The majority of gamers have always been shallow and short-sighted and sought quick gratification, IMO. I think it’s human nature. And over time game developers seem to have given in to this demand more and more and monetized it, even though it usually cheapens and dimishes the rewarding feeling of accomplishment one gets from games. Younger generations, for many of them, it’s all they know. And they constantly try to overcome the cheapness of it all by aimlessly zooming through one game after another and hopping from game to game in search of the next quick and cheap moment of gratification. That’s what the majority of gaming has become today.
There are still deep, rich, and rewarding gaming experiences out there, but they have become the exception.
i always make it an adventure. i recall playing star wars galaxies and trying to get a special beast master pet *a rancor, from dathomir, home of the nightsisters. THAT was an adventure.
You can play it like that. All I’m saying is that the younger generation probably just sees it as a needless barrier to their objective, which is running the dungeon.
I don’t think younger generation wants things handed to them on a silver platter but that they are less patient and more so prefer the path of least resistance in bridging the gap from where they are to where they want to go.
In other words, perhaps they’ve become smarter and more efficient in their thinking. Evolution and all.
i logged in one day, after not playing for a few months to find my graul and rancor sitting uselessly in my inventory. all they could do was tricks. my class had been removed from the game! imagine if blizzard suddenly removed the hunter class from wow. lol
and it isnt genetic, its local to culture and environment. people of extreme cold and extreme hot climates, develop long term investment skills out of necessity, same with people who have monsoon seasons. we have a huge swath of climates, completely negated by modern technology and availability of resources. resource availability leads to loss of long term skills, resulting in instant gratification. this leaks over into reproductive activity, overwhelming the resources, leading to re-establishment of long term investment skills. full circle.
First off, let’s not over-generalize. The reason WoW has so much mass appeal is because it’s a game that can be quickly picked up and played for a couple of hours to give you some feeling of progression. It appeals to both a younger audience and folks who work for a living who don’t have a whole lot of free time on their hands due to life’s many obligations.
Vanilla WoW and WoW Classic are games that one has to spend a lot of time on if they ever want to have any meaningful accomplishments–first by leveling their character to 60 and then to go through the grind of end-game attunement. You could, of course, play casually and just hop on for a couple of hours every few days and maybe earn a level; that slow grind, however, deters some would-be players because there are, frankly, better things to do with that time.
It’s human nature to seek the path of least resistance. That hasn’t changed, IMO. The difference is that older games used to not give you an easy option. They forced players to overcome the challenging obstacles presented, which led to a greater feeling of reward when completed.
But now most games have an ez-mode, like retail LFR, or pay-to-win option and the quick and easy path is always available. Nobody’s forced to overcome tough challenges anymore, and so they often don’t even try, because they don’t have to. And for many younger gamers, that’s all they know.
And in Classic, where there aren’t any ez-modes, players have found exploits to create ez-modes or pay-to-win options, and Blizzard has let these practices go unchecked.
This is the core of the issue IMO. Classic requires long time investments to be good. realistically you need at least 10-15 hours of relatively uninterrupted time a week for one character to really get the most out of the game. A lot of young people seem to prefer games that are easier to pick up and feel good about after 30 minutes to an hour. Classic is not that kind of game.
Because videogames these days are all about instant gratification. I actually have a younger brother, born in 2001, who played WoW during WoD and Legion, and recently he said he tried Classic and didn’t like it because “everything is slower”.
i remember the only way we got news about future star wars movies is if we went to the store and bought a magazine that covered scifi movies/books, which often had no info till almost launch day, sometimes up to 3 or more years apart. now we just surf to the official star wars site and read it directly. hehe. everything is instant, except jobs, apparently
I’m not young and I still didn’t enjoy Vanilla/Classic leveling that much past maybe level 15 or 20 when it really slows down. It’s so… much… running. And honestly it’s not very interesting unless you can get into dungeons. The first couple “bring me 10 wolf pelts” quests are fine but that’s the vast majority of solo questing. Stacking quests was hard, and I’d often run out of quests or find myself running 15 minutes back and forth to a quest giver. Dungeon quest chains were more interesting, but groups were really hard to find because most people were at max level and raiding.
I only got through to level 40 and a mount in late Vanilla/TBC because I was playing with a friend. It picks up a bit after 40 and Outland was a lot better. At that point I had an epic mount, quest stacking was somewhat better, and Outland wasn’t as massive as Azeroth so I could get around the world.
I got sucked into Classic again a few months back and had completely forgotten how soul-crushing leveling is before 40 and your mount. I almost bailed to play retail except for having RL friends and wanting to see BWL and AQ40 at level.
I don’t think it’s a generational thing. People haven’t really changed much.
It’s just that the gaming landscape has changed. Back in the day MMO’s were slower by design, either because the developers hadn’t even thought of doing it differently, or because of technical limitations.
There was also no real social media, and the ability to share information over the internet was much less than we have now. The item databases and map sites for previous generation games are absolutely archaic compared to what we have now. Classic wow players had: Thotbot and Zygor guides. Lol. Today’s players have: sixtyupgrades, wowhead, classicdb, class/server discords with pinned guides, much better addons, etc.
If you took what we have now and plopped it in front of a bunch of the old school EQ players from back in the day they’d drop EQ for retail in half a second and start zooming like champs. Some wouldn’t, but it’s not based on someone’s age or generation. Some people just like to zoom is all.
everquest mmorpg was one of wow’s big predecessors and influencers and it didnt even have an ingame world map. lol you had to memorize the game’s continents and cities and it was at least as big as azeroth. the boat trip between continents was a half hour and there were no flying mounts or even ground mounts till like expansion 7 or so.
yep. haha. i had it mapped to the arrow keys on keyboard, so if i turned right or left, it’d press the button and itd print out on the screen either what direction i was facing or that i had no idea what direction i was facing
oh and you had to collect components and make your own arrows if you had archery skills. you had to learn fletching
I’d argue it’s better in TBC cause exp requirements were nerfed. So there’s not as much running around needed, especially as Alliance. I started in TBC, and I never needed to do zones like Ashenvale or Darkshore back then. Here in Classic, you can’t skip a zone if you’re leveling through mostly questing.
But yeah, outland quests flow a bit better. But you do give up some…epicness.
