My dear wow,
It’s over. I’m not in love anymore. This message is a letter of separation.
But after so many years spent together, I can’t leave without a constructive word. Make of it whatever you want, it’s entirely up to you.
I will shape this letter as a list, to make it easier for you to understand my points. But first, a few disclaimers. We met when I was 14. I am now 28 and, let’s be honest, we both changed in different ways. This is ok to not love each other anymore, it’s only the normal flow of life. Also, I have to admit that my point of view might be a little focused on storytelling since I became a screenwriter. But we have been telling each other stories since the dawn of humanity, so it might be something important.
Let’s begin somewhere :
- Systems serving stories, or stories serving systems ?
Back in the days, I felt like dungeons (i.e. a system) were the end of secondary storylines. You would do quests in a specific region and then get a final quest sending you to a dungeon for a shiny unique reward. Nowadays, I sometimes feel like dungeons are here because… well, it’s wow, you need to have dungeons. The dungeon quest is free to accept at the entrance, whether you began the storyline linked to it or not. The reward is a small amount of anima, which doesn’t make a lot of difference to get or not to.
Back in the days, pvp was inherent to the fact that wow is about two factions opposing each other. You would find your place in the story even when playing this type of content. Nowadays, pvp doesn’t make narrative sense anymore since Horde and Alliance are not really supposed to be at war anymore.
I wonder how new expansion stories and content are invented today. Do the game designers create covenants because the story asks for it, or do they create the story because they wanted to add a covenant choice, a soulbing system, to the player’s experience? I feel like someone said “I want this expansion to be the chapter where players will make choices that matter. What systems can we create to achieve this ?” and then only “Which story would fit what we have decided ?”
I might be entirely wrong about their creative process but this is what it feels like to me. Story seems to be of secondary importance compared to ingame systems and, therefore, it lacks deepness, emotions and compelling characters. I strongly believe that systems should always be created after the story.
- The central position of the player in the story
I remember feeling very small when I started playing world of warcraft. I was a part of something big, bigger than me and all my friends united. I was a simple soldier and some players, exceptionally better than me, were leaders, known on the whole server, but they still weren’t above Thrall, Jaina or any Warcraft important character.
I am now the “Champion of azeroth”, the “Mawwalker”… actually, all my characters are, and all my friends, and every other player in the game. I asked Magni to stop calling me champion but he wouldn’t !
I don’t know a player who really believes he is the one that saved azeroth. Actually, I think this narrative approach, where the player is the central character of the story, doesn’t work in an MMORPG. This is the way most games create their story, but it wasn’t really the case of wow before quite some expansions, and I feel like it was one of those ingredients that made it unique.
- Who is the target ?
When World of Warcraft was created, my guess is that the targeted audience was something like “Young people. Ancient Warcraft players. People playing Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer and Magic cards… nerds in general”
Video games have developed so much since then that it seems clear to me that there are a bunch of different potential audiences to target when you create a new game today. Sadly, I guess the only question that matters to investors is “which audience will make us the most money?” and I’m sorry to say, my fellow nerds, that we probably aren’t that audience.
World of Warcraft as a game will have its place in history for the bold choices that were made to create it. But its success made it a very lucrative game and I don’t see its owners giving up on trying to make more and more money with it. I honestly have no idea about how it will end but I have few hopes that it will be beautiful. Attracting more players seems to me like a quest of Don Quixote fighting windmills.
- A competitive game and its eternal balance struggle
Wow has always been a competitive game. Guilds were fighting each other to be the first to kill a boss. Best PVPers were fighting for the best rating. But it was all amateur at the time. How could you pay a whole 40 players team ?
Now things are a little bit different. Guilds manage to find some money, players can stream and make money like this. The audience has played competitive games like League of legends and expect to see competitions in their favourite good old game too. But competitions imply massive changes to the game. They imply balance.
Two different sides of the game need to be balanced, PVE and PVP. Any change done to one influences the other, but these are two very different ways to play the game and it seems to me that this is another Don Quixote vain quest.
For instance, the choice has been made to buff some spells by a hundred percent in PVP content, and it really feels like we are playing two whole different games. Moreover, PVE players don’t need PVP players, and PVP players don’t need PVE players to play their part of the game. We almost don’t see each other. Once again, there is no narrative content to glue the whole thing together.
- Being part of a family
Guilds were essential to the mood of the game since its beginning. I remember my first casual guild, with amazing people I could socialize with. I remember being a GM, invading Stormwind with my fellows and hanging out in the outer world to have fun and fight other faction players there.
Now (but I might just be unlucky), I only meet guilds of competitive players, with a precise schedule I can’t follow, or guilds of depressed people I don’t want to hang out with because I don’t want to be depressed too.
Just like I loved being part of a bigger world, I loved being part of a bigger family. And this sensation is now gone. At least on the big server I’m playing on, and moving to another server costs too much money.
- A big empty world
World of Warcraft’s map is huge. I mean, really huge. I have so many memories of every region that I sometimes just love to fly around, visit and explore the world to try to discover things I didn’t notice last time. But this world is empty.
The game keeps most players busy in a small bunch of regions with daily quests to do in order to keep the pace of the competitive side of the game. So much that I don’t have much time to chill in the outer world, and anyway, I wouldn’t meet any players there.
I love the pre-expansion events when you get to go back to old regions to get some rewards, fight some players, relive some good memories. I sometimes think that the wow team should just use the content they already have to create new patches, new events, new content.
In the real world, you can live different adventures at the same place and this is what makes the place so special and precious.
- The neverending story
We defeated the demons that chased the draenei through the entire universe and began the whole Warcraft story. Wasn’t it supposed to be the end ? Wasn’t it the biggest evil threat to fight ? No, there is still a bigger threat, a bigger evil.
I don’t like forever-rescaling stories. I don’t want to be a bigger hero. Give me intimate stories of love, revenge, tyrants among Horde and, why not for once, Alliance !
I loved Sylvanas, Tyrande, Nathanos, Anduin conflicts, but honestly, I don’t care about the Jailer because I never heard about it before. It might just be my personal taste in terms of stories but I think inventing a new mythology over and over is not a viable narrative solution.
I could probably dig a little more but what would be the point ? Will anyone even read that letter ? As I said, it’s fine to change and to let time do its work on ourselves. It’s just hard to witness it sometimes.
It is time I return to the real world. I wish you all the best. I am sure we will meet again in another dimension !
N. B.
