In the early drafts of Meeples Together, our topics were more far-ranging and so we included case studies of things like American Football and the Dungeons & Dragons game, which were cut as we tightened up the book. Here’s another of those “lost” case studies, on the World of Warcraft MMORPG. Though it’s somewhat distant from tabletop co-ops, it’s still full of intriguing ideas for any co-op game design.
Case Study: World of Warcraft by Rob Pardo, Jeff Kaplan & Tom Chilton
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment (2004)
Cooperative Style: MMORPG
Play Style: Adventure Game, Roleplaying
Overview
World of Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG) played by millions of players scattered across many “realms” (servers). Within the game, a player takes on the role of a fantasy character, who then adventures across the world of Azeroth, fighting monsters and completing quests to level up. There is heavy interaction with other players — either as members of an adventuring party or as opponents in a player vs. player (PvP) environment.
Challenge System
The challenge system of World of Warcraft focuses on quests. The game contained 2,600 quests when it shipped, while the major expansions have added thousands more[1]. Each quest originates with a “quest giver”: a non-player character (NPC), item, or object that gets the player going. Each quest also has an objective, which is typically collecting a specific object, delivering a specific object, killing a specific monster, or talking to a specific NPC.
Some of these quests (particularly those focused on killing and collecting) might require multiple successes to carry out; for example a player might have to kill six “Blackrock Battle Worgs” to complete an early quest. In addition, quests are often chained together. Thus after a player successfully kills those six Blackrock Battle Worgs, he might then be asked to kill eight “Blackrock Spies”.
Quests are implicitly linked to a “spawning” system. This is what generates “mobs” (mobiles — which are NPCs that are meant to be killed), objects, and resource nodes. The spawning system makes the various gaming elements reappear on a timer after they’ve been killed or taken.
You put all of that together, and you effectively have a scenario system like that seen in Descent: Journeys in the Dark (2005) and other co-op adventure games. To be precise, a scenario in World of Warcraft is made up of: one or more linked quests; the mobs, objects, and resources that are necessary to complete those quests; the spawning system which ensures those gaming elements are available; and the locale where all of this goes on. For example, the Blackrock Battle Worgs and Blackrock spies, plus the two quests related to them, plus the environment that the mobs and quest givers are found in could be considered one complete scenario design. However, a World of Warcraft scenario design can also be much more complex — such as a dungeon, which might be a complicated, designed environment full of lots of different mobs, all keeping players from getting to their ultimate objective.
The clear division of a scenario into environment design, spawn design, and quest design is something that could be successfully carried over from World of Warcraft’s challenge system to something found at the tabletop. Similarly, the simplicity of an individual quest’s designs, which then layers up into a more complex whole, is something that tabletop designers can appreciate and perhaps mimic.
It should be noted that every element of World of Warcraft’s challenge system has more complexity than can be detailed here. For example, a mob might bother someone that’s not on its quest, if that person is unfortunate enough to enter the mob’s “aggro radius”. Thus a mob can simultaneously be the object of a quest, and so part of its scenario, and a more general combat threat to anyone else in the area.
Unlike most cooperative games, there isn’t really an option for the challenge system in World of Warcraft to “win”. An individual player could be inconvenienced if his character was killed, but even that is just a temporary matter. This removes a lot of the tension from the game and has the potential to hurt the game’s “flow” if anxiety isn’t maintained via some other means. It also produces a very different sort of gameplay from that found in a tabletop co-op where death (or at least loss) is on the line.
Challenge System Elements: Real-time Activation; Exploration Activation; Simulation; Random Trigger; Set Trigger; Environmental, Removal, and Interrelated Consequences; Combat and Task Threats.
Cooperative Game System
The basic quests in World of Warcraft are designed so that one player can complete them. However, there are also group quests that are oriented toward small parties of 2-5 players and raid quests that require very large parties of 10 or 25(!) players. Because of the requirements of group and raid quests, Blizzard Entertainment has built specific elements into World of Warcraft to better support groups of players playing together.
This cooperative support begins in the definitions of the characters themselves. World of Warcraft broadly defines three combat specializations for characters: tanks (who absorb damage), damage dealers (who deal out damage), and healers (who heal damage). By combining these character class specializations, a party can ensure that it’s well balanced … and thus able to take on the challenges of group quests.
However, character specializations aren’t monolithic; a lot of different character classes fit within each of these three categories. For example, death knights, druids, paladins, and warriors can all be tanks. As a result, a party can end up with very different group dynamics depending on which specific classes join up — and variability in a game means replayability in a game.
The use of categorized specializations in World of Warcraft is fairly different from the way that specialization works in most tabletop cooperative games. At the tabletop, each character tends to offer a unique advantage to the group, rather than a categorized advantage. A notable exception is Star Trek: Expeditions (2011) — which effectively categorizes its characters into the command, science, and operations specialties, while still maintaining unique skills for each of the characters in those specialties — just like World of Warcraft.
World of Warcraft further supports group play by explicitly defining a party as an in-game entity and allowing players to use controls to add members to that party. A defined group has its own private communication, but it also serves two other purposes, both important for cooperation.
First, game-defined parties ensure that the group fairly shares experience points (XP) by equally dividing them. This largely resolves the problem of “kill stealing”; in early MMORPGs (without official grouping), someone might rush in and steal a kill (and thus XP) from another member of its group, but when it’s all shared equally, this is no longer an issue.
