End of the Road?

It’s September 2012, and WoW is launching its fourth expansion: Mists of Pandaria. It’s coming with all the usual trimmings and trappings: new lore, new zones, a new race and class, and of course leveling. However, this time people wouldn’t only be leveling their characters. They’d be leveling their battle pets, too, in a Pokémon-like system using pets that, up until this point, were purely for vanity.

Since then, for the last 13 years, the pet battle system has been an evergreen feature of World of Warcraft. An activity to do in your down time between seasons and patches, as you level through the zones, or when you just need a break from the gear grind. It’s an activity you can start and stop as you please, and you won’t be punished with a less than stellar vault for missing a pet battle WQ. It’s a system that has something for everyone, with challenging fights in pet dungeons, activities to fill out your trading post log, world quests, pvp, and even mount collecting. With hundreds of turn-based fights and thousands of pets, additions to the collection and more enemy battles have become a staple for each expansion…until Midnight.

However, we have to take a step back from Midnight to find the path that led us to this point. It could be said to go back years, but we saw a resurgence of energy and focus on pet battles in Dragonflight, so I want to start there.

The beginning and middle of Dragonflight gave us some of the best work we’ve seen on pet battles in years. We got a new introduction to pet battles quest chain, the Whelp Daycare, a new way to battle in the Forbidden Reach, adding new enemies to the original zones in a later patch, and interesting ways to collect pets. However, it fell off by the end of Dragonflight in the Emerald Dream, the first major patch of the expansion we saw no new battles.

It's long been theorized that pet battle content is one of the, if not the first, features to be cut when crunch comes into play, and the best example of this is in Shadowlands. Aside from a mostly one-off fight against Anthea in Kun-Lai Summit and a pet collecting quest chain for Gurgl, neither of which had any connection to SLs, we had no new battles added after the SLs expansion launch.

In the same vein, the recent dwindling focus on pet battles in The War Within might also be a victim of crunch because of the new content pace. They frontload as many resources as they can into an expansion ahead of time, but eventually the pace catches up, and the battles get cut.

In the most recent major patch, Ghosts of K’aresh, I think we’ve witnessed the final boss of crunch for pet battles. Not only did we not see any new enemy battles, but there were also no wild pets despite the zone literally crawling with critters, making it the first time this happened since MoP implemented the system. Even a place as inhospitable as The Maw has wild battles, and the broken world excuse doesn’t hold water when we have Argus. Even the pets we did get in K’aresh specifically were all reskins with identical move sets, and in many cases identical stats, as well.

This lack of wild pets on K’aresh caught the attention of players, even those outside the pet battle community, and many expressed their dismay at the lack of pets to capture. Quite a lot of people stated how weird it was but didn’t think too much more about it. For those of us in the community, it embedded a deep foreboding about the future of pet battles, which was confirmed in the Midnight Alpha.

Before I go any further, I want to state that everything already in the game is not being removed. All the old battles will still be available, all the pets that currently have abilities will continue to have them, and they aren’t implementing the new ‘capture’ system to previous expansions. And yes, some of the new pets in Midnight will have abilities, but the ratio right now is around 80% (49 pets as of now) will not battle/have abilities while only 20% (10) will.

However, the ‘should’ in the blue post on the Alpha Forums about pet battles is mildly concerning when they say, “All parts of the pet battle system that were implemented in previous expansions should continue to operate as they have before.” We already have years of bugs they won’t fix, so how likely is it they’ll fix something if a patch breaks it when they’ve abandoned the system? Also, given that there was no blue post about the changes until the pushback, who’s to say they won’t just remove things we already have and turn them into legacy achievements without telling us that, either?

Moving on, there’s also a misconception some people seem to have about another line in the blue post that states, “For players who love to do pet battle combat, that will be available.” This covers the combat we already have, but people are also reading it as there will be new content when that isn’t the case. All they have done is add new achievements to some of the easiest, older battles we have in Eastern Kingdoms, Kalimdor, and Northrend.

If Blizzard didn’t add any new player dungeons to Midnight, just added gear that was 80% cosmetic and only 20% with stats to Classic dungeons as well as a few achievements, would that be disappointing for a portion of the playerbase? I’d imagine so.

And as min-max, gear-oriented, and numbers go up as dungeons have become, in WoW they also serve a bigger purpose: telling a story. The stories of the dungeons help give the new expansion its flavor and sets the stage for the raids. The same can be said for battle pets on a much smaller scale. They help give the zones, as well as their denizens and enemies, flavor. What we’re seeing isn’t just the sunsetting of a much-loved system, but an eroding of the underpinnings that put the RPG in MMORPG.

There has been an overwhelming amount of support for a system that supposedly gets ‘no engagement’. When you don’t ‘iterate,’ to use their term, for years and slowly cut content, how can the engagement metrics reflect the number of people who enjoy the system?

I’m not saying they need to take any of the suggestions that have been offered on how to ‘fix’ pet battles, but try adding an incentive instead of cutting away. I’d also suggest letting the dev who created the Forbidden Reach battles stretch their legs in the system a bit and see what they can do. It’s probably one of the only examples we have of fights that are more dynamic than just, hey, fight me.