Lately I’ve been enjoying the Cataclysm closed beta videos of a WoW enthusiast named John “TotalBiscuit” Bain. His videos are quite informative and entertaining to say the least. He also runs a blog called The Cynical Brit.
If you watch his videos using the highest resolution on YouTube and go full screen you can get some good idea of some of the changes coming our way in Blizzard’s next WoW expansion. I heartily recommend his videos. In particular, there’s a video review of the Dwarf/Gnome starter zone entitled: A case study in bad starting zone design that is exceptional.
Coldridge Valley Gets a Cold Reception
In that article John released a compelling video that demonstrates the changes found in the shared Dwarven/Gnomish starting zone of Coldridge Valley in Dun Morogh. You’ll notice that his main criticism is that the zone doesn’t have much in the way of narrative (storytelling) and fun quests.
He also contends that this is inconsistent compared to the polish that other newbie zones like the Worgen, Goblins and Trolls have gotten from Blizzard and creates a disparity that would prevent players from creating Dwarven and Gnome alts. He is absolutely correct.
What I find interesting is how he finds “killing” quests to be a bit of a bore. WoW is pretty much a game about killing mobs and taking their stuff. This may be a bit of cognitive dissonance as he is also a self-confessed raider. Raiders essentially just kill stuff don’t they?
He makes a lot of great points as far as inconsistencies are concerned. One glaring one is where a troll NPC just stands there and starts talking after you’ve just murdered a bunch of troll teenagers.
One thing you will notice is that Blizzard has made practically all of the trolls in the cave non-agro. I too noticed this change in a recent visit to Elwynn Forest starting area of Northshire Abbey. The Defias Thugs and even Garrick Padfoot the thug boss in the vineyards are all non-agro. The dumbing-down (read: let’s not alienate potential new subscribers) of WoW seems to be proceeding on schedule.
It seems that ultimately every MMO ends up being violated like this by meddling game designers with good intentions. I recall the sad day SOE made the guards in the original EverQuest Greater Faydark zone unattackable. I believe I quit EQ not long after.
Back to WoW, I always loved the Dwarf newbie zone. I was just happy to be transported to a magical land of beer guzzling dwarves. I marveled at seeing my tracks and the tracks of rabbits being made in the snow. Seeing your breath in the cold weather was also a great feature of that zone. Yet the simple magic of Dun Morogh is not enough for jaded gamers.
Here We Are Now, Entertain Us
From listening to his comments on this starter zone I get the impression that many players expect big budget God of War and Zelda like narratives in their MMOs now. Somehow the expectation that players must be entertained has crept into the psyche of modern MMO players.
I’m afraid Blizzard has raised the bar so high they may be victims of their own success. After Wrath of the Lich King, everyone will be expecting a Hollywood style Deathknight starter zone now.
The Art of Creating Newbie Zones
Creating compelling starter zones is a tricky business. You want them to be amazing but not too amazing as you’ll never be able to compete with it and end up creating false expectations among your players.
One example was the starting experiences in Turbine’s Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar. I’ll never forget when the village of Archet was burning and I had to run through it and defeat some villains. It was amazing. Somehow the rest of Middle-earth — especially the levels that followed — never managed to recreate the pulse pounding excitement of those starting areas.
-Wolfshead
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
(I think you should have put your conclusion at the beginning, some people might really read “and now the hater is bashing Coldridge Valley!!!”)
You point out something very crucial: The intro to the theme park world must keep players enticed and eager for more, but keeping up that high standard is almost impossible.
(Personal) Story is hailed as the salvation of the MMO. Bioware does this with SWTOR (+”fully voiced”) and ArenaNet with Guild Wars 2.
But all these cinematic moments of grandeur are not YOUR story. They are everyone’s story. We do not want to be that unique, but running the very same entertainment parcours on rails as everyone else can also be quite boring.
Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan perfectionized the questhub design philosophy, with breadcrumb quests and quest paths and all that for an all around guided and entertaining bus tour through Azeroth.
LOTRO loses its grip on the player once he leaves Archet. The world is big, you get tons of quests, you might miss doing your epic storyline on level as you get sidetracked by tons of quests. But this is not only bad, it also has a positive quality: People start exploring their world on their own.
