I found an article today that posited the decline of WoW’s membership had a lot to do with how tightly-controlled and inorganic the starting experience has become.
I thought that was an interesting point. I don’t necessarily hate Exile’s Reach–it does a good job of explaining your character’s abilities and it provides solid gearing for non-heirloomed players (rare as they are). But it also does a really bad job of explaining who the factions are, what the races are like and what’s going on in the story…like, a really bad job.
That’s not to say the starter zones were all that. The quests were frequently boring, the gear didn’t help anyone and there was no explanation for your abilities. But I confess, I kind of miss them now.
The Forsaken starter zone, for example, I think is key to understanding why Forsaken players felt so strongly about the faction. From the second you rise out of the grave, you understand exactly who you are, exactly what you want to do and exactly who is trying to destroy you. You don’t have fancy gear or an understanding of how Heroic Strike works, but you’ve got a mission and a community.
The community part is harder to pull off now, obviously, due to player decline and content scattering. Exile’s Reach makes a lot of sense, but I really wish we could find some kind of happy medium between the two.
The factions are now so big and cosmopolitan that a concentrated experience does make a lot of sense, I believe. But surely, there could be something like an experience for the Horde and the Alliance that wasn’t just cut-and-paste content to kill ogres. FF14 does a pretty good situation where your experience funnels you toward the community you’re meant to be in (one of the starter cities) and makes you care about that place and I think it wouldn’t be terrible for WoW to take a page from that.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe as WoW drifts further away from the faction conflict, Exile’s Reach is precisely what’s needed for this point and time. Maybe it doesn’t make a ton of sense to have starter zones like we used to.
I think the starter zones should probably be revamped at some point to get the best of both worlds. Like, perhaps you have a starter zone for each base race that kind that gives you an idea of the race’s history, beliefs, etc. That would be the 1-10 experience. After that something similar to Exile’s Reach to 20 but it goes into the broader faction stuff. So you’d go from being a blood elf paladin learning about your people and about the Blood Knights and you end up being shipped off to fight in some conflict. Both places get you better prepared for what you’ll be doing mechanically too.
The happy medium? No more Chromie Time for leveling. It scatters people around too much. You go Racial starting zone to faction zone(for lack of a better term rn) to TWW Then Midnight then Last Titan. And yes I think you should have to go through the saga.
I think the OG starting zones, and even the Pandaren starting zone are great at immersing you into the lore of the race you’re playing. Dracthyr are able to accomplish that to an extent, but it’s really about setting up Radagast and Sarkareth as villains. So yes, the original starting zones hold a special place to me as they effectively add in the story elements to really treat this in part as an RPG.
I like exile’s reach for what it is, but it’s mostly teaching you mechanics of things - and that’s not necessarily a bad thing to me. But it really shows how this game has started to focus less on the immersive aspect of playing a game like this with all the lore it has behind it, and it’s more about the mechanical side of it. Each side has its good and bad, but for me personally I’ll always prefer hopping into Tirisfal Glades as a newly risen undead or a Draenei that recently awoke from the Exodar’s crash.
Do I miss the OG zones? Nah, they were inefficient, slow and you had to struggle going through the experience because yeah, nothing was explained, you were given very little and tossed out into the world. They only serve as a nostalgia trip.
The bespoke starter zones, like the Worgen, Goblins, Pandas etc, they had a ton of work put into them for cutscene and story. Those zones I think should be revamped to mimic an Exile’s Reach experience. But they’re still outdated storywise.
Exile’s Reach is just a better solution. The game’s population is largely old players who keep coming back or sticking around. Sure they should have done more to create a factional identity, but Blizzard REALLY wants to get rid of the factions and just make it one big one (given that they’ve done their best to homogenize the Horde into an Alliance form of government). But they know they can’t so this is really the best we get.
I don’t play most of the old starter zones anymore because I’ve done them to death. I will still do Deathknell, Northshire and Coldridge Valley, but usually after getting that quick XP and gear from Exile’s Reach. Or I roll something I can skip on altogether, like a void elf. Or I become incredibly lazy and buy a boost.
