well had to take to get the best out of your character, and also some talents that were pretty boring, like a 1% bonus to something important for each point you put in the talent, up to a limit of 3 or 5. The sheer size of the trees plus the gap between very noticeable-in-play effect and very-important effect made it easy to accidentally hose your character but good. Relatively hardcore players would go look up recommendations from even harder-core analysts, but players at large could and very often did find themselves not doing as well as they could for no obvious reason at all.
They've overhauled talents in a couple of key ways, and I really like the results.
There are fewer talent points - just one every other level now. And there's an altogether new emphasis on helping players understand what it is they're choosing, when they choose a talent tree: to get some neat goodies that reinforce the nature of that tree right off at level 10, and then to channel their spending a while. Take a look at the talent tree presentation for hunters, for instance, and mouse over the icons for spell and ability names. Even if you skip all the numbers, you can get a pretty decent sense of what kinds of things a character with that specialty does. (Likewise with, to pick a few of my other favorite classes, warlocks and druids and shamans.)
There's an interesting - and delightful - early consensus about the optimal specifications for various trees, too. I'm seeing a lot of comments to the effect of "these 10/12/however many points are really crucial...and, well, spend the others on any of these, whatever best suits your personal style and needs." There are so few choices that you'd want to steer anyone from that there's a much wider scope for customization and just plain messing around. I love that very much.
Focus, grasshopper
Every WoW character has two crucial stats measured in graphical bars on screen: their health, and their power stat. Health is health: a character gets hit, she loses some; a character gets healing, from whatever source, and she gains some back. The power stats are all kind of the same in that you spend some to power neat effects and do other things to get it back, but the details vary.
Spell casters use mana. Spells consume it; drinking mana potions and invigorating drinks restores it (as do a variety of special effects). Casters start off a session in the field with full mana, usually, wear it down in one or more fights, and build it up in rest stops between fights. Warriors, and druids in bear form, use rage. Attacks consume it; being hit drives it up. They start off empty, most of the time, and build it up in the course of each fight, spending as they go, and having the unused portion bleed off when fighting's done. Death knights use rune power, which is kind of complicated and I'm not going to say anything about it here. Rogues, and druids in cat form, use energy. It regenerates rapidly, so that they start off most fights full, spend it on maneuvers, and regain some between special attacks and then at the end of each fight. These considerations shape how each kind of character fights, obviously, and how they adventure - do they need downtime, and if so, when and under what conditions.
Hunters have always used mana, and I've never been entirely wild about that. Just not thoroughly convinced it was ideal. Hunter pets have always used focus, which behaves a lot like rogues' energy in terms of regenerating rapidly and getting spent equally rapidly. Well, now hunters also spend focus. It changes the feel of my hunter in play I really like. Most special shots and commands to pets consume some focus; the Steady Shot attack speeds focus regeneration, and it bounces back on its own at a pretty good clip. It simplifies my characters' luggage (healing potions, yes, mana potions, no more!), knocks out a category of downtime need, and the shared power source between hunter and pet seems right, given the bonds they form.
There's more, but that's enough for now, don't you think?