SPOILER Exploration feels absent from modern Wynncraft

i think it's pretty fine for the content book to have the include content that actively benefits the player (but i could see having the default filter not include caves, so it's a bit more navigable and less overwhelming) since there's still plenty of content that you have to just find--i can't recommend just going around the ocean border one time enough. there's so much random shit around that is rad as hell (and it looks like is still being added? this is in one of the ocean border caves and uses heroes(?) cosmetics, along with fresh mob models and some other cool shit.)

at least for me, there seems to be plenty of unmentioned content just to be found, that really lets players build their own stories with (and then we get those super awesome theory threads--it's been too long)

just peeping ocean border, under-ocean caves, and the like ruins and graves and stuff along wynn mountains is really fun, even though there's really nothing to gain from going there

 

Yeah sorta my point. There's still a lot of things to find and form stories around. They also do storytelling and just make places feel more alive and lived in.
There's been a lot of it with all the more subtle out of the way reworks that's been happening in recent updates. Nobody really mentions them but there's been a decently large amount of changes and additions across wynn.
The utilisation of all the festival skin stuff has been really cool imo.
Not just in environment stuff but also in a ton of the new mobs.

 

I disagree.

When quest stages don't give coordinates, there's no reason the destination should be marked at all. Not being able to find it is a simple case of skill issue. If all those places were marked, many quests would be really boring. For example, the one thing that makes me like Lost Tower is that the player is forced to explore Ancient Nemract and find the right kind of tower based on a small detail.

I don't find coordinates annoying. Yes, they tell me the exact direction to go into, but I'll actually have to think it through on my own instead of a giant red beam shining in the distance. Coordinates don't break game immersion, beacons do.

 

If the quest is ??? where exploration is part of the puzzle then yeah I’m fine there not being beacons (I don’t think ??? gives coords either). But most quests aren’t that way and when they don’t give coordinates, it’s usually because of the GM probably forgot to or the stage doesn’t involve traveling. And as someone who’s beaten every quest at least twice, it’s not that it’s “impossible” to find the quest locations or just a “skill issue.” It’s that it’s hard to remember every stage of 100+ quests that also change every update. This one in particular is gonna throw a wrench in my mental memory of the early game with all the revamps and level changes.

It’s okay if you don’t like beacons; I just think that it’s okay if they’re the default as long as it’s toggable. If this was a survival game like the vanilla base game, then yeah beacons would break immersion. But this is an MMORPG; it’s inherently less immersive than survival or other genres. Most RPG’s in particular have an interactive in game map. Due to Minecraft limitations, you can’t have that in Wynncraft without opening up a separate tab for the online map. Which is far more worse for immersion than beacons.

 

Respectfully disagree on this. The map.wynncraft.com map feels organic and doesn't give a clear view of many locations. Using it for gameplay felt very immersive for me.

This is a completely separate issue that should be fixed on its own.

Then what purpose would the beacon even serve? If it's hard to deduce where to go in a 20 block radius, the environment should be edited instead of adding a beacon right next to the player.

Why would you have to remember the stages? The game tells you what stage you're on as you're playing. I understand your point in the case of quests like Bob's Lost Soul and Temple of Legends, but those big fetch quests are few in number.

I interpret this as you wanting to complete quests as fast as possible on replays. On quests, First playthrough value > Repeat playthrough value. You can always use the wiki in cases like these. The constant reworking of quests adds some replay value to the game; I don't see an issue with it.

Other than that I can see your points.

 

While I'm also a lot more neutral about the content book change, I think that you're romanticizing Wynncraft's exploration aspect too much, and I don't think that the issues with Wynncraft's early-game progression have been covered in much detail. I'll attempt to explain what you talked about in terms of Wynncraft's exploration.


First I wanna talk about the old quest book, and quite frankly I don't think it did a very good job of getting new players into the action. It carries a lot of the old MMORPG design of guiding players through a very streamlined string of quests, and I reckon that this in particular leads to a lot of confusion. What happens when players aren't a high enough level to keep up with the quests, and then are forced to grind a level? What happens when players get stuck on a certain piece of content (this should be very difficult to do at least in the early levels, but around lvl 30-40 it might get tricky)? The quest book doesn't necessarily help you with that. You end up leaving the player to find out what they are supposed by themselves, and at this early in the game, getting stuck like that can be the difference between a player continuing to play or leaving forever. In that aspect, the content book does a good job of guiding the player towards horizontal progression, and with the new system of rewarding players upon first-time completion of a cave or setpiece you can give them some of that extra XP so they can continue with the vertical progression afterwards.

In terms of secret discoveries, I agree with you about their existence in the quest book to a certain degree. A big issue I have with secret discoveries in the first place is the tome slot that is only unlocked after a certain amount of secret discoveries, which completely defeats the purpose of having secret discoveries in the first place. However, the fact that secret discoveries are tied to character progression now is (unfortunately) justified, and it has been done in an acceptable manner since they still force you to find out what to do once you reach the area that they are in. (although I'd much rather have secret discoveries in the content book guide you towards NPCs that tell you about where to go next to add more world building instead of just guiding you to where they are around).


