When WoW was new, there was a lot in the game that wasn’t well designed. Maybe “not well designed” isn’t really the right way to put it. More likely, the game designers just didn’t really know how certain game mechanics would play out in practice, so they threw stuff together to see what would stick and what would need to be reworked. Hunters are a good example. Back in the day, Hunters had to level their pets’ skills “by hand”. Pets didn’t have their own talent points. They had abilities with ranks. Abilities depended on the type of pet. Cats, for example, might have a bite ability. As a cat’s experience level increased, her potential ability rank increased as well. I don’t remember the exact details, but lets say a cat had a bite of rank 1 when newly tamed at level 10. At level 20, the maximum bite rank might be 2. But the cat’s bite didn’t automatically increase to rank 2. It was still at rank 1 until her hunter trained her to rank 2. How did a hunter train her cat to rank 2? Well, this is where things got interesting. Different ranks of an ability were actually considered different abilities. A rank 2 bite was basically a different ability than a rank 1 bite. In order for a hunter to teach her pet a certain rank of an ability, the hunter herself needed to know that ability at that rank. How did a hunter learn pet abilities? By going out and finding a beast that knew the ability, at the given rank, taming it, and then spending time with the pet. If the hunter spent enough time with the pet, then the hunter herself would acquire all of the abilities of the pet. Once the hunter learned an ability, she could then teach it to all of her other pets that were able to learn that ability.
What all this meant in practice was that hunters had to spend a fair amount of time taming pets just to learn pet abilities. And looking back on it now, the whole system feels like it was a bit ad hoc. By which I mean that it didn’t feel well thought out and it ended up creating game play I doubt the game designers had envisioned when they first designed it. For example, hunters couldn’t necessarily depend on which untamed beasts had the rank of ability they needed to learn. Research was required to figure out which beasts to tame in order to learn the abilities they needed. Not all beasts were the same. Cats in some parts of the Azeroth would know rank 2 bite, while others, in other parts of Azeroth wouldn’t. You couldn’t just run out and tame any level 20 cat and expect to learn rank 2 bite. You needed to know where to go and what cats to look for. All of which meant that hunters had to play a kind of mini-game of taming pets just so they could play their class. Personally, I enjoyed this ad hoc mini-game, but I could imagine other hunters not enjoying it at all. I could also imagine that other players playing classes other than hunter might be a little jealous. Not necessarily because they didn’t get to play the same taming game. But because they didn’t have a mini-game like it for their class.
Pets no longer have ability ranks, and there is no longer a need to go out and tame specific pets just to learn new ranks of abilities. The whole system was scrapped in favor of a talent system for pets. Pet abilities still exist, but hunters can now be guaranteed that pets in a given family will have the abilities of that family. Blizzard has normalized the entire pet ability system so that each family has its own unique set of abilities. The current system feels much more like it was by design. It also feels like it behaves exactly as the game designers envisioned it would.
I am fascinated by the distinction between ‘ad hoc’ and ‘by design’. Game design that is ‘by design’ feels very predictable, while ‘ad hoc’ design feels unpredictable. Ad hoc design can lead to emergent game play. By ‘emergent game play’ I mean game play that isn’t imagined by the game designers. My guess is that, in general, game designers aren’t really comfortable with emergent game play because it is, almost by definition, out of the designers’ control. Game designers may have very few tools with which to alter or “fix” emergent play. Going back to the hunter example, it may or may not have been the case that the designers intended for hunters to travel the world looking for beasts to tame, but that is the play that emerged from the pet abilities system. But that game play was not really under the designers’ control. It was a confusing system for new players, and even experience players might not be aware of how to find the beasts they needed to tame to take full advantage of their pets’ abilities. All of which likely resulted in some hunters having an advantage over other hunters simply because they knew about the Petopia website, or they had read some forum post with a trick about where and how to tame a special pet. There was likely little that the game designers could do to make serious changes to the pet ability system as it existed in the original game. So they scrapped it and replaced it with something far more predictable and far less ad hoc.
The current pet talent system is almost certainly easier for the developers to tune and balance. It’s also easier for new players to understand. I’m not knock the talent system at all. I think it still provides hunters with ways to customize their pets. Heck, in some ways the talent system gives hunters more interesting choices than the old pet ability system did. I know the Blizzard game designers are very big on providing players with interesting choices and the current pet talent system does that well.
That said, I can’t help feel a little nostalgic for some of the emergent play that has disappeared in the game.
