Design Process: Analog WoW Arena

While the first day of design workshops at GDC was really fun, the second day was even better! In a workshop led by Stone Librande (of Riot, previously Blizzard), the goal was to turn digital games into analog games that captured their essence. As people were calling out games they wanted to work with, one man stood up and said World of Warcraft. As a giant WoW nerd, I immediately hopped on his team.

Since WoW is such a large game, we decided that a good thing to focus on was the arena aspect. We really had to focus on figuring out what the essence of this was before we actually started working. We made a list: cooperation and teamwork, competition, momentum, suspense, trust in your teammates, hope, randomness, furiosity... we could keep going. But as we analyzed these traits of the game and talked about how it made us feel, we realized what the essense of arenas really is: the drama of the momentum swing. When you think your team is so far ahead and sure to win, then that one crit completely destroys your hopes and turns the tables. That rogue that snuck up from nowhere. That perfect use of a heal. This is what draws spectators into each and every match, getting them cheering and hollering.

And that's what we wanted.

What we came up with is what I believe to be the most intense, heart-wrenching paper prototype I have ever worked on, or even played. Stone liked to refer to us as the "standing table", because we were always standing up and rolling dice at each other (Why standing up? It makes everything way more intense, obviously). We brought lunch back to the room to keep discussing as we ate, and we constantly changed mechanics and worked with values. In fact, we are going to keep working on this to make it something even more awesome.

We started out thinking we needed a large grid to play on and a strong movement mechanic. But movement really so important in arenas, or should we focus on the attacking instead? We decided on the later. We wanted to make it intense, keep the action going. I argued that a long or involved movement phase would just break the momentum swing we were trying to create, and the others agreed. We ended up with movement on a 4 x 3 grid, with two rows belonging to each team. The "movement phase" was just discussing with your teammates whether you were going to move or not, which generally revolved around pushing or grouping up. Like I said, the movement wasn't the important part.

Instead of creating mechanics for all the different classes in World of Warcraft, we decided to focus on the roles. Our game was 3 vs 3, and players had multiple roles to choose from. Teams could bed made up of all one role if they wanted to, but it's best to have a nice grouping. This took some discussing, but we ended up with four: melee damage, ranged damage, healer, and hybrid. The melee player can attack players in adjacent spaces. The ranged player can attack within their own lane (row or column) as long as there was one space between them and their target (This led to an issue I'll discuss soon). Healers can heal within their lanes, can't attack, and can heal themselves. The hybrid class was an interesting thing to balance. We wanted them to be able to heal or attack, but how to go about that? What we ended up with at the end of the workshop was a player that must declare if they are healing or attacking during the declaration phase, and can only heal and attack adjacent spaces.

So clearly for healing, the healer role would be preferable to the hybrid since they can heal in lanes, not just adjacent. But what makes the melee role better than the hybrid? We ended up with increasing the melee player's starting health from 15 to 18, though that is definitely something to keep messing with. While hybrid is nice because it can both heal and deal damage, pure healing and pure damage roles shouldlogically be better at those things.

I mentioned before the issue with ranged players. It didn't seem right that a melee player could run right up to an enemy ranged player and attack so that the ranged player couldn't. It was too big of a weakness for the ranged players to have. To patch that issue up, we made it so that once a melee player crosses over to their enemy's side of the map, any enemy ranged players can then attack them in adjacent spaces (basically, they have their "one space in between" limitation lifted). This makes it so that if the last two people standing in the game are a melee player on one side and a ranged on the other, the ranged still has a chance.

We broke the game into four phases: move, declaration, roll, and damage/resolution. The move phase simply consists of players moving, with team initiative rolled for at the beginning of the game, and the team who took the most damage the round before moving first in subsequent turns. The declaration phase is when players declare what they are doing (aka the hybrids saying whether they're healing or attacking) and who their target is. The roll phase is the central phase of the game, where players roll dice to determine healing, attacking, and dodging. The damage/resolution phase is when all damage is calculated and doled out, with damage resolving before healing.

Before getting into the core, the damage, I'll quickly explain stun lock. We wanted a stun mechanic that would root a character to the spot they were in for a turn, taking away their movement and allowing the other team to use their turn to group on on them, if desired. At the end of the damage phase, each player who took damage rolls to determine stun lock. If you roll a 1 or a 2 (with a d6), you are stun locked. Therefore, there is a 33% chance that you are stunned the next turn.

Onto the most important part of the game: rolling! We started with simply rolling against the other team. Our teams tended to have two attackers and one healer each. The two damage dealers on one team would determine to attack one guy on the other team, and vice versa. We decided that damage would be determined based on a best two out of three roll. Each team would roll at the same time three times. After each roll you added up your team's score, and whoever had the higher number won that roll. If your team won two out of three of the rolls, your damage would go through, whereas the other team's wouldn't. The winning team rolls one more time to determine if the attack is critical: if you both rolled the same number, it's a crit! We had a lot of fun with this, and it got very tense.

For healing, instead of rolling against the other team you roll against yourself. You still roll three times, but instead you're trying to roll a 4, 5, or 6. If two out of three of your rolls were one of those numbers, your heal goes through. If you roll doubles on a successful roll, such as 4 4 2 or 4 5 4, your heal is critical for double the healing.

Of course, after playing for a little but we realized we had been blind to some problems. What happens when you attack with a teammate but aren't attacked back by your target? What if you just attack someone alone, and they do or do not attack back? There were a lot of cases that we missed that just didn't fit under the team best two out of three mechanic that we had in place. Naturally, we had to fix this.

Attacking with no resistance (your target doesn't attack you back) is rolled just like healing. There's a chance that you'll miss, and also a chance you'll crit. It's rolling against yourself. Team attacking with no resistance is done just like two single rolls without resistance. This seemed to solve the problem with appropriate odds for critting and missing, and we were happy with it.

To encourage team play and give movement a little more "oomph", we added a buff mechanic as well. You cannot share a space with an enemy, but you can share a space with up to one other teammate. When this happens, both players get a +1 buff to their healing and attacking. This means that instead of healing/damaging for a base of 1 point and critting for 2, the base is 2 and the crit is for 4! This added a nice aspect of risk versus reward that was missing before. Sure, put your healer with your melee player, but they're at risk.

What came out of this workshop was a well-bonded team, a lot of lessons learned, and an intense and fun game involving standing, yelling, and rolling. Turning WoW arenas into an analog game seemed daunting at first, but the end result was something I and my teammates are infinitely proud of. Here's to the future and continuing working on it!

#designprocess #analog #worldofwarcraft #WoW