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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

What made WoW environments so compelling is that were very stylized and deliberately not "realistic". If you look back at the history of games that focus on photorealism they date really quickly as the tech moves on yet WoW's aesthetic is much more timeless.

Secondly, the game feels good. By this I mean the movement and responsiveness.

Third, the game in its original form was particularly immersive as the WoW developers eschewed the loading screens that were an immersion-breaking feature of the big competitor at the time (ie Everquest). Sadly this design principle has fallen by the wayside in recent years.

Lastly, WoW came about at a time before social networks when online games were the first proto-social networks for many, many people. Through guilds you found likeminded people.

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For the environment design aspect, I'd add that in the earlier iterations of the game something that inadvertently added a lot of appeal was the somewhat "organic" nature of zone composition, where there wasn't a 1:1 match between what the quest writers needed and what got put on the game map.

There were all sorts of things in each zone that just existed to exist, with no connection to any quest or player objective. It felt like the map artists were given a lot of latitude to design as they pleased, with the quest writers coming in after them and writing quests to match the map as it had been designed.

This was flipped on its head at some point around Wrath of the Lich King or Cataclysm, where instead nearly every square inch of every map existed for some quest or player objective. It made the game more convenient, but also made it feel a lot more like a game than a lived-in world.

The term for this is "conveyor belt content". And yes, this took off in WotLK, probably in big part due to the achievement system. Why? This replaced player agency in determining content with a Blizzard-supplied checklist and the effects of this flowed on to map design (IMHO).

It was also around that time that i think the Blizzard's internal policy changed.

Before to that they were creating a game, and balancing it in vacuum. Afterwards they went for designing metagame - picking how player should play. It was more egregious in their newer games though - especially in diablo3(where Blizzard literally makes builds in form of armor sets) and overwatch.

The character animation was also significantly better than what was typical at the time even in, say, an AAA FPS, which helped immersion. The travel system by flight both helped hide loading delays and provided an opportunity to show off the environment from a different vantage point, a kind of pre-programmed vista showcase.

Edit: occurs to me these flights were basically the equivalent of HL1's rail ride intro sequence, integrated into the game and in great numbers.

Flight paths also offered some nice foreshadowing. When flying from Ironforge to Stormwind, which many alliance players would often do, you fly over Burning Steppes, a very high level zone. A menacing music starts to play, a brown fog covers everything around you, there's lava, dragons, the zone looks "scary" but also exciting. Makes you want to play so that you can go there and explore it for yourself.

They were also chock full of things to see. Flying over Ironforge there was that dwarf/trog fight that you could never get to, but always wanted to. The world felt huge and full. You knew that if you just got over the next hill there'd probably be something interesting to look at or make you go wow. EQ didn't have those same set pieces.

It's interesting to compare the early super-military look for tf2 to the zany cartoon version they wound up with. Their original plan would have looked old within a year or two, but tf2 still looks great today.

TF2 does not look great today still. Its artistic stylized look has been ruined by pay-to-win and cosmetic collectables.

> Sadly this design principle has fallen by the wayside in recent years.

Sadly this is due to new content being added as disparate “continents” that exist apart from the rest. Recently, content that had multiple zones on the same continent still has no loading screen. But since they have to adding new places to go to, and all the existing land being accounted for, they add new “continents”. But even new zones that get added mid-expansion are also separated by loading screen since they were never accounted for in the initial set of zones for the expansion. These days you might pass through several loading screens just going from one place to the other as you magically teleport around the world and cosmos.

Funny enough, the world felt larger when it was smaller because it was rare you ever encountered a loading screen.

> Funny enough, the world felt larger when it was smaller because it was rare you ever encountered a loading screen.

It's not only about loading screen. The world felt larger, because you had to walk and take the fly path a lot! Going from one end of the world to the other took literal minutes in flight. Then after they introduced the group search feature which automatically teleported you in the dungeon you had chosen, the world felt much smaller, because in practice you were only seeing a tiny part of it.

100% agreed. The cross-realm and phasing/layering they introduced further shrunk the world as well. While I think those features were ultimately good for gameplay reasons, they definitely stole from the magic of the original game.

I’ve not found an MMO that feels as smooth as WoW to play the character, and honestly it’s not even close. Nobody has even approached WoW’s crispness of gameplay, almost seemingly because nobody has really even tried, and I wonder why that is.

The Warhammer MMO was very close on a number of these key fronts - especially style and good gameplay feel.

It just failed for other reasons, notably the large overlap among people playing it and WoW deciding WoW was a better way to continue their time sink since they'd already invested, and the end-game content wasn't there at launch the way people expected it to be.

Interestingly, Blizzard did copy some of the key concepts from it for later expansions of World of Warcraft (open world "join in" style events / boss fights, to name one).

I like ESO better in "smoothness". WoW combat feels a little bit clunky in comparison, especially in chaotic trash fights with multiple targets. I find it very frustrating when I can't attack just because my selected enemy moved to my side, even though there are 5 other targets standing right before me. Stacking nameplates doesn't help, making the position of a nameplate unrelated to the position of an enemy (but if you turn off stacking, you'll have trouble selecting the right enemy).

