Warcraft Director of Community

Posted on 2/23/2010 at 7:46 AM - Post Comment

The easiest solution, though it avoids the root of the problem, is to disperse the ground spawns to a more realistic population level. There are areas where one would expect to encounter monsters, and that is where the heavy concentrations should be. Hard core hunting should occur in the fortresses and camps of the various villains, monsters, and animals that are the bane of the adventurer, not every time you step off the path. This opens up the wilderness for travel and casual hunting while giving players the kind of combat that exist in epic stories: battle in the lairs.

The deeper solution to the dangerous wilds is to shift the focus for leveling and character growth away from simple slaughter to other types of quests. I say "other types" because many quests these days consist of killing ten goblins or collecting the carcasses of twenty wolves. This amounts essentially to the same thing as camping. There are other ways to implement quests (and many of these are used currently), such as retrieving an item from an enemy camp or fighting through a monster fortress to take down a boss. These types involve killing monsters too, but the rampant slaughter is not the target of the quest (though it does provide incidental experience and gamers may return to a dungeon just to hunt). The focus is turned away from random wilderness spawns and into the heart of the enemy lair.

There is one exception to this solution that I should note. The "Rite of Passage" I most enjoyed while playing Asheron's Call was the Dires run. In the early days of the game, there were no portal routes or ties within the Dires so only veteran (or very cunning) players could make the long journey across these dangerous lands to reach the outpost of Ayan Baqur on the far side. I failed my first attempt, but was filled with the thrill of accomplishment when I finally made it. Unfortunately, this gauntlet was later nerfed when a portal tie was placed just outside the town. The elite run concept here is a very cool one, but should be applied sparingly. In games where every wilderness is a teeming hive of monsters, running the gauntlet looses all meaning.