Project Lore

Wishful Thinking is a column dedicated to the theorycrafting behind World of Warcraft.  No, not the number crunching madness perfected by the folks at ElitistJerks, but the features, abilities, and design ideas that the Project Lore writers conjure from their squishy pink stuff. A Perfect Example Of A Soloable Boss Please hold your comments until after reading the post.  Fallacies and design flaws will be brought to light later in the post. World of Warcraft's dungeons are absolutely fantastic.  They offer bite-sized content (at least since The Burning Crusade) for players with only an hour or so to spare.  The challenges are appropriate for the levels required, and include a healthy mix of encounters, trash mobs and loot. Sure, it may take as long as the run to create a group, but that should change with the upcoming cross-server LFG system.  I digress.  Five mans are as close as the MMORPG comes to offering a multiplayer experience that's deep and goal oriented without requiring an immense time investment.  But it doesn't have to be. Imagine dungeon designs that didn't require five players.  Heck, it wouldn't even allow a full handful of Azeroth's finest to enter.  These dungeons would be specifically tuned to smaller groups, four, three, two, possibly even a soloable dungeon.  They'd be even more bite-sized content (more pickup and play).  Challenging the group to push through smaller trash groups and requiring players to maximize the skillsets and abilities made available to them.  The inherent need for less people would mean less time forming a group.  The new creation would allow for Blizzard to easily return to a long lost dungeon attribute, non-linear gameplay.  In short, tons of benefits. The possibilities of sub five man dungeons are nearly limitless.  We'd have soloable dungeons that offer a maximum challenge for every class.  Those capable of perfecting their class would be rewarded with maximum loot, those who wipe could be locked out of the instance until the next day.  Groups could be split up – Gothik The Harvester style – and forced to help each other through the split paths.  The smaller nature of these dungeons would allow for Blizzard to implement experimental gameplay attributes for an increasingly diverse and unique grouping experience. Running with a priest, rogue and a mage?  Well then there'd be no reason to tackle that boss who drops plate and mail.  But perhaps you have to kill Big Bad Bossman because he offers the only priest, rogue, mage route to the final encounter.  That's right, done well the long lost design method could allow a group that isn't the holy trinity alternate ways through the dungeon.  Yes, a design that wouldn't require the holy trinity, a DPSers wet dream. Now on to the obvious problems with such designs.  The main problem is one of balancing.  No matter the size of the content balancing is always an arduous task.  That fact doesn't change here, and could easily become worse.  If Blizzard designed the content to accept absolutely any combination of classes, then balancing would get out of hand.  Instead the developers would have to be smart in the creation, designing the experience to only work with a subset of classes.  A subset that the players would have to figure out, the hard way.  Or they could use the multi-pathing idea to give players multiple routes to try. Another issue would be loot.  Should players be given the same ilvl of loot as a normal five man?  What about badges?  All of that should be entirely dependent on how difficult a run is – an idea that Blizzard already subscribes too.  That's the third issue, the perception that a raid would be easy, or easier, when run with classes x, y, and z.  That's pretty much the case right now - run without a Shaman and you feel that lack of Heroism – and won't change until all classes become clones of each other.  Or those special abilities are turned into items... Just do it in five man you say?  That's a reasonable point, but there are many ideas that wouldn't make sense, or even be feasible in a five man environment.  Not to mention that an attractive factor to these fun sized packages is that they'd be easier for Blizzard to create due to their minute nature.  A five man that ended in twenty minutes just wouldn't seem all that challenging, or engrossing. Blizzard's mantra lately has been that the company wants to offer content to all of its subscribers, not just the hardcore, or the casual.  Wouldn't the mix of incredibly difficult solo dungeons and smaller dungeons offer just that?  What do you think?  Would you be up for the challenge of a soloable dungeon?  Interested in experimental design and story telling mechanics?  Let's here your ideas for a sub five man group.  The best may be selected and expanded upon in the upcoming revitalization of the Design A Dungeon column.

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