In comparison, in ESO most (melee) attacks are not targeted, meaning you can cleave your way through a trash fight without playing Enemy Selector Simulation.

That said, at the moment WoW is still my favourite timesink though. ESO does a lot of things better, but there's not much on an end game and at some point you've just seen it all. I'm not into cosmetics so there's just not much left for me to actually do in ESO.

You should probably be using more AOE. Also, you shouldn't be using your mouse to select targets, you should be using it for movement.

Some tips (most of these shouldn't have changed much, but I haven't played in many years):

You don't have to hit enter to start typing a command. /t first few letters of mob is pretty fast.

You can also hit tab to rapidly switch targets.

Bind A and D to strafing instead of turning.

You can bind slots to modified keys, like Control-6 or Alt-3.

If you're a melee class, you probably have many moves that hit multiple targets, while also not being raw AOE. Spend a bit of time getting familiar with your spellbook; there are a lot of gems.

Learn your rotation! Check Icy Veins for your spec: https://www.icy-veins.com/

I'm not exactly sure how new you are, but you should also probably be using Bartender, Recount and DBM.

I already do pretty much all of the above. I've played about 6-7 months now, arms warrior, so mainly single-target DPS. I have few AOE abilities. A lot of my abilities don't work if the target isn't directly in front of me, even abilities like Mortal Strike and Rend with can hit multiple targets. The big difference with ESO is that in ESO I rarely need to target an enemy. You pretty much only do it as a ranged DPS if you want to target a specific enemy in a mob.

WoW combat is a lot more tactical and complex. ESO is smoother and faster, but simpler (only 6 abilities per bar, 2 bars max)

Movement is important in WoW. If you're not keeping people in front of you, you need to focus on it more. It's one of the layers.

The critical thing here is that you really shouldn't be mouse targeting.

Any good tutorials or videos on that?

No clue! I haven't thought about the game in years!

What worked for me, though, was joining as many raids as possible. Dungeons are good too, if you're tanking. You'll suck for the first few, but after a while you'll stop sucking, and it'll make your life a lot easier.

Lord of the Rings Online is quite close. Wonderful environments as well, not to mention the lore.

For me it was all of the above, but equally important, the sound design was superb. Not just music but game sounds as well.

Yeah, I played for about a year during the original release and haven't played since but I still go back and listen to some of the tracks as ambient background music while programming and often times they trigger nice memories.

It was just one of those games that mixed together all of the right things at the right time, very similar to the original Diablo II in the early 2000s.

I met a good friend through playing Counter Strike before social networks were universal, 2003-2005 or so. Early 2000s gaming felt (or I remember feeling) a lot different. Match making wasn't prevalent in PC games yet. You would play on different servers til you found you like. Then you would get to know the other players are form deeper relationships that I haven't had since then. I haven't really met any friends in Counter Strike after it implemented match making in CS:GO.

I was always annoyed by the loading screen when moving by boat between west and east continents.

I guess this loading screen was added due to technical reasons. Likely each continent was managed by a different server.

Another loading screen that I didn't like, was the underground tram between Stormwind and Ironforge. It made the tram feel fake (which I guess it was). Would have been awesome if it really was an underground tram that ran under the game world.

These 2 loading screens broke te immersion a little bit.

I'm guessing also a "realistic" time to travel between the two continents would not be very appealing the thousandth time you have to do it.

This is something EVE online deliberately leans into. Time to travel between star systems adds up really quickly and promotes a feeling of living in a particular part of the galaxy. Where going to a city to use the auction house has enough friction to be an annoyance in WoW, in EVE there’s so much more friction that it becomes a whole logistics game within the game. There’s money to be made hauling cargo because of this, and hauler ships offer the trade off of bigger cargo holds with fewer defences.

EverQuest had a long boat ride you could take between regions. It's hard to imagine any game company doing that in a MMO these days.

I expect the loading screen was in large part to there being no smooth transition when sailing from one continent to another.

WoW in its original form still had "zones" where there was a small delay in moving between them. These delays were actually exploited by players for PvP purposes (ie camping those zone transition points).

I think it's because you can't load assets from the entire game world in main memory, so when you go to a new zone it'll load assets from disk (slowly).

You could, even back in vanilla. I remember making a Linux ramdisk and installing the entire game into ram.

I think the tram had to be fake given the actual world geometry. If you consider where the tram should be it makes no sense. Well that, or they had to totally change the world to accommodate it or give it a very strange path.

The tram loading screen could have been an engine limitation. Streaming the game world from disk works nicely if the player moves at a pace that is slow enough that the disk can keep up. Long range teleportation breaks that assumption completely. You can deal with that case in two ways: accept a loading screen or build teleportation support into the streaming system, which means that both ends of the teleporter need to be loaded at once if you walk up to it. I assume that Blizzard decided against all that complexity deep in the engine for a single use case.

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