Do you have a permit for that?
Regarding this comment on my previous entry, I’ve realized that how games do expansions is not a standard thing, at all. Some games give you a ton of new content and attach it at the end, raising the level cap so that everyone has to do this new content to reach the final level. Other games simply add new zones and things to do, but don’t change the level cap at all – more content that they offer to players but don’t require. I’m sure there are other alternatives, but I’m going to explore both of these since I’ve been thinking about the merits of either in the next two posts.
With the first option, the best game example I have is World of Warcraft. (Big surprise there.) All three expansions to WoW have added a ton of new content, new zones, new abilities, new races and / or classes, and and increased the level cap. This meant that everyone who has played or who plays WoW is going to play through the new content if they wish to reach this new level cap. This makes sense if you are a game designer – why would you spend months or years of your life working on something that people then don’t play? However, there are a few rather major problems with this:
- This new content has little to nothing to do with anything the players have been working on prior to it. This was especially bad in TBC (their first expansion), because not only did you enter new zones, you were literally traveling to a different world entirely – there was no connection to the places you’d been leveling at all, aside from magical portals. And then, after 10 levels in TBC (which, because they sped up the way you leveled through the content after Wrath (second expansion) launched, meant that you only saw about 2-4 zones IN Outlands), you immediately got ferried right back to the other world. It was incredibly disconnected, and didn’t make much of any sense, especially since every expansion was designed to present one or two major threats to the world, and these threats are always usually bosses at some point in the expansion. However, now that you’re not seeing the entire content, you’re going from one major threat to another without any resolution. This was especially noticeable with Cataclysm (third expansion), when they re-did the starting zones and made Deathwing the major boss of the expansion. You now are warned about him early on, and encounter a lot of reasons why he’s bad and dangerous from levels 1-60, and then you spend 20 levels in the first two expansions’ zones and don’t hear anything at all about him…and then suddenly, you’re back in oldworld for the new Cataclysm zones and he’s super-bad again! It’s mostly silly how it was handled, and feels like everything is just being tacked on without too much thought on how these are going to weave together.
- The new content is significantly more difficult than anything the players have encountered before, and the gear and item rewards you get from it is heads and shoulders better than what you had prior to the expansion. This was done because they wanted to ensure that players went to the new content – if the promise of new quests and levels wasn’t impetus enough, now the gear is so much better it’s not even worth using your old stuff. Some of the absolute best gear you could obtain prior to the expansion coming out was suddenly replaced by a random drop you got from a bog lord in the second zone, and it basically trivialized everything you’d done prior to the expansion coming out. This was done to “level the playing field” between players when the expansion came out, so that nobody had a head start…but it also served to make any “endgame” content in the previous zones completely worthless. There’s no reason to do any of the old raids in Vanilla WoW other than “I want to see what this was like.” You’re making some content super-worthwhile at the complete expense of other content.
- Because there are new levels, you’re going to have to give players new abilities and powers to fill them. Obviously, you could simply go, “Well, Wizards have fireball and ice storm and magic missile, so I’ll just give them another rank of these at appropriate levels and that’ll be good to go.” The problem with that is that it’s boring. Players are experiencing a ton of new content, and they’re going to want new tricks and tools to interact with it with. So you have to create a bunch of new abilities that are unique and interesting, and then you give these to players during these new levels. What this means is that while you’re leveling up, you’re getting a set of tools, and you get a bunch initially, and then usually just a few additional ones as you level up, so you start getting used to how you deal with things. Then, suddenly, you’re getting a bunch of new tools and start having to drastically re-evaluate how you play. It’s also often incredibly hard to come up with new and unique abilities to give players, especially for the second or third time you have to do it, so you start redistributing other class’ abilities. This certainly helps you balance, but then you start watering down the overall experience for players – they might have picked a class specifically because they were good at X thing and now they’re no longer the only one who’s good at it, and maybe now they’re actually not AS good as another class. Class balance gets very muddled when you start adding new abilities and powers, and usually leads to a lot of headaches while you try and work it out.
I’m sure there are other problems, but these three, alone, are enough to make me seriously question why you’d want to make expansions that do these things. I’ll explore the other style of expansions next time, but I’m curious what people think about what I’ve said above. This is all from my perspective as both a player and a designer, but it just feels a little lazy. You want people to do your new stuff so, as opposed to just making it enticing, you almost force them to do it by telling them they’ll be pathetically underpowered and alone if they don’t.
