This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer's very own MMO column. Every other week, I'll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we've all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.
World of Warcraft: Midnight's first season has been… well, a bit of a mixed bag. While the launch-day offerings impressed me, patch content—the major thing that gets remembered in the expansion pack history books—has ranged from rather quite good to downright confusing (I still do not like the Folio).
And, to be fair, Midnight had a ton riding on it. It's the middle child of WoW's ambitious Worldsoul Saga and the first expansion where combat AddOns have been heavily hamstrung. As a consequence, every spec in the game was redesigned in some way. After 20 years of waiting, we even got player housing.
I have not envied Blizzard's position as much as I've raised my eyebrows at its choices, on occasion, and I think it's a marvel that things have pretty much gone fine. I like Prey, I've missed AddOns less than I expected, the remade Silvermoon is downright beautiful, and player housing has knocked it out of the park, bar some microtransaction nonsense.
I recently sat down with several developers from WoW, including lead encounter designers Taylor Sanders and Andrew De Sousa, as well as associate game director Paul Kubit and lead quest designer Rachel Vought, to ask them how they thought Midnight's first season had gone.
Broadly positive, is the answer—with the devs citing Mythic+, solo content such as delves, and Prey as bright spots. Kubit says: "I'm having a great time with season one. I am still this last week rounding out some of my own personal Mythic+ goals, trying to get my numbers as high as possible. But things that have been just a joy for me this first season have been—playing through Delves again, having another season of Delves to explore with a new follower Valeera … and also the addition of Prey alongside it.
"I think that the new feature of Prey, while not technically part of the traditional season, does have some seasonal elements to it, and it sort of played nicely hand-in-hand with how progress went through through delve."
That's something Vought echoes, too: "Having the Prey overlay, just doing outdoor activities, has been like such a delight—because we talk about optimizing the fun out of it, but it's like no, actually, I kind of do want the extra challenge while I'm doing my world quests, and it's a lot of fun."
Though she has been naturally psyched to revisit Silvermoon for the first time since the Burning Crusade, as well: "Going back to Silvermoon and getting to see [it updated], and getting to play through the story and all of that has just been incredible for me as a player. I've also surprisingly been enjoying delves and getting to play local stories, and obviously we're going to get more of those in Curse of Ula'tek as well. Continuing the story, the campaign, and also getting to explore the island."
While, to me, these all track as reasons to be satisfied with the current state of things—after all, I've written positively about them on this site—there's also the other side of the coin, the idea that Blizzard's breakneck pace has given players too much to do without a stern direction: Too many currencies, too many dailies, too many reputations and void assaults and delves. Kubit says:
"We always try to listen to as many players as we can in our game, and we find that—you all as players are not a monolith. You have vastly different play styles and vastly different preferences, and that means that—for as many people as who do feel that strange feeling, like 'there's too much for me, there's too much going on', there's just as many folks who are like 'I wish there was something new happening this week'.
"What we try to do on the reward side and incentive side is make sure that folks who are hungry for lots of new things to do," be it grinding or stacking cute furniture, transmogs and mounts in collections.
And, listen—while I empathise with Kubit here, with MMO audiences being particularly hard to please, I'm not all that sure this works as a simple case of taste. I've played other MMOs that simply give you a wide breadth of things to do, but WoW places a lot of these activities in a package of seasonal pressure. Daily and weekly checklists that will, at some point, become undesirable or even unattainable. The wider systems might be evergreen, but Midnight's also been laden with its fair share of FOMO.
An AddOn-less world
On the encounter design side of things, Sanders and Sousa are both enjoying getting to play in a space where a WeakAuras tech won't be able to code out a solution to everything—allowing them to rely more on memorisation, positioning, and communication-based mechanics.
Sanders tells me: "I think the encounter design team has been learning a lot as we try to design mechanics, in this new paradigm where players have, in many ways, less computational help in terms of the information they're getting in real time, and trying to understand what types of new mechanics players might enjoy in that world.
"You saw us experiment with this a little bit in the L'ura encounter, the final boss of Midnight, with the runes and the symbol mechanic," Sanders is referring to Death's Dirge, here, where L'ura marks players with an order of symbols that have to be struck by a laser in the correct configuration.
"It was fun for me as a designer (and as a player) to see different social groups that I played with, whether it was a pug or my standard raid group, develop different strategies to that. Each group had their own personalized way of handling it … I did hear about a group that had five different people remember the different symbols and repeat them in order. That blows my mind. I can't believe that that worked for a group. A friend of mine told me about that. I'm not sure I believe him."
That same design technique's going to be used for patch 12.1, as well: "We have a couple new places where we're experimenting with this in the Curse of Ula'tek update in the new raid, the Venomous Abyss, and as well in the new delves nemesis boss … You're going to continue to see us explore that a little bit as we try to find new ways to engage players in an AddOn-less world."
Sousa, meanwhile, says that the amount of players trying Mythic+, which has reached new records during Midnight, is also down to the lowered barrier to entry: "That's really affected even our core design for something like dungeons and Mythic+.
"You know, as you're aware, Mythic+ was very, very accessible in Midnight season one. Players are jumping in and really enjoying it. And in a world where we've pulled these things back, our design has allowed for us to emphasize some core skills, and not worry about the delta between folks that have complex add-ons and people that are playing with the base game, so we're seeing people engage a lot deeper as those (perceived or not) requirements have been lifted."
Sanders agrees, saying: "We've seen the package that players felt like they used to need to be able to, baseline, raid or do competitive PvE content shrink or or disappear entirely. So the base UI for the game is better than it's ever been, and we're very excited about continuing to develop that in the future."
Ultimately, the new state of affairs that WoW has laboriously constructed seems to be working for its development team—and while I'm not entirely convinced it's been all sunshine and roses, speaking as someone who has felt the exact opposite in my other MMO of choice, I can't say I prefer it when a developer plays it safe. On balance, I'm still glad WoW's been shaking things up, and I'm keen to see if Blizzard can keep refining its flagship MMO going into Curse of Ula'tek next week.
