Patch 7.3 - Vile Fiend Mount, Patch 7.3 - Heirloom Neck, Tweets, DLC #595

Back when you were working on WoW, how much did the concept of “theme park” vs “sandbox” influence the drawing board? Did you guys identify with one side more than another on a scale, or did you consider WoW to be it’s own entity, and introduce features to fit the current trend of gameplay?
WoW followed the theme park philosophy pretty strongly. Before WoW, MMOs were much more about creating an “interesting” (quotes intentional) world in which players could go find “fun” things to do. But often that fun devolved into grinding mobs. WoW was explicit about constantly providing directed gameplay, largely through quests. Rather than the quests petering out and reaching the point where you have to grind, in WoW the quests just never ran out. There are even way more quests than you need in order to reach max level, and increasingly there are even quests at max level. Quests aren’t even the only system that provides stuff for players to do.

Beyond just WoW, I’ll be a little controversial here and say that I worry that the importance of sandboxes to successful game design gets overstated. I’ve also noticed that it is game reviewers who get really excited about open-ended gameplay, and I’m sure part of that reason is because they have to play through so many games at a frenetic pace that something where they get to set the rules is appealing.

And I do get the appeal of sandboxes. It’s just that so often the game can’t often deliver on the massive expectations of what a sandbox really is. I get really bored of games where I have to go find the fun or invent my own fun, usually because games can’t ever really deliver on “Anything that you can conceive, you can do.” Instead I always find myself bumping into the limitations of the system. I can’t really be a thief who just survives stealing from other players. I can’t really be a merchant or a politician or a prophet because the game systems aren’t robust enough to support that. Minecraft lets you make ridiculously elaborate architecture. GTA is funny when the cop AI collides with semi-realistic car physics. But both are still pretty limited in terms of sandboxes.

(My favorite game is D&D, where a human dungeon master does allow you to do almost anything you can dream up. Computers are far behind.)

I could talk a lot about Breath of the Wild. It is a fantastic game. But I also do get bored sometimes when I climb a mountain just to find nothing interesting up on top. Yes, it’s great that the game lets me climb any mountain. That freedom is amazing. But I’m going to stop doing it if I keep finding boring mountaintops. Watching the different systems interact in ways that you would expect (”Lightning is attracted to metal!” “Bombs can move things when they explode!” is fun to witness and maybe entertaining from a creative expression standpoint. But that doesn’t automatically make it fun. I still want something engaging. If it can be an engaging open world game, great. But if it’s just an open world game, I’m going to move on to another game quickly.

I completely realize this is personal preference, but I’d rather designers give me an experience that they think would be fun for me, rather than giving me a tool set and letting me invent the fun. But I’m a guy who loves Lego, but never builds anything other than the model the boxed sets are designed to make. YMMV. (Source)