On Game Design, Blizzard and MC
Oct. 22nd, 2008 04:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
teddogBeing the media geek I am, I tend to look at things in an odd way. Yesterday evening, I had the chance to run most of Molten Core on World of Warcraft, to the point that we could run it. This was mostly done as a curiousity - Molten Core was the first attempt at designing a massive raid. It was originally tuned for 40 people. To compare, the new raids coming out soon are going to have two versions, one for 10 players and another for 25 players. The scale is much different.
Plotwise, there's not much of a storyline to discuss. It boils down to "Some dwarfs accidently-on-purpose summoned an elemental and now you get to raid his clubhouse!" The less said about this, the better.
The design is much more interesting to look at.
For one, it's pretty cheap. My first time raiding was in Karazhan, which is a highly detailed tower that you fight your way up, interacting with monsters and NPCs along the way. There's a strong attempt both include new characters and ones from earlier canon. There's even an non-combat event where you can play a game of chess. Dozens of rooms aren't even used for gameplay and you can explore and discover oddities.
Molten Core, on the other hand, is a big hole in the ground. It's a cave system that, while unique in layout, doesn't really offer anything. There's rocks, some more rocks.... a lava pit, but the rocks were kinda red anyway.
Likewise, the monsters are seriously ALL the same models used over and over again. You're either fighting a core hound, a fire elemental, a lava elemental, a giant or a flamewaker. Even the bosses pull from the same models. It's a bit dangerous, because sometimes you'll pull a boss and not realize thats' what it is! We did that with Lucifron and Baron.
The placement of the bosses is dumb too. There's no build up or "rooms". They're tucked away in corners. The only thing that's notable is the names, some of which have obscure references.
With how unbalanced the game is at the moment, the bosses are cake. Their quirks aren't very noticable for the most part.
Lucifron - Lucifron's Curse is annoying, but we pulled him with a pack of core hounds. Even without mana, it wasn't THAT hard.
Magmadar - The fear is annoying, but doesn't do damage. Otherwise, he's now a tank-and-spank.
Gehennas - I don't remember. I think we AoEed (Area of Effect spells) him down.
Garr - The debuffs aren't really an issue. AoEed down.
Baron Geddon - Living Bomb is still a problem. It CAN be healed through - we only lost 5 players and bombs weren't running away.
Shazzrah - Nothing notable. All I remember is "He's a mage!" "He's going down anyway!"
Sulfuron Harbinger - He and the guards can be AoEed easily. Not an issue.
Golemagg - We attempted to kill the core hounds first, but then discovered that they healed themselves. They're not trouble to deal with.
Majordomo Executus and Ragnaros - We didn't have the water, so no-go on them.
Molten Core doesn't hold up well, even in the context of the pre-TBC raids. I haven't seen the Ahn'Qiraj raids (as a friend put it, it's "STARSHIP TROOPERS! WITH SWORDS!"), but Blackwing Lair, Zul'Gurub and Naxxramas overshadow it. In the context of the TBC raids, Molten Core reminds me too much of Gruul's Lair, which I hated. But, yeah, the "Hallowed Core" is now nothing more than a chance to burn down monsters as fast as possible.
Plotwise, there's not much of a storyline to discuss. It boils down to "Some dwarfs accidently-on-purpose summoned an elemental and now you get to raid his clubhouse!" The less said about this, the better.
The design is much more interesting to look at.
For one, it's pretty cheap. My first time raiding was in Karazhan, which is a highly detailed tower that you fight your way up, interacting with monsters and NPCs along the way. There's a strong attempt both include new characters and ones from earlier canon. There's even an non-combat event where you can play a game of chess. Dozens of rooms aren't even used for gameplay and you can explore and discover oddities.
Molten Core, on the other hand, is a big hole in the ground. It's a cave system that, while unique in layout, doesn't really offer anything. There's rocks, some more rocks.... a lava pit, but the rocks were kinda red anyway.
