Warlords of Draenor Thoughts
I just hit the new level cap in World of Warcraft. I think WoW has become an interesting game as a way to see a decade of evolving game design on display. There are a few things I want to look at. Quest Design In the beginning, quests were repetitive tasks where you start at point A, go to point B, kill/take/harvest something, and either return to point A or move on to point C. This structure is still what WoW, and every other game uses, but a few things have been updated. WoW is sliding ever closer to a mobile quest system. In modern and sci-fi games, this is easy, you just use a communicator of some sort to tell the quest giver you did what was required. A great example of this is Wildstar. In practice, a mobile quest system reduces the zone ping pong effect of running each path twice. I think it is a much better method of questing than the quest hub model. However, WoW generally doesn’t have cell phones, so there must be a magical or mechanical item to do this. Blizzard is in a bind if they want to keep immersion going, so Continue Reading →