But that’s because I’ve literally played every expac as current content and I couldn’t even tell you how many characters I’ve made, deleted, race changed, faction changed, remade, made copies on other servers, etc. I’m into this game for thousands of dollars by now.
If I was a new player coming in, I’d be lost as heck as to what’s going on in either old starter zones or Exile’s Reach. The old starter zones - even revamped a bit - are still pointed toward older content. And Exile’s Reach is just quickstart into the game.
TBH I’d guess most players looking to join up for the first time are PVEers and don’t care about the deeper lore. They know they’re a tauren and that’s good enough for them. They don’t care about the nuances, just the cool appearance.
I personally think that, in addition to a old world revamp, a starter zone revamp is DESPARATELY needed for the reasons people have listed. I feel like the the best way is to make each starter zone larger and into their own versions of exile’s reach that act as more self-contained narratives that aren’t as dated as some of the the zones have become.
We could have a redone northshire centered around clearing out a kobold infestation, an undead starter zone based around cleaning up the now blighted undercity, we could finally retake gnomeragon, ETC
I think you’ve explained it well, Enekie. The starting zones gave us a sense of who we are. When we create one of those original races, we get a sense of the essential elements to a story, at least to some extent. We get the who, what, when, where and why, to a large extent. We learn, in those first 2-3 formative zones, who and what our people are, what led us to this point, why this land is important to us (or at least why we live there) and so on.
Exile’s Reach gives us a brief mention of who our race is in the intro cinematic… but it’s a case of telling rather than showing. We very quickly learn the core values of the Forsaken, Night Elves, Tauren, Humans, etc by just questing in their lands, immersing ourselves in their culture. On Exile’s Reach I don’t feel like we get enough to really be compelling. We get a vague sense of the Horde, or Alliance, and what our class is. But even in that we miss the nuance. A new player making a Blood Elf Hunter, for instance, is going to miss the rich and individual feel of a Ranger/Farstrider, as opposed to a simple hunter.
I think Exile’s Reach was a reasonable way to fix confusion in a more streamlined levelling experience, but in a world that has grown so large, I think we miss a lot by moving away from the race-specific zones. They added a lot of flavour to the people’s of Azeroth in a way that just isn’t present anymore.
I miss them for the nostalgia but not for the pragmatic aspect of leveling in a 20-year-old MMORPG in 2024.
My first starting zone was night elf. Wandering around the forests and caves of Teldrassil with the OG starting zone music was a singular experience for me. I still get chills to this day thinking about it. I was immersed. When I explored beyond the original confines of the forest and discovered MASSIVE boughs jutting out from what I thought was solid ground, I realized I was leveling inside an impossibly giant tree. It blew my mind. That was my introduction to the Warcraft world.
This whole piece captures that moment but it was most magical when the strings and vocals kick in around the 1:11 mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXMguMnsyak
That said, nostalgia is just that: Nostalgia. You can’t recapture it because that’s not the point of it. It’s OK to not be able to repeat a memorable experience, that’s what makes it memorable. While the OG zones definitely did instill faction pride in me — as later on did orc, Forsaken, Northshire, and other zones — beyond the rose-tinted glasses, I can’t ignore how meandering the experiences sometimes were, how many times I got stuck on quests with only Thottbot to not lend a hand, and how long it took me to finally lean into one zone after hopping around for the right feel.
That said, I’m not lauding Exile’s Reach over the original experiences, either. While the pragmatic side of it is solid in terms of teaching class, gameplay, and UI basics, it also removes the original race/faction immersion of the first starting zones. Is it good to introduce new or returning players into the game? Yes. Does it inspire the same race or faction pride as the originals? Debatable. I’d be curious to know the thoughts of someone who never played the OG starting zones. Is it as immersive into the “World of Warcraft” as the original zones are? I’d argue “no” but my nostalgia is definitely tipping the scales here.
