The past is prologue

We don’t need Vanilla servers. We need new content built on Vanilla philosophy.

I’ve been a Warcraft player since 2004. I’m not happy with every change that’s come to the game, but a lot of good stuff has been added over the years. I don’t want to do the exact thing over again — I just want what’s new to preserve what was good about the old.

My peeps, sometime in 2006

If you want to find the soul of Vanilla, look at the dungeons. Dungeons today are brief interludes, mere speed bumps on the way to the level cap. It wasn’t like that in the beginning. When you did Gnomeregan for the first time, you weren’t racing to the end for your cooperation satchel. Your attention was right in front of you: on the alarm bots, the Clean Room, the punch cards. It felt important, and worth doing for its own sake. People took it seriously, perhaps even more seriously than they approach mythic raids today.

It can’t be the first time every time, but this content could shine again if allowed to. Simply loading up an old version is not an option, but it is possible to reverse course on the streamlining, simplifying, and homogenizing that’s gotten us to this point. Expansion by expansion, the WoW team has made decisions that were reasonable in the moment but have compounded other problems. Along the way, new technical capabilities have also been gained — queuing, phasing, scaling, etc. It’s a good time to evaluate whether there are new solutions to old problems.

The first step off the right path was the layout of Burning Crusade dungeons. BC was in many aspects the high point of 5-man dungeoneering, but its drawback was in short simple layouts. Whereas Vanilla dungeons had branches, rings, and three-dimensional warrens of tunnels, with few exceptions most dungeons since have been short straight hallways. BC dungeons had the challenge of Vanilla and then some, but it was just a challenge, not an adventure. The players were taken out of the driver’s seat.

Even as the dungeons became linear, BC set a high bar for players’ sense of agency across the arc of the expansion. Your pace of progression depended exclusively on your accomplishments, not the patch cycle or collecting 500 McGuffins in LFR. When you became ready for a new raid, it was because of what you did, not because of what the patch did. For me personally at least, attuning felt more rewarding than loot. Things went further astray when attunements began to be considered too confusing. The idea became that anything should be available to everyone immediately. The downside that would eventually become apparent was that when you don’t have to do anything, it no longer matters whether you do anything. The patch rolls around and the old raid is finished fait accompli, like a little pantomime in a cuckoo clock.

This wasn’t immediately clear until the other shoe dropped: catch-up gear. Finding geared recruits was a big problem in the later days of both Vanilla and BC, so its not unreasonable that something was done. The problem was that it was done with the same philosophy as was applied to attunements, which was essentially: everything but the latest tier is dead. Don’t bother progressing — just grind points in the most accessible content. This paradigm was honed to a point when the Trial of the Crusader arrived before the mass of mid-core raiders had even killed Yogg-Saron.

The number one cause of declining subs has been the content droughts between expansions. The only time this wasn’t a problem was at the ends of Vanilla and BC. World-first guilds may have had a different experience, but everyone I knew in Naxx or Sunwell was racing against the expansion, not waiting for it. The most damaging thing to WoW has been to get everyone moving up a tier in lockstep with every patch. Only something like 1% of players did Vanilla Naxxramas, but that didn’t make it a waste of resources. The missing perspective is almost everyone aspired to raid at the highest tier, and that kept them engaged.

As a former raider who’s short on time but still interested in lore, I should be the prime audience for LFR. I find it terrible. The experience is paradoxically rushed and boring at the same time; the player attitudes are toxic; the dramatic cutscene at the end rendered emotionally hollow by being alone in the crowd. I can’t imagine this is really a good experience for anyone, but I can also see why business risk and the optics of the situation would make it difficult to cut. I suggest instead, if there can be content for everyone, let there be something for those who loved Vanilla-style progression too.

Some people want things to be exactly as they were before, but I want to propose something a little different: take what was most important about the old game and double down on those elements specifically. Above all, don’t split the playerbase onto more servers. Make the modern game a better Vanilla than Vanilla ever was. (We can rebuild it; we have the technology.)

Start with kind of maps you don’t make anymore — Dire Maul; Gnomeregan; Stratholme; Maraudon; Razorfen Kraul; the original forms of Wailing Caverns, Scholomance, and Sunken Temple. Of course the king of them all is Blackrock Depths. There could be entirely new dungeons in this style, but you can mitigate the risk of a new(old) design philosophy using old assets. Give them the timewalking treatment in terms of stats, but don’t stop there. Aggro used to be hard, so put the aggro dropping affix on them permanently. Generate random objectives with the adventure system. Point people towards interacting with unique features like the Clean Room, the Dark Iron Coffer or Stratholme’s mailboxes. The Infinite Dragonflight is a flexible enough narrative device to tie it all together. These places are full of doodads, hidden crannies, and optional bosses, so don’t use LFG wing definitions. Let people walk in the portal and decide for themselves when they’ve accomplished their aims.

Be willing to inconvenience the player. A quest should demand things of you, not conform to the places you’re already going and the things you’re already doing. Make quest chains that alternate instance and outdoor objectives. Send people to multiple continents. Emulate the examples of the Hammer of Zul, Scepter of Celebras, and Egg of Hakkar. Don’t give everyone the same objective on the same day, either. Make it necessary to cultivate friendships among people willing to help each other.

Arrange these dungeons in tiers, with a process of attunement. If anyone’s confused, we have the dungeon journal now. Gate encounters using items like Onyxia scale cloaks or hourglass sand. Special gear mechanics can supersede iLvl, which is not relevant progression axis in timewalking. Some of these things may be crafted, which should be a journey in itself. In Vanilla you didn’t just use the single level-appropriate leather type and a generic elemental mote. If you wanted a tiger fur cloak, you had to actually go find a tiger. Having to seek out the alchemy lab or black forge could be an obstacle, but underscored that you were doing something special.

Some encounters age well, but others will need deeper overhauling to be interesting challenges in today’s game. Part of the challenge originally was having no idea what a boss was going to do before pulling it. It’s hard to imagine that now with everything so documented on Wowhead and YouTube, but when leveling, people often went into encounters blind. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but you can inject new surprises and uncertainty. There have occasionally been encounters with randomized elements, such as abilities held by AQ trash, or the composition of arena-style fights in Magister’s Terrace. Different combinations were like completely different encounters. Use things like these pervasively throughout new timewalking content to create novelty and reward adaptability. Enable PVP talents in timewalking and design encounters like you’ve never heard of “pruning”. I think things would start to feel like Vanilla then.