While Legion's iteration of missions may not have done much to improve the view of some players, I personally think it addressed a few major issues with the chief among them being that mission content became side content fueled by resources that was typically acquired from other content. Order Hall missions weren't without their problems though since they are highly reward and were used to time gate some content including key features such as the third relic slot on one's Artifact. Fortunately, improvements continued throughout the expansion that eventually culminated into removing missions as a requirement to progress major quest chains in favor of creating optional quest chains specifically for missions.
The upcoming Battle for Azeroth expansion appears to promise the return of missions, which reflects statements made in a number of interviews. Missions are also showing up in builds of the expansion. Some may wish to see them gone entirely much like with other features like Looking For Raid, but I see a lot of good things that could come out of missions. In this article I'll summarize what can be learned from Order Hall missions and use that information, along with information from a certain other game I've been playing a lot of recently, to suggest improvements to future iterations of missions.
Lessons From Legion
As I mentioned in the introduction, the Legion iteration of missions had improvements but was also not without its flaws. Highlighting what was good and bad will be useful for determining how missions in Battle for Azeroth should be designed.
What immediately comes to mind is that missions started out in a pretty good spot since, as I also mentioned above and in a past article, missions required the acquisition of Order Resources that were primarily earned from doing content such as World Quests and Dungeons. While I was concerned about how rewarding some of the missions were, the requirement to do other content to do missions is a good idea to use going forward since it effectively makes missions serve as a bonus reward for other content that encourages increased participation. Furthermore, since some missions had rewards that gave a quest to do content such as dungeons and raids, a feedback loop of sorts was established that involved shifted between doing other content and missions.
Unfortunately, this dynamic changed over time as Order Resource acquisition was improved in a number of ways that ultimately made the prospect of running missions highly self-sufficient. On release, there were ways to run missions without leaving the Order Hall but it was exclusive to the 6 classes that could research World Quest completion items. However, this required a bit of luck and based on the comments, the effectiveness of the item was buffed in 7.1 to allow the completion of more rewarding World Quests (though I cannot confirm this information). Order Resource caches were also added in 7.1 along with the Blood of Sargeras vendor.
Patch 7.2 then introduced Paragon reputation rewards, which was a good example of how to do a Paragon system but had the consequence of awarding a cache that always provides some Order Resources. This in addition to missions that can award reputation tokens helped to improve the self-sustenance of missions a little further. In addition, since reputation tokens became account-bound after a character became exalted with a respective reputation, paragon reputation rewards could be redeemed on characters that were Order Resource-starved, effectively allowing one to transfer Order Resources even more than the Blood of Sargeras trader allowed for.
Patch 7.3 featured the aforementioned improvement of removing mission-related requirements from major quest chains. Instead, it further cemented the role of missions as side content by creating a quest chain that involved completing missions and empowering champions to unlock new missions that served as a form of exclusive progression similar to Pet Battles. The idea of having mission-based progression as side content is one that I think should be emphasized more in the future, but some of the rewards were questionable.
The rewards featured a slew of new missions that awarded a fair amount of gold, Primal Sargerite, and Blood of Sargeras. The latter was the most concerning since if the bonus reward was earned, which was made easier to do with the addition of new champion equipment, one earned more Order Resources than they spent on the mission. Specifically, it was possible to earn a surplus of 600 Order Resources every time they completed a 200% success chance mission for Blood of Sargeras, which greatly improved the self-sufficiency of running missions.
All of these changes ultimately allowed for the ability to run Order Hall missions in a manner similar to Garrison missions where there's barely any need to leave but the player can produce a fairly high amount of gold income. It is no surprise then that Order Hall missions are starting to get nerfed.
Based on this summary, I have determined the following information to be useful to consider for improving missions:
- Missions should be a form of side content that isn't required to advance in major content such as through quest chains that unlock important features.
- However, missions should be advantageous to do in a sense, preferably by driving players to do major content in some sort of way.
- Missions should try to avoid gold rewards and other rewards that can significantly impact income. The consequences of rewarding players too much for doing missions can be very great and in the case of gold rewards, may contribute to more inflation that may cause issues for newer players among other problems.
- Missions should also require a little effort to keep running instead of using a self-sufficient system. Making the ability to run missions self-sufficient greatly undermines the purpose of missions being used as an engine to drive participation in other content.
An Idea From Another Game
Putting the lessons learned from Legion to good use in Battle for Azeroth's missions is a big help especially for preventing them from becoming an unchecked money-making machine that requires eventual intervention. However, I personally think more can be done with missions to put further emphasis on their purpose as an engine to do other content. This brings me to a recent game I played that briefly utilized a concept I could see being used in WoW.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 utilizes a similar feature to WoW's missions in the form of Merc Missions. It plays in a similar manner that involves sending out units equivalent to champions or followers in WoW on missions that are completed after some amount of time. The player can then earn various rewards. While Merc Missions are more intertwined with the game itself there was one specific type of mission that caught my eye and they were missions with no listed duration.
These missions initially confused me since I was unsure what one was supposed to do so I tried to do one and cancelled it after a while. I later learned these missions required the player to go to a location where they would then start a quest and the mission would complete. This inspired me to come up with a similar, albeit unoriginal, idea of having similar missions in WoW that add World Quests to the map for the player to do. Having such missions would not only drive players to do other content but it would also create the other content that the player has to do, which may have an additional benefit of exposing players to further content that the game's world has to offer such as other World Quests.
My Suggestion for Missions
Based on all the information above, I have come up with a specific suggestion for how missions should be designed in the future. Not all missions necessarily need to be designed this way but I would strongly prefer if the vast majority of them are.
As I mentioned already, it would be best if missions were a form of side content, which Legion has already done a pretty good job at accomplishing despite some issues. To prevent future concerns, missions should entirely refrain from awarding gold and only a small number of missions should provide immediate rewards without further player intervention, which I will classify as "reward missions." The rewards themselves could consist of non-gold currencies, reputation tokens, and items relevant to missions such as champion equipment.
About half of the remaining missions would also not require player intervention from the mission itself but instead of providing a usable reward it would give the player a quest to do some non-mission objective such as completing a dungeon, which I will classify as "task missions." Making task missions more common compared to Legion would increase the emphasis of driving players missions and other content due to the stronger association between the two. However, there is a possible issue where missions may feel mandatory to get the most out of other content. Therefore, the ultimate reward of task missions should be similar to that of reward missions in most cases with the exception of the infrequently offered raid quests.
Finally, remaining missions would add a World Quest to the map for the player to complete. These missions would be similar to reward missions but take much longer to naturally complete for about half of the normal reward. Players can complete the World Quest to expedite the completion of the mission and earn rewards that are also to half the normal reward of a reward mission. The idea of these "World Quest missions" is to provide a faster method for earning rewards from missions but doing so requires more effort.
The result of this suggestion is that there would be more active options for players who prefer not to idle for their rewards, which coincides nicely with my ideal mission design. This suggestion also could be of benefit to more idle players since tying some missions to other content may eliminate the need to use currency to run missions. This in turn would allow idle players to ignore other content in favor of missions if they want as long as they're willing to accept it won't make them incredibly wealthy like past iterations of missions.
Ultimately, I think missions need to change a bit more to reach an ideal state of being side content that isn't too impactful on the game's state while serving as a feature at least some players can enjoy. It may never end up as optional as features such as Pet Battles, but it can certainly take many beneficial directions.
No comments:
Post a Comment