Evolution of dungeon design in Warcraft

Often I see people arguing that Warcraft has evolved in the wrong direction being accused of nostalgia. Well, I'd like to present some evidence that might not be the case, and that the focus on grinable dungeons as a guiding design principle is one of many such gameplay optimizations some of us find detrimental to the game (and the genre as a whole).

To avoid speculation on fluffy old feelings I want to make my example with the dungeon Sunken Temple which was redesigned in the latest expansion. It exemplify everything I find wrong with this particular game's evolution. Originally one of my favourite dungeons, entering it and completing it to end was a whole adventure in itself. It was also one of very few dungeons to feature some simple puzzles. On first runs it was quite easy to get lost because you'd taken the wrong hallway, or suddenly seeing one of your teammates dead because he had bumped into some trolls on his own.

Before entering the dungeon you had to navigate through a maze-like entrance. Nothing spectacular but interesting that such a large section being shared by every player on the realm (in particular when meeting the opposing faction). As seen on the map the redesign team thought this was a waste of time, cut it in half, making a straight path to the entrance.


Then comes the actual dungeon. When entering you're faced with several hallways. Some parts are blocked off, thus you are required to complete certain parts and puzzles for unlocking others. Even though the actual mechanics of the dungeon are fairly simple it adds to the overall experience, giving you a sense of adventure. The encounters are many and varied, with each section of the dungeon having a distinct theme.


Then comes the redesigned dungeon. The entrance and dungeon was literally cut in half. It is very telling of how of they view dungeons are mere tools for distributing loot. A great dungeon design simply reformed on the whim. The updated map speaks for itself.


Even though loot has always been a major feature in earlier dungeon design, there was always a sense of adventure entering dungeons like Sunken Temple, Uldaman, Blackrock Depths, Upper/Lower Blackrock Spire, Dire Maul, Scholomance, Stratholme. I don't know why these kind of dungeons suddenly seemed to grow fewer and fewer. The trend seemed to start with The Burning Crusade expansion. There have been a couple of exceptions, like the Karazhan dungeon, but in general these tiny loot-oriented trips seems to be the norm.

Some of these issues might also feed directly into Blizzards ongoing problems of keeping players engaged. Players burn though content faster than Blizzard is able to produce. Blizzards solution is to produce even more content at ever faster rates. I personally believe the issue raised here, hint systems, and fast travel solutions is working against them. Instead of making life easier for players, try challenge them instead. Create interesting places to visit. Bring back the journey. Give the players an adventure. When loot become the sole motivation for keeping a player enganged, the mmo has simply failed as a game.

This post was initially triggered by this video from one of the dungeon artists who used to worked at Blizzard. I went back reading about the old dungeons, then discovered the rewamped content for the latest Cataclysm expansion. I'd also like to note that the period I played this game actively was between 2005-2007.

Bonus: You might have noticed that I left out Gnomeregan. I could never get my friends to enter that place. At the mere utterance of the word I would receive objections.

You left out Maraudon, the most maze-like dungeon I've seen. Princess runs were fast, but clearing the whole thing took half a day. In fact, it took so long to clear every room, the beginning would respawn before the dungeon was completed.

Then again, noone actually cleared Maraudon more than a few times - after that it was all about Princess runs (teleporting near the end of the dungeon with a teleport staff/item/thingymabob).

Anyway, dungeon design has certainly been streamlined, but the actual content is much, much harder. Ragnaros Heroic 10/25m is far beyond any fight seen in vanilla or TBC. The complexity is simply staggering, as is the tuning.

In fact, the new Ragnaros fight is possibly the most complex fight ever seen in WoW. Yogg'saron and Firefighter might rival it, but I can't really think of any other fights.

Personally, I remember a time where we had breaks between content. I had time to play alts back then, do some PvP and what not. Nowadays we barely manage to kill the final heroic mode before hitting a new dungeon. It's exhausting. I prefer the model of TBC to all other content I've seen:
- Fairly straight forward progress through most raid content.
- Tough final bosses that pushed raiders to their limit. Final boss kills determined the "top raiding guild" on each server.
- Enough time between content to actually do something other than raiding.

Ever since heroic raids got introduced, the normal content has been laughable, while the heroic content is so hard it takes bloody ages to get through it. Clearing ICC25 HC was such a drag; it took much longer than any instance in TBC or vanilla.

Edit: As for HUGE 5-man instances like Sunken Temple, Maraudon and Gnomeregan - they were removed because people generally were not interested in spending 4-5 hours clearing an instance with a bunch of randoms. It may work with friends, but certainly not randoms, and 5-man content is now introduction level content.