Likewise, the monsters are seriously ALL the same models used over and over again. You're either fighting a core hound, a fire elemental, a lava elemental, a giant or a flamewaker. Even the bosses pull from the same models. It's a bit dangerous, because sometimes you'll pull a boss and not realize thats' what it is! We did that with Lucifron and Baron.
The placement of the bosses is dumb too. There's no build up or "rooms". They're tucked away in corners. The only thing that's notable is the names, some of which have obscure references.
With how unbalanced the game is at the moment, the bosses are cake. Their quirks aren't very noticable for the most part.
Lucifron - Lucifron's Curse is annoying, but we pulled him with a pack of core hounds. Even without mana, it wasn't THAT hard.
Magmadar - The fear is annoying, but doesn't do damage. Otherwise, he's now a tank-and-spank.
Gehennas - I don't remember. I think we AoEed (Area of Effect spells) him down.
Garr - The debuffs aren't really an issue. AoEed down.
Baron Geddon - Living Bomb is still a problem. It CAN be healed through - we only lost 5 players and bombs weren't running away.
Shazzrah - Nothing notable. All I remember is "He's a mage!" "He's going down anyway!"
Sulfuron Harbinger - He and the guards can be AoEed easily. Not an issue.
Golemagg - We attempted to kill the core hounds first, but then discovered that they healed themselves. They're not trouble to deal with.
Majordomo Executus and Ragnaros - We didn't have the water, so no-go on them.
Molten Core doesn't hold up well, even in the context of the pre-TBC raids. I haven't seen the Ahn'Qiraj raids (as a friend put it, it's "STARSHIP TROOPERS! WITH SWORDS!"), but Blackwing Lair, Zul'Gurub and Naxxramas overshadow it. In the context of the TBC raids, Molten Core reminds me too much of Gruul's Lair, which I hated. But, yeah, the "Hallowed Core" is now nothing more than a chance to burn down monsters as fast as possible.
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Date: 2008-10-23 01:34 pm (UTC)If you didn't have proper dispelling and decursing in MC, even in t2+ people *died* to the curses and the debuffs.
Really wait for Majordomo and Rag. Better yet do Majordomo without knowing anything about how the fight works first. :D
It might seem like its easy now, but at first it really was hard. I'll spare the "we spent 12 hours wiping on Lucifron" stories.
To give you some idea I was the *first* BM raiding hunter on my server. One of the big things I do to do was prove that I could keep a pet alive in MC and most of BWL while not loosing dps.
BWL wasn't actually beta tested before it was released and well let's just say that the current version is a massive nerf from the original. Originally Vael and Neff were on 3 hour respawn timers and much much harder, also originally none of the three flappies (Flamegore, Firemaw, Ebonroc) were tauntable, so you had to do tank switching without proper threat meters without taunt. This was okay for alliance, BoP and all, but it kinda sucked for horde. Even up to a few weeks before TBC was released my old raid group had problems with people zoning into BWL and then DCing.
Ragnaros is still pretty tricky at 70 unless you have two well preped tanks and people really know how to spread.
Naxx in its original form was about the most tightly tuned raid instance they made before Sunwell. KZ in its original form was quite difficult too, then again the current heroic 5mans are easier then the original versions at 70.
They used to say that in MC you learned to heal, in BWL you learned to tank, in AQ40 you learned to move and in Naxx you learned to dps.
ZG I like better then ZA, but then again I just find ZA annoying. Or well I find the ZA trash annoying and unnecessarily difficult. The trash gauntlet before the dragon hawk boss really doesn't add anything to the experience.
One of the best things about ZG though to me was always the amount of infernals that some of our locks used to drop.
Onyxia back in the day was more annyingly random the Gruul since a lot of her randomness can't be beaten by tossing dps at things[1].
Some of it I think is point of view. The old raid instances look rather different looking back on them then they did when you first saw them at 60.
[1]My solution to most problems in WoW is to toss more dps at them until they go away.