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Developer Information About Season of Discovery Phase 3

Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield has been sharing his thoughts on Twitter regarding Season of Discovery Phase 3, the lessons learned from the development team on SoD, and how leveling is impacted by those design choices.
Home » Classic Era » Developer Information About Season of Discovery Phase 3

Developer Information About Season of Discovery Phase 3

Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield has been sharing his thoughts on Twitter regarding Season of Discovery Phase 3, the lessons learned from the development team on SoD, and how leveling is impacted by those design choices.

Josh Greenfield Ranting on Twitter about Season of Discovery

Aggrend said:
Heya friends, kinda been quiet on here recently and I’m sorry for that. The team and I have been hard at work on things for Phase 3 (and Cata!). We’ll have some sweet phase 3 info out pretty soon.

Thanks!
 

Aggrend said:
 
Please consider make SoD have horizontal progression at some point. Classic WoW players love the leveling experience and seeing it being treated as a chore that should be skipped as quickly as possible to get to the end game is not the ideal situation 👍
I honestly agree with this. We’ll talk about this more in a bit, but I think one lesson we’ll walk away from SoD with is that adding all this crazy stuff for classes and encouraging everyone to play multiple characters isn’t super compatible with the slow, methodical approach to leveling that original wow has. I don’t know the perfect solve to this, but this is the exact kind of design problem we suspected would be created with the format of Season of Discovery.

Also, due to the nature of splitting up leveling into brackets it really throws into contrast how much it slows doing going from 25-40 compared to 1-25. It’s okay as this is an experiment through and through, but it’s something we’ll think about if we ever try something like SoD again, for sure.

We also have a much more diverse cross section of people playing SoD than really any other version of classic so far, so there’s a lot of different desires and expectations being brought into the game from folks with wildly different perspectives being carried over from other games.

It can be frustrating for us at times, but it’s also an interesting thing to observe as a game dev. One thing I love about my job is that I’m always surprised and am always learning something in some way.

Going to be interesting to have a retrospective with our team on SoD someday, for sure!
 

Aggrend said:
 
I’m surprised to hear that there’s even an idea of doing anything other than sod-like stuff in the future. From a player perspective it feels like you’ve caught lightning in a bottle and the next step would be to build upon it instead of toss it out for a different season gimmick
Hard to say exactly what we’ll do. We have a lot of ideas, that’s for sure and we had a lot of ideas before SoD even released. The funny thing about our process on classic is that we have ideas and plans going into things, but those ideas often times evolve rapidly into something else based on reception and feedback. It’s one of the best and worst things about our team. Our pipelines can’t be set too much in stone too early because we know we’ll want to pivot based on what we learn mid-race. It’s also why our team being smaller and more focused is so valuable (even if we have some rougher edges sometimes than we’d like). With a large team comes a lot of capabilities we might not have, but it also comes a the cost of agility.

I think my comments were more just rumination on the sort of dichotomy of how awesome the original wow leveling game is vs. what our goals for SoD are with all the class changes we made. I think I’m very glad we have Era and Hardcore to preserve that original WoW leveling journey as it was though. I’d likely feel very different about SoD if that didn’t exist.

I of course think SoD is fantastic and I’m very happy with it and super proud of what the team did with it. I absolutely want to keep doing more things like this and/or to build on this. Part of being a good dev imo is looking at what could be improved though, and keeping that in mind as much as also looking at what works and building on that.

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