I've made my feelings pretty clear on how game developers simply don't make instances on the size and scale of a Blackrock Depths (Classic WoW) or Garth Agarwen (LOTRO) anymore. Instances are now designed as bite-sized chunks for a quick dopamine rush, where the fun is less an experience of an epic place but more of a test of skill in your speed at completing the instance.
I was thinking about this last night when I responded to Kurn's blog post from Sunday, in which she asked what was people's favorite Classic WoW instance. While I ultimately chose Deadmines as my favorite because of its status as a gateway drug (and the conclusion of the main Defias story throughout the Stormwind territory), I have to give plenty of props to the "big guns" of Classic WoW instances: Stratholme, Blackrock Depths, and Blackrock Spire.
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| By comparison, Scholomance is a short instance. |
Compared to modern instance design, those Classic WoW instances --well, most of them save for Dire Maul and Scarlet Monastery-- are gigantic places that were meant to be living, breathing locales. The devs took their cue from RPGs and the big dungeons found in tabletop games, such as Expedition to the Barrier Peaks or The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, and created expansive places to explore. Yes, you had to make multiple forays into a lot of the instances to complete quests --not just for loot-- and more than one of them were informally gated by level difficulty, such as Uldaman, where if you did the early portion at-level you'd find yourself vastly underpowered at the end of the instance.
Over time, however, these strengths of the older instances grew to be looked at as less than a key feature and more of a bug, and were consequently smoothed out of dungeon design. I suppose you could say that as MMO design focus changed from the leveling journey to endgame raiding, instances grew to be looked at as a stepping stone for the player. With the introduction of timed challenges (Retail WoW's Mythic Plus) and perpetually increasing difficulty modes, instance design is now far more about the mathematical and skill-based exercise of speed and precision rather than the integration into a game world. At that point, instances have grown to be looked at as an endgame in itself, complete with a story-mode (with or without AI-assisted NPCs) all the way to a perpetually increasing challenge mode (Mythic+).
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For all the speculation of a Classic Plus to Vanilla Classic WoW, and for the record I am still highly skeptical that a true Classic Plus is coming*, one of the hallmarks of anything that would classify as Classic Plus would have to be a return to grand, sprawling instances. If Blizzard were to put all of the Classic Plus content after the Naxxramas raid, then the vertical progression would kill off any real sense of a Classic Plus. It would just be an alternative to the official WoW timeline but keeping all of the problems contained therein.
Of course, I am in a pretty small minority here, because the popularity of the modern instance design speaks volumes. When most people talk about Classic Plus, they speak of "NOT the official timeline" rather than "more stuff for the leveling journey" in Vanilla. It's a reaction to how things are now and deciding that taking another fork in the road is a better idea.
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| From the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Relics". (via Tenor). |
Answering the question "What does Classic Plus mean" will go a long way toward understanding what Classic Plus we might get, and knowing the Blizzard of today I'm not sure I trust them to answer it in a way I'd like.
*I believe that it's equally likely that Blizzard would announce the ability for people to purchase their own private server software so they can host "official" Vanilla WoW versions. Blizz might even allow those purchasers the ability to manipulate some things, such as difficulty levels and buffs/debuffs to players and mobs to make the experience easier or harder. If there's one way to kill off the private server market, it's that.
Blackrock Depths all the way for me. That is the sort of instance design that was completely punted after vanilla.
ReplyDeleteYes, the nub of the "classic plus" issue is that it means whatever people want it to mean. You can find and argue with people who will say that Season of Discovery was, in fact, classic plus.
On the private server thing, allowing users to run it stand-alone is probably a non-starter. The parts you need to unpack and stub out and still make sure things work like a professional effort... that is a non-trivial amount of work that I don't think you could convince MSFT to fund.
But renting servers for you and your buddies... using the current servers and letting you log into a special shard with your own settings... and maybe even your own choice of expansion level... I bet MSFT would chew on that given their success renting Minecraft servers.
I will say that at least some of the instances in TBC (and to a lesser extent Wrath) did have a bit of an epic feel to them, but by the time Wrath came around the "multiple wing" instance design became more in vogue and consequently the instances were shortened accordingly. Longer instances, such as The Old Kingdom, were the ones that people would immediately drop if they discovered that was the random instance they got in the Dungeon Finder.
DeleteI honestly think the latter idea of a special shard for your friends will be the way to go, because a purely stand-alone would be a LOT of work. I do think that if cost is no object Microsoft would be interested, but that cost will be really high to offset any potential loss in revenue. Blizz hasn't forgotten that WC3 spawned the MOBA game style, and they still wish they had all that money in their pockets.