Interestingly, World of Warcraft provides XP-related cooperative incentives for forming larger groups. Thus a two-player group shares out its experience normally, while a five-player group instead multiplies its total experience by approximately 1.4x before sharing that experience out. Perhaps this is just meant to help players feel like they’re getting some experience, even in a large group, but it also means that a large group is objectively better than a small group for total experience earned.
Second, game-defined parties allow their members to set a “looting order”, which organizes (and limits) which players take loot from monsters and when they do so. Looting order options include “round robin”, “master looter”, and “need before greed”. As with the XP division, this is clearly meant to offset the anti-competitive incentive of players just grabbing cool stuff for themselves.
More broadly, the issues of kill stealing and loot grabbing — which World of Warcraft party grouping resolves — show off an interesting tension between the cooperative nature of World of Warcraft questing and the competitive nature of the overall game, where each player wants to advance his character. We might wish for this sort of “problem” in tabletop cooperative games, but tabletop games don’t tend to have some of the advantages that World of Warcraft does for creating anti-cooperative incentives:
First, the equipment an individual character acquires in World of Warcraft represents long-term gain in a game that a player might continue playing for months or years. Comparatively, the incentives of a board game are very short-term, because they’ll disappear when the game is over except in rare cases like the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game (2013). Obviously, the long-term incentive will be stronger than the short-term one.
Second, World of Warcraft provides a pseudo-anonymous environment where players can do awful, anti-social things without apparent consequence. This situation may somewhat repeatable at the game table … if a game provides some way for players to take anonymous actions — like Battlestar Galactica (2008) does in its skill check crisis resolution.
Though adventuring parties form the ground-floor basis of cooperation in World of Warcraft, there’s also a higher level of cooperative organization. Guilds create cooperation at a larger scale: a strategic sort of cooperation, compared to the tactical cooperation of parties.
Mind you, strategic guilds also support tactical parties. The guilds are very necessary to gather enough players together to actually perform a raid — since as noted that requires 10-25 players to simultaneously engage in a quest. In fact, raids can form a cooperative goal for a guild: they’re a reason for the guild to exist in the first place.
The focus on raids also encourages higher-level guild members to help lower-level guild members to level up, so that they can participate in the higher-level activity. This leveling-up help could involve questing with lower-level characters or just giving them advice. However, once more World of Warcraft provides some programmatic support through the “guild bank”, which is a collection of equipment and money that multiple guild members can contribute to or take from. It’s a well-defined, rules-oriented system that allows for the cooperative transfer of equipment — without the cooperating players ever having to meet!
However, raiding isn’t necessary the end-all and be-all of guilds. Guild members are also encouraged to work together through “guild advancement”. World of Warcraft rewards guilds when their guild members take certain actions and work together in certain ways — and thus the players are encouraged to work together in those ways.
Even without this programmatic support and encouragement, guilds in World of Warcraft would provide the structure of trust necessary for players to cooperate together. However, through the inclusion of specific in-game elements — like raids, banks, and guild advancement —Worlds of Warcraft increases the usefulness of guilds and thus better supports the cooperation that occurs within them.
(Which is of course a methodology suggested throughout Meeples Together.)
Adventure Game System
Rather than being a cooperative game that has taken on adventure gaming trappings, World of Warcraft is a pure adventure game that has a heavy focus on both cooperative and challenge systems. Thus it includes adventure game elements like characters, equipment, experience, and leveling up.
However, World of Warcraft has actively tried to limit the amount of story that’s found in its quests, because the designers realize that players want to play, not to read. As one World of Warcraft’s gameplay director says: “We need to stop writing a [expletive] book in our game, because nobody wants to read it.”[2] It’s probably a useful lesson for all sorts of games: story and other adventure gaming elements can be interesting, but only so long as they don’t interfere with the actual gameplay.
Final Thoughts
World of Warcraft is very different from tabletop games, as it made obvious by its major systems.
First, its challenge systems are different in part because they have to react to a constant flow of players coming and going, and in part because they can use computer systems to create more complex underlying systems.
Second, its cooperative systems are different in part because many, many more people can cooperate together, and in part because those cooperators are also ultimately competitors — each of whom is trying to advance their own character. These factors results in cooperation of a different sort: one that requires competitive incentives (like multiplayer quests and guild advancement) more than it needs anti-competitive incentives.
All of these differences may put World of Warcraft far from the world of tabletop cooperative games … but it also may offer great ideas that aren’t currently being used by the tabletop world.
The World of Warcraft Team
Any modern-day MMORPG is probably built by a cast of hundreds, but three folks get top billing for World of Warcraft (2004): Rob Pardo, Jeff Kaplan, and Tom Chilton. Pardo was the lead designer of World of Warcraft and Blizzard Enteratainment’s Chief Creative Officer until 2014. Kaplan was responsible for world design and was WoW’s Game Director in the ‘00s. Chilton was responsible for PvP and other design and was WoW’s Game Director until 2016.
[1] Nutt, Christian. 2009. “GDC: Learning from World of Warcraft’s Quest Design Mistakes”. Gamasutra. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22953.
[2] Nutt, Christian. 2009. “GDC: Learning from World of Warcraft’s Quest Design Mistakes”. Gamasutra. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22953.