SEAR DevBlog, week of 3/16/26: The Vashjir Problem

Aspiring to greater heights?

On Monday I caught whatever virus my wife had last week, and it laid me out pretty good - I was able to get a few things done, but I had to cancel a lot of meetings due to voice issues and put a lot of things off due to brain fog. Feeling better today (Sunday) and expecting to be all the way back in the saddle tomorrow, but the downtime gave me a lot of opportunity to ponder.

We have a number of new options in the toolbox for level (and particularly, racetrack) design now that we have a more malleable mesh and our stick-to-surface functionality is working. As I've mentioned previously, there are a number of considerations that come into play when deciding how much to actually use verticality in racetrack design though, chief among them the sky story and phase transition considerations.

But that idea was kind of a prelude to this one. We've also been looking at how much depth we want to give each phase, particularly in the context of shortcuts, but also in terms of full-blown alternative paths.

Phase-based design lends itself to experimentation in this regard, both because of the general brevity of each phase and just the novelty of the format and the desire to see what we can do with it. In other words, if dual-pathing doesn't work, the harm is limited because there's always another phase coming after this one. This all definitely makes me inclined to experiment - in fact one of our new phase-levels for the Escape From Korus-iii level that we're working on right now has a fairly bifurcated middle section, with two distinct paths. One is shorter, but more perilous, than the other - a kind of high-risk, high-reward proposition. Each path also has a smaller shortcut proposition within it, making for a total of 4 possible paths.

The question becomes, is this good? Is it something we want? In the moment, does it reward players who can make snap decisions based on their specific situation and know the entire level well, making it feel like a satisfying design to engage with, or is it just an obstacle to figuring out what any given player's "ideal path" is?

I still want to play it for sure to find out, but in case you were wondering about the title of this post, here's where Vashjir comes into it.

I'm leveling a monk alt in WoW Mists of Pandaria Classic right now, and I just hit the 80 - 82 spread where you have to decide between Vashjir and Mount Hyjal to level in. I've always loved Vashjir - it's a fully underwater zone, which makes it completely unique (at least up until this point in WoW Classic) because it is actually 3-dimensional.

Now of course the whole game is 3-dimensional, but what I mean by that "actually" is that you really have to utilize that 3rd dimension routinely in order to navigate the zone's quest objectives. Where in any other zone you might occasionally have to consider the possibility that the item you're looking for is hanging from a tree or actually in a cave beneath your feet, in Vashjir this is a constant consideration, not a novelty. The quest hubs are frequently hidden inside of reefs that are located above or below you. Kill targets can be above or below you. Combat - slightly finicky at the best of times, as your target runs around behind you and break your ability to target them - becomes even more difficult as targets that may appear to be in front of you are in fact (you guessed it) too far above or below you to target.

I had always considered this to be endearing and novel, personally, and looked forward to leveling alts in Vashjir. But in this grand experiment that is the replay of WoW Classic, I've talked to countless players who despise Vashjir.

On face, we're just talking about a more thorough utilization of the 3rd dimension the game has always had. But in practice, it's far more than that - it's a complete transformation from a game that routinely, fundamentally, exists on a 2D plane, into one that is played in a 3D space. Whether because the game is not necessarily designed for that kind of play or just because it's a change and change is bad, a lot of players bounce off that transformation and go level in Hyjal instead.

With SEAR, on face, we're just talking about a more thorough utilization of the concept of shortcuts, something racing games have always had. But in practice, too much pathing eventually becomes exploration. Exploration is best done, in my experience, when it can be savored - when you can slow down, look around, get your bearings, investigate every nook and cranny - and that is essentially the opposite of a racing game, where the environment is primarily there to serve as window dressing. Verging into a situation where people feel pressure to go back and check out something else risks making them feel bad for missing things that every other element of the game is screaming at them to miss because they don't have time for it.

There's a middle ground here. One of the spaces for that middle ground is hinging that exploration more on alternate phase environments, rather than alternate physical paths within a single phase. And there's still an argument to be made that some amount of side-pathing is highly valuable in phase worldspaces that are small enough to be played in 15-second increments. For example, Last Days of Zala phase 1 is pretty straightforward for me at this point - would an alternate path just to mix it up really be so bad?

We'll have to play through this and see. But the big advantage to alternate phase environments is that it's a proposition unique to SEAR. Discovering yourself in a whole new phase-level during a particular part of the song would be a unique thrill, I think, moreso than simply choosing a different path from the one you normally take in any given environment.

But whichever way we go, the Vashjir problem is an important one to keep in mind. There is a line, and we need to make sure we don't cross it.