The original zones were written with the RTS games still very much in mind. It was 2004 and Warcraft fans could finally just wander around a 3D Warcraft world unrestricted by loading screens. That was the magic and draw of it all and the starting designs reflected it. But since less players played the RTS games today and 3D worlds are the bare baseline, expectations have shifted to incorporating players into the rest of the playerbase ASAP, not immersing them in the fantastical world itself. They’re two fundamentally different designs and that’s hard to compare. That said, I’d love to see what the current team could do with a combination of the two, but unless the C-suite signed off on what would essentially be a mini-expansion rehaul, I can’t see it happening anytime soon.
Exiles reach at least is self contained and transcends the story beats of the main issues plaguing Azeroth. Starting in the traditional zones may offer some lore, yes, but they also give context to Deathwing or whoever the main antagonist was at the time. At least Exiles Reach gives a brief overview and then sends you to Chromie who lets you know that you’ll be seeing stuff that already happened, which is a good thing to know as a new player. I don’t think ER is doing a bad job at explaining current events. I think it avoids it on purpose. That’s the evergreen starter zone that will always be relevant.
I do miss the old starter zones. I think if you are interested in the difference races beyond whatever racial bonus they give - if that even matters anymore - they give you that immersion factor. That being said, they need to be totally over-hauled so they can get beyond that whole slog through the past and past expansions to get you to the present day. There should be a “modern” starter point that is update to where that race is now, in terms of leadership, factor, and the world. I’d also like to see class specific quests in those zones so you can get a sense of how that races views the class. I say this in light of all the new classes that have been added to different races.
Given all of that, I do think that Exiles Reach does a good job at not being dated, and does let you skip the slog I mentioned above. I think it is a good option, probably the best available. But, having done it a couple of times already… I’m glad it’s short. I’m done with it. At least with racial zones you don’t have the same experience on every character - just every other character.
I don’t disagree with that. Evergreen content is definitely advantaged in that respect.
I do kind of wonder if you could work that into new starter zones, though. If you’re Horde and choose to start in Durotar, you could hear a bit about the Legion. If you start in Eversong, you could hear a bit about the Scourge and so forth. Every race was impacted differently, after all, and I think it could be elegant to pick up the threads of different conflicts and follow to where they join.
Of course, I think at this point, I’m basically suggesting a complete overhaul of the game world.
The original, and even the Cataclysm revamps, starter zones hold a special place in the heart I fed to a bear.
My very first character was a Tauren druid and while I enjoyed the zone, a level 60 player was running around on their epic ground mount and gave out bags and gold to new players.
When I asked them why, they told me they had a hard time starting out and didn’t know you could repair gear, so this player carried multiple sets of the same stat and type armor until they were level 40 or so.
Then during the Cataclysm days in the starter zone, heirloom gear really seemed to smother that random generosity.
The ambiance of the starter zones is still wonderful and sometimes I go hang out in them just for that.
I’ve said it before, but Blizz needs a small internal team dedicated to just updating the appearance of the world (and the quests) out of the Cata era one by one. Or at least just the major zones of the world with the most disruptive damage to the world.
I want the Barrens cleaned up so badly I can almost taste the red dust. And a bridge to connect the “upper” and “lower” Barrens.
But yes, they trashed to planet and they need to make repairs. Is it just easier for them to build new zones from scratch than it is to update existing zones? Or do they just not want to deal with it?
They could create self-contained Towers (or caverns, or something) (like Torghast) that would be perpetually placed in the game, in each races starting zone or something, to explain events, culture, etc. I posted my suggestion once before:
With how much the game has changed, the zones have changed, leveling, everything else? It would benefit them to create something in-game more permanent to provide new players with a place they could go to learn about each race and the battles / important moments in that race’s history.
Since it would be permanent, they could add ‘events’ and ‘stories’ within it as the expacs / game goes on.
I feel like the end of Last Titan or w/e will see a “healing of Azeroth” which means revamped zones and new quests. Cata timewalking will shift everything to cata time.
I feel like the devs have just moved completely away from trying to create and maintain multiple points of view.
The races have all lost their unique origins, factions have lost unique quests in zones, we all follow the same singular path now. For better or worse. Been that way since Shadowlands.