There's an interesting concept that I heard talked about a little in Blizzcon interviews. The exact phrasing of it varied, but I think the overall idea was horizontal system expansion.
Let's look at two examples:
Artifact weapons began with a talent tree of sorts that gave a progression system in the early patches of Legion. Later, that talent system was expanded to have more talents, bringing power levels further up (in addition to higher item level loot.) Later still, we got the Netherlight crucible.
This is vertical system expansion. You pile power on top of power. It keeps people invested, but it also creates power creep. We've seen this again in Battle for Azeroth, where Azerite armor and now Essences seriously increasing character power. The system goes far more complex and things ramp up to the point where players are profoundly more powerful than where they were earlier.
Horizontal system expansion is different.
An example of this would be something like Overwatch adding new heroes.
When a new hero, like Sigma, is added to the game, it does change the metagame by introducing someone with new strengths and weaknesses that either need to be countered or exploited. But it does not invalidate the other characters. Let's say you just love playing Torbjorn. Torbjorn does not automatically become less powerful because there's a new hero.
Indeed, it's actually not too dissimilar from introducing a new class to World of Warcraft. My Paladin didn't really get more or less powerful when they added Demon Hunters to the game. But it expanded players' options and felt like a worthy addition to the game.
Shadowlands is at an early stage of development - there are a lot of systems they don't have nailed down yet. Now, I hope that they do nail those down quickly. As you might recall, Azerite armor did not even become available for testing until the BFA beta was already underway, and it's pretty clear that that system was a train wreck that they're still kind of trying to patch together to make work.
In Shadowlands, the really important new system will be Covenants, which, as I understand it, will affect gameplay primarily through two things: you'll gain two active abilities, one broadly for anyone in that Covenant and the other specific to your class. In addition to that, you'll Soulbind with various NPCs in those covenants and get bonuses based on the person you choose, each coming with a kind of talent tree to lean into certain strengths.
The hope is that the variations between the different soulbinds (which are meant to be easy to swap out) and their talents will mean that there's less of a "wrong" choice to make in picking a Covenant. It's meant to be that you pick one whose aesthetics you like and that make sense for your character's personality, and that within that, there will be a broad enough selection of abilities that you can find the stuff that benefits you mechanically in any of them.
So an interesting question is going to be how they develop over time.
It's very early to guess at that. But perhaps using more horizontal expansion in this case would be the best option.
Consider, for example, that we could get a new zone in a later patch. Given that zones in the Shadowlands are basically different afterlives, perhaps we'll encounter a fifth Covenant in a new zone. What if, then, they just made that another option for any character to choose, rather than the existing four, but with no special benefit beyond what the other Covenants get?
It might be simpler, though, to instead introduce new NPCs that you can Soulbind with, which also preserves the power of the old options while just giving new options as the expansion progresses.
The real question, though, is going to be how willing Blizzard is to let you be "done" in any of these systems. They'll want you to work on some kind of progression, but piling on new systems or even just expanding vertically existing systems does run into that power creep issue.
I'd caution Blizzard to try taking it a little easier on power systems. After all, through most of WoW's life, gear was really the only major power system. From Vanilla through Warlords, the only thing that made your character more powerful in combat was the stuff you were wearing. Sure, you could put gems in things or enchant them, but that was about it.
And it worked.
Now, I loved Artifact Weapons, but the thing I loved about them was more the flavor and story of them. I was more excited to unlock new appearances than I was to max out their talent trees.
And I think there's potential, if they really focus the reward structure of Covenants on cosmetics and story more than raw power, for the system to be something players love. I don't think you need to separate out the psychographics of players who really love flavor from those who really love min-maxing, as there's surely a big overlap, but I think players will be far more forgiving of grindy mechanics if the rewards are story, flavor, and cosmetic-based rather than power-based. I fished up nearly two thousand fish from the Throndoril River in order to get the Corrupted Ashbringer skin, but I'd never do that just to get more power to get a .5% damage increase for a raid.
The thing is, I've always felt that in an RPG, player power is there to serve the role-play fantasy. Numbers are only there to make me feel like I'm playing a legendary hero of Azeroth. I know a lot of people like tinkering with the theorycrafting, but for many others, all that stuff is just a barrier to the sense of play - and yes, barriers can make things fun. A challenge is fun. But systemic complexity for the sake of systemic complexity isn't great.
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