“Games are very rapidly solved these days,” says Ion Hazzikostas, the game director of World of Warcraft.
Hazzikostas, known to the World of Warcraft community as Watcher, has developed the 16-year-old massively multiplayer online role-playing game since 2008. On a call with WIRED, he reminisced about how, early in the history of games, before raid walk-through videos, data-mining dumps, and Easter egg maps, opacity was a double-edged sword. To explain, he swerved over to Street Fighter.
“Youd have a whole competitive hierarchy in a local arcade, a local videogame store, where there was some character that was perceived as the best or the strongest because some person in the neighborhood was great with them,” he says. But in the next town over, arcade regulars battled with different tricks, different strategies, a different hierarchy of characters. Information was fragmented, localized.
“The reality is that almost everybody was playing the game wrong,” says Hazzikostas.
These days, before a new Street Fighter releases players have researched and number-crunched with the gusto of a rocket science research lab, assembling tier lists and theorizing optimal move combos immediately posted on Reddit and YouTube. “The internet as a whole, the world as a whole, has refined the process of accelerating and socializing information, figuring out problems.” For Hazzikostas, tasked with stretching World of Warcraft into a larger and larger virtual universe, and sustaining an increasingly elusive sense of awe, that accessibility of information is both a curse and a blessing.
In its early days—fittingly for the fantasy genre—World of Warcrafts magic was deeply intertwined with its sense of mystery. It was countless gamers first MMORPG; back then, the pull it had on millions of players was in part due to the vastness of its world and the long, rocky path to top level glory. To find a party, youd stand in the city center and /shout until someone agreed to come with you. To teleport to another city, youd track down and pay a mage. To attempt a raid, groups of dedicated players relied on the age-old method of trial and error. (This contributed to the viral “Leeroy Jenkins” meme, in which a player of that name abruptly sprints into a dungeon midway through a meticulous strategy explanation.)
“There were no rules. There was no right or wrong way to play. Just you and your pet wolf, as a hunter, trying to make your way in the world and figure things out from there,” says Hazzikostas.
Swimming around in this deep, cloudy sea, players had to search blindly for open hands to hold. This feeling of being teleported into an antagonistic, unknowable world forced players to use each other as buoys.
After 30 minutes of yelling “LFG SHAMAN LVL 40” before landing in a party, Hazzikostas says, players were “much more likely to be tolerant of each others faults. You probably werent going to kick your healer who made a mistake from the group, because then youd be back to spamming chat for 30 more minutes.” If the healer kept everyone alive and was even a little nice, youd be more likely to add them to your friends list for faster leveling next time. Strong networks of friends emerged from this, players whod shift from discussing spell rotations to significant others, in text chat, third-party voice chat, or over the phone.
“Theres an inverse relationship between friction and the strength of bonds that are formed as a result of that friction or to overcome that friction,” says Hazzikostas.
Streamlined
Over the course of its life, World of Warcraft, like other still-relevant MMORPGs, has streamlined. Developers smoothed out the bumps slowing down players pathways to the high-octane stuff—live-or-die raids and fanciful new landscapes—with automatic party-finders, quest markers, simplified gameplay systems and the like. Leveling is fast, and is slated to become 60 or 70 percent faster with World of Warcrafts upcoming Shadowlands expansion. Players led much of this change, with aggressively aggregated information on forums, wikis, and walkthroughs, and the culture of optimized grinding thats now become the norm.
“Epic raid bosses were something only a small percentage of the playerbase got to experience,” says Hazzikostas of the early days of World of Warcraft. “Today, a large share—something like over half—were able to defeat the biggest multiplayer raid encounters the game has.”
World of Warcraft players are much, much better than they were back in the games early days. “Today, people are almost trained to min-max,” says Hazzikostas, referring to the play strategy of minimizing weaknesses and maximizing strengths. “The community pushes people in that direction, especially socially. Even if its not your preferred playstyle, the people who may want you in your group or may not, are holding you to some of those standards. Once its knowable, youre expected to know.” The answer to any mystery is a Google search away.
Nobody would trade the accessibility of information today for half a year stuck below level 40. But the resulting game—and the MMORPG genre, which took cues from World of Warcrafts success—started to feel a little mercenary starting in the late aughts. The game is more casual, because both developers and players made it that way, so building player-to-player connections isnt as vital. Although World of Warcraft included level-syncing and server-hopping to make it easier to play with preexisting friends, online strangers plugged into a party here or there became disposable.
Classic
In August 2019, a litmus test launched for how player behavior has changed over World of Warcrafts lifetime. World of Warcraft Classic is a separate game capturing World of Warcraft as it was close to its release in 2006. Gameplay is fantastically inefficient. (“Meditative,” says Hazzikostas). To get somewhere, you probably have to hoof it. To track down the troll youre supposed to give the tiger skins to, you have to run around and search. Even though ample guides and walkthroughs exist for World of Warcraft Classic, the game simply isnt made to be blasted through at top speed. As a result, questing feels less like a means to an end than an end in itself.
Personally, I cant play World of Warcraft Classic without add-ons—modern overlays that bring quality-of-life changes to the interface. On a second monitor, I Google specialized maps and leveling guides while ping-ponging my character from quest to quest with the other hand, never interacting with strangers. Every now and then, while Im swinging an ax against a raptor, a player might come up and ask whether I can help them complete the same quest. WeRead More – Source
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