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?
