After playing the original diablo and going back to look through World of Warcraft gameplay, I gained insight to why Blizzard has been struggling to retain much of its player base over the years. The reason for the decline of the studio is the studio’s unwavering commitment to complexity in their game design.
For those of you who’ve never played classic WoW, you should be aware of the fact that that version of the game is substantially easier than retail WoW despite what some community members might tell you. The reason for the disparity in overall difficulty between the two versions lies in the number of features present and influential to the player’s experience. Additionally, retail WoW is horribly optimized for PC players despite being a PC game. These two problems are the byproducts of a two sets of terrible design decisions, and they are replicated in much of Blizzard’s other releases.
The former set is caused by the fact that Blizzard keeps adding currencies (paid or unpaid) to retail WoW, keeps adding new progression features disproportionately to the number of new levels and zones, keeps adding new ‘optional’ mini games that slowly become mandatory for certain gear and zones, keeps adding new mounts that break the purpose and pacing of navigating through the map, and keeps adding new items and stories that fuck up the meta and lore. The latter set is caused by the fact that blizzard has failed to centralize HUD elements to a single menu, failed to provide complete keyboard control over all elements of gameplay, fails to keep the number of key binds required to play the game as low as possible, and fails to keep most of the existing hud elements meaningfully informative.
These factors put together can make WoW feel like a complete headache to understand. Understandably, most new players quickly drop the game either out of confusion because they don’t understand what’s going on, or out of boredom because they don’t understand the purpose of the game’s structure. Veterans have left retail WoW permanently for the same reason. Unfortunately, it is likely that tho departure of these players is intentional.
If you were to go back and look through Blizzard’s presentations on game design, you would know that WoW was originally designed for questing. The game at its core was meant to be a simple and casual experience. Your only real task was to hit max level by completing quests. This made the game accessible to people of a
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