About twenty of you have contacted asking for an overview of how to structure and flow a raid zone. Well, first off, it takes a lot of people to do it to the level of quality that WoW achieves it. However, I can give a quick high level overview.
This is very likely to be a three or four part’er – so hang on to your hats and poke me till it’s done! Alright, let’s do this.
High Level Raid Construction:
- Theme
- Characters
- Purpose
- Memorable Moments
- Structure
- Shape of Raid
- Landmarks
- Obstacles
- Flow
- Execution
- Environment
- Bosses
- Events
- Filler
- Progress Tracking
- Support Work
- Testing
- Personal
- In-House
- PBE
- Live
- Retrospective
- What went well
- What can be improved
- Take-aways for next time
Theme
Ideally, the theme should be a single cohesive concept that pulls the raid together. Molten Core, for example, is all about a lava cave and its denizens. Blackwing Lair was about dragons and experimentation. Sometimes, the core concept can be clear, but its expressions varied. (For example, Ulduar)
In general, you want to start with a tight, simple theme and expounded upon it heavily in the Structure and Execution phases. This rule applies to most things in game design and leadership – set the core heart and soul, then let the more experienced implementers figure out the details. This will lead to increased trust across the team and create opportunities for personal craftsmanship to be expressed.
Characters
Characters are the essential cast that will be used to tell the story of the raid. In a highly complex and well-produced game like WoW, this determines which voice actors will need to be called back, which new characters need to be cast and sets in motion the concept art for any unique forms or gear those character might have.
Characters are weakly broken up into two axis:
Friends / Enemies
Major / Minor
Purpose
All raid zones generally serve a common purpose – create an elaborate shared experience, with trials, challenges and rewards to incentivize a raid group to assault the location. However, there’s often a deeper plot purpose as well – does the raid advance some major story or capstone some long narrative that’s been built up earlier in the game?
Other times, a raid zone might be there to serve entirely as an experiment. See Malygos (Wrath of the Lich King) and Trial of the Crusader. In these cases, there’s a hypothesis: “An entirely destructible raid zone is cool.” or “A series of challenges without a change in location is more cost-effective and interesting”.
The more experimental the hypothesis, the smaller and more focused the raid typically is – as a developer, you want to hedge your bets appropriately. If it you find a new and effective formula, you can always scale it up. By contrast, if its a bomb… it’s better to let it go.
Memorable Moments
Finally, once the theme and purpose is in place, choosing a few key moments to convey the big parts of the story and choosing what you want to showcase and which events are worth the extra investment of time and resources. In WoW terms, this is a mixture of cinematics, events and scripted camera sequences.
Structure
(Image credit: allakazham)
One the overall theme is established, the next challenge is to figure out the physical structure of the raid. Since most games (and people) think in 2 dimensions, the most common way of doing this is to sketch out a flat top-down drawing of the raid zone.
(Continued Next Time)
Blog followers, why don’t you guys give me a hand here – post some theme ideas and we’ll “build” this new raid zone together.
Core Direction Ideas:
- Near Future Cyber Tech
- Dragons
- Archaeology
(Part 2)
If we’re talking purely using an angle to easily explain the process, I’d say something simple. Like “Dragons” being the central theme.
In a purely selfish suggestion that I’d just like to see how it works itself out: Not many MMOs have tried to tackle an underwater raid zone. Everquest had Plane of Water and WoW has SSC (even though that isn’t really underwater), but that is all I can really think of. I imagine mechanically it would be a nightmare, but a nightmare I’d find pretty interesting. Even if it doesn’t work out in a practical since, just stepping through the building process and seeing what issues arise would be interesting.
We could do Dragon and keep it simple.
Regarding underwater, I’d rather not introduce a highly flawed gameplay model for the WoW concept since it dramatically complicates the way we think about time and space. 🙂
I’d love to see a WoW take on the classic treasure hunter theme, delving into ancient vaults filled with riches untold – An Archeology Raid!
Dragons is always a good theme!
I’m totally unbiased to evaluate that 😛
Let’s try this:
Heist in a futuristic world?
I think I’ll try combining these four ideas next week.
Good with any of the ideas mentioned thus far.
If I were to throw out a new one, though, I’d do a twist on the near-future tech with a wacky science/tinker type theme. (Always thought it’d be cool to have a Gnome centric raid back the WoW days and bosses like Flame Leviathan and Mimiron were highlights of the game for me)
I feel like there’s plenty of room for translating that one theme into a number of interesting mechanics across a raid, from erratic portals, to cloning machines, to any number of other wacky gizmos.
I’d love to see an emotional love/hate story, between the now two dead lovers, with necromantic theme.
The NecRomance: World-shaping Love and Spite.
The two would be ex-lovers and now fighting each other, and you side with either of them. Throughout the raid, you get to see their relationship build up and fall. In a grand final battle you face both at the same time, and it’s a big back and fourth battle, which allows you to switch allegiance between the two, and the one you are allied with, helps you then. They also attempt to backstab you, and turn on you, forcing switches.
In the end you kill both of them.
Am I being too grand here, spinning away too far?
A touch too grand for a simple project like this blog series 🙂
Evil mastermind that wants to take over the world by doing inhumane experiments. Bonus points if the mastermind is extremely charismatic.
I mean, we always have one of those guys almost at the goal posts, serves as a purpose for some to become heroes.
Also, regarding the first paragraph, I could probably sum it up with ”Science-like scenery”.
Alright, this makes sense I will integrate it into the next post 🙂