It seems almost every decision Blizzard made post-BC has been to streamline the experience, and to minimise the TIME required to experience content.

I'm not necessarily talking about difficulty level - but the process of getting TO the content and THROUGH the content combined - to make the most time-effective experience as they can.

Personally, I can easily see why they're doing it - but I also happen to DESPISE the thought behind such game design.

It goes FULLY against what I think a meaningful MMO experience should be, which is very much supposed to be a world that you can immerse yourself into - and that you don't MIND "wasting" time in. You don't want the player to feel punished by being slow, or having to travel the world to reach his destination. That's supposed to be part of living in another world - and if the design paradigm is right, it will seem like a peaceful and restful break between battles or challenges.

Problem is, though, that they've made the game into a blatant gear-upgrade simulator. It's all about mechanical progression through layers of ever-increasing numbers, and you absolutely don't want to interrupt that process by pointless timewaste - such as gathering a group of like-minded adventures to meet an interesting and time-consuming challenge.

Now, I'm all for removing needless hassles in the UI or the basic grind/carrot structure - but you should ALWAYS consider the over-arching implication on the core design structure when you remove or simplify features.

Honestly, I don't think Blizzard originally intended for the game to become this instance-driven seclusional challenge/candy dispenser. That's just where the smell of money has led them.

Now it's too late, so: oh well….

Maylander said:

You left out Maraudon, the most maze-like dungeon I've seen. Princess runs were fast, but clearing the whole thing took half a day. In fact, it took so long to clear every room, the beginning would respawn before the dungeon was completed.

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Yes, that one too. It was a popular request among my friends. Princess is certainly interesting.

Maylander said:

Anyway, dungeon design has certainly been streamlined, but the actual content is much, much harder. Ragnaros Heroic 10/25m is far beyond any fight seen in vanilla or TBC. The complexity is simply staggering, as is the tuning.

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The multiple difficulty dungeons is another of my dislikes about how dungeon design has evolved. I used to play in a casual raiding guild. Compared to the hardcore raiding guild we would lag behind maybe 3-5 months. By that time the dungeons would normally had gone through some tuning, we'd gotten a little better geared, so the challenge would get resolve that way. Some dungeons was out of reach, like 40-man Ahn'Qiraj and Naxxramas. Multiple difficulty I doubt would had helped us. We used 25-man Zul'Gurub for relaxation and the difficulty was manageable. I very much doubt our guild members would be interesting in running a hardmode version of the same dungeon, like say a hardmode Molten Core. 3/4 would've probably join a 10-man guild instead, while the other 1/4 would join a 25-man hardcore guild. A majority of those 3/4 would probably be miserable about doing the easymode content, but unwilling to take part in hardmode content. In that reguard I would maybe prefer singlemode dungeons that get tuned during the initial months after release. It would let hardcore guilds get a real challenge, while casual guild could get a taste of action too later on.

Maylander said:

As for HUGE 5-man instances like Sunken Temple, Maraudon and Gnomeregan - they were removed because people generally were not interested in spending 4-5 hours clearing an instance with a bunch of randoms. It may work with friends, but certainly not randoms, and 5-man content is now introduction level content.

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For the sake of diversity, shouldn't there still be room for some larger intricate dungeons? I wouldn't necessarily call them HUGE either, more like large. What I feel missing also is little more imaginative topology, like the older dungeons, vs the city planner-like execution of the later ones.

DArtagnan said:

It seems almost every decision Blizzard made post-BC has been to streamline the experience, and to minimise the TIME required to experience content.

I'm not necessarily talking about difficulty level - but the process of getting TO the content and THROUGH the content combined - to make the most time-effective experience as they can.

Personally, I can easily see why they're doing it - but I also happen to DESPISE the thought behind such game design.

It goes FULLY against what I think a meaningful MMO experience should be, which is very much supposed to be a world that you can immerse yourself into - and that you don't MIND "wasting" time in. You don't want the player to feel punished by being slow, or having to travel the world to reach his destination. That's supposed to be part of living in another world - and if the design paradigm is right, it will seem like a peaceful and restful break between battles or challenges.

Click to expand...

Something certainly happends to you as a player once you reach the end-game. Gear is certainly a main motivator for being willing to put of with dungeon grinding. I must confess, my hunter was often accused of being a chinese-grinder because of the time spent alone in Dire Maul, hehe. Maybe Blizzard simply industrialized the whole process of acquiring gear, in terms of content production. It's not like they lack the talent, atleast in the artistic department.

I never checked out the remake of Sunken Temple myself. I wanted to keep the original design in memory and avoid the disapointment.

