BFA zones for new players have got to go

Lore Story Forum
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This is something that I didn’t really think about until just today, but Kul’tiras and Zandalar are not good introductions to this game. To some degree they feel disconnected from BFA, but they aren’t totally. You get hints of this subplot of the faction war before you get shuttled off to whatever the new xpac is, and with these zones remaining the new player leveling zones into DF, it’s going to confuse and alienate players even more. New players don’t get to see War of Thorns or Battle for Lordaeron. They have no context why they, fresh off Exile’s Reach, are doing anything they’re doing or why on KT/Zanda. They had no idea why they’re suddenly off to the Shadowlands in the middle of BFA, and while DF might be a better transfer from BFA to the new zones, it makes less sense because the Horde/Alliance have had an armistice for 5 years but apparently upon arriving to DF they’re skirmishing again. Makes sense to a new player who still was war campaign quests in their questlog they’ll never do, but not as much to someone who unfortunately played BFA and knows how that ended.

Here’s what I mean: Behind the backdrop of the things you’re doing on KT and Zanda, there’s this faction war narrative going on. Horde is probably more disconnected from it but you do get hints about Sylvanas being bad apples here and there. But none of that ever gets resolved for a new player. You’re likely to hit the level you need to hit before you go off to the new xpac, so you don’t actually resolve anything. So you’re going to get this backstory on the faction war and why you need to hate the other team, but none of that ever gets resolved. You get pushed off to the next experience without really knowing why you’re doing anything you’re doing. Also neither faction leader matches up. For Alliance they’re following King Anduin, but they’re going to get dumped off in the new xpac and be like, wait, where did Anduin go, who’s this Turalyon guy? For Horde you’re going to be like, wait Sylvanas was just my Warchief, why do we have a council now? What happened?

Again, not going to be something that Blizzard is going to want to do, but 10-60 needs a story agnostic, self-contained adventure like Exile’s Reach. Something that is explicitly written as being able to have occurred at any time, with a climax that wraps up everything from the zone before dumping you off at Stormwind/Orgrimmar for the next expansion plot. After you’ve completed this journey once as a new player, you can play Chromie Time as much as you want and experience previous expansion zones.

I think this forms a better foundation for new players getting into the story. Because if you start with an interesting story that invests you and has a proper climax that isn’t tied to a raid in the next expansion, you’ll want to try out the other leveling experiences and want to see those stories as well. As it stands, the BFA zones have self-contained stories but they are tied to an overarching narrative inextricably that is, quite frankly, terrible. Right now you don’t have a friendly new player experience. You have a disjointed experience that only WoW veterans will get.

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Blizzard does not care about new players, and has not for a while. You are playing a game that is being transformed into a hardcore esports game with cash shop gold as a primary source of income for the company.

Too much work.

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Yeah, I know they’re not going to want to do that, especially because it is not max level content. However I think it needs to be done for the long term health of the game. Not that it matters because Blizzard is more focused on monetizing their already existing playerbase, as you said. Exile’s Reach maybe gives us some hope that might not always be the case. Exile’s Reach was probably the only good move in Shadowlands.

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Thinking about it, Zandalar and Kul’Tiras feeling disconnected from the rest of BFA makes complete sense since they’re amazing and the rest of BFA is garbage

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Not disconnected enough for new players and not connected for players at the time.

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I am no game designer. Not much of a Gamer. Trying to conceptualize some marvelous answer to revamp the WoW Experience for new players seems a tall order for me, especially with Lore and Story or personal RP as the consideration.

I have enough Alts and do not see myself leveling any fresh ones. And this game is so old. Making a cohesive seamless story of it all for new players is rough, when people who have played since Vanilla have trouble making sense of all the plot holes and loose threads and retcons.

It just feels bad and needs a fix. There is a lot wrong with leveling in WoW, especially for new Players. That is for sure. I do not know if Blizzard will ever deal with it, or maybe they will just let the Game die off and wait for a WoW 2, after Microsoft owns it.

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Erm, no? They’re not skirmishing on the Dragon Isles. There’s literally zero conflict between the factions on the Isles. If you think of the war mode, that’s just gameplay at this point.

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Blizzard doesn’t really cater to new players anymore, the game is so vast and almost cumbersome at this point so as a new player it just becomes overwhelming VERY quickly even with their implementations of a new starter experience.

That being said, the introductory parts of BfA are ideal to a new player in that they introduce two lore-rich hubs for each respective faction with their own internal zone stories/conflicts that don’t feel like they will suddenly become outdated story-wise like a lot of older content is. There’s a little bit of cross factional conflict to give a newer player some semblance of understanding of the stance between the factions but not enough to make it feel weird when they step into Dragonflight during the armistice.

Unless a new player is really digging deep into BfA by playing continuing patches from that expansion, I think it’s the best touchpoint.

