Vertical and Horizontal Design: WoW

I’ve been spending a lot of time in Northrend, playing the latest expansion of World of Warcraft. Wrath of the Lich King has been a new experience for me, since I missed out on it during my college years. Instead I was focused on Super Smash Bros. Melee. After spending thousands of hours in WoW since Classic’s revisit, I still so much of World of Warcraft to explore.

Vertical design, similar to telescoping, gives players the ability to look forward or ahead in their gameplay and find a path of continued enjoyment. As a real life analogue, players always desire more. When games give clear objectives and vertical paths towards achieving them, players quickly game the system to find the rewards as quickly and as easily as possible. This is incredibly apparent with the Classic revisits of World of Warcraft. Since the content has been fully explored, the mystery of the game is lost upon the majority of the player base. The joy is not in the mystery, it is instead the process of climbing up ladders of design to experience accomplishment and to reach the next challenge.

World of Warcraft has faced a complex relationship balancing the difficulty of the game for newcomers and casual gamers against the hardcore players and streamers who make up the face of the game. For many players, the revisited designs of WoW are more approachable in that the vertical steps of game design are so well documented and understood that there is no mystery whether a player is making progress or what there is to do next, and those goals are more achievable than ever.

When players finish vertical paths or disengage with them, horizontal or exploratory design reigns in. A physical symptom of a player disengaging with vertical design and horizontal design is that a player no longer plays aka raid logging. Until there is new content, vertical or horizontal, a player who has disengaged with both designs no longer engages with the game. There are rare exceptions, like social constructs and community building. But these are the exceptions, not the rule. This is the importance of horizontal design. Because vertical design and branching paths will always take immense production power, horizontal design offloads the pressure for game designers to deliver the next shiny stepping stone. Because gamers are chasing a metaphorical dragon, the arms race between designers and gamers pressures designers into prioritizing external metrics. To avoid this, exploration and horizontal design allows breathing room and life for the game and game designers, which in turn benefits the player.

Is horizontal design simply placing a second vertical design alongside? Yes and no. Wrath of the Lich King introduces dual specialization, allowing players to quickly switch playstyles in raid. Having players experience multiple roles, gaining gear and experience in these roles, and identifying their character in multiple ways is how one simple change broadens the role playing game experience. While players previously had the ability to switch between specialization at a cost, it could only be done in cities which limited the role play. In previous expansions, I myself rarely explored talent switching despite being able to afford the cost. Perhaps due to interface friction or a weak desire to explore, I simply did not enjoy multiple specializations in previous expansions of WoW. To play a different role, I played a different character.

Joyous Journeys is an experience buff which started yesterday and lasts throughout the holidays, to encourage players to return to the game and to level up additional characters. With the introduction of heirlooms, gear which end game characters can mail to their starting alternate characters, WoW introduces a bridge between two vertical designs. Other introductions include allowing reputation rewards to be passed from within the account, freeing players from grinding reputation on multiple characters, a challenge in previous expansions.

Limitations such as characters only being allowed two professions at a time cause profession based players to play more characters. More and more designs have been introduced which let professions interact with each other, which encourages players to explore a separate vertical design, one after another.

Symbiotic and bridging mechanics between vertical and horizontal systems encourages players to stay beyond the minimum play time required. The combination of design is a cornerstone of World of Warcraft and why it is so addicting by nature. While some players remain vigilant on one vertical design with end goals such as parsing or speed running, a majority of players stick around Azeroth to explore and enjoy both the vertical and horizontal designs.

Hiking Sycamore Canyon

My girlfriend and I just went hiking along one of the easier paths in Sycamore Canyon.

It was an easy trail for casual hikers like ourselves. Round trip it took us a little over an hour. The trail featured minor elevation and a few changes in biodiversity. Aside from the wonderful conversation and the fresh air, the plant life and the trail design captured my attention.

The beginning part of the trail featured a lot of cactus life. It surprised me how they grew in little patches along the hill. I’m sure the little moisture in the area was being drained in groups. As we walked further along the path, we saw large vines of golden leaves entangling all the trees. We had seen a warning about poison oak and suspected that it had infested a large region of the forest. Several trees were completely covered by the vines, losing out on any sun or water that might have once supported it.

