Do you remember patch 1.10 in World of Warcraft?
Do you remember when they announced that 1.10 would bring weather to WoW?
Try to think back to your original reaction to the news or if you weren’t there, try to imagine what would be your reaction of your favorite MMO announced that the next big item on the patch would be the addition of rain and snow to your game? Would you be pleased? Would you be angry?
Patch 1.10 was one of the latter patch of the original WoW and had two big items in it. The first was the addition of tier 0.5 armor for the more casual players who couldn’t raid and the second and focus of the patch was the addition of weather. In fact, the patch is called Storms of Azeroth and you can watch the little preview they did back then if you’re feeling nostalgic. For my part I remember me and my friends being real excited at the idea of having weather in our game. It was one of the most exciting things to ever happen to the game for us because back then, we weren’t so focused on stats and mechanics and we only wanted to enjoy a great world.
Virtual worlds or game systems?
I’m using 1.10 to showcase the switch in mentality that gradually happened over the years in MMOs. Back when WoW launched,MMOs were as much about exploring a virtual than it was about raids, instances and all the other mechanics that are now the focus of the game. If today, Blizzard was to announce that an entire patch was centered about adding weather effect to zones it would probably generate a storm like we’ve rarely seen. Blogs and gaming sites would jump on Blizzard to ask why they would waste precious time when there’s so much else that needs to be fixed and you could probably melt the ice caps with the flames from the forums. Of course, there would be a minority glad to see the changes because they still enjoy living in a virtual world but they would be the minority.
I feel like we have lost something important along the way. You can argue that WoW 10 millions plus subscribers are proof that you need to focus on game systems but WoW popularity and name was built during a period where the focus was still on a living world. In the very beginning, most people thought WoW wouldn’t last especially since EQ2 was just around the corner but WoW rose to the top simply because people found it to be a better crafted world. People didn’t come over to WoW for the raids, they came because they enjoyed Azeroth.
So I’m wondering, could it be that the secret to the holy grail of MMOs, the WoW-killer, simply be to craft an interesting virtual world? To not care as much about the systems, raids and mechanics but simply to craft a believable world where players would enjoy spending time. In short, would I enjoy filling my screenshot folder with awesome looking scene and would I stop running simply to marvel at how great the village looks?
The short answer to your last 2 questions would be “yes”, at least for me. When I first began playing WoW in 2005, I lost track of how many hours I spent just drifting about the world. The “pilgrimage” that every Night Elf had to do from Auberdine to Ironforge, trekking through the dangers of the lvl20-ish mobs Wetlands, visiting Loch Modan’s lake and the snow-covered hills of Dun Morogh was one of the highlights of every new player. It was a pain to do with any NE alt, but you could always ask a warlock friend for a summon. I remember doing the Warrior-specific lvl30 quest near Hillsbrad Foothills, receiving my shiny blue 2-handed sword and adventuring up to Western Plaguelands, only to be stopped by a lvl50-ish adventurer that warned me I was in the wrong area for my level. Stopping in my tracks to take beautiful landscape screenshots, that I still have. The very reason why I was drawn into the game was because of these things and how my friends described the world interaction.
Nowadays, it’s all about min/max and grinding. It’s a system. It’s no longer a world. I had hopes SWTOR would prove to be a world, but it wasn’t. As long as MMOs invest in these formulas, WoW will be without a killer for a long, long time.
I’m hoping that Secret world will show the way for a future big name game in that respect. TSW will never be a WoW killer but some call it a sleeper hit and it’s based on world building before systems. I’m hoping they prove to everyone that world building pays off.
I remember riding around STV after that patch thinking of how cool it was that it was raining. Then I probably went and tanked SM Cath on my shaman, because somehow that made sense at the time. And why not? I could do it, and with no silly program to tell me that shamans couldn’t tank, I did.
For me it was ungoro crater. I remember being in a cave and watch the rain fall outside for a long time, just being impressed with the mist effects and the ton of rain falling.
My guess is: no.
I remember the forums melting down around patch 2.3 when Blizzard said they were putting quest-givers on the minimap (the prior yellow dots only appeared for completed quests). No, seriously. I’m talking massive, massive hate-filled posts about dumbing the game down and so on.
What the “community” has lost since 2004 is its (virtual) virginity. Back then, when 200k subs was a record-breaking hit, weather could be a big deal because weather was new. Everything was new because you likely never played a game like WoW before, let alone another MMO.
People would rage today against a “weather patch” because weather is an expected component of all environments. If GW2 launches without weather, people will notice. People will notice even more if it gets added in later as a “feature.” I don’t get excited about power windows and air conditioning when I shop for cars; if those are missing, that’s a deficiency.
You can’t go home again.