I think some of the original dungeon designs were too complex for pickup groups, mainly Sunken Temple, Wailing Caverns and Mauradon. They were however great for groups of friends willing to invest more time to the cause. But other dungeons worked well for all groups. Dungeons like Zul Farrak, Shadowfang Keep and Stratholme struck a nice balance of being easy to navigate while still not feeling completely linear. The great thing about the early dungeon design was the variety.

The video that hishadow linked also reminded me of some of the non-instanced dungeon areas that were great for exploring solo or with a friend. The elven barrows and crypts below Duskwood are some of those I remember fondly.

I remember I was split in my opinion on the TBC dungeons. On one hand they had very boring linear design, on the other they had much better designed encounters and graphical goodies. I felt very dissapointed the first time I tried Ramparts, but it grew on me after a while, and so did most other TBC dungeons.


In terms of dungeon and raid difficulty I feel that Blizzard left out the middle road during WotLK and Cataclysm. Those players that liked some risk and danger but wasn't interested in heroic raids were left out. TBC was great for this group of players with the heroic dungeons and T4-T5 raids.

Imho there has been an undending series of design decisions ranging from poor to downright retarded following the Blizzard/Activision merger (too many to go into in detail).
Sure there have been a few good ones now and again but it seems marketing has been given a dispropotionate amount of control over content and design as a whole.
Where once the game was designed with an emphasis on what would be fun it is now being designed by polls and extensive marketing research.
While the carrot was allways there but it was hardly the sole motivation for logging on to do an instance or two.
For myself atleast the fun of getting through the various instances far outweighed the potential rewards and im sure wow's success was in no small part owed to its ability to turn the grind into a journey.
Elaborate dungeon and encounter design coupled with lore and quests made the repetition of an instance something to look forward to rather then a grind for drops.
At some point however the journey simply ended and instances became reduced to something that stood between you and the loot.
In other words the game has lost its soul.

I never really liked Sunken Temple or Maraudon myself, and as much as I DID like Blackrock Depths it was hard to find other players who were up for clearing all of it. In many ways the streamlined dungeons give me a more "effective" experience, but it's not perfect.

Maylander: I admire you for managing to raid hardcore in WoW and still have time to play other games! I've not done any hardcore raiding since the end of vanilla and the start of TBC. I liked the very first tier there, Karazhan was amazing in many ways, Gruul was tough but managable before the nerf and while Magtheridon was over the top before the nerf we got our only server first on him after he was taken down a notch so I like him too.

But then my guild fell apart due to the extreme tedium of the trash in Serpentshrine Cavern so I'm not so sure I like TBC:s model after that... But there seem to have been a few outstanding raids after that which I regret not getting to do, such as Sunwell Plateau and Ulduar. But I hear Ulduar was outdated way too fast by the new raid release cycle you describe?

Toaster said:

I never really liked Sunken Temple or Maraudon myself, and as much as I DID like Blackrock Depths it was hard to find other players who were up for clearing all of it. In many ways the streamlined dungeons give me a more "effective" experience, but it's not perfect.

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I was never a big fan of those either.

Toaster said:

Maylander: I admire you for managing to raid hardcore in WoW and still have time to play other games! I've not done any hardcore raiding since the end of vanilla and the start of TBC. I liked the very first tier there, Karazhan was amazing in many ways, Gruul was tough but managable before the nerf and while Magtheridon was over the top before the nerf we got our only server first on him after he was taken down a notch so I like him too.

But then my guild fell apart due to the extreme tedium of the trash in Serpentshrine Cavern so I'm not so sure I like TBC:s model after that… But there seem to have been a few outstanding raids after that which I regret not getting to do, such as Sunwell Plateau and Ulduar. But I hear Ulduar was outdated way too fast by the new raid release cycle you describe?

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Yes, that's part of the problem. As hardcore as we were back then, raiding four nights a week with a fairly dedicated crew, we never actually managed to clear Ulduar before the next patch hit. By clear I mean "do all the hard modes" - Yogg 0 was still left (cleared the rest).

After Ulduar, we went straight into Trial of the Grand Crusade, which we barely managed to complete (zero-wipes achievement) by the time Icecrown Citadel came out. Icecrown Citadel lasted the entire time until Cataclysm was released.

The first and second tier of Cataclysm has been the same way - we never managed to kill heroic Nefarian before the release of Ragnaros, and I doubt we'll be able to kill heroic Ragnaros before Deathwing is out.

It has become a very tedious, never-ending cycle where we don't really have any time to relax. Only the redicilously hardcore can actually get through all the content fast enough to relax a bit.

In fact, we've now reached a point where we realize that we simply can't keep up with Blizzard's crazy progress, so we've decided to calm down our raiding and just accept the fact that we won't actually get server firsts anymore.