Remember back in the good old days, when MMO dungeons used to be big, sprawling mazes you could spend hours just getting lost in? Now most of them follow a similar formula: Narrow-ish corridors with three to five bosses. Sure, the set dressing varies, but the mechanical template is always bite-sized.
World of Warcraft is an old enough game to have had both, and it might one day have them both again. I recently spoke to associate game director Paul Kubit and lead encounter designer Dylan Barker about Labyrinths, an upcoming feature in World of Warcraft: Midnight. It’s still a large work in progress—not releasing on launch, but instead a few patches down the line—but it seems like a huge evolution of The War Within’s Delves system.
In case you’re unfamiliar, Delves are short, bite-sized dungeons that you can do with one to three people on varying difficulty tiers. Labyrinths, first introduced during a roadmap released in January, are going to be less bite-sized Delves, areas that might take multiple evenings for a group of people to explore.
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While Kubit and Barker weren’t able to share much information with me, given it’s still early development days for the feature, they were able to talk a little about where the idea came from.
“Delves have shown us that there’s just a huge appetite,” says Barker, “not just for something that’s bite-sized time-wise, but also something that I can go in solo, press my buttons, get a feel for my class, fight some real monsters and get some real loot.
“It has surprised us all in a great way, just how much enthusiasm there has been for the feature and something like Labyrinth, is a natural extension of: ‘What else could we do in this space?'”
Kubit, meanwhile, sees Labyrinths as a sort of counter to how WoW’s Mythic+ dungeons—timed, high-stress gauntlets designed to be completed in minutes, not hours—have shaped the game’s design philosophy.
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While he’s certainly proud of how Mythic+ dungeons have been received (heck, an entire game built by another studio, Fellowship, literally caters to the Mythic+ crowd by making that the whole thing), he concedes that “one of the things that Mythic+ has done for dungeons is that it’s changed the way we’ve made them [compared to] Classic.
“If you remember, back in Classic, we had dungeons like Maraudon, Blackrock Spire and Depths, where we had like 20 bosses in a dungeon. And that’s not something that happens anymore—dungeons have three or four bosses … And maybe we lost something along the way.”
I confess, as soon as Kubit began talking about it, I myself had a Ratatoullie-style sense memory flashback to spending upwards of an hour futzing through Wailing Caverns, which at the time felt like a huge ordeal. I was, in my defence, around 12 years old, but Kubit isn’t wrong in that WoW just doesn’t really have those sprawling megadungeons anymore.
“Maybe in the chasing of that specific mode of Mythic+, we don’t have that ‘weekend project’ where ‘I’m just gonna get lost in this cavern with my friends and we’re gonna go clear the whole thing’.
“That RPG fantasy feeling of getting lost in a big dungeon doesn’t exist in the dungeon space anymore—but it could in our Delve space, if you look at something like Labyrinths. So that’s something that Labyrinths are trying to tap into from an emotional point of view.”
I, myself, am all for it—I often lament the loss of the oldschool MMO, not just in the fact it doesn’t exist anymore, but also in the fact I don’t really have time for one, either. If Labyrinths can bring a little of that old school magic back for a modern era? I’ll be there, getting lost.
