WoW And The Non-Raid Content Issue

Something I find very interesting is that there is a lot of pent-up frustration in segments of the WoW community over the emphasis on raiding and dungeon gameplay in the game.

I think that there is a lot of sound reasoning behind this sentiment, but it sometimes expresses itself in iffy ways, like the ask that not as much raid or dungeon content be added or the idea that people only do Mythic Plus because streamers told them it’s good. Today, I want to kind of analyze this claim, and I’m going to start with a thesis statement and work my way backwards.

First, let me say this – I am not without biases in this “fight.” I am a raider, through and through, it is what I love about the MMOs I play(ed), and I recognize that bias going into this. It makes me bristle when people suggest that developers just shouldn’t add raid content, because intended or not, I read that as “you shouldn’t have the things you want” and that does color my perception. In an ideal world, I want everyone to have what they want in their game of choice, and even with split development staff working on different things, WoW prioritizes high-end PvE content over other activities – so I get where the frustration comes from, even as I note that simply not making new raid content wouldn’t magically result in new non-raid content being added faster. Having said that, I think my thesis will hopefully put minds at ease, so here goes.

My assessment of WoW’s content strategy is this: the game has never had more designed non-raid content than it does now, but that is the problem for non-raiders. Let’s dive in.

Early WoW had almost nothing in terms of non-dungeon, non-raid content added in patches. Vanilla had the battleground patches for PvP and had the reworked talent trees patch after patch by focusing in on a few classes at a time, but most of the content added was new raids and dungeons. In terms of non-raid gameplay, you got the Silithus revamp for Ahn’Qiraj, the Eastern Plaguelands world content for Naxxramas v1.0, and…well, that was about it. Nearly everything else designed for players at endgame pushed you into a raid or dungeon. They worked to make both more accessible through things like reduced raid size zones (Zul’Gurub and Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj), bringing dungeons down to more fair levels (reducing the 10-player mini-raids common in Scholomance and Stratholme to 5-player caps and bringing UBRS from a 15-player common run to 10), but all of this was aimed squarely at pushing players into this content.

What did early WoW do well that made non-raiders stay and play in spite of all of this, though? I think it’s basic – the game offered an immersive world unlike anything else at the time and a variety of things you could just choose to do. There was little design pressure to do reputations back in vanilla, to push on professions, really to do much of anything. You were free to self-direct, and it wasn’t uncommon for players to simply spend their time hanging out in Azeroth, using the role-play suitable spaces of inns, cities, and the little nooks and crannies of the world as places they could just exist. It’s quite telling that most of the memories of vanilla that persist aren’t raid boss world firsts or dungeon anything, but things that could only happen in an open world with the kind of freedom offered by that design – the in-game funeral crashing (fun fact: my Wrath-era raid lead was in the guild that did the crashing, and he is exactly the kind of asshole you could see participating in that), or bringing the Corrupted Blood debuff from ZG into an AH and watching a pandemic on hyper-speed. Sure, there’s also good old Leeroy Jenkins, but so much of the humor of that has little to do with the dungeon itself!

Early WoW offered a lot to casual players explicitly because it did not deign to tell them what they had available to do. You could choose any number of goals or things to do, and everything could feel rewarding because the game was so young – no one has that much money so gold is significant, gear scaling is low so world drops carry and keep value for longer, and reputation rewards are all fun little tchotchkes instead of vital progression requirements so that content is just there for something to do.

But I think the most important point is still the scale of the world and sense of place. Early WoW felt like, well, a world – it was a patchwork of zones but you could run through it continuously, end to end across a full continent without ever hitting a loading screen or any other reason to pause, with impassable mountains and these little flourishes like open seats in an inn or NPCs milling about. I may have stayed a WoW fan to run raids and get deep into endgame content, but I became a WoW fan because of the sense of wonder and intrigue the game offered.

Over time, however, the game honed in on a model that worked for it – PvE instanced content was The Way, so you saw more raids, more difficulties, increased viability of dungeons in endgame (and even that was a rollercoaster for an expansion or two), and increased emphasis on gearing and progression that led to post-cap progression and the modern nightmare of how leveling and empowering a character simply never ends. With these changes came concessions to a non-raider audience – new world content like the dailies in Quel’Danas, the Argent Tournament, the Molten Front, and more. The addition of raid-level gear to faction reputation vendors also gave some measure of benefit to non-raiders, helping them gain some extra player power without stepping into the raids as the gear power creep began to climb.

Modern WoW has a ton of activities and things that are built for players to do, even outside of instanced PvE content. Nearly every major patch from Mists of Pandaria onwards has offered a new zone for world content, new objectives, new gear, new rare mobs, new world bosses, a new story chapter. Blizzard clearly puts a lot of effort into this content and wants players to enjoy it. There is a problem, though, and it’s one that depends on the individual, but I think it does make an impact – this content is designed.

Old WoW had this feeling of being a world, a place, and the things players could do within it were subject only to a minimum of guardrails – limits like fatigue, physical barriers from locations, and the limits of what quests and options the game had. But it was free in that way because the game had no single-track it was trying to push you onto – you could go to the buffet of content and pick from it at will, with all of it having some value to your current gameplay. There was no invisible hand pushing you to the new hotness, the current thing – you were, in every sense, free to self-direct.

