“It is easier to make a complex thing than a simple thing”
This can’t surely be true, right? Sadly, especially in game design, this is true.
A complex thing can have many moving parts, many knobs to tweak and have a thousand miniature rules to handle the edge cases. A simple thing does not have this luxury. It just works and – if well enough designed – you ignore its elegance.
Simple is not crude
Just because a thing is simple, doesn’t mean it is difficult to use or poorly thought out. Compare these two axes. Thousands of years apart, they both serve similar purposes of chopping up wood. 
Yet for all of these things, the differences are astounding:
Material, Size, Weight, Balance, Shape, Features.
The ability to design comes from two skills. The ability to see these differences and the ability to conceive new ones. Many people become unfortunately hung up on one or the other aspect of design. Either they steal everything they see – or they make everything new – and lose all of the lessons someone else has learned.
Theft is Flawed
I started out by stealing every idea I ever had from somewhere. The first comic book I drew was mostly a retelling of Super Mario World, but with me as the hero. The first story I wrote was a thinly veiled fantasy version of the cold war. The first boss I created in WoW was stolen off the white board of my manager, Scott Mercer.
This last point is important – he handed me the pre-planned design, told me to steal it and simply focus on creating it. This is the great thing about theft – it allows you to focus on the physical labor required to bring an idea to life.
If you look back at most of the stories that filled the apprenticeship period in the US and Europe – it was filled with tales of young kids whose masters forced them into rote creation, rather than innovative or creative creation. Generations of iteration had shown that you are a stronger creator if you’ve started out mimicing someone else first.
However, if you stall out and rely on mimicry forever, you are unable to adapt to the changing needs of your environment.
Innovation is Flawed, too
After working on Attumen, my next boss was a guy known as the Shade of Aran. Stretching my wings a little bit further, I tried to stick to a lot of basic, easy stuff and only mix in a little new stuff. The result turned out okay – I actually learned so many lessons working on him that I’ll dedicate a full post to him later.
What is more important right now, is what happened to me after finishing him. I was riding so high on having successfully brought my own personal concept to life, that my brain surged from the recognition of having created something that balanced common with cool.
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| Credit to the talented John Polidora |
This told me, “Everything you believed was right – you can innovate even further now. No limits!”
Boy, was that a mistake. I quickly lost sight of the basic things I had done right on Shade and decided to go into crazy land. In fact, I straight up OD’ed on Innovation and the result was… Netherspite.
Netherspite was a boss fight so far removed from the reality of the game that it constantly broke the game’s rules. Tanking was defined by a perfect execution of a positioning dance. Healers had infinite resources, while dps had massively increased damage.
Sounds amazing, right? Well, sure! All of those things are great. The problem is – when you make that many changes at once, your boss encounter ceases to be part of World of Warcraft and instead is part of BDR – Brazie Dance Revolution.
In fact, the encounter was so far detached from the rest of the game that elabourate diagrams and planning was required for a normal group to execute it properly.
Please don’t misunderstand – planning is an excellent part of a deep, fulfilling multiplayer gaming experience. However, this encounter required such high levels of execution according to what were ultimately my whims, that many players chose to skip this encounter every week.Furthermore, this encounter was extreme bug prone and about half of the work I did in Karazhan involved fixing bugs, timing issues and random AI quirks that occurred under the bizzare rules of Netherspite.
I made that picture of Netherspite my desktop background at work for about a year, to remind me of what happens when you let your personal lust for innovation take over.
Innovation’s Price
I’ve been really lucky – I have an incredibly forgiving team that has allowed me to extend myself far further than I should have. Coming from an tech-savvy background, I was able to script my way out of the hole I created for myself on Netherspite.
However, it came at a price. After Netherspite, I was reassigned to work on the most basic content in the game. Basically told that until I mastered the basics, I needed to stay away from content that allowed me to get away with overly complex designs.
