3 ms·

The secret sauce of Vanilla was the sense of place and sense of community. You don't need the old patch. You need persistent identities and travel time. Small p

The secret sauce of Vanilla was the sense of place and sense of community. You don't need the old patch. You need persistent identities and travel time. Small populations, no server or faction transfers, and walking to dungeons is the vast majority of it. I also really miss Vanilla dungeon design, where I felt like I was exploring a dangerous place instead of having a very scripted, linear experience. I loved Blackrock Depths, Maraudon, and Blackfathom Deeps. I get why these aren't economical for developer hours, but they are a magical experience.

kemayo 8y ago
Some of the longer dungeons were hard to run, though. I played Vanilla, leveling several different characters to 60, and I'm pretty sure I only managed to run Maraudon start-to-finish once. (Doing just the inner Mauradon shortcut to kill Princess was more common, admittedly.) I do kind of miss those things, I admit. Instances where you could find keys that would persistently unlock shortcuts, so if you came back later you could bypass bits of it. (Or if you were a rogue.) That said... the time investment required was quite ridiculous, in hindsight. I don't miss things like sitting in Ironforge for an hour saying "3DPS 1H LFTank" every few minutes... and then spending another hour getting from Ironforge to somewhere like Dire Maul (okay, or being the two? three? people in the group who volunteered to sit around by the dungeon to use the meeting stone to summon that tank when they showed up). The LFG tool exists for a reason.
- taneq 8y ago
  > I'm pretty sure I only managed to run Maraudon start-to-finish once. The early dungeons had a massive range of levels, though. IIRC the mobs in outer Maraudon were low 40s (high 30s?) whereas Princess Theredras was lvl 50. You weren't really meant to clear the thing in one sweep.
  - gknoy 8y ago
    It didn't help that Maraudon was in Desolace, and the only place harder and more time consuming to get to (for Alliance, at least) was Feralas. It was something like a half hour journey to get there, counting boat travel, gryphons, and riding yourself, so you ended up often only playing with people who were already there, or already questing in the area.
hinkley 8y ago
At the tail end of the text based game era I tried to work with a couple different groups building large maps and better story lines. It bothered me profoundly that the memory usage in the games was proportional to the details of the map instead of the number of players. One guy had built an entire world in the Thad Williams' Memory Sorrow and Thorn universe. It had a great text processing engine but it was built on a fatal use-after-free flaw that was beyond me to fix at the time, and the head of the project understood it less than I did. Eventually he folded and worked on my second favorite one, which I built a text-deduplication library to decrease their memory footprint by half (there was pushback on expanding the map due to resource constraints). I'm not sure they ever used it. By the time I removed an obvious footgun they'd already said no. Later I later took a computer graphics class, and when one of the assigments was based on fractal landscapes. I still believe that the right way to run a big world with a small team is to use a generated world as the base, and then have your team carve a civilization into it. The computer makes the river valley, the designers put a town in it. The computer generates a cave, the designers fill it with monsters. The backdrop is cheap as can be from a human and compute resources standpoint, and it's easy to have a big space even before you have enough stories to fit into it. The fourth bit of code I wrote in what became my primary language for years was a fractal map generator, trying to get coastlines and ridgelines that looked organic, but by then I had a real job and had begun to worry about the Skinner Effect in multiplayer games.
taneq 8y ago
Spot on. Dungeon finder and cross server BGs / dungeons killed the sense of community. Instant travel to instances killed the feeling of the size of the world. All the streamlining of combat and the removal of the threat management game made dungeons boring while adding loot tokens made the dungeon grind mandatory.

kemayo 8y ago

Some of the longer dungeons were hard to run, though. I played Vanilla, leveling several different characters to 60, and I'm pretty sure I only managed to run Maraudon start-to-finish once. (Doing just the inner Mauradon shortcut to kill Princess was more common, admittedly.) I do kind of miss those things, I admit. Instances where you could find keys that would persistently unlock shortcuts, so if you came back later you could bypass bits of it. (Or if you were a rogue.) That said... the time investment required was quite ridiculous, in hindsight. I don't miss things like sitting in Ironforge for an hour saying "3DPS 1H LFTank" every few minutes... and then spending another hour getting from Ironforge to somewhere like Dire Maul (okay, or being the two? three? people in the group who volunteered to sit around by the dungeon to use the meeting stone to summon that tank when they showed up). The LFG tool exists for a reason.

taneq 8y ago
> I'm pretty sure I only managed to run Maraudon start-to-finish once. The early dungeons had a massive range of levels, though. IIRC the mobs in outer Maraudon were low 40s (high 30s?) whereas Princess Theredras was lvl 50. You weren't really meant to clear the thing in one sweep.
- gknoy 8y ago
  It didn't help that Maraudon was in Desolace, and the only place harder and more time consuming to get to (for Alliance, at least) was Feralas. It was something like a half hour journey to get there, counting boat travel, gryphons, and riding yourself, so you ended up often only playing with people who were already there, or already questing in the area.

hinkley 8y ago

At the tail end of the text based game era I tried to work with a couple different groups building large maps and better story lines. It bothered me profoundly that the memory usage in the games was proportional to the details of the map instead of the number of players. One guy had built an entire world in the Thad Williams' Memory Sorrow and Thorn universe. It had a great text processing engine but it was built on a fatal use-after-free flaw that was beyond me to fix at the time, and the head of the project understood it less than I did. Eventually he folded and worked on my second favorite one, which I built a text-deduplication library to decrease their memory footprint by half (there was pushback on expanding the map due to resource constraints). I'm not sure they ever used it. By the time I removed an obvious footgun they'd already said no. Later I later took a computer graphics class, and when one of the assigments was based on fractal landscapes. I still believe that the right way to run a big world with a small team is to use a generated world as the base, and then have your team carve a civilization into it. The computer makes the river valley, the designers put a town in it. The computer generates a cave, the designers fill it with monsters. The backdrop is cheap as can be from a human and compute resources standpoint, and it's easy to have a big space even before you have enough stories to fit into it. The fourth bit of code I wrote in what became my primary language for years was a fractal map generator, trying to get coastlines and ridgelines that looked organic, but by then I had a real job and had begun to worry about the Skinner Effect in multiplayer games.

taneq 8y ago

Spot on. Dungeon finder and cross server BGs / dungeons killed the sense of community. Instant travel to instances killed the feeling of the size of the world. All the streamlining of combat and the removal of the threat management game made dungeons boring while adding loot tokens made the dungeon grind mandatory.