Updating Old Content VS Making New Content

With the announcement that Fruma is releasing this year, and hints of new content after that, it got me thinking. Rekindled was branded as the update that brought Wynncraft up to date, using all the newest tricks and features, but a decent portion of the game still feels... outdated. Sure, earlygame and (most) lategame activities are super polished and engaging now, but the midgame and certain endgame activites still feel... rusty.

Take, for example, Legendary Island. It's filled with old AI mobs, and (very annoying) old spells. Of course, I understand bosses take a lot of work to redo, but that doesn't change the fact that most of these fights straight up, well, suck. Almost all of the bosses are ranged mobs (generally the most powerful AI type), use the same selection of spells (flamethrower, arrowstorm, teleport spams, and... pull and push *shudder*), taking away the uniqueness and significance of their fights. And with them being buffed drastically after Rekindled, it feels like some of these bosses are hard... just for the sake of being hard. There is no strategy behind them.

Of course some of the bosses are AMAZING. R-4X (the rat) is really unique and has great telegraphs. Cybel is an amazing concept, with a very memorable boss fight. But the others? Not so much. They do have their own gimmicks, but usually pretty small and insignificant. They're just... ranged AI player models that spam flamethrower, push, and teleport.

Quests/progression is another thing. From level 40 (when you travel to Gavel) to around level 100 (Silent Expanse), most of the quests and areas are very outdated. Confusing quests, barrier blocks everywhere, it's definitely still fun and playable, but compared to the earlygame it just seems lackluster. Many players get to this point and kinda... lose interest.

Obviously, Devs can't just wave their hands and update Legendary Island and the "midgame" instantly. Redesigning and reworking 9 bosses and countless areas and quests is a lot of work. However, my main concern is that creating new content has overshadowed the need to update old content. I'm really excited for Fruma, but I also am pulling my hair out because Plague Doctor just Pull-Explosion-Arrow Storm'ed me and I instantly died.

There is barely any news or talk of updating content, and I feel that's actively holding the game back. It's a delicate balance; updating old content for attracting and keeping new players, or adding new content to keep the current player base engaged. Especially with the midgame, which is sort of a blur. There is no "right path", and I would love to hear your thoughts about how Wynncraft should go about polishing itself.

TL;DR: New content is cool, but we need to discuss more about updating old content.

 

Fruma could be delayed for another 3 years for all I care. It's not like we'd be losing something that we currently have anyway.

There is so much content that we do have now, though, that needs to be improved past 2014~16 standards.

 

This is a strange issue to talk about because it depends on the content they rework and how they rework it.
Naturally, I would like more models and AI for everything, and I especially want to see more custom models for various mobs that use those silly player models, particularly in Gavel. But to say that it's "more important" than new content is not really something that can be discussed because I don't think it takes all that much effort to do both at the same time, and I think that even applies to something as sizeable as Legendary Island. I imagine that they could work on Legendary Island at the same time as Fruma for example without it interfering too much with their schedule.

However, on the topic of having to pick one or the other; I don't think it's controversial for me to say that the Ocean is the most outdated "province" in Wynncraft, but I would want them to rework it in a way that actually justifies the time spent to rework it instead of adding new content. Just tidying up the islands and giving them some more content in my eyes wouldn't be enough to justify taking up an entire update because it doesn't fix the fundamental problems of the way the Ocean is designed. I don't want an Ocean rework to be half-assed just so the team can do it and get back to the new content, nor to be able to work on it at the same time as the new content. I'd like it to be a truly ambitious update comparable to Rekindled or Spellbound, even if it means waiting longer for it to happen while the team works on whatever they got cooking at that moment.

For the Ocean specifically, the way I would do it (and I'm actually making a full-length suggestion for this) is that in addition to improving the islands, they should really lean into the idea of it being an ocean by lowering the sea floor all the way down, add many entire underwater parts of the ocean complete with new builds and places to explore, make underwater combat a thing with unique mob AI and interactions, and of course provide QoL changes/upgrades to both water traversal and underwater gameplay to tie it all together and in doing so, that would not only improve a significant early-game area of the map and really hype up new players for what's to come but also open up a whole new style of gameplay for future content in the form of underwater sections.

