Blizzard
After 20 years, it’s now possible for solo players to finish storylines in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft that previously required a group to do an intensive raid.
That’s thanks to “Story Mode,” a new raid difficulty that was added for the final wing of the first raid of the recently released The War Within expansion.
Over the years, developer Blizzard has expanded the difficulty options for raids to meet various players and communities where they’re at in terms of play styles. The top difficulty is Mythic, where the semi-pro hardcore guilds compete. Below that is Heroic, where serious, capital-G gamers coordinate with friends in weekly raid schedules to progress. Then there’s Normal, which still requires some coordination but isn’t nearly as challenging and can typically be completed by a pick-up group within a few tries.
The most accessible difficulty is Raid Finder, where you’re matched up with random players automatically to complete a vastly easier version of a raid. Now Story Mode has been added to the mix, and it’s even easier than Raid Finder.
How Story Mode works
In Story Mode, you fight only the raid’s final boss, which has been scaled back in stats and complexity so that it’s beatable for a single player or a very small group of friends. Challenging encounter mechanics have been removed, and the whole fight has been retooled to focus exclusively on the narrative aspects.
There are some rewards, but they’re not the same as those on more difficult raids; the goal was to avoid cheapening the experience for those who do want to go all the way.
So far, Story Mode is available exclusively for the newest raid, which is called Nerub-ar Palace. It hasn’t been made available for other encounters yet, but Blizzard has hinted that this could be the long-term goal.
Supporting new (well, actually, old) play styles
Throughout WoW‘s history, it’s been common for the conclusion of a major storyline to involve defeating the final boss of a raid or dungeon. In the earlier years, Raid Finder didn’t exist, so only a small percentage of players who were willing to take on hardcore raiding could see those narrative outcomes.
Raid Finder was added in the Cataclysm expansion, but that still required grouping with other players, which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. For some players, the social aspect of WoW is simply guild chat while doing solo activities at their own pace. Some people even play WoW without interacting directly with other players at all, treating others in the game as background crowds that add immersion to the experience.
In most areas, WoW has been better than most of its peers at supporting this kind of play. I played WoW socially early on, but I’ve played almost exclusively solo for the past several years. To see the endings of storylines I encountered while questing, I often turned to YouTube to see the cutscenes players got when they beat the raids.
Story Mode is also relevant for older content; Blizzard wisely introduced a new approach to leveling new characters where players can essentially pick a past expansion to level through. It’s tuned so that the players reach the level cap and are ready for current live content at more or less the same time they finish the final solo zone quests in that expansion. But it’s only during special Timewalking events that those players got the opportunity to find other players to do the raids with, so they often didn’t get to finish the stories.
Story Mode solves both of those scenarios, and it’s a fundamental philosophy shift for how WoW approaches endgame content.
A lot of players enjoy WoW‘s positive community aspects but don’t like the pressure of having to perform for others in a high-stress situation. Raid Finder addressed some of their concerns, but since some people just play for the story, there was no good reason for Blizzard not to have done this ages ago.
Story Mode might even be enough to get lapsed players back who might have left because they didn’t have time for the demanding social schedules associated with raiding. It also doesn’t take away from hardcore players’ satisfaction or enjoyment if casual solos can see some version of the final encounter and cutscene of a story arc, especially since the rewards are so distinct.
Sometimes, casual and hardcore players can play the same game without ruining each other’s experience. That’s a fine line that Blizzard has struggled to walk sometimes, but Story Mode is one of a handful of cases where it’s a win for everyone.