One of the features of World of Warcraft: Midnight I’m the most excited for is Prey. In case you’re unfamiliar, Prey is a system (that you have to sign up for) which will ambush you with a specific boss enemy you’re hunting while you’re out in the open world, eventually leading to a 1v1 when you take the bugger down.
It’s an ingenious way to handle a spectre that’s haunted MMOs for years: Open world difficulty. See, world quests, dailies, and the like are a core part of the modern MMO ecosystem—you’ve gotta do all your little tasks. But if you like a challenge, said tasks often start to feel like chores.
In a recent interview I had with senior game designer Kim Flak, I was told I was indeed bang on the money with this assumption: “I think that kind of gets to the core of a lot of the different goals we had with Prey. So it is a little bit ‘tackling the idea of difficulty’, but I think it’s less straight-up difficulty. It’s not like just clicking on a hard mode. It’s more increasing moment-to-moment gameplay challenges, and giving players opportunities for skill expression in the outdoor world.
“It’s easy to get into a flow state when you’re just doing your routine, you know, you’re doing your world quests, your rares, your treasures, you slouch down in your chair…” By ambushing you at inopportune points, Flak explains, Prey shakes that routine up: “What does it mean to have to all of a sudden have to think about: ‘Do I have crowd control? Do I have the right talents? Do I have enough health before I go into this?”
Knowing how resistant MMO players are to the idea of unfairness (guilty), I ask Flak how Blizzard intends on keeping this system feeling fair: “Prey does have rules that players will kind of learn as they progress through the three different tiers of difficulty.
“For instance, for ambushes specifically, players are going to learn that you only get ambushed when you’re in combat. So if you’re standing near the flight master, or you AFK to go get your pizza, you’re not just going to randomly come back and be ambushed.”
Well, at least on the lower difficulties: “Nightmare mode kind of is the ‘don’t AFK’ mode. If you need to AFK, you’re going to want to go to a rested area. You might even want to log out. You might want to hearthstone back home, because on Nightmare mode, going AFK might get you killed. But hey, it’s in the name, you signed up for it.”
The real thing that surprised Flak during testing was how on board players were for getting dropped in on out of nowhere by their Prey targets: “One thing that I was surprised by was that players really liked being ambushed.
“I was a little afraid, like you mentioned a little bit earlier, that players might see these as moments of friction that felt a little unfair. Like ‘I pulled that mob, and I would’ve lived if that guy hadn’t ambushed me!’ But players overall were like, ‘I like being jumped. I like that experience. It’s fun, it’s surprising, and it’s a moment for me to, all of a sudden, shift how I’m thinking about what I’m doing.’
“It really delighted me, because I was hoping players were going to like the surprise of ambushes, and overall, a lot of them did.”