Just a month ago, Vox released a video on trail design on how well made trails are invisibly designed for its users. As a designer, this fascinated me way more than an average person could be. I noticed the changes in elevation, the bumps and angles, the curves of the paths, and the surrounding markers. The ease of the path and the small changes made for a pleasant walk.

Without a video deep diving the design of trails, someone like me wouldn’t appreciate the simplicity and the undertaking in designing the trail I undertook. The first image in this post seems little more than a meandering line through terrain. And for many people, that is all hiking needs to be. In the relationship between designers and users, the best intercourse is often none at all. Thank you to Vox for highlighting such a simple, yet beautiful design topic. Thank you to my girlfriend for dragging me out from my computer desk. And thank you to California and America for supporting our access to nature and leisure. I love appreciating good design as a user, but more so I love understanding good design as a designer. I recommend sharing the video and sharing a hike. We could all use great simplicity.

Buffet Floor Plan Design: Golden Corral

Yesterday Amanda and I went to Golden Corral for the first time. It is a nation-wide $$ American buffet chain. Buffets have a special place in my heart. Growing up, my immigrant family was not in the best financial shape. My elementary school awarded coupons to a local American buffet restaurant called Old Country Buffet for each quarter of perfect attendance. As a child who didn’t know much about helping out around the house, I knew that attending school everyday was a simple way I could contribute to something special. The memories of exploring and eating all the Western foods my parents didn’t serve at home as well as the rare moments of an ABC child making their parents proud far outweighed the quality of the food. In hindsight, the buffet was nothing special. But the memories were.

This is my crude paint image of the floor plan of Golden Corral. I’m sure by locations this plan could vary. But this plan in itself is the reason I came to write today. The food? Fine at best, nothing inedible.

Upon walking into the corral of gold, I noticed the most fascinating thing. Not labeled but filled in blue, this square represents the first upsell GC presents to us: the fountain machine. I have never seen a restaurant with a fountain machine in a queue, at the very front of a restaurant, before even being seated. Man, I thought, they must really want you to be refreshed… maybe from a long hot day or when waiting in line. No, the real premise is $3.49 for a fountain drink. Sure, you can get water. But with dozens of choices and free refills, can you really resist turning down some liquid sugar on this special meal? Yes, we do. Amanda gets us two waters.

The grey block is the host stand with a small waiting area behind it. Servers seat parties to the side, in my poorly aligned square field. Most parties were either small groups of 3-4 or individuals, making the average table size 2-3 people. As my younger memory served and from the people we saw that day, the general demographic is a random scattering of families and older, single individuals.

Seating is nested to the sides of the restaurant, leaving patrons near the bakery and salad bar. As the economics of buffets entails, getting patrons to “fill up” on “empty calories” is how the restaurant wins and patrons gunning down premium items repeatedly is how the patrons get the best value.

The grill is placed in a genius way. It represents the maximum value, the real reason people come to eat here. Fresh, hot food with great aromatics placed front and center. While waiting in line, you can see and smell meat. You can feel the value. Your server greets you at the host stand and walks you further and further away from the only thing golden about this place. In only a matter of ten steps, your view of the grill has disappeared and only its scent follows.

I avoid the salad bar and bakery until last. I want to get my value. I make a trip over to the grill and notice there are several chicken and pork dishes. That’s to be expected, I thought. But where was the steak? Where was the beef? Since Amanda and I came for lunch and the lunch price is less than the dinner, I assume the good stuff comes out for dinner. The only beef served on the premise was grounded, either as a half-burger slider or as meatloaf. Well played. The only seafood I spotted were thin, fried fish fillets which I avoided and a seafood salad with imitation crab, which I had a bite of.

As with all buffets, the meat was scattered along the grill with vegetable and carb-heavy sides neighboring each meat dish. I managed to grab two plates of mostly meat, grabbing a few sides I couldn’t pass up. Like I mentioned before, the food quality was not bad, but certainly not something memorable. Like the gaming meme I’ve heard before, the real prize was the friends we met along the journey.

Would I go again to Golden Corral? Maybe once a year. There are much better AYCE places. But the childhood memory of American buffets and it’s wild accessibility means that the nostalgia will take over me here and there and the corral’s beautiful design will draw me back in. Next time, I’ll spend a few extra dollars to get steak on the menu.

