WoW Factor: Is this the time Blizzard’s changes stick?

Well, folks, I promised you that this week I would talk about my further impressions playing through the Legion alpha. But then I spied a rather fascinating post about the state of the game and the changes being wrought upon World of Warcraft (with thanks to fellow writer Justin and his excellent blog roundup), and it wound up more or less writing a column for me in simultaneous response, agreement, dissension, and clarification. Which is, to be fair, all stuff that comes into play with the Legion alpha, so it’s sort of similar.

If you’re not buying that, don’t worry; we’ll have nothing but the alpha to talk about for a long while. I’ll revisit the topic.

It’s not exactly controversial to say that WoW has changed a lot over the years of its existence, seeing as that’s a statement of fact rather than opinion. I’ve watched one of my favorite specs go from punchline to raid support to heavy DPS to PvP powerhouse to mediocre DPS, and each time it has gotten just a little bit weirder. So why do things need to change so much? Is it helpful to the game? Do we really have any promise that this is the time everything stays the same?

Feed a cold, starve a fever

The funny thing is that the biggest problem that Blizzard has is its madcap attitude toward change. The studio is never willing to tweak. It’s always eager to change too little or not enough.

I’ve gone on record saying that I’m on board with most of the Legion changes that we’ve seen so far. As a whole, the changes bring the classes and specs more in line with what they’re supposed to be in the first place. Losing Metamorphosis on Demonology means losing a big spec-defining ability, but it also means losing a big spec-defining ability that arguably didn’t make a whole lot of sense within the spec to begin with. Specs like Enhancement that have long suffered from a lack of design attention are getting solid design with actual goals now. They’re good changes, on average.

But they’re also big changes with no increments to them. Demonology Warlocks didn’t have time to get used to the idea that the spec would no longer feature Metamorphosis, and the game hasn’t slowly changed the play mechanics to support the change. It’s just a sudden declaration that this ability is going away and the spec is changing.

One has the sense that this was not always the case. Major class revisions have happened forever; vanilla had a patch each dedicated to revising one of the game’s nine classes, while The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King both had major revisions to each class and spec. The difference was that those changes seemed to be made with an eye toward adding abilities, that even if you lost something cool in the process you gained something equally neat or neater. Over the years, the shift has been to emphasize what’s being lost, that major aspects of the class will just change with harsh delineation.

I maintain that the changes we’re seeing are good, but they’re also sudden, and they’re coming on the heels of an expansion that explicitly sold itself on gutting classes with an eye toward “unnecessary” abilities. Combine that with Mists of Pandaria‘s “let’s change nothing” attitude and it’s hard to feel that these changes have much staying power.

Once, it felt as if choices about design were made with an eye toward the long-term health of classes and the game’s play environment. Now they feel sudden and unprompted. And the same can be said about expansion features that come and go with alarming regularity. The idea that Garrisons are so quickly discarded gives the feeling that nothing outside of Legion will care about what happens in Legion, and why should it? Those systems are being created, large and involved, then thrown away as soon as we step out of that area.

It’s the two extremes. Change nothing or change everything; by no means should things be gently tweaked over time. Absolutes.

Will it stay?

If the new expansion had announced Artifacts and no level cap increase, I would have actually been far more hopeful about the changes sticking around.

Cataclysm really rewrote the book on how the game worked. Before Cataclysm, it felt that there were certain fundamental rules governing how the game worked and what was functionally inviolable. The old world was the old world, and it had an anchoring quality. Talents worked a certain way. Cataclysm was willing to rewrite the entire old world and one of the fundamental aspects of leveling in a major way… then throw it away after just one expansion.

In short, it sent the message that nothing needs to last past a certain point. Every system, however fundamental, can be made to work for one expansion and then discarded. In Garrisons, we see the largest system yet that is going to simply not matter moving forward.

Had we just gotten Artifacts added, I would have seen that as a sign that the game was letting go of levels and embracing a different method of progression. Certainly leveling an Artifact weapon serves as progression and ticks all of the necessary boxes. There’s no real reason the game couldn’t simply stop the level marker at 100 and use Artifacts as a new form of progression moving forward; future expansions could easily give specs a choice of artifacts or new pieces of artifact gear, allowing players new and interesting choices about progression that aren’t tied to simple level.

But there’s a level cap increase, and that leads to the near-painful certainty that whatever we’re doing now is just going to be forgotten once we move on to the next expansion. We’ll lose all of those Artifact abilities, but it’s all right, the ones people care about are going to be baked back into the core abilities and the rest will be forgotten, because what does it matter?

Remember the Draenor perks? Are those even thought about within the development team? Are they brought up? Or are they going to be discarded as well?

But again, the biggest problem here is that there’s no incremental element to any of these changes. We don’t slowly move from one element to another; we jump haphazardly from one new system and new design philosophy to another. That’s why the mood before an expansion feels so unreliable, why it’s always an open question whether or not a given change is going to stick around or just flit off when the next expansion comes calling.

For all of the positive changes I see with Legion, the biggest refrain I see from players over and over is that no one wants more things to change. Even Enhancement players are happy enough with our current rotation, and while I’ll be the first to say that the spec needs something more, I also understand being willing to just leave well enough alone. There’s that constant and oppressive feeling that it’s just changing for now, and whatever you like now won’t stick around through to the next time.

The worst part, of course, is that you can’t go back. Creating a sense of permanence requires years of effort, and the fact is that the game had that sense and lost it. A new foundation takes time to set in, and if the developers were interested in doing that, they wouldn’t be creating another expansion meant to create a new foundation until the next one happens.

You see it in interviews, even: the idea that subscriptions are just cyclical and don’t stick around. It’s a self-feeding misconception that conveniently frees everyone involved from considering how the actions of the development team might affect player retention, this idea that players sort of float in and out over time. And then another wave of new developers come in, progress on the next expansion slows further, and it’s time for another top-down revision to the game’s systems with the assumption that that must be the issue here.

All of which means that it’s very hard to play the Legion alpha without looking at every fun toy and asking when it’s going to be taken away.

As always, feedback is welcome down in the comments or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next time around, yes, further non-meta impressions of the expansion testing.