EQ2 Vs WoW – Zone design

A really good post from Damien Neil on Q23 with which I tend to agree (he even links to one of Darniaq’s maps. It’s time for me to dig that part too, wohoo!).


Damien Neil:
In an attempt to figure out why I can’t get into Guild Wars, I fired it up again last night. After about half an hour of play, it hit me: The zone design is terrible.

Zones are filled with linear paths. Every once in a while you may hit a junction, but most of the time there’s exactly one direction you can move in. The infamous invisible walls block any divergence from the path.

Mobs stand on the paths without rhyme or reason. They’re just…there. They have no context, other than “the world is full of monsters”. Worse, half of them are buried: As you walk along, monsters literally crawl up out of the ground to fight you every few paces. You can’t avoid them, so you walk a little, fight, walk a little more, fight, repeat, repeat, repeat.

HRose is dead on about WoW’s zone design. Yes, there are bags of xp standing around, but they always have a reason to be standing where they are. This goes beyond “put ghosts in the graveyard and give the gnolls a pot to stand around” as well–there’s always context to the mobs.

The fact that virtually all of WoW’s mobs wander a little makes a difference. Yes, they’re generally leashed to their spawn point, but they walk to and fro and put up a facade of having something to do.

It’s been quite a while since I last played EQ2, but it didn’t do as good a job of this. Take the Forest Ruins zone (a small newbie yard in Qeynos). The zone contains a keep in the middle surrounded by a lawn, with a bit of seashore on the north end. You can see a map of it here.

Take a look at that map’s index of mobs. Sun Beetles on the east side of the ruins, Rock Adders on the south, Antonican Hawks on the southwest, Timber Deer on the northwest…each one of these areas has a big mass of mobs milling about. Separate, distinct, and utterly artificial. Why don’t you ever see a hawk on the northeast side of the ruins? Don’t the deer like the taste of the grass to the south?

But there’s a good side to EQ2’s design as well. The Forest Ruins is a tiny zone, but blends many different types of content. Most of the mobs around the keep are suitable for a low-level solo player, but there’s the occasional linked set intended for a group. The keep contains much tougher mobs than the rest of the zone: you need either a group or a higher level to enter it. However, you can fight your way along the river under the keep and get a look at the tough mobs standing overhead. If you enter the keep and find yourself in trouble, you might escape by jumping in the river. The passage beach to the north is only accessible through a passage guarded by tough mobs–you can get a tantalizing glimpse of it when you first reach the zone, but it will be a while before you can actually see all of it.

WoW’s zones make thematic sense, but are tactically bland. EQ2’s zones are thematically bland, but tactically interesting. Guild Wars’s zones (the early ones I’ve seen, at least) are both thematically and tactically bland.

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