If we compare, BC, WotLK, Cataclysm, Pandaria, WoD and Legion all feel incredibly dated already because they encompassed a very specific story that has now concluded, and BC/WotLK particularly feel very clunky and outdated compared to the current questing and graphics of later expansions. I won’t even mention Shadowlands because it’s so left-field that throwing a new player into the afterlife is a sure fire way to confuse the hell out of them.

TLDR; When we consider the ulterior options, BfA feels like the best option in my opinion anyway. Plus, Chromie time is always available for those feeling a little more adventurous.

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I agree with this; I’m sure they were picked because they had the most up-to-date graphics, and not for story reasons. Hopefully the new player zones will be changed to something else once BfA isn’t the latest shiny thing anymore.

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To a point I do feel we’ve to acknowledge we are living in a world where you can learn about any fictional setting at any time.

I think this is why super hero movies have blown up the way they have. In the before times if you wanted to know who like Dr.Strange is you’re going to have to track down a comics store and hope they have some relevant issues on sale. Now though in addition to Wikipedia pages you can find whole mini documentaries on YouTube covering the character in exhausting detail.

WoW is the same way. So they don’t really have to explain everything. They can just give you a taste and if you want more there’s no shortage of resources to learn from, which you can definitely access as you wouldn’t be playing the game in the first place if you didn’t have an internet connection. This isn’t ideal but I’m not sure what the alternative would be.

MMOs just are going to be a bit confusing for newcomers. WoW isn’t unique in that case. I tried a few others after quitting WoW for a spell and all of them have problems with walls of content from different expansions hitting you at once. Frequently with no indication on chronological story order and often in a way that causes you to spoil older stories for yourself by accident.

I actually think WoW’s leveling revamp is the best solution I’ve seen. You’ll at least be able to get through a zone storyline or two. You’re definitely not getting through all of an expansion’s storylines but at least you’re not being abruptly shoved into new ones.

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Being honest, while it’s rough and unpolished, the current new player story experience is the best we’ve had in years.

Cataclysm broke the story progression and for a long time, no real attempts at repairing it had ever been attempted. Blizzard was content to rush you to max level and experience the latest expansion pack. The new starting zone, into BfA, into Shadowlands, is at least cohesive, even if hollow at points.

We are well overdue for Blizzard to step up and introduce a proper leveling campaign for both sides. This would be useful because it would be new content for old and new players, especially if the rewards scaled to max level. This campaign could be made with the expectation you won’t stick around in any one zone for that long, and could take you from traditional racial starting zones and through each expansion, though some could be skipped.

While I agree in principal that it’s bad for the game’s longevity to have a nonsense new player leveling experience, we’re so well overdue for a proper fix that the damage is largely done. There are other MMOs praised for their multiple expansions long coherent start-to-finish storyline, and WoW already has the reputation of an incoherent mess of a story that isn’t building up or going anywhere. As much as I adore Warcraft 3, we are still heavily saddled with legacy characters from a game that’s almost old enough to drink and is probably older than a fair chunk of the playerbase. That is alarming, because it suggests difficulty in building up new characters and threats. Hopefully we get another Cataclysm-tier expansion pack that tackles these issues head-on.

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It could definitely be better, but when I’m comparing BFA to FF14 ARR to SWTOR to ESO, I actually feel like BFA is winning the comparison for early content pretty handily. The first thing everyone says about FF14 ARR (the base game content) is that it’s rough, and I would very much have to agree. It’s better than pre-BFA WoW as a new player experience, but it’s not the part of FF14 everyone praises.

You know what is a dramatically underrated part of new player retention?

You look damn fine (or cute or whatever you want) from the word go pretty much in FF14 with no constraints on that. Both your player model and your clothing options, even if you don’t get access to glamours out the gate. There is no ‘clown clothes’ period, ever, without deliberately going for it.

I fundamentally disagree that BFA is a bad introduction on the grounds that the faction war isn’t resolved as part of the leveling content; you get it established pretty firmly throughout the leveling process that the Alliance and Horde dislike each other, but there’s little you’re likely to run into that establishes why. A good introduction to a complex setting doesn’t have to answer every question it raises, it has to bring you up to speed on the status quo and make you want to know the answers to those questions.

Alliance vs Horde has always been background at best outside of Mists of Pandaria or time-limited events, so that’s all the player needs to know before going to the focus of the content.

WoW’s consistent issues with storytelling are structure and followthrough; introductions and climaxes usually feel pretty good from them in isolation, because they’re practically designed to exist outside of any context other than what you are shown at that very moment.

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I’m going off of what I heard during the DF announcement that there was optional skirmishing available at the beginning and war mode was not mentioned. You were able to go and “make trouble” on the other faction’s boat or something. They might have cut that out by this time.

I’m drawing from a video I watched a bit ago about an FF14 player trying WoW for the first time. More or less what he had to say was that coming off of the BFA zones and heading into Shadowlands, he had no idea for his motivation or who Sylvanas was, or why any of it mattered. That’s not as much of a problem in DF considering that it will probably have a way more toned down opening, and maybe going forward we’ll see less “HERO, COME QUICK, THE NEXT APOCALYPSE HAS STARTED!” as soon as you hit level x8.

