So I just jumped back into wow Retail in anticipation of the new expansion next month. The first thing I did was play through the patch 10.2.0 - Guardians of the Dream questline… and boy was I surprised at how bad it is, both from a story line and quest design perspective.
My gripe on the story line is two fold:
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The heavy reliance of in-game cutscenes to tell boring plot points. If its not interesting don’t make me wait through a cut scene. Can we please have less but more interesting cutscenes. If its not good enough to be properly animated maybe its not good enough for a cut scene at all.
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The corny dialog, member berries, and pandering. I almost puked in my mouth when all the different wow classes/characters appeared in one of the animated cutscenes towards the end of the campaign. Make cool content again like the Lich King. The faster content delivery cycle is only good the content is interesting.
My gripe on quest design:
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Too often I’m just running through a crowd of mobs to get to an objective, or I can pull some dragon flying aerobatics to jump over them. Its all kind of lame when I compare it to my experience recently of playing wow classic, wrath, and cata. I can’t quite put my finger on it but it probably starts with the issue that mobs aren’t dangerous anymore and are instead just these annoying things that make it harder for me to mount my dragon when I get stuck in combat.
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The quests are just boring… I know that isn’t helpful feedback but they are and thats all I can provide. I would even enjoy more grind oriented quests like wow classic. Whenever I run into a non-standard quest in retail that has me do something odd I just get annoyed.
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Why does all the character audio sound exactly the same as the last two expansions? Hire new voice actors. Use different audio effects. Every character shouldn’t sound like Pelagos. The music also shouldn’t sound the same.
I’m a long time wow player and I must say that replaying Vanilla-to-Cata Classic has made me fall back in love with the old game. Unfortunately it has also highlighted to me the sad state that retail is in. Parts of retail are still fun, grinding mythics is great, raiding is great. But there is something seriously missing in the quest design and storyline.
Thanks for reading this post. I’m optimistic that that the next trilogy will be better and that is why I’m trying to provide constructive feedback.