It takes some time to overcome the confusion and having no horse means you have to walk and fight a lot. But I would never have discovered the lake in the north of Breeland, between North Downs and Breeland, where some quest givers and two bosses plus some odd turtles roam the area. People are absolutely right if they say the few questgivers there are not worth it. But I could mine some silver there, found a boss that dropped precious splinters and swam through the lake.
I just had to tell this my buddies, and the reactions varied wildly: One was totally excited about the “secret area”, another already knew it and some found it “totally not worth it”.
The trick is to give people a great story, but ideally it is kept in the background and just wandering the world must be interesting and rewarding. Following slavishly the -> of the questhelper is a modern disease.
The contemporary trend of instant group teleport to instanced dungeons is a good thing on the one hand, but it also reduces the world again to a nuisance. Make the world the place of exploration, now that would be fun. Special random encounters and temporary small dungeon entrances, I would like that.
The dumbing down trend has to stop as well. It is like giving kids only numbers up to 10 and no multiplication/division, as it is too hard and no fun. Dumb mobs for supposedly dumb players, how UN-FUN. The Ogres in Loch Modan were really fun to fight as they were elite and dangerous. You could do it solo, but having a partner or party made it easier. It was a natural hotspot for grouping. But no, solo friendly, piss easy. I could take on the whole cave with my later char after they dumbed them down, a cave that wiped a group before.
MMOs really become like movies. Very cinematic, and you are supposed to act according to the script!
It is no wonder that EVE gets ever more popular. You there have the choice whom you are working for or not. You can grind mobs, run missions and it all can pay off. You do not get punished for not following the -> of your “questhelper”. Now this becomes a bit sandbox vs theme park, but it gets even worse: theme park MMOs become more and more about watching your own semi-interactive movie.
We do not need more game designers, story writers/authors, movie directors, what the genre needs are visionaries, WORLD DESIGNERS that really live up to that name.
Treadmills are easier to make than worlds. Cheaper, too.
Just like to add to what you were saying about the ‘world’, in essense what it needs to be is that anything can happen from point A to point B.
Developers now days have this mindset that point A and B are the only important aspects, hence skip everything in between. But the game world needs to be set up in a way that anything can happen from point A to B. Random events from players to random events themselves. And maybe in the end the point of the journey isn’t to get to point B, maybe point B ends up being a side thing, or maybe it doesn’t actually exist and you were fooled into doing something (e.g. the NPC set you up) yet in the end had an amazing time because of the world and the journey itself.
Like you were saying ,what it comes down to is that the world itself needs to be made interesting.
Either way, remove quests IMO or rather the boring rules they follow. Instead of accepting to kill a NPC, you kill the NPC or go into an area first and something opens up without the quest format.
That looked snooze worthy to the extreme without any storyline of interest, without any text to read or voice over worth listening too that’s all it could ever be though. All that was left was the combat, I really don’t buy these guys are a threat to the world if they go down in 3 hits.
I thought it was ironic the last comment about the final fight being too hard, when he runs in past all the mobs and then complains that the other mobs actually help
some extra info got added, the zone is officially not yet finished.
But it is not so much about the quality of the starter zone, but more about the general issue:
“Somehow the expectation that players must be entertained has crept into the psyche of modern MMO players.”
I am afraid we already got used to that, but contemporary MMO design seems to follow this scheme instead of giving players the proper world and incentives to do stuff on their own. This might also be healthier in the long run and more enjoyable for both players and producers, nobody can produce new exciting content over and over.
“Story is hailed as the salvation of the MMO. Bioware does this with SWTOR (+”fully voiced”) and ArenaNet with Guild Wars 2.
But all these cinematic moments of grandeur are not YOUR story. They are everyone’s story.”
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Exactly.
The memories that are most powerful from my MMO experiences are goals I set and achieved on my own, stories that were completely my own. I do not have vivid memories of some quest I beat or anything like that.
The sooner MMO devs realize this the better.
This is what I’ve been saying for the past few years on this blog too.
The problem is that the current crop of MMO devs have huge egos. It’s all about *them*. They act and behave like rockstars. Just watch the BlizzCon spectacle that they hold each year for evidence of this.
These devs want *their* stories to be what you experience — not yours. They don’t have the courage, maturity and humility to let the players dictate their own experiences and memories. This is why we are in the current state we are in. Any company that is making another WoW clone is going to fall right into this trap.