While I completely agree with you that open-world exploration is something that gamers want, the comparisons that you make aren't very fair IMO. In a game like Tears of the Kingdom and Elden Ring, the entire game is crafted around the idea of open exploration, which can't really be said for Wynncraft. Just as a preface, I have nothing against Wynncraft's map/level/general designers, and they do some really great work nowadays, but to say that Wynncraft has been carefully designed throughout its existence would be dishonest. I reckon that much of the content in the game wasn't designed with such careful planning in mind, at least in the older days. I think that the idea that a lot of these open-world games want you to explore a vast world without guidance is a bit overblown, because in a lot of these games things are made visible or suspicious or interesting on purpose. Contrary to what they might be called, most if not all of the secrets within the game want to be found, and designers for those games usually do a very good job of making that player experience feel organic. Modern Wynncraft has done this a lot better than the old design, as most caves and important setpieces are fairly visible, and they should be.

Perhaps the biggest differentiating factor between Wynncraft and other open-world games is that the player is granted a lot more freedom in how they are allowed to progress, and the game scales difficulty based on your progress (at least for TotK). Wynncraft's linearity is on-brand with MMORPGs because that's what Wynncraft is. It's an MMORPG. That's not to say that it can't be an open-world sort of game though, but there is a really large conflict of interest.

One of the biggest issues is that Wynncraft's discovery and exploration are directly tied to its MMORPG-brand linear system of gear progression.

Due to this, I think that the content book is a necessary change for new player-retention, alongside client-side chests which allow what are probably inexperienced newbies to bypass what has previously been a progression wall (at least in my experience, I've seen new players struggle due to having underleveled gear).


How would you go about fixing this issue and bringing back exploration as a core aspect of Wynncraft?

Well, part of the problem is that Wynncraft is built to be a linear MMORPG. However, there are some things that can be done delinearize Wynncraft's progression, at the very least being:

1. Removal of strict level requirements for quests, and instead being replaced with a level recommendation and a dynamic difficulty meter that adjusts based on the player's current level vs its recommended level (effectively lets you do some quests earlier than intended if desired)
2. Significant changes to an area's recommended/avg level (allow players in the earlygame to choose which area they want to go)
3. Better world design & reworks to many caves and important setpieces to be more generally visible without requiring beacons as guidance (could be done in a multitude of different ways, ranging from just making the area look unique or having NPCs guide you towards certain destinations on the map)
4. A rework of the linear system of gear progression so that chest looting is no longer the best (and effectively the only as of now) way to obtain loot while leveling.
5. Probably a lot more I'm missing but I've been writing this for an hour and a half now so I'll stop here.

Do I think that most of this will happen? No, not really, but that's okay. Wynncraft's main selling point isn't exploration, it's the fact that it is an MMORPG.
Do I think that the content book is a perfect replacement to Wynncraft's quest book? No, but it's a bit of an upgrade that is probably aimed towards new player retention.

 

I disagree with this. Out of all my playthroughs of Wynncraft, especially in the early game, I practically never got my gear from loot chests. Not that I never tried looting chests; it just that I never got good drops that I would actually use in my playthrough. Most of my gear came from a mix of mob drops, quests, dungeons, shops, and the trade market. And because quests, dungeons, and mobs gave xp as well, it was more worth to do them over loot running through most of the game.

Of course in the endgame loot chests became the primary way to get gear and money, and I’m sure this is true now more than ever with the upcoming update. But for 95% of the game you don’t need to loot chests at all to get decent gear and doing so too much can unnecessarily slow down your progression.

 

Isn't number 3 already being done a decent amount? There's been a lot of npcs which just point you towards caves or secrets, and a lot of the caves have had more obvious entrances

 

are we talking you can do it 10 levels under or just anyquest cus i feel like it would be easy to carry someone through a journy futher/beyond since there is very limited mob fighting
and then they would get all the exp taking them to level 50 ish quickly

 

This was a really insightful read. Looking back yeah, I probably was romanticizing exploration a bit too much.

Also as Oinuk and Daktota mentioned regarding cool builds hidden on the map, I think that's definitely a great reason to explore and one I didn't really think about. More stuff like the inn near Ancient Nemract would be a better fit for Fruma than changing a bunch of stuff to make it more like Elden Ring or something.

 

I personally see nothing wrong with increasing QoL in terms of navigation, because it allows more players to find things that they wouldn’t have before, and increase player retention. I honestly support this direction, because it effectively increases the amount of content for people playing blind, without spoiling too much. It just makes everyone’s lives easier.

I think Wynncraft has enough cool builds to give people tons of incentive to just look around and venture off the beaten path.

 

do they "find" it though? there is no searching, there is just "seeing".

I would argue otherwise, as the caves will become just another paths. It does not incentivise exploring, but following the content book.

 

Exploration does exist IMO, you just can only explore an area once.
You can explore areas such as MH or SI, but you can't do it once you have the entire area memorized.

 

Thinking from a new player's perspective, I would find it really weird if a game was to tell me "check out this cave over here" for every darned cave on the map, when all that I find is 4 mobs and a loot chest. It makes the quest book provide massive informational overload, while at the same time making me feel like I don't need to explore because if they're already telling me where everything is, why bother exploring? And, as an experienced player I know that not everything is listed in there, but a new player is not going to recognize this. If you tell them "here's a hundred caves with loot chests and other minor rewards at the end of them" they're naturally going to assume you list everything of note, because if you're listing stuff that minor, what else is there of note to find?

 

The really plain and lackluster visual design of the content book aside, how about just have quests, discoveries and other stuff separated by default?

Have an NPC during the "introducing the content book" aspect of the tutorial point out to us that we can also view discoveries and other non-quest stuff via buttons. At least then it's a little bit less subtle and doesn't make new players assume that secret discoveries are like the "focus", albeit optional next step while they do their quests.

Hell, I played through the new earlygame simulating as a new player and if you were to ask me what buttons are at the bottom of the content book I won't be able to answer. Please make the GUI better.