All That's Past is Prologue

Sometimes I wonder if Blizzard's legacy of an RTS game developer has unduly influenced their World of Warcraft expansion design.

Oh, not that WoW is going to turn into an RTS, despite what a subset of the player base might want, but where --or more precisely who-- the emphasis is on in an expansion.

Compared to some RTS games, such as Age of Empires, Blizzard's RTS design incorporates leaders into a story and makes them the central part of the story the Warcraft and Starcraft games told. Sure, you're there as the player, but the story revolves around these central characters. 

From Starcraft Remastered, you can
see that the leaders are incorporated into the
mission design and not just cutscenes.
From resetera.

Not only did the polish and gameplay set Blizzard's RTS games apart, but the stories they told influenced their design of the Diablo games as an action RPG with a defined plot.*

From Diablo 2 Resurrected.
Screencap from Ars Technica.

Blizzard's second last RTS game, Warcraft III, went all in on the story and leaders, where more RPG elements were added into the RTS design than ever before, more tightly integrating the story with the RTS game itself. 

So Blizzard did something unexpected, they pivoted and created an MMO that doesn't have any of those central design tenets.

***

The release of Vanilla World of Warcraft was not only a departure from Blizzard's RTS core, but a change in design emphasis. Sure, there are faction leaders and other important personnel around throughout Azeroth, but the game design didn't revolve around them. There wasn't a main story in the same way that other Blizzard designs had, but a bunch of smaller stories that were strung together with quest chains. Instead of a tightly integrated story with an emphasis on the leaders as main characters, the player was the main character in a vast world with minimal emphasis on the heroics of the few people in charge.

I guess that wasn't bound to last, because a decentralized game world wasn't in Blizzard's DNA. 

It took a few expansions, but by Wrath of the Lich King WoW had pretty much returned to the Blizzard fold in that the leaders and a central story were tightly integrated into the game, and it's been that way ever since. This is what Blizzard is most familiar with developing, and your job as the player is to basically facilitate the story that the faction leaders are involved with. Like or hate the story, this is the pattern that formed in the Warcraft and Starcraft games, and that is what Blizzard knows best. 

People --myself included-- rail against the so-called lobby-based nature of Retail WoW, but when you consider it is the spiritual successor to the earlier RTS and ARPG games that built Blizzard's reputation, it's not a great surprise. When you throw in the lobby-based story found in shooter games such as Call of Duty, Blizzard is providing what they believe gamers expect out of a game. 

In the same manner that turn-based isometric RPGs are tightly integrated into Larian Studios' business, what we are seeing out of Retail WoW is in Blizzard's. It would take a monumental effort to break out of that design philosophy, and I'm not altogether sure it would be a good idea for Blizz at this point to do so. As much as I prefer Classic Era, Blizzard's fanbase doesn't expect that decentralized, non-story-driven design out of them. They expect lobby-based story beats with an emphasis on the faction leads and the other chief protagonists. If anything, the leveling process in the game world is the anachronism here: it's a nod to an era when Blizzard broke out of what they did best as a company to try something new with different design parameters, and Blizzard can't bring itself to shed that vestige of it's old MMO design. Instead, Blizzard uses the leveling process to move the story from the introductory phase to the "why" of group content at the end; it's not an end in itself, as it was in Vanilla WoW, but in service to the endgame, which is where the real story in Retail WoW begins.

No, I was NOT going to put that line from
South Park in here. If you want it, you can go
find it via a quick search. From YouTube.

It is kind of funny in its own way that the Retail WoW player base argues about details in expansions such as systems, whether the group content is any good, or the quality of the story, but they have simply accepted the larger design philosophy as-is. What you see out of Blizzard now is what you will get, because they have no incentive to try anything truly new. Even Season of Discovery isn't that new; it's just a reshuffling of the cards, as it were, but keeping the same basic design in place. Since Blizzard is now the "MMO and Action RPG developer" in Microsoft's stable**, they are most likely destined to stay in their lane and only work on those items. If you've a dev team that wants to try something new, don't expect to find yourself under the Blizzard arm of Microsoft Game Studios; you're better off going independent.

*Yes, I know, I'm not that fond of the plot in Diablo. There's a lot more "action" and a lot less "RPG" in the Diablo games. That doesn't mean there's no plot, however; "no plot" is more akin to playing Gauntlet than Diablo, despite the mechanics' similarities.

**Apologies to The Elder Scrolls Online, but Zenimax/Bethesda is known for first person RPGs, not MMOs. In my opinion, it wouldn't surprise me if ESO eventually gets moved under Blizzard because "they're the MMO developer" for Microsoft. Never mind the game world or the corporate culture; there's always a bean counter somewhere who wants things to align perfectly under their proper silos.

What Might Have Been

This YouTube video was posted only this morning (my time), but...

The Baldur's Gate 3 music is kind of surprising.

They could have gone with, say, Elwynn Forest

and it would have been better in my opinion.

Yes, I realized that it was done in the same vein as Baldur's Gate 3, but I have to admit that this little 2 minute video underscores just what an RPG set in the Warcraft universe would look like.

