I don't remember if Blizzard uses this term, but in Magic the Gathering, there is a term the designers use called "evergreen" when referring to mechanics that appear in the game. (By the way, their lead designer Mark Rosewater's weekly article "Making Magic," which he has been writing for over a decade, is really, really interesting if you have any interest in how game design works. Seriously some of the most insightful and entertaining reading out there.)
Magic, like WoW, is an iterative game. In Magic, the company comes out periodically with new sets of cards, often introducing a new chapter in the story, setting things on a new world, and then introducing gameplay mechanics that reflect the themes that they're exploring. Take Ravnica, probably their most popular setting (so popular that they made an official crossover with Dungeons and Dragons - which is also made by Wizards of the Coast - with an official sourcebook for running D&D campaigns set in Ravnica,) which was born out of the idea of making a set that encouraged players to build decks out of two of the five colors - thematic and ideological divisions within the core mechanics of the game. Ravnica built its world around these two-color combinations, imagining a world ruled and fought over by ten mega-powerful guilds - representing each two-color combination.
In Ravnica, each guild was given a keyword ability - a mechanic that is given a shorthand name when it appears frequently enough to warrant such a thing. (There are also "ability words" that are used similarly, but the word itself is not meant to carry the rules of the mechanic within it, but instead point out that the mechanic described afterward is a recurring one.)
Magic has many different types of cards, but probably the most common are creatures - representing anything from human soldiers to massive dragons to semi-real illusionary monsters, all that the player has "summoned" to fight for them. Many keyword abilities are found specifically on creatures, though others will appear on different kinds of cards.
I'd argue that the quintessential keyword ability is "flying." In Magic, when combat begins once a turn, the player whose turn it is chooses a number of creatures they control and declares them as attackers. The defending player then can select creatures they control and assign them to these attackers as blockers. The creatures then assign combat damage to whatever they're hitting, and creatures potentially die and players lose life when they take damage.
Flying is a very easy-to-understand mechanic because one can visualize it. A flying creature can only be blocked by a creature with flying. Naturally, your soaring dragon is just going to fly over the zombie your opponent controls and get to its target. But if your opponent attacks with their zombies, your dragon can easily swoop down and intercept the zombie's advance.
Flying has been in-game since the very beginning, and has appeared in every single card set.
Now, speaking of Ravnica, we can look at a mechanic called Transmute. Each of the guilds in that setting got their own ability (either a keyword or an ability word) and in the first set, the Blue/Black guild House Dimir got Transmute. This allowed you to pay a cost and discard the card with the ability to search your deck (called the Library in Magic) for a card that cost the same to cast. For a guild that was built around secrets and gathering information, it was thematically appropriate.
But while Flying has been and probably always will be found in every set, Transmute was short-lived. Strong or not, the mechanic didn't pop as inherently intuitive or fabulously popular, and so we haven't seen it since then - even in sets that returned to Ravnica and its ten-guild structure.
Now, to pull a bit of an Alice's Restaurant here, I'm not here to talk about Magic. I'm here to talk about WoW.
Just as Magic has card sets that come out in annual blocks, WoW has a two-year expansion cycle. While we are playing the same characters we have been since 2004 (potentially - your Lightforged Draenei Monk might have been very rare in vanilla WoW) there is this cycle in which everyone is basically brought down to zero by raising the level cap and having us do new quests, run new dungeons and raids, and undergo a new cycle of gear progression before we can be the god-slaying badasses we had been previously.
Stuff that had been previously very important, like maxing your acquisition of veiled argunite, is now rendered totally irrelevant.
Some mechanics do involve this sort of a soft reset while remaining basically the same. Reputation, for example, is not lost when one outlevels an expansion's content, but the addition of new reputations means that even if I'm exalted with everyone from Northrend to the Broken Isles, I'm still starting at neutral with whatever factions I'll encounter in late summer or fall of 2020.
Thus, reputation is an evergreen mechanic. Indeed, any iterative game needs evergreen mechanics for it to feel like the same game. If Blizzard were to announce that classes, as a thing, were no longer going to be a part of WoW, it wouldn't be World of Warcraft anymore. It's not apparent how such a transition could even work.
But there are mechanics that are introduced and then left aside when we move on.
Take Scenarios in Mists of Pandaria. While the technology has been used to more effectively allow for big set-piece quests that used to be handled with Phasing (see the Battle of Undercity - or rather don't, because you haven't been able to do that quest since 4.0,) in Mists Scenarios were presented as an alternative to dungeons - being role-agnostic, unlike dungeons that required the standard 1-3-1 mix of tanks, dps, and healers. While the rewards were just randomized and often not great, it was far, far quicker to queue up for these and get a group easily.
But then they went away. Today, we have Island Expeditions, which are, secretly, basically just scenarios, but where the "game" of the scenario is always the same, just in different environments.
But in Warlords and Legion, we had nothing like this 3-player quick gameplay option.
Of course, mechanics and content are sometimes blurred.