However, over time, the game has become, well, more of a game and less of a world. You can see this just in looking at capitol cities – the capitols of Vanilla are huge places that felt like cities at the time. TBC brought Shattrath, a sprawling space that had gameplay content and directives sprinkled all over its 3 levels of verticality – annoying to navigate in a hurry, but then you got flying, and by god, it worked. Wrath, however, brought Dalaran, and look – I loved Wrath, I like Dalaran as a gameplay device, but city it is not. The Dalaran of lore is supposed to be a massive mage city, this gleaming sanctuary of magic, but the version we see in WoW (both versions, in fact) is just not that at all. It’s very easy to get your quests, drop off at the bank, and be on your way though. Ever since then, we’ve mostly had capitols that are tiny little staging grounds – the Shrines of MoP, the literal shanty-towns of WoD, and Dalaran v2.0 in Legion. All of these are very gameplay-accessible, but they aren’t really cool places, outside of small touches like the Dalaran sewers. By having cities like this for a decade, it made it so that when we got proper cities again in Battle for Azeroth with Boralus and Dazar’Alor, people either complained about the spread-out nature of stuff (hello Dazar’alor!) or how the space was ultimately meaningless since the stuff you needed was in a tiny strip of the map (Boralus is thy name).

The same is true of actual gameplay, though. The game used to offer a wider array of content with the ability to determine your own path – you have X number of launch factions and you want specific rep rewards, and you were able to dictate your own way through that content in an order that suited you. None of the paths through said content had a huge sunk cost to them, so you could change it up midway through if you wanted to and move to a different faction or focus.

The modern game has more content than ever designed for a non-raiding audience. Zereth Mortis actually pulls this off pretty well by virtue of being designed to be specifically skippable by progression raiders, who just need to show up for story content in order to get their double-legendary and be on their way. The zones Blizzard has been adding, really starting with Timeless Isle in MoP, are dense with content – world quests, daily quests, multiple reputations, rare spawns, new gathering nodes, little puzzles, treasures to find on the map, and just a ton of other things thrown at you like weekly quests, reward currencies, catch-up gear that can push you into raid readiness (if you so desire), and more. WoW’s content for non-raiders is robust.

But we get back to that pesky word “designed” and now we arrive at the main idea I’m chasing after here – because the content is designed to be done a specific way, players have less choice in what to do or how to do it and it grows tiring more quickly.

Old WoW was a messy game with arguably a similar raid focus to today’s game. But old WoW was also a world, a place where the content structures and the sense of discovery aligned to create something that was special to a lot of people. Current WoW feels like levels in a game – designed by a person to have the appearance of a world, but coming up a bit short. Shadowlands exemplifies this problem – each zone has precious little signs of life, and there isn’t any real notion that people could live (or, well, un-live I guess lol) in these places. There’s a dearth of RP spaces, and the game’s questing structure through the core level-up story has these clearly designed moments where a vista is intended to inspire awe – and it does, but it also feels constructed. There’s a gap between the beauty of the Grand Canyon or Mount Fuji and, say, the Seat of the Primus in Maldraxxus. Old WoW has lots of little spots where the beauty of the world felt accidental – places like Thousand Needles, the vistas of Tanaris, or the view of the central area of Hellfire Peninsula from the Dark Portal. All of these WoW things were also designed and built by a team, but they don’t feel designed. I loathe the idea that MMOs or open-world titles need inconvenience to be immersive, but in some ways like this, it works – the wide expanses of a lot of WoW’s original post level 40 zones are designed in a way that makes your mount feel special, but the entire game is full of places like that even before. As a Night Elf player many times over, I made the Darkshore run in vanilla too many times to count, and sure, it was annoying at times, but it also gave me this sense of scale unlike anything I had ever encountered in a game before.

The World of Warcraft we have today offers more choices for total content to non-raiding players than it ever has before. But that content has been stripped of artifice, made obviously compliant to gearing timers and a content cadence that is favorable to Blizzard. It has the illusion of being a choice, but it grounds players to it with no real choice to deviate short of doing more of it (to a defined limit) or not doing it at all. Rare spawns occur on a fixed, determinable timer or trigger. Treasure options you can discover out in a zone cycle based on quest objectives or other conditions, in addition to the one-time finds and the puzzles like locked chests or mystery items. You’re sent from a quest hub that is roughly equidistant to each major region of the zone, set to do quests that put you on a lap around the zone, before returning back to that same original hub. It is content, and some of it is quite fun and engaging, but you are on Blizzard’s schedule, by god, and you have no way out of that.

Raiders get long, sprawling raid instances full of bosses with some measure of randomness in mechanics and multiple viable strategies to push forward through tough encounters. Each raid group has their own idiosyncrasies and so there’s variety in it, without accounting for Mythic Plus and how the modifier stack for it can drastically change dungeons week-to-week, creating a massive possibility space that has decision space for things like routing, buffing, and boss engagements (in theory, because routing definitely gets to be solved quickly). Through the lens of the current non-raid content in WoW, it is easy to see why such a player might not be happy – because they’re locked to Mr. Blizzard’s Wild Ride with no real choice out of it. And sure, you can self-direct to other options like legacy content, transmog farming, gold making, and the like – all of which are viable paths to enjoyment, but they also rarely change, short of newer content becoming soloable or doable with a small group of friends so you can steamroll it for your choice of mogs.

At the end of all of this, my core argument is this – WoW needs more true options for non-raiders, where they have legitimate freedom to dictate their path and choices, and until then, Blizzard is going to be serving a large plate of non-raid content that just doesn’t quite hit the same.