What makes WoW bad? I think we’ve figured it out to be honest as we have had a few years to debate it.
- Over-systemisation: The worst quote I ever read from a WoW developer, one which I cannot find, was one from the early part of the teens when he said WoW needed less evergreen systems like archaeology which needed updating every expansion and more expansion specific features.
He was worried that each new evergreen system would increase the design burden on the development team whereas expansion specific systems could be dropped once they had served their purpose.
The result? The developers now sink inordinate amounts of time into developing new systems that are going to last only two years before being disabled and ditched and then they have to start the process all over again. Players enjoyed the novelty of the system in Legion because artifacts were cool, but artifacts then taught us all the powers given by such a system are ripped away from us.
BFA saw system piled upon system as the developers sought to correct their initial mistake with azerite armour. The Azerite power system was better but we had no investment in it because we knew it would be going away. The corruption system was horrible, it led to characters scaling out of control and Blizzard not caring as it was only for a single patch.
The current Covenant system is horrific as well given that many classes can’t play their full range of specialisations because spec A may have Night Fae being BIS whereas spec B needs Venthyr.
The solution for this point is to go back to basics. Stop creating pointless system after pointless system with complicated UI elements. In 10.0, strip them away and restore the relationship between character gear and character FULLY. No more artifact weapons, azerite armour, azerite necklaces, corrupted gear or Covenant powers.
If you want to give classes a new ability, design it as a permanent addition you are comfortable for them to have from here on out otherwise DON’T DO IT. Players aren’t excited any more by new abilities as we know they will be taken away from us. Restore permanence to our character development.
As for systems that increase player power in interesting ways, the domination gem system is a far more elegant approach. Perhaps you should restore it as an evergreen system using jewelcrafting?
- Treating the game as an e-sport: E-sports are good. Designing the game around them is not, e-sports should flow from a game accessible to all, rather than being an e-sport title you hope to have broad appeal.
Now we can’t complain it about it in battlegrounds and arenas, that’s where balance makes sense, but we can complain it about where it doesn’t belong.
Mythic+ is fundamentally designed wrong as a consequence. There were really two ways they could have gone when designing mythic+. The first way, they way they took, was a time trial. You need to beat the dungeon before this arbitrary timer expires to get maximum rewards. This leads to the gameplay of trying to barge through the dungeon as rapidly as possible with the dungeons themselves being designed to slow you down. This approach favours stacked AOE and massive burst damage It is now even infecting class design in other spheres as tanks and healers are moving from being devoted to their respective roles towards being more akin to hybrids, expected to do damage.
This approach also suits e-sports because it is easily communicable to an audience when two teams are racing a timer against each other.
The superior path for mythic+ would have been a death count. This would have allowed a return to an older type of dungeon crawl wherein each pack would have been it’s own encounter and where care and skill to manage the pack would have have been the guiding design philosophies rather than trying to obliterate them as fast as possible. It would also allow for the return of crowd control as an active part of encounter design, something which has been sidelined over the years due to this fixation on mass pulling. Dungeons are supposed to be crawls, not sprints.
- Fragmentation of narrative: A blizzard dev many years ago said they should stop trying to shove a book into their games. And unfortunately those words have been taken to heart. Warcraft’s story is currently pretty lousy, with other games able to pull off better narratives with more satisfying emotional payoffs.
The worst sin though is where they take all the resources they have for a plot and then break it into pieces so that you can only get a fragment of the story on one character. In Legion it was the twelve class order hall campaigns, in Shadowlands it’s the four covenant campaigns (and those four campaigns are in some places mutually contradictory). The only time it is acceptable to tell a different story is if it is Horde and Alliance, and that is because those two factions are baked into the game at every other level. Otherwise, rather than giving people four different storylines they can only get through on alts, give people one lengthy, meaty and significant plotline to work through that is four times as long.
Treat your story with respect. A lot of players don’t care for that of course, but for many others a buzz over in game events and characters is a signifcant draw and can help bring lapsed players back.
- Not leveraging your legacy: As of 9.1 WoW will have 48 raids and 112 dungeons, a legacy built over 17 years of effort. As of 9.1 only one of these raids will be truly relevant and only 9 of the dungeons. Every two years a gargantuan amount of work is put into building these raids and dungeons and then they are mostly forgotten. While old raids can be farmed for mounts or transmog, they are done so solo and without any really challenge beyond not falling asleep as your overpowered characters ploughs through content designed for far more people. The only time this content becomes vaguely relevant is through the timewalking system, yet the timewalking system is anemic, undertuned and somewhat laughable and therefore it isn’t fun.
Other games with less resources, such as SWTOR, have been forced by their constrained budgets to keep reusing older dungeons in lieu of newer ones but WoW is on the other end of the spectrum, jettisoning all their previous work. Surely it is not beyond the wit of the developers to reach a happy medium and overhaul timewalking into a system that keeps older content relevant?
- A lack of things to do and an obsession with power progression: WoW has degraded into focusing on three activites, raiding, pvp and mythic+. Everything is built with those in mind and so everything has to give us tangible powers, such as the Covenants and Torghast which aren’t allowed to be fun activities for the sake of it, they need to matter in relation to the big three.
The big three are solid and enjoyable, but the RPG side of the MMORPG has wasted away as a result. The game badly needs other, non-power progression related actitives. Torghast should just have been a pure roguelike experience where we could earn toys, pets, mounts and cosmetics.
And the lack of player housing is inexcusable at this stage. One addition, admittedly a big one, that could revitalise a whole swathe of the game by providing an entirely different progression path for people and which seemingly isn’t implemented because it cannot be tied to player power, which is what they did with Garrisons (and is one of the reasons Garrisons failed).
Conclusion: So those are my big five reasons as to what makes WoW bad. If I had to tie them together into an overaching philosophy of failure, it’s that WoW seems focused on giving us quick hits for a dopamine rush rather than a more nourishing and satisfactory experience and that many players are reaching a point where they can’t reach the same highs they used to. This was a philosophy we helped the developers create of course with demands for convenience and speed and by removing the inconveniences from the design which created texture. This is not to say the game was perfect at the beginning and has degraded since, classic in many ways is an artefact of it’s time and would not work in the modern world, but there was a point when WoW reached an optimal level between the player experience and player desires and that rather than settle there, the devs kept going.
Looking back I believe this point was reached somewhere during Wrath of the Lich King. Too much water has now passed under the bridge for just recreating Wrath of the Lich King to be the solution but a solution is required to this continual and all pervading sense of dissatisfaction many of us feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with where the game has gone and where it has ended up. The developers really do need to stop with 10.0, take a step back, and fundamentally re-evaluate their game. Some of the decisions they took years ago for the best of reasons, or the worst of reasons, have not panned out and it is in their interest to treat 10.0 as the end of WoW’s third era and the beginning of something new and exciting.