Yesterday I was taking some notes about minor details and design bits in WoW and here’s a list with smaller things, often not noticed, that this game does FAR better than every other mmorpg in the market. I think the Blizzard’s care and unmatched execution can become particularly evident from these smaller details, that are often more than details.
– Great terrain textures. Blizzard’s art direction has been praised many times, but in this case it’s the particular of the ground textures that I noticed and that I think is a demonstration of a wonderful work. No other game has beautifully painted textures as WoW (to compare with the dullness and variable quality in EQ2). It’s one particular piece taken out of all the graphic in the game that isn’t easily attainable. The one that better demonstrate the talent of Blizzard’s artists. You could criticize the cartoonish style of the art direction or take graphic bits from other games to demonstrate that something better is possible. But the ground textures are absolute, unmatched masterpieces with all the other games widely outperformed.
WoW ground texture gallery
I think the ground textures represent the very best part of WoW’s art. This becomes particularly evident when you compare the game with other games that can rival with it when it comes to render impressive environments, like Guild Wars, whose ground textures try to imitate WoW’s style but still failing to match the art quality. People may find silly that I point out a detail like this one, but the ground textures have an extremely important role on the graphic impact. Often in these games the ground textures are just repeated patterns that give a strong sense of dullness. In WoW the environments are immersive not only because of how they are modeled and varied, but also because the dull effect given by the “tiles” is removed for the most part.
The beauty of these textures is then not also due to the work of the artists, but also to the way the graphic engine was engineered. High-res textures on the terrain and long clipping planes are often enough to cripple the framerate in games with expansive outdoor locations. In WoW the textures on the terrain retain a decent resolution, the clip plane is amazing and the performance is still great. From this perspective you cannot desire more. These textures also take advantage of a pretty “shader” effect (I think it’s a specular mapping) that makes the texture “highlight” under the sun at a certain angle. Even here Blizzard’s choice is a very good and solid one. This effect is used consistently on all the textures for the terrain in the whole game, it’s doesn’t cripple the framerate at all compared to other shader effects that you can see in other games and it is also really well used to add detail and realism. So they always keep an eye to the performance of the engine, while only selecting those “fluff” effects that really contribute to the graphic impact, to then reuse them consistently.
Even when it comes to the design of the graphic engine all the smaller details are examined carefully and then added to the game only when they are truly excused and relevant. And not just thrown into the mix casually and without much though. Which corresponds to the overall philosophy used by Blizzard: toying with less elements, less “crowdedness”, less noise. But with a much higher quality standard to pass before something makes through to the game.
A game-y approach. Instead of adding complexity and delving in it, WoW took the mmorpg genre and put it under a magnifying glass to carefully examine it, simplifying as much as possible, radicalizing some elements, removing the bad-habits and the superfluous, and continuing to polish while striving for “perfection”. A model of a game where nothing is unjustified or experimental.
A detail of the graphic engine as the one I described is just a confirmation of the recipe used.
I’m also worried about “The Burning Crusade”. I fear that those artists that did those masterful pieces of art could be between those who left Blizzard to join one of the companies that recently spawned. So let’s hope that I’m wrong and that the talent is still strongly in Blizzard’s grip. Those arstists are priceless. Whoever they are.
– No artificial linked encounters. In EQ2 the designers, following a similar mindset used for Vanguard, decided to “expose” more and more the “wires”. While in other games like DAoC you can never easily tell those mobs that are “social” (so that aggro you by bringing along other mobs) and those who are independent, in EQ2 instead you can target the mob you are going to pull and the interface tells you directly if there are other mobs linked or if your target is detached and can be pulled safely alone. Actually in DAoC the “social” reaction of the mobs was often, in fact, a reaction. If you pulled solo you could get just one mob, while if you were grouped you could get more than one. In both EQ2 and WoW the pulling mechanics aren’t “reactive” in the sense that they vary depending on how many players are in the pulling group (in WoW the level of the characters affects aggro radiuses, though), but it’s here that WoW differs from EQ2 and that I think it is far superior from a design point of view.
In EQ2 it’s the interface that tells you which mobs are linked and it’s the designer to place these encounters by hand and decide those that are linked and those that are “solo”. So the mechanic is completely “external” to the game (see my OOC-design critics). You just “read” it through the interface and react accordingly. This was a major gripe for the players, in particular coming from the EverQuest Classic, since pulling and learning the encounters in that game was a puzze-game in itself, that was purged in EQ2.
WoW differs from that approach even if it keeps things extremely simple. There isn’t any “social” flag system that defines which mobs are linked and which mobs aren’t. I don’t know if there are special cases, but from what I observed the mobs simply react to a fixed radius throughout the game. If the mob you are pulling is at a close distance from another, then those mobs will run to you together. Out of that radius it will be a single pull.
The interesting design approach here is that the model is consistent throughout the whole game. Without cases that disrupt or contradict the experience. The players slowly grasp the rule because this rule is a constant, so it can be “grokked” by the players (using a term Raph used on his book to define the mastery of a pattern) even if they haven’t fully realized it consciously. It is a consistent in-game behaviour because these mobs don’t react to scripts defined by a designer, but on a somewhat “physical”/immersive element that is familiar to every player: distance. Already in the first ten levels of your character, while trying to make through a cave without aggroing the whole place, you start learning the “safe” distance between the mobs so that you can pull safely without getting more than one. And then you continue to re-apply and re-experience this rule till you have fully mastered it. Till it becomes “instinctive”. So that it’s actually about removing the filter of the interface to move closer to a “visceral” pattern.
