Talking Game Design - Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games - page 63

phasing has killed the one thing they were trying to give us: more immer-
sion and the feeling that our characters can make a dif erence.” 54 With the
new design players complained about feeling like they were 'on rails,' as
the game led them from place to place, rather than encouraging them to
explore an open and inviting game world. Although Blizzard, the game
developer, stated they do not fully agree with the whole of the critique,
they also said that “we're taking all these criticisms in stride and will be
using them to improve the questing experience for future expansions and,
to an extent, future patches . . . Your feedback keeps us from swaying too
far in any one direction though, so we greatly appreciate threads like this
one.” 55 Although this could certainly be lip service to the player base, if the
Blizzard response is indicative of overall policy, it is a case of player feed-
back impacting the way in which games are designed. However, as this is
a general statement largely aimed at a broad design goal, it is hard to trace
whether or not the feedback will actually be employed in future ef orts. Tol
Barad is a dif erent story.
Tol Barad was designed as a key feature of the Cataclysm expansion.
Building on the success of a surprise hit in the previous expansion, the bat-
tle for Lake Wintergrasp, Tol Barad was designed as “an open world PvP
zone” that also contained “a hub on Tol Barad Peninsula for both factions
to complete daily quests.” 56 Battles were set to take place every two and a
half hours and sides would be evenly matched in their ef ort to win control
of the island. There are three keeps and three towers, and the attacking side
needs to gain control of all three keeps before time runs out to win. Control
of the keeps depends on measuring “the number of players from each side
in the immediate area” with a secondary calculation where
each time a member of your faction [side or team] is killed in the imme-
diate vicinity of a keep, a slider bar will move slightly in favor of the
opposing faction. So not only does the size of each force in the area
determine who controls each keep, but losing allies during the contest-
ing process determines control as well. 57
Destroying towers is done only by the attacking side, who add fi ve minutes
to the contest for each tower destroyed. The winning side gets access to
additional daily quests, a small raid zone, and a direct reward of honor
points and commendations if they were participating when the battle
ended. The losing side gets honor points for participating in the battle and
the chance to play again in 150 minutes.
Shortly after players leveled to eighty-fi ve, which must be done to par-
ticipate in Tol Barad, it became apparent that the design of the zone was
poor. The idea may have been good, but the execution led to a situation
where “Tol Barad would be fun if it weren't so horribly broken in its goal
and mechanics.” 58 There were a wide variety of problems identifi ed with the
zone, most of which combined to create a situation where “any defending