Unavoidable Calamity

A World Of Warcraft delve concept

Summary

After discovering a plot by remnants of the Twilight’s blade cult to poison Silvermoon’s denizens with void corrupted wine and sow chaos from within, the Champions of Azeroth will explore the source and put and end it it, although, what they discover is something unexpected.

Breakdown

For this project we developed a set of frameworks, based on research of existing WoW delves, from which we created:

 
  • Goals and Anti-Goals
  • Design Guidelines
  • Enemy Design Framework
  • Encounter Design Framework

Goals and Anti Goals

Delve Goals

  • Build a delve that fits WoW’s design philosophy

  • Create interactive objectives that are fun and new while maintaining familiarity 
  • Have dynamic interesting encounters that can challenge the player in higher difficulties

Framework Goals

  • Communicate designs clearly and efficiently with the least amount of words needed and avoiding numeral identifiers
  • Identify creature’s archetypes to create a familiarity with the type of creature before getting further detail
  • Each action/attribute has additional unique identifiers to explain how the creature promotes interactions with other core game mechanics

Anti Goals

  • Make a delve that is too complex with too many mechanics
  • Create mechanics that might frustrate player base
  • It feels like each encounter is the same thing with small changes
  • Make the encounters too difficult and annoying
  • Make the encounters too simplistic and boring

Guidelines

Mobs should have synergy at minimum between two of them

Add variety to the encounters to make them feel distinctive between each other

There should be a straight forward solution to the mob groups other than “dps them down”

Some encounters should not be needed to complete the main objectives

Rules

These rules were determined by examining different delves from the current expansion (War Within) and how the mobs, encounters, objectives and abilities behaved. The intention with these rules (and observations) is to create a design space that embodies current WoW delve design language.

Regarding mob design

Mobs should have synergy at minimum between two of them

Add variety to the encounters to make them feel distinctive between each other

There should be a straight forward solution to the mob groups other than “dps them down”

Some encounters should not be needed to complete the main objectives

Regarding mob design

Mobs should have synergy at minimum between two of them

Add variety to the encounters to make them feel distinctive between each other

There should be a straight forward solution to the mob groups other than “dps them down”

Some encounters should not be needed to complete the main objectives

Research

We investigated existing WoW Delves to understand their framework and rules. We played multiple delves to analyze the amount of rooms, objectives, encounter composition and enemies’ abilities.

Delve Rooms

We used existing delves as references to determine how many rooms each delve had. We reached the conclusion that most delves have a total of 4 rooms including the final boss area.

Delve Objectives

Objectives on existing delves revolve around grabbing an item for a delve mechanic, interacting with the environment, and eliminating certain enemies or collecting resources. We used these references to create our own objectives, interactable, and goals.

Encounter & Ability Composition

We determined most encounters had a max of 5 enemies to a minimum of 2. Afterwards, we looked into the existing abilities and the difficulties of the enemies to determine frameworks and rules that worked for this project.