The result of this is that “mastery”. The possibility to learn to track down mobs and pull them at the right time. Which is a so much better design choice then the one used in DAoC, where these mobs behave accordingly to rules that are hidden to the players (leading to frustration and a not-consistent game), and the one used in EQ2, where the wires are blatantly exposed.
Terrain inclination and physical barriers. Here DAoC is another example of how-not-to-do-it and WoW a good example about how to make it work, also directly linked to the previous point. In the “New Frontier” overhaul to the PvP zones, DAoC’s designers decided to add tactical elements and a better role of the terrain in the mechanics by creating zones that could not be passed and one-way barriers (cliffs, valleys etc..). The idea is not a bad one, but the implementation, as it not rarely happens in DAoC, was awful. The reason of the failure of this mechanic was that these barriers were arbitrary.
Those barriers were placed by hand by the zone designers following their own tactical reasonings that could have been good or wrong, but the problem was that they became “invisible walls” that the players could not figure out consistently. You just couldn’t guess where you could expect a “wall” and where you could instead manage to move through. As you can imagine this can be truly frustrating and the players ranted constantly about it for that reason. The “feature” was also even more crippled by another bad implementation. These invisible walls not only prevented you to pass, but they also made your character stop moving completely, so that you had to turn in the other direction and then move again, removing the possibility to “slide” against the wall to find an “opening”.
This was an engine limitation in DAoC (I could be wrong, though). The game didn’t allow to create one-way physical barriers. Or you had a zone border (so a two-way block) or you could run even up a cliff at full speed (actually much faster since speed was only horizontal and didn’t factor the verticality).
Often WoW is mistaken on this aspect. Some players think that it’s the texture that gives cues about where you can go and where you cannot, but the texture is not an active part of the mechanic, nor the one that is really utilized by the players. It’s the engine of the game that automatically determines the places where you can go from the places where you cannot, depending on the inclination of the terrain. It is then the world editor that the designers use to also pick the appropriate textures.
Even here the mechanic, as for the one ruling the behaviour of the aggroing mobs, is consistent. The behaviour is a constant that the players can slowly grasp and then reuse naturally. At a glance I can tell you where my character is probably able to walk and where I expect to “slide back”. I can guess where there are the passages and where I could try to “push”. This because while playing the game I’ve learnt to parse the concept of terrain inclination and it is now a spontaneous guess that can happen without me actively trying to have coscience of it. Like for the “distance” concept used to figure out which mobs I’m going to aggro with a pull, the “inclination” is another physical, consistent and familiar element that all players can grasp and reuse.
It is consistent because both the “inclination” and “distance” are elements coming from *within* the game and not out of it (like a script or a flag). And “game-y” at the same time because instead of striving for a simluation, they decided to simplify and reduce the pattern to just one, easy to grasp, element that is a constant used then for all the encounters. So they picked ONE element out of hundreds possible (game-y), while choosing it *within* the game world (intuitive for the players and coordinated with the “immersion” in the virtual world).
There isn’t even the need for visual cues that tell you where you cannot go because the textures change from zone to zone, while it’s the terrain inclination to be the constant. So the element that is always reused and that can be grokked more naturally and then applied effectively.
Even here game design is carried over to the game engine to support features and behave consistently. And it’s again another great demonstration of Blizzard’s flawless execution.
– No mindless fetch quests. What? No fetch quests? WoW is filled with fetch quests, why I say it has none?
Because it is true. In the sense that there are no quests whose only purpose is to make you waste time by walking from point A to point B. This mindset is simply missing from the game. There aren’t unexcused quests as a pretence of making you waste time with unfun bits of the gameplay (to an extent). It would be stupid to add a quest whose only purpose is to make you walk just to waste time and, in fact, WoW usually avoids this.
There are instead PLENTY of mmorpgs out there who use the fetch quest exclusively as a time waster. A good example is again DAoC, where the latest two expansions had a vast amount of mini-quests (tasks) whose only purpose was to be a time waster (see also my comments here).
In WoW, instead, there are no deliberate and exposed “time wasters”. At least if you don’t consider the whole game as one. To explain better, WoW uses “fetch quests” but with a precise function within the game. Never unexcused (see the constant?). These fetch quests are instead tools used actively by the game designers to direct the players. So their purpose is not only alien to the “time waster” idea, but also quite important in the dynamics of the game.
These fetch quests are often used to conclude cycles and make your character travel to new zones where its adventure will continue. They highlight a path and lead the player by hand. So it’s not just about completing a boring task that the quest asked you, but about building “narrative bridges” (or “rails”), used to connect the various locations and stories in the game and avoid the player to feel lost and clueless or move out of where he is supposed to be.
The quests aren’t just a method to deliver content in this game, but also as a learning process to let the players slowly discover the possibilities the game has to offer. And that “learning mechanics” becomes then on its own the very best form of gameplay that the game has to offer (and with an awful replayability since you can only learn stuff once).
And it’s another great example of how even the most stupid form of quest in WoW retains a strong role and function that works so well that is often not even noticed.
A well-oiled game. A masterful engine.