But Exile’s Reach being well done was an effort to help onboard new players. I don’t know how successful that really was, probably not very, but it does show that there was a modicum of effort at providing a new player leveling experience.

Vast rift of difference between “Horde and Alliance don’t like each other” and “We’re at war”. Words like “War Campaign” get thrown about, with a mission table that asks you to send your hero units on campaigns that are explicitly war operations against the other faction. All of that was resolved at the end of BFA and new players will not see that resolution, at all.

I think that there is a difference between questions being posed and not answered, leaving you to puzzle them out and plotlines just falling off a cliff leaving you to wonder what happened. The former would be question of like, the origin of the Orcs (before that was answered), the origin of Elune (before that was more or less answered). Those aren’t plot lines that are begging to be answered but questions to puzzle. Whereas questing in a war campaign and then getting a quest to do the new expansion to later find out that there was an armistice for the last five years is going to be confusing.

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You don’t have to/can’t interact with the War Campaign and table until you’re pretty late at current leveling rate. I’m not sure if it’s level locked or quest locked but the character I was most recently leveling didn’t even have the option and was already to their 40s. To say nothing of it being slightly out of the way to reach that table, especially without epic flight.

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While that’s true it wasn’t quite this bad for WoW in the past.

It’s not something I think that is inherent to MMOs because they’re MMOs, simply because a lot of focus tends to be put on the players that the service already has, rather than attracting new ones. This is why most MMOs have stagnant playerbases. Or they’re single player like ESO and SWOTOR and it doesn’t matter if they have much of a playerbase or not.

I think the transition from BFA zones to Shadowlands zones is jarring and abrupt to say the least. You get a message from Darion, a guy you don’t know telling you that Sylvanas is basically going to undo the cosmos. If you’re Alliance you may not even know who that is either, and if you’re Horde you’re wondering how that happened when she was your Warchief 2 seconds ago. Because you don’t see any of that build up. Because the BFA zones are disconnected from the main story, but not disconnected enough to not leave you confused as to what happened.

Blizzard really does not want to do this, and I suppose I can see why, considering the vast amount of effort it would require to redo all of the zones. I think it would be more efficient, in the long run, to sort of keep this jank timeline with the capitol cities being more or less ‘locked’ in time, with Chromie there to provide you leveling paths to stories from the past. That’s why I think a new player campaign that is disconnected from any narrative except those that have more or less laid the groundwork for WoW, like Exile’s Reach, is preferable. This would also give an opportunity to just create an expedited leveling experience with more in depth quests than the typical “kill 10, collect 5” quests that you do over and over, with more interesting storylines and maybe even RPG choices that do exist in other MMOs at this time. It would be it’s own self contained adventure, so it wouldn’t require your choices to necessarily jive with whatever expac that comes after.

That’s only an issue for Horde because of Dazar’alor’s godawful layout. For Alliance the mission table is right there. You can’t miss it, and you will probably interact with it at least once. There’s also the war campaign thing, which you do get early on. None of them really involve much ‘war’ it’s true, they’re all context for setting up bases in the other faction’s hub. The only exceptions to this that I can think of is Stormsong for Horde and Zuldazar for Alliance. Both of those involve heavy contact with opposite faction forces. But in each it’s all with the greater context of the war that’s currently going on.

Now that I think about it some more, with a few editing touches we wouldn’t need an entirely new leveling experience, as much as I’d want one. We’d need some way to explain the whole Azerite deal, but maybe they’ll get around to that when they get to the sword thing.

All they would have to do is make the war campaign and mission tables stuff that you can come back to do at max level for the story, and edit some parts about Sylvanas and Anduin in the storyline up to that point. Those changes are a lot smaller and more reasonable to do.

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You will only be able to do that in War Mode.

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Just a small thing: I actually chose the word “slightly” from the perspective of the Alliance. It is a bit annoying to get on that boat without flight and flight feels too slow to use (even though it’s actually faster!) Without epic. Average new player will not even try to investigate that once they are able to interact with it.

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BfA being the new player route is by design because it lets them completely brush the faction war and any of the complexities under the rug. You can get through to level 48-50 without touching the War Campaign at all, and even then, the initial War Campaign is mostly preparing for a war without any actual true conflict. Shadowlands won’t be part of Chromie Time either, so they’ll go from BfA to DF directly. No faction war, no Lordaeron, no War of Thorns.

Which just goes to show how thematically at odds with the rest of the setting Shadowlands is.

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My understanding, but maybe someone can correct me, is that BfA was only required because it was the penultimate release before the current one. When we move on to Dragon Flight, shouldn’t Shadowlands take it place?

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Bluzzard has confirmed otherwise. You’ll still level in BfA in as a new player during Dragonflight.

https://www.icy-veins.com/forums/topic/65776-leveling-changes-in-dragonflight/