I was thinking about this today while talking to a friend of mine. One thing that I've been noticing and learning over the past few years is that games that are coming out these days are designed with "persistent" content.
Persistant content to me would be:
- A list of quests that become available every day.
- A reward that can be obtained every few hours (ie it has a cooldown).
- Gear with random stats that can potentially drop better itemization if you keep playing.
- Multiple increasing difficulties of content (M+ system, raid system).
- Multiple tiers of crafting recipes.
Finite content would be content that, once completed, would not need to be done again.
It seems to me that one of the staples of wow's current design involves a ton of persistent content. It's not just wow though. Think of any mobile game made in the past year or so, that is built upon a "free to play, but pay to win" model. Most of the "good" games that have come out in recent years have a ton of "daily" content that bombards you with a recurring deadline that pressures you to play a certain amount every day in order to maintain your resources.
I think the trend towards this game design is one of the main things that has put me off of WoW lately. I'm not sure when exactly it started, but I know for sure that one of the main reasons I don't play some of those games anymore is because of the artificial stress that gets put on me to keep playing even when I don't feel like it.
I think one of the main things that attracted me to original/vanilla wow was that I could put the game down for days or weeks at a time, and come back to it and just pick back up where I left off. You can still do that, but there's still that psychological element that if I'm not constantly playing, I'm "missing out" on something important. Also, when I log in, there's a psychological element of feeling pressured/forced to complete a series of tasks before I can do something else. This ultimately creates an artificial form of stress and anxiety on the player that was never present in earlier versions of the game.
I think that might be my biggest issue with current wow's design. There's a huge emphasis on "persistent" content, and one thing that keeps me from wanting to play these days is that sense of anxiety I get of feeling "sucked back in" to the game and feeling pressured and forced to keep up with all the daily and weekly activities. At some point it starts to feel more like a monotonous job, and less like a game that I wanted to just play for fun. It's alright for a little while, but as time progresses, it starts to feel like a burden.
One thing that I really loved about classic wow was that you could just log in and do whatever you felt like, without feeling like you had to do something else first before you could start doing something you really wanted to do instead. Additionally, I sincerely felt that if I did a certain thing long enough, at some point I could completely check it off my list, and I would never have to go back to it. This gave me a sense of accomplishment and closure, where as persistent content is constantly reminding me that nothing I do will "stick".
I have been thinking about this lately, and I wonder how other people feel about the differences between persistent versus finite content.