World of Warcraft at 60

I do enjoy playing World of Warcraft with my level 60 character. But I realize that this is mainly due to my guild, The Order of the Rose-Croix, which manages to strike the fine balance between being casual enough to be friendly, and being professional enough to be efficient. So while I enjoy the endgame, I can see how others might be turned off by it. WoW at 60 has a number of serious problems:

The main problem is that WoW at 60 is clearly a different game than WoW from 1-59. It is like participating in a marathon, and finding that instead of a finish line at the end there is a soccer field, where you are expected to team up and play. If you are lucky, you like both games, the leveling game of 1-59, and the raiding game at 60. But if you only like the leveling part, level 60 feels like game over. And if you only like the raiding part, then being forced to level to get there is a grind. In my opinion WoW could learn from the console role-playing games, where finishing the game would often unlock new, more exotic character classes, and thus encourage you to start over.

The second big problem of WoW at 60 is that it isn't accessible to everybody. That might come as a surprise to some people. After all, getting to level 60 is easy enough in World of Warcraft. But when you can't gain experience points and levels any more, an alternative advancement game kicks in, which consists of improving your equipment, and getting the high-end recipes and resources for crafting. And while from level 1-59 you could always chose between soloing and grouping, the level 60 alternative advancement gives you only the choice between grouping and raiding. The only thing you can solo is farming money for your epic mount, or resources and items for your alts. People who enjoyed WoW for it's soloing possibilities, and there are a lot of those, will quickly feel blocked and unable to improve their character further at level 60.

Practically the only way to play at level 60 is with a good guild. Doing high-level instances with pickup groups is a recipe for disaster. Unfortunately good guilds are few and far between. There are lots of small and ineffectual guilds in World of Warcraft, which have problems getting enough people together to regularly raid even just the smaller instances, and who will never see Molten Core. On the other extreme there is at least one uberguild on every server, with a strict military organization, raiding every day. But in such guilds you are quickly reduced to a small cog in a big machine, built for coughing out phat loot. Such guilds are often cold and unfriendly, some even kicking people out if they don't show up for raids every night. Then "playing" World of Warcraft quickly turns into "working", and soon stops being fun.

It is ironic how some people complained about World of Warcraft being too soloable, not fostering social cohesion like Everquest did. But in the endgame WoW is turning more and more into Everquest, a game where you need a huge organization to get 40 people for a raid together, and then need to be able to play for several hours in a row. The casual game, where you can log on for one hour and do something useful, ends at level 60, and that is a shame.

I don't believe that World of Warcraft will ever raise its level cap to over 60. Raising the cap would clearly cause some big problems with the current game design. The talent system is based on you *not* having enough points to get all the useful talents, and adding 10 or more points to that would unbalance it. Many of the current high-level instances are designed to be raid content, and would suffer if they could be done by smaller groups of level 70. And in the end, raising the cap isn't really a solution, it just recreates the same problem a bit later.

So what is needed is other forms of alternate advancement, which are open to casual players. Activities which you can do for one hour every evening, without a group or guild, and which still improve your level 60 character. In my opinion Blizzard made a big design blunder by tying high-level crafting to high-level instances. It shouldn't be necessary to raid to get all the high-end recipes, long multi-step quests for them would have been better. And being able to craft certain items only in the middle of a dungeon is just plain stupid.

But it seems that right now Blizzard is only planning to add more of the same type of raid level dungeons. The next patch will bring a dungeon for medium size raid groups of 20 players, which was missing. Nice for me, and whoever else has a chance to get 20 players together. But not solving anything in the fundamental problem.

If it was up to me to design an expansion set, I would add a new continent, inhabited by two races, one Alliance and one Horde, to get people to start new characters. The continent would have lots of new content for level 1 to 59, especially dungeons level 10 to 50. And it would have only very little content for level 60 characters, maybe one raid dungeon or so. World of Warcraft is a great game, which achieved a tremendous success by being accessible to the casual player. But even a casual player can reach level 60 in a year and find himself facing a different game that isn't for him. Blizzard needs to reach out to these casual gamers that make up their core audience, and stop listening to the vocal minority of hardcore gamers. Unfortunately there is no expansion set announced yet, and nearly everything on Blizzard's under development page is unsuitable for casual gamers. I'm far from doomcasting WoW, but this isn't a viable long-term strategy.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:01 AM Permanent Link