 

As much as I'd love to see old, outdated content overhauled, it really feels like the playerbase doesn't give them a reason to do that right now. There is an old warning in game design that players will do the most optimal thing, not the thing that is the most fun, and, left to their own devices, will optimize the fun out of a game. With MMOs, there's typically an emphasis on the endgame, with many actually offering ways to bypass pretty much the entire game to get to the endgame, as that's where the game actually begins. And, if you look at advice to new players, those two things are pretty much what's been happening in the Wynncraft community. Nearly every single time a new player asks about what they should be doing or tries to make a build at a lower level (actually playing through the game), the first reply is frequently telling them to rush to endgame in order to do endgame stuff (this is especially true of builds, but definitely makes its appearances in a lot of "new player, what should I be doing" threads).
As someone who finds the midgame the most enjoyable part, this really kinda makes me sad. In addition to making me sad (which is obviously the more important thing here), this creates a feedback loop where more players are at endgame, which means they make more endgame content, so more people rush to endgame.

Add to that the the average invested player already has several, if not all of their classes at endgame, and that's what the dev team has to make the lion's share of the content for, in order to keep the invested players (the ones who pay) interested. Sure, plenty of them would do another playthrough if the midgame was revamped, but eventually, those classes would end up at endgame and they'd be in the same situation. Adding more endgame content (especially repeatable content) keeps invested players invested for longer (and spending for longer). Wynncraft is honestly amazing at how much you don't need to pay in order to do well, which is a great thing for players, but means that a lot of their income probably comes exclusively from a relatively small number of highly invested players. I don't have any real figures, but I'd be really curious to know what percentage comes from people with less than 10 hours if playtime, what comes from people with a few dozen to a few hundred, and what comes from people with over 1000 (seriously, if you're reading this Salted, I would absolutely love to see that data on that if you have it. I would literally trade someone else's shiny warp for it.).

I would be shocked if the third demographic was not considerably higher than either of the others (or at least the first and the lower ranges of the second).

And I'm not trying to be cynical or imply the team only does stuff in the interest of maximizing profits, but they are a business and they need to be able to at least sustain themselves, and people who don't play don't pay. They don't really have any predatory monetization stuff, they haven't got any real subscriptions, they don't have paid DLCs. They pretty much rely on people who are invested in the game deciding to buy stuff to make the game a bit more fun for them. If they don't add stuff for old players to do in every update, that's an update that excludes what I'd bet is the most profitable demographic (which is why a lot of MMOs rarely, if ever, do that). So, they need to balance adding new content and refurbishing old.

Wynncraft has done an astonishingly good job at keeping old content up to date (hell, Gavel Reborn was basically just that), and I am sure they will continue to modernize the game and to make sure everything is brought into parity, because they do genuinely care to make the game better, but I really wish people would stop telling newer players to rush through all of that because I cannot imagine something more demoralizing and demotivating than putting hard work into the next big thing to rush past. If we really want everything everything to be brought into <year>, then we, as a community, need to, or at least should, stop giving them reasons not to by encouraging people to skip it.

TLDR: I'd love to see a bunch of stuff updated, and would be totally happy if they had an update that was entirely that, but can we please stop telling new players to rush to endgame?

 

Yeah I totally agree. It’s not just a development problem, it’s also a player base problem. Which is why I think we need to discuss mid game a lot more.

 

Here's what I'll say on this- what we've been primarily *doing* for the past few years is updating old content. 1.20, 2.0, and 2.1 have all been updates that mainly aim to improve on older content and bring it up to standard. We aren't going to stop doing that now (there's obviously a lot more to be done), but we want to release something entirely brand new after all this time.

 

I agree that a lot of wynncraft's content should be brought up to date, but with some exceptions, especially for what concerns quests. In my opinion some of the quests between lvl 40 and 100 (the range OP mentioned) are absolutely memorable and should go untouched, more specifically quests between lvl 60 and 80. Take for example Memory Paranoia, the only (iirc) quest that still uses some armor stands in cutscenes instead of NPCs. It's true that the armor stands definitely aren't up to standard with current wynncraft, but the quest is still really fun and being one of the oldest quests in the game it makes sense to leave there a little piece of history.

What should instead be the focus of a rework in my opinion is Corkus. The whole island has got a great potential, but I feel like its six quests and very few secret discoveries don't use it to the fullest. There a lot of areas where I could envision new quests with new lore (clock tower, Relos, pirate coves, just to name a few) and also the current quests are nice but could still use some care.