Design is meant to serve both the restaurant and the patron. In the all-you-can-eat field, these parties find themselves at the opposite of interests. Yet choices in which dishes are on the menu and when, where they are placed, what the patrons experience and in what order… all of these design choices were made by a corporation to protect their interests. And the fact that the parking lot was full on a 2pm on a Friday tells me that Golden Corral protected their interests successfully without pushing away their customer base. And for that design, congratulations.

City Building with Greek Gods

Zeus: Master of Olympus is a city building game developed by Impressions Games in 2000. The expansion Poseidon: Master of Atlantis was released in 2001, following and building upon the core elements of Zeus. I fondly remember this game as a preteen, with distinct memories of playing this while overseas in China. What is a young boy to do in a foreign country aside from play a ton of video games? I recently found these two games on Steam for $5 and immediately downloaded them.

The 1st campaign, Birth of Atlantis, has open terrain to let players freely build.
Aphrodite’s red particle glow is a lot smoother with the widescreen mod.

The game has aged well. It is still the city building game I remember. The art style still holds up today, especially with a custom wide screen mod I downloaded and installed in a few minutes after following a youtube video. The wide screen support also updates the monsters and heroes to have less laggy particle effects, making the game operate smoothly 20 years later.

I did not play Caesar or Pharaoh, but I’ve seen and read of their similarities. These games simplify and abstract the elements of city building and house them in a flavored package with campaigns, scenarios, and challenges. I was never a fan of earthquakes or tornadoes randomly running through my Sim City. Despite that, the random but limited damage gods do in Zeus and the controlled challenge of monsters does not bother me. Those challenges ranged from mild nuisances to flavored obstacles. There is a military and combat aspect, as well, with options to create defensive military structures such as walls or towers, or to bribe your way out of invasions if your economy can handle it.

Argos – a map from the community forums displaying huge city blocks.
The creator even included blueprint layouts for others to copy.

To my surprise, there is still a community of players playing Zeus to this day, uploading as recent as a week before this post. Players upload their cities to show off their housing blocks, a term used to refer to a closed loop of residential housing with all of its needs built in. Designing and supporting large housing blocks is a good chunk of the fun in Zeus, as other elements like traffic or ordinances that appear in other city building games have been abstracted out of Zeus. Instead, there is a large focus on making the residents of the city happy and fulfilled through the basic needs of food and water, to the advanced needs such as fleece, olive oil, and culture or science. City walkers have different uniforms to represent their roles and residential homes upgrade visually as their needs are met, making a nice feedback loop of: build the necessary buildings for the people, watch city walkers patrol and provide, then watch residential properties grow. Homes upgrade immediately once provided with what they need, and the game lets you know what the residents are looking forward to next. Once homes upgrade, more citizens can flock to your city, ultimately supporting more workers or military.

The residents here need to be taught by more scientists before they’ll improve their homes.
Just wait until a scientist walks by these unsuspecting residents.

Zeus manages to live on after 20 years by including a custom campaign editor. Even after 20 years, players are still creating and uploading custom adventures, with the most recent user submitted adventure named The Famine, uploaded February 16th, 2022, which is themed around Demeter, the goddess of agriculture. The author posts their creation with pride and the reviews are glowing. It’s beautiful to see this game still live on after 20 years. The core game design elements still stand strong today, despite dozens of other city builders competing on the market. There’s something special Impression Games hit on with their simplified city building, flavor infused, Greek gods game. I sank almost 60 hours into this game over the past month, all because I saw this game was on sale. I didn’t even know the game still had a community of players still engaged with it, developing city blocks and campaigns to this day.

Atlantis Sandbox – a community map displaying beautiful housing blocks in mountainously confined spaces.

There is a special kind of fun in organizing and developing cities. At times, Zeus even toes the lines of a real-time strategy game with resource development, military, and deadlines. There are usually multiple solutions to any campaign, which provides freedom to map designers, allowing maps to feel different despite sharing tools. The fantasy of worshipping Greek gods and developing beautiful cities is truly experienced in this game. It is a definite recommend from someone who cherishes replay value. It is certainly not an easy game, but it is indeed a rewarding one, both in systemic organization and in fantasy engagement. If you love city building and Greek mythology as much as I do, this game is a must-experience.