Suramar was the most sophisticated max-level zone we've seen in WoW (granted, there was little precedent - the Vale of Eternal Blossoms was the only other such zone to appear in an X.0 patch.) While the zone was not really new in any mechanical way - it had quests like any other zone, and some quests were unlocked by increasing your reputation with the associated faction, similar to Operation Shieldwall or the Dominance Offensive in 5.1 - it seemed to signal a new commitment to long-term, story based content that we'd get after hitting the level cap, when in previous expansions we've tended to simply shift focus to running and re-running instances to gear up.
Perhaps not a mechanic, exactly, but Suramar seemed like an evergreen concept's first iteration. However, even starting in Legion's later patches, with the introduction of Argus, and certainly in BFA's endgame, we've instead tended to get short-term story quests that can be played through in just a week or two, which primarily just serves to introduce areas designed for repeatable content like world quests, dungeons, and raids.
I do wonder if they'll ever do something like Suramar again. I certainly hope they do (and hopefully have a follow-up that is less frustrating for one faction - I know that any player who went through Suramar would feel that they'd earned some personal loyalty from Thalyssra and crew, but allowing Alliance players to have that whole experience only for the Nightborne to join the Horde felt... not great.)
Meanwhile, there are other mechanics that are perhaps more surprising to see returning.
In Warlords of Draenor, the Garrison was pitched with the concept that players had to establish an outpost and recruit allies. While mechanically they couldn't prevent people from going back and forth from Draenor to the rest of the world, story-wise one was meant to be isolated and cut off from support. Additionally, by this point players had been through so much that they were starting to get respect as powerful members of their factions. As such, the idea was that you were actually the ranking member of your faction on Draenor, there to serve the High King or the Warchief directly.
So sending people out on missions made sense.
Mechanically, however, it was a bit dull. And especially given the dearth of really rewarding content in Warlords, and the fact that you could attain raid-quality gear simply by sending followers out on missions, the mechanic is sort of a perfect example of what didn't work about Warlords.
So it was perhaps shocking to see Legion bring the mechanic back. Legion scaled it back significantly, and pointedly made sure that, rather than giving you actual gear, it would instead give you items that pushed you to run content and then give you bonus gear as a reward.
It worked a hell of a lot better, and fixed some of the problems with the original system.
But was it fun? And did it deserve to return in BFA? Is this a mechanic that is actually worthy of being an evergreen part of WoW?
The only real effect that it has is that players can now engage with their WoW game remotely via mobile apps. The mission table system is simple enough to work on an app.
But does that make it good? And worthy?
I sometimes think that Blizzard has a problem of coming up with really good solutions to problems that don't exist. Take the profession buildings you could make for your garrisons. These were meant to allow you to more efficiently craft things with your professions. They even added a mine and an herb garden where you could, daily, reliably get a bunch of resources for most of the professions (leatherworkers and tailors still had to go outside the house, even if they'd get more stuff using the Barn.)
But to make the efficiency of, say, the Engineering Works feel more useful, they then came up with this limitation on professions by having some material that every other recipe would require be limited to a once-a-day production. You could make your Truesteel or whatever the hell it was for Blacksmithing, but simply using the profession would mean that it would take a very long time to simply make a sword. And even getting the recipe for that sword would also mean grinding out some currency that was similarly time-locked.
So now, phew, there was a problem that this great solution could help solve. The Blacksmithing Hut would now let you make more Truesteel over time.
Which wouldn't be a problem if you could just make as much Truesteel as you had the materials for (I might be getting the name wrong, but whatever.)
In Legion, we got artifact weapons. Here's what I loved about artifact weapons - they each had a story to them, and were built to have an iconic appearance. You could unlock new appearances that played with that iconic look, keeping the fundamental aspects of it (usually) while changing elements of it. The Ashbringer, for example, always had that sort of disk of light and the Lordaeron L as part of its crossguard, but you could have a version made of fire, or one seemingly corrupted by the Scourge.
They also came with a sort of talent tree, but to begin with, this was something you'd just fill out eventually. It allowed them to add a new resource - artifact power - that was sort of a godsend for the designers.
As a generic currency that players would always want more of, it was an easy thing that could be tacked on as a reward to any activity they came up with.
In BFA, we got the Heart of Azeroth, which took this idea from artifact weapons, but while we got exciting visuals and world-building storytelling with our weapons, the Heart of Azeroth is nothing but a McGuffin with no history and clearly no real world-building implications associated with it. And every character has, essentially, the same one.
But we now have things like Island Expeditions and lots of World Quests that are built around the idea of gathering this resource.
It seems clear to me that Islands were something Blizzard was excited about. Given that this is the big High Seas expansion, it made sense to go raiding remote islands for treasure. But how to motivate people to do this when they could be running dungeons or raids or doing world quests?
Azerite power (which they renamed artifact power given that it was mechanically so similar) became the solution.
But should this be an evergreen mechanic? Should every WoW expansion henceforth have mission tables and artifact power to grind?
Personally, I don't think so. I loved artifact weapons, and the fact that I managed to get the mage tower challenge appearance on Truthguard is a big gaming accomplishment for me (I am disappointed I didn't get it on any other artifacts.) The mechanic on its own is not really that compelling, and served more to reinforce the thrill of having these legendary (well, beyond legendary if we're talking item quality) items at our disposal.
Basically, just as Transmute sort of worked for House Dimir, artifact power worked for the Ashbringer. But that doesn't mean we need to have it all the time.
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