That is a very interesting comment. I hadn’t considered it from that angle, about it being popular because it was new and shinny. You’re making me think here. I’m pretty sure the virtual world issue is relevant but I wouldn’t dismiss your point either…
good thinking
Hi
, and yes I agree. I fell in love with Azeroth from my first step into Elwyn Forest a bit after the patch you are referring to. I always loved the idea of wandering around exploring and finding things and I think its so sad that kind of play is no more. It was a much better world in those days and so much more fun. I am a very very casual end game raider and really don’t care if I cap out my points every week or not or whether I have the absolutely best gear in slot. I would far rather have fun in game. A new character who gets her first mount will still have the celebratory ride to Redridge that all my characters have done, just because its fun. There is a saying “take the time to smell the roses” and so many would do well to remember that. Have a great day 
Of course ‘virtual worlds’ were better, and I am pretty sure that newcomers are being drawn in by that for the most part. Just look at the advertising aimed at newcomers, they don’t talk about ‘new Raid’ ‘free Epics!’ or whatever, they pretty much always focus on ‘a world filled with adventure’ etc. So if you want mass-market appeal, you’d better get your world straightened out or else make a different game type lke LoL.
Focussing on ‘virtual worlds’ would also mean (if we concentrate on Blizz) we wouldn’t have almost-asinine Blue posts like the one in
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/4940478720#8
As one of the posters said:
”
The whole point of (especially subscription based) MMORPG’s's is that you should never run out of content to begin with.
Let me formulate it differently: you’re not supposed to be able to ‘finish’ them, that’s what single-player games are for: you play them, you finish them, you shelf them.
That is also why the old term for MMORPG’s – virtual worlds – was a lot better, as somehow I doubt we would be debating ”when will I have finished the world?” or ”when wlll my characters virtual life-journey be finished?” .
”
(note that this would also mean this whole obsession of dumping people into the last Raid might warrant a second look)
Expecting a MMO to never finish is unrealistic, tbh. You would either have to raise the difficulty of content to insane levels or have a team of creative developers that would be able to push out new content almost every month. The WoW community (especially high-end guilds) have become insanely good at clearing content.
The problem with the current content is how Blizzard decided to try to appease to the masses instead of continuing with the same formula of having high-end guilds driving the need to finish content, because you also wanted to be “imba” and have “phat lewt”. Cataclysm had this change very evident. I stopped playing around the start of the expansion. 2 months ago I decided to return and try it out again. I used a scroll of resurrection to get an instant lvl80 mage and within 2 weeks, thanks to Dungeon Finder, I had enough gear and experience to jump onto raid finder to get some high-end gear and kill Death Wing. 1 week later I was actually raiding 25-man for it. I skipped the entire expansion content because there was simply no need for it. I stopped playing shortly afterward.
To be fair, the way that it was in WotLK was also wrong, where if you had an alt or new character late in the expansion, there was no realistic way to get it to raid the end content unless you had a guild that was willing to give up some gear to you. But this was mostly because of the min/max mentality that came with the raid achievement system and mods like GearScore and the current native iLvl system.
Things are so different now that the original 40-man guilds are now turning into 10-man, simply because the added strain of organizing 25 people isn’t worth the effort anymore.
Didn’t Wrath introduce the ‘Tier skipping’ with the Random LFD Heroic awarding Frost badges?
I remember plenty of people complainting during Wrath that the old system which you describe (the TBC system) being better for example.
The more important thing however is that ‘finishing the game’ is indeed not ‘supposed’ to happen with virtual worlds.
Has anybody ever ‘finished’ EVE for example, or can someone really say they’ve ‘finished’ a game in absolute terms when they have done only the raid content but couldn’t find their way in the open virtual world without a GPS system?
You can have done all of a single type of content within a virtual world, but the number of players that could be said to have ‘finished the game’ is, in a well-designed virtual world, extremely limited.
In WoW terms, we’d be talking about somebody who has
a full account of 50 characters levelled to cap,
done all the Raids with them at level-appropriate intervals,
achieved the highest possible Arena and RBG rankings in all Team sizes with each of them,
played in all the Twink brackets with them,
has Exalted in every possible faction open to them on each of them,
has all possible Achievemetns on each of them,
is gold capped on all of them
has all the Mpunts and Pets open to them on each of them
grinded out all the possible Gear and Professions/Recipes,
knows all the Quests by hard,
knows all the nodes by hard,
can quote the in-game Lore books verbatim by hard
Only then would they objectively have finished the game in absolute terms. Everything else is ‘having done enough for my personal taste’.
NetherLands, good job mentioning EVE. It’s the perfect example of a game where the community is driving the content of what happens in-game, in spite of the PvE content being added. The patches are adding more stuff to the game, while the community plays a VERY active role in keeping the Universe alive and dynamic.
With WoW, it used to be like that, but now it’s more the content driving the community. People are consumers of PvE content and JUST that, the world dynamic has been lost somewhat. I don’t think anyone can tell me, with a straight face, that what we have nowadays has a better world dynamic than the time of the Southshore – Tarren Mill battles… or even the Blackrock Mountain gank fests, where people ganked left and right.