This specific project I had while i was in the Rewards team was directly linked to the Warclaw’s design process / systems, but it involved a lot of considerations of quests and open world design, I personally learned a lot from it. So, here is my process for designing these hidden treasures which was pulled from the Warclaw Systems page.

Even while I was on a different team I was still ensuring the Warclaw's completion by configuring a system for hidden treasures “Kodan Caches” to be found and dug up around the open world. I also placed all of these treasures amounting to over 350+ random spawn locations with thousands of possible permutations per day.

The goal for this design was to have these treasures to encourage deeper exploration of the map, push players to use the Warclaw more, but also not demand the player go out and hunt these locations down. The core reward from these hidden treasures were a key part of the economy for the new expansion. This necessitated another layer of complexity to the design, these treasures needed to be accessible and understandable to a casual player. To summarize these hidden treasures needed to be engaging but not demand deep engagement, a difficult balance. Below are the decisions which allowed me to accomplish that.

The first hurdle in this design was to ensure that players could interact with mounts of dirt and interact with them to get a reward. Usually in our game a player has to dismount, then interact for a few seconds, receive the item, then remount and go find the next one. This flow has a lot of friction points which could demotivate a player and make the experience feel taxing. So, I engineered a system which allowed players to stay mounted while digging up the treasure using the ‘Dig’ skill, which had switched from Sniff when close enough to a dirt mound. This drastically reduced the friction points and streamlined the process to a near 2-3 second process and one button press. This snappier process for collecting treasures allowed for a smoother transition back into the action the players were performing before, reducing any unnecessary cognitive load on the player.

The original design of the treasure hunting loop was that players would use the ‘Sniff’ skill and if the treasure was nearby the players would be lead to it with a smell trail vfx. In playtests this system was taking out a lot of the fun, it felt less engaging to simply just follow a trail to a spot you were meant to find by yourself. So, I leaned into a ‘treasure map’ kind of design, where, if near a treasure and ‘Sniff’-ing, a sound would play and minimap icon would appear where the treasure was. This icon is not quite perfect information and didn’t give them the exact elevation or precise spot due to the logic and scaling of our minimaps. Players would consult the minimap like a treasure map, in playtests we found this to be really fun and feel different than other treasure hunting minigames the team had made in the past. Another important design aspect is that a lot of the dirt mounds were visible without using ‘Sniff’, and when the skill was used a large cloud of ‘smell’ would appear around the dirt pile allowing players to find it without much trouble. This helped strike the balance of giving the player too little and too much information, players could even challenge themselves to not use ‘Sniff’ and just simply explore to find them.

The aforementioned core rewards were the unusual coins, a reward given to players for exploring new maps in an expansion. These coins were used to craft new highly sought after items, so a baseline of a certain amount of coins rewarded had to be met for casual players. This meant that these coins needed to require a lot of time from the player to obtain but also that the chest locations needed to be considered even more.

To encourage exploration and ensure it doesn’t get repetitive, each guaranteed chest spawn had >6 average location permutations. Each chest would respawn in one of those location permutations daily. I had to decide early on if this randomness was player specific or shared across every player. I chose to make it universal as players could work together to find them. (proof) However, the randomness in the reward wasn’t universal and so some players would get better rewards than others even if they dug up the same chest. This kept things a bit more balanced in a luck sense while also playing into one of our game’s core pillars of, “always being happy to see another player”.

Each chest had three possible tiers of rewards. Tier 1 (T1) was a reduced reward, they gave a small amount of coins and had small chances to get the higher tier rewards. Tier 2 (T2) was a medium reward with higher chances. Tier 3 (T3) had massive guaranteed rewards but it was a locked chest, this chest was unlocked with a special key which could be bought from exploration specific vendors. My original idea was to split the rarity across 20 chests per map, with the rarity and relative count of the tiers being related to their reward value. (T1s being more common, T3s being rare) But as we playtested and got more feedback we found that players expected the treasures to be on common paths. So, I changed our spawn rates to be a bit more rigid, and a bit more predictable / more rewarding, I also increased the total amount on the maps, and I moved more of the treasures to common pathways. I made sure to only give T1 in commonly traveled areas, so those that didn’t want to engage, but felt compelled to, didn’t have to disrupt their style of play. This also reminded players that they could go and search for more treasures, this made sure that this more ‘hidden’ system was still on players minds and they could be rewarded further by engaging with it.

While I was placing the chests I also thought about exactly how a player would navigate between quests and around the world on their Warclaw. I specifically placed higher tier chests in hard to reach areas that a Warclaw would be well suited to get to. I also placed the rarest chests in difficult areas, specifically near repeatable quests and groups of hard enemies which players would most likely be grinding. Adding intrinsically rewarding activities or placing them near fun quests as a bonus reward was part of my effort to make treasure hunting not as repetitive or boring as it could have been.

With these changes and overall end design it seemed like players enjoyed it so much so that players are trying to map out every possible location of them and also commended it for it’s smart social forward design.