Welcome to the WoW Weekly Design Corner! In this editorial series I (Mezzy) look at different parts of WoW and see how I would design the next new thing, or perhaps improve upon it.Today we’ll be taking a look at dailies and world content.
In the past 2 expansions we’ve gone through all types of degrees on dailies and more recently exploration content in the form of treasures. In Mists of Pandaria we started out with a huge amount of dailies, then it got brought back to singular daily hubs and the unlocking of new dailies over time in the throne of thunder. We ended up in the timeless isle with many rares and treasures but no real direction which would turn out to be an experiment for Warlords of Draenor.
The problem of Mists was that at the start of the expansion there was a daily overload, you had to unlock multiple factions to do more dailies for gear and profession rewards. This burnt out people from dailies which gave some an aversion from the concept of dailies.
As you know in Warlords we had the apexis dailies which would push you into going to different areas every day where you would kill mobs, rares and destroy objectives. It would allow you to slowly grind up the reputations and see different parts of the world to prevent getting sick of the same area. Unless you got The Pit over.. and over.. and over.
One of the issues was that the reward, apexis crystals, didn’t really get you anything that was still useful by the time you had saved enough. The other issue was that there was no story connected to them at all.
Now we’re in Tanaan where we get more dailies that makes us visit different parts of Tanaan every day and we have the option to continue to do the remaining bonus objective areas if we want even more apexis crystals. At the same time we have 3 new reputations that gain rep either through dailies and a weekly quest or grinding out the Saberon mobs.
While this is definitely an improvement over what we had in 6.0, going to the same areas every day despite the added structure will burn you out quickly.
So how can world content be improved? Well for starters let’s look at what worked and should come back.
- Slowly gaining reputations through dailies and weeklys is a lot better than the passive grind we had in 6.0.
- Going into a different area every day helped prevent burnout from the same environment
- Both one time and recurring treasures were a nice extra niche to explore
- The same goes for one time and recurring rares. If anything it would be nice to see a combination of Mists and Warlords style rares.
- Reputations having rewards that still mattered by the time you got them leveled up.
- And the rotating daily npcs such as Harrison Jones in the garrison.
So let’s take these elements, put them in the next continent and give some structure to it. How should the world content look like next?
To illustrate it we can use the map of Draenor to get a better picture. Have 3 or 4 reputations that give useful gear and profession rewards along with the usual toys, mounts and pets. Have 7 different areas that are possible daily hubs each day. An npc will send you to one of them each day, and for that day you will be able to do a set of dailies in that area. Each reputation can be earned in 2 of the areas, leaving 1 reputation for just 1 area and allow thatreputation to be grinded out through mob killing.
And then finally have the rotation of these areas set just like the current profession npcs in the garrison so that you don’t get the same area 4 times in a row and every reputation has a chance to be gained equally.
Now this will eventually become boring like all content eventually becomes. However the diversity should prolong it before this does happen. Keep in mind that while you have these dailies, there will be rares and treasures out in the world as well.
Now while they will help we need more dynamic content. Which is why I would love to see world invasions being introduced to the world as well. These would be similar to the rifts in Rift. Have random invasions out in the world where you have waves of mobs attacking a certain area, ending in a mini-boss.
Helping get rid of these invasions will reward the player with a currency that they can turn in for certain items. Think of items like account bound reputation tokens. Which would allow you to speed up getting reputation with a certain faction if you feel the rotation of hubs doesn’t give you reputation quickly enough or extra reputation for your alts.
Of course that’s just one example of a possible reward, but think of items that don’t give a massive character power boost, but are useful for a while. Later patches could of course introduce new rewards to keep invasions relevant.
Which concludes how I’d design future world content. What are your own thoughts on what type of world content should be added to the World of Warcraft? Let me know in the comments! If you liked this video please subscribe and like the video to help us out. For now, I’m Mezzy and I’ll see you again next time.