“But I MUST Innovate, or else I mean nothing”
The above sentence is a crying voice that still haunts me everyday. In fact, I regularly succumb to this fear and go too far. That’s okay, you’re totally normal. There’s one thing to keep in mind, one thing that is incredibly hard to accept and incredibly powerful once you do:
“There will always be another chance”
Maybe not on this boss, maybe not in this situation, maybe even not in this game, but another opportunity will come up again. As long as you don’t give up on yourself, you’ll continue to grow.
A Balance is Required
Steal until you learn the rules. Innovate less than the maximum you can handle.
Steal too much and you never develop the mental muscle required to handle the more complex problems you’ll face down the road. Innovate too much and you’ll consume all of your resources fixing bugs and solving newly created problems.
In my experience, it generally takes 4-8x more time to create a new thing than it does to improve an old thing. So if you’re like me and constantly feel the call to innovate – plan ahead.
Next time, I’ll describe the most fundamental piece of World of Warcraft’s combat system… can you guess what it is?
This is something I`ve lived, but never really realized. I just see it as pulling from many different places, and putting it together with a touch of my own ideas.
Also goes to show sometimes doing too much puts you in the hole rather than doing less. Need that balance.
Overall, I can say I have great respect for you. Shade is probably my favorite encounter to this day, and most of Karazhan as well. I remember when it was difficult, and I learned much from the raid as a whole on game design.
For the record, Netherspite was my favorite fight in Kara, and I’m incredibly sad my group was one of those you talk about who usually skipped it.
Of course, Shade of Aran was my most hated fight so you can’t win them all.
The first time I’ve seen and downed Nethrspite was on WotLK. I had some experience in the game and my cousin was leveling her first toon and had just hit 70. We decided to gather some guildmates and show her what a raid is. We chose Karazhan.
Most of us were 80-s, so we were simply nuking the bosses. We tried this method with a big, ghost-like dragon we saw in a side room too.
A few moments later we were lying on the floor, wondering “WTF was that?” and if the warlock had soulstoned someone who can resurrect.
Someone suggested skipping it, but I disagreed and as a raid leader read the tactic on Wowhead. It took me a while to finally figure out what should we do to prevent the dragon from healing itself. At least i thought so.
We tried one more time. It went better, as we had assigned some people to standing in the green portals to lock the beams, but in the end we were left with only two people alive and the rest screaming at them to finish Netherspite off. We managed, and there was one big “YEEEEEAAAH!!!” on TeamSpeak.
This way Netherspite ended being my favourite TBC boss, as i did all the other 70-lvl raids later, and my cousin started to continuously ask me when do we go on a raid again.
I entirely agree. The wretched chaos of tanking all the elementals, running away to LOS arcane explosion, running close and standing for flamewreath was an insane and painful mandala of hurt emblazoned on my soul to this day. The comparatively simple mechanic of Netherspite; rotate the beams, is something my raid could easily pull off.
You must have been playing a rogue or warrior. 🙂
This was a great post. I think I can share my experience then.
I was in a course for geometrical algorithms, and me and another guy came from Skellefteå (which is a smaller town, that only have a few unique courses from the main Uni in Luleå). We knew we were better programmers than the Engineer Masters 5th years, even though we were 3rd year Bachelors. We have much more practice coding, and both of us kinda looked down on the guys being at the main branch of the university.
At the same time the main branch have no clue what is going on, and looks down upon us.
Last project of the course, you was given a geometrical problem and allowed to solve it. I picked making a countour from several rectangles. I got cocky, and instead of looking up how to solve it from the book or on the internet, I decided to re-invent the wheel.
I made up my own solution for the problem. My solution was clumsy, didn’t work in all cases, but solved the problem. I had to use a power point presentation heavy with pictures to even have people understanding what the hell I was doing. I was really proud of my innovation, and I had not yet noticed how lacking it was.
Coding it was true hell, it was NOT made for coding first hand, I’ve had to redo it 2-3 times already, and spent around 2-3 months on it. We got about 1 week – 1 month to finish it, depending on how fast we choose subject.
In the end things got so horribly delayed because of my own innovated solution, and result is not very good on top of that.
When Mr Brazie says keep down on the innovation, he is really speaking the truth, and it’s a really good advice.