The thing is, I'm not sure whether Blizzard could actually create a good CRPG based on WoW. What your character is --and is capable of-- in WoW is vastly different than in an RPG such as Baldur's Gate. You're practically a walking demigod in Retail WoW, whereas you'd have to scale back everything to you being pretty much a nobody in a Warcraft CRPG for it to work well.

I'm not trying to put my biases from Retail WoW here, it's more that I've played a few pencil-and-paper RPG campaigns where you start out as a big ol' hero and... Well, it just doesn't work well. It's much easier to build yourself up from zero to hero and have a satisfying campaign rather than essentially starting out as high level (or high society) and trying to figure out the world when you're already supposed to be an expert. When you start like that, the DM ends up doing a lot of the heavy lifting as you get up to speed, and you frequently feel like you're watching the DM play with themselves for hours at a time. 

If Blizz were to swallow some humble pie and create a story that starts with a bunch of nobodies or lowbie types and follow an arc like in one of the Baldur's Gate, Pillars of Eternity, or Neverwinter Nights CRPGs, yeah, that'd work. Although knowing Blizz, they'd probably model it after one of the Divinity games but amp up the power scaling very very quickly.

EtA: Corrected grammar.

Who's the Hero Now?

While I enjoy reading about the WoW lore, it may surprise some people to know that I'm not a big fan of the books.  A great deal of my indifference is due to the design decision in Azerothian lore to emphasize the leaders at the forefront of everything.

Look at it this way: if you're out questing in the L1-L60 areas of Azeroth, when you report to a faction leader, it is a "big deal".  Sure, you can show up at any of the capitals, walk right up, and dance around Sylvanas*, but actual interaction with the story is fairly rare.  The emphasis, naturally, is on you as the hero.  You're out in the field, interacting with people who report up the chain to the faction leaders.  Now, there are third party groups out there you interact with, such as the Cenarion Circle and the Argent Crusade, but the lion's share of quests come from the two factions.

This format makes sense, because the faction leaders are consumed with less of the day-to-day and more  nation building and maintenance.  There are advisors and councils who deal with other things, such as the war effort.

Historically, by the time we reached the Age of Enlightenment it was a rare sight to see a monarch in battle, and a monarch having adventures was unheard of.  Monarchs weren't the strongest, most powerful, or most intelligent people in the nation, but their bureaucracies ensured that they didn't need to be.

Azeroth, on the other hand, has a bizarre environment.  In the time of WoW, Azeroth has lost a great deal of its population, but at the same time has tons of toons when a server is busy.  There are Native American inspired cultures and "the strongest rules" medieval type of societies, but also has the trappings of Steampunk and the later Victorian Era.  These are huge continents, but near instantaneous travel via portals is a reality.  And yet the societies don't have any cross pollination, despite the forces at work.

This is a world where --if you follow the books and the lore-- you have the faction leaders and their equivalents going off on adventures.  They are the focal points, because they are the strongest, the most powerful, the most intelligent.  In some respects, this is a lot like a David Eddings series.

And like a David Eddings series, after a while it starts to feel like a who's who of people at the top.  The rest of the Azerothians don't exist, except as a bunch of red shirts.

I suppose I can't blame the books, given that the authors are working within Blizzard's constraints, but it just doesn't feel right.  WoW has taken the focus of the game away from the folks at the top and given it to us, yet the books are still stuck in Warcraft 3 mode.





*Not to mention the inevitable question why you'd do such a thing.  Unless you have a death wish or something.

Kicking things off

Hopefully this will be a fun project to talk about gaming, specifically the World of Warcraft from two points of view.

Recently my wife and myself returned to Warcraft and one of my wife's livejournal friends got suckered into trying the game. As we all know it's a slippery slope and he's well on his way.

Having somebody come into a game that's going on 5 years old and having a somewhat innocent (for the lack of a better term) view on the game got me curious about starting a blog with two points of view on various WoW topics.

So, to kick things off, I thought a general synopsis of race and class balances across the various servers would be interesting.

Using warcraftrealm.com's census tools we can see some interesting trends. This is showing 3,010,592 total characters. This data is only that which has been submitted by specific people using an addon on that tracks the census, however it still serves to give a basic snapshot of the population and various trends.

Level 80 population by race


18%-------9%-------9%-------36%-------29%



33%-------14%-------21%--------9%------22%

Level 80 population by class (both factions)



15%-------10%-------9%-------9%-------13%


--9%-------8%-------8%-------8%------10%
So what sort of conclusions can we draw from this?

Alliance players must lack imagination. Who wants to join a fantasy world and create a human?
Also, you can see how much love the dwarves and gnomes get. Even the new guys on the block are more popular than them. I guess people like space goats.

Horde players got a, as my wife puts it, "pretty" race and they're all over it. The newest race to the Horde also holds the highest population. I was not surprised by the Troll population. Nobody likes Trolls, seriously. I was surprised to see that the Orc population was that low in comparison to the others.

Now we get to the classes and no surprise there. You guessed it. Death knights are the king of the castle currently. And why shouldn't they be? They're the new fancy class. Also, as a side note, 41% of the DK population seems to be either Human or Blood Elf.

What would be an interesting chart to see is how many main spec varieties there are of the different classes. In other words, how many healers, tanks and dps are floating around out there.