FF-X reminded me of an older approach to challenge related to travel.  In XII and XIV, you can see every enemy on the field and avoid them.  All versions previous to that, it was a random event while travelling.  This is somewhat jarring in X, especially related to rare monster hunting.  One particular bugger only shows up every 20 fights it seems and I need 10 of it.  Random battles are certainly frustrating and being able to pick and choose your enemies is more fun approach.  Especially when it comes to ambush attacks that instantly kill your party…damn Marlboros.

I’m also playing a bit of Quest for Glory (in the 2nd one now) and combat in the wild is deadly.  I can take on one type of enemy so far, what being a weakly wizard, so I want to avoid travel in most cases.  Skipping the content here would remove the feeling of “argh, run away, run away” I get while crossing zones.

UO had visual enemies on screen that I could (should) avoid.  Destard, the dungeon of dragons, was a death pit of running around avoiding everything that moved.  Even the rune/recall system was fraught with death, especially if you bound the rune to a really bad spot.  High level recall books often had a few runs smack dab in the middle of a lich/demon cave.  That’s ignoring the entire PvP aspect of travel.  NPCs broke chase, enemy players did not.

EQ took a slightly different approach, notoriously with the massive trains (hello Butcherblock!).  Enemies had massive aggro ranges and followed you the entire zone.  SoW was the only way people survived some of these places.  I chose a necromancer specifically for the dead man floating buff, which allows me to travel the skies above the death traps.  Travel options were severely limited and death from a wrong turn (including potential corpse loss) was a bit too much for me.  If enemies broke chase after a while, I think this would have been a fine compromise.

WoW originally had a densely populated world, where travel on the roads was often deadly.  Sure, they didn’t follow you forever but if they caught up with you, bye bye.  It was very easy to chain a bunch of enemies together without trying and world PvP (STV and the Mill) created massive death zones.  BC kept this approach for leveling and then it introduced player flight…

Player flight removed any and all risk from travel in the game, similar to what I did in EQ with my necromancer.  Since you couldn’t fight enemies in the air, there was rarely any serendipitous socializing.  The world became empty with people dropping in, dropping out and avoiding interacting with the world at all.  WotLK took a similar approach and made 2 zones that were near impossible to travel without flight.  Cataclysm gave flight to everyone, everywhere and there are entire zones I never experienced.  Combined with the massive dependency on phasing, I barely grouped with anyone at all, if I could ever actually see anyone.  MoP was the final kick at the can for this model.

Timeless Isle is the best success Blizzard has had with non-raid content since launch.  Emergent gameplay cannot happen with everyone in the air, so no one flies on the island.  They have stated a few times now that the TI model is going to be used for WoD and they still haven’t committed to any flying at all during the expansion.

I think this is a great thing.

Let’s chat a bit around the fire shall we?  There’s an old saying that goes “Do not raise your children the way [your] parents raised you, they were born for a different time.”  I think that applies extremely well to gaming and even more so to MMOs.  A gaming generation lasts about 5-7 years.  The last console wave was on the tail end of this.  The general point of this is that the strategy applied at the start of an MMO needs to change over time.

In IT design there are two portions of a service that are often classified as above and below the waterline, like an iceberg.  Only a very small portion is ever seen by the user (above water) while an inordinate amount of time is put on the back end items (below water).  So whenever you see a patch/expansion, figure the amount of time it takes for you to consume it and multiply that by at least 100 to get an idea of the amount of effort it took to generate it.  So, if you get 60 hours of gametime, likely it took 6000 hours (which is a ~month for 30 people) to create it.

Suffice it to say that IT developers strive to find economies in the below water systems in order to maximize the amount of content delivered in the least amount of time.  Agile development!   The older the system, the harder this is to do.  Microsoft famously stated that the average Windows coder during the XP days, only ever put in 1 line of code per day due to historic content.  IE had the same problem up until version 9, which explains why it still fails the Acid3 test.  In order to move forward, sometimes you have to rebuild the foundation.

Today’s world is run through agile development, meaning that changes needs to be applied quickly and for lower cost.  This is done through service oriented architecture.  Think of it as Lego blocks.  If I wanted to build a boat without Legos, it would take a heck of a long time – wood, nails, etc…  If I built it with the blocks, then I could get a boat built in 10 minutes.  StoryBricks (for EQ Next) uses this model.  So does the Foundy in Neverwinter.  GW2 is able to release new “living content” at a quick pace because of their toolsets.  SWTOR seems to have an update every other month.  TESO and WildStar are both promising something similar, with a quick dev cycle to justify the subscription cost.  EvE does a decent enough job too.

The outlier for years has been WoW.  Their patch cycles aren’t the worst, a few months between but their expansion windows are simply ridiculous.  There was a time when “soon” meant quality.  It does for Starcraft.  It did for Diablo3 once Jay left (that game is barely recognizable now).  It has not often meant it for WoW.  The MoP expansion, outside of new art, introduced one new mechanic – pet battles – and that took 11 months.   Flex Raids, arguably the 2^nd best thing to come out of MoP, took much less time. WoD looks like we’re going to see at least 14 months with no new content.

Now, there are a couple of possible reasons for this.  One, Blizzard is exceptionally greedy and wants to milk the user base for all their money.  I doubt this when MoP launched, it was the lowest rate of sales in their history.  The next quarterly review is expected to show another drastic drop, likely hitting the 5-6 million user level.  Second, Blizzard only runs 1 development team that changes in size based on the content being developed.  This seems highly probable as it ensures quality development and a lower bug count but not having multiple source codes running around.  Old code needs to be stable and the toolsets must be ancient.  The WoW ship is massive and even a little tweak can have massive repercussions.  There is tons of evidence that raiding is at an all-time low, somewhere near 15,000 guilds total raided in SoO outside of LFR.  Servers are being connected (merged without some of the hiccups) continuously, with only a dozen or so that are not slated.  When people are leaving en-masse for “greener pastures”, it puts the fire under the designers to keep what you have and get people back.  Pressure, in design, often leads to very bad ideas or impractical ones (such as the Path of Titans which sounded amazing).

I am not saying Blizzard is closing WoW or that it’s failing.  Just that the statistical anomaly that existed for ~5 years seems to be returning to normal.  Players have realized that there are plenty of viable options on the market.  It’s just surprising that with all the change that has happened on the market, that Blizzard hasn’t made a more concerted effort to change their design practices.