^ This one gets it.
Sure, but I don’t see it happening.
I’d rather it seem like you don’t have to be max level to have the game work properly and allow you to earn things that matter. I like it when every step of the journey counts for something.
Except thats just your opinion.
I believe the opposite has happened and think comparing classic to live on these topics its clear live wow does it better.
Like, so much better youd have to be a lunatic to say otherwise.
Just the fact that there was no central story happening in classic and most zones had no lasting story impact alone is enough for me to disagree there.
Seems like you’re grasping the facts… but the realization isn’t quite dawning on you.
A big issue with the game right now is that it’s too reliant on metrics.
Playing a game according to metrics will never give people them an emotional connection to it, it becomes a dry and rote experience that they play out of habit rather than out of genuine enjoyment. It works for a while, but afterwards people just get bored and frustrated when they start to realize what’s going on.
In essence, the developers have to stop focusing on the metrics of the game and focus more on the EXPERIENCE.
As I said before, the metric-driven mentality of the game REALLY needs to go… and it has to go back more towards giving the players an enjoyable experience. I’m deliberately NOT being specific about to give the developers more freedom, and trying to push for a particular change falls back on that metric-driven mentality again.
Vanilla WoW (and by extension, WoW Classic) was driven by the experience, there were no metrics to speak of back then. It was all new, so there was a huge focus on exploration and discovery. Even after so many years, and nothing genuinely new to discover (damned data-miners), there’s still some joy to be had revisiting the old locales.
I actually did play during Vanilla, but I was definitely an explorer of sorts rather than actively pursuing any sort of particular endgame.
Desolace being desolate and empty was a bit of an issue, but the zone still had some uniqueness by being like that. After all, Horde characters still had to track down Rexxar wandering up and down the main road for their version of the Onyxia questline.
While many people do desire a sense of direction, not every part of the game needs to be busy and occupied… and some times, the purpose not being obvious is what people are looking for.
It all depends on how you look at it. As I said earlier, I didn’t care for the endgame in Vanilla WoW… and quite frankly, I feel that I’ve been better off for it.
If you don’t get seduced by the idea of constantly pushing your way through repeating a handful of raids just to progress to the next one and say… oh, decided to try and find every nook and cranny in the world?
That’s where WoW Classic will shine.
Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if casuals were MORE interested in taking their time to explore the world rather than being efficiently funneled towards the endgame.
The irony of the whole situation is that Classic has MORE to offer casuals, simply the way it’s structured. The current version of the game just makes casuals grumpy by funneling towards the content they DON’T want to play (raiding, Mythic+, etc.).
Needs more creativity.
There are tricks to navigating your way through the world and around mobs, knowing what sort of gap will allow you sneak past enemies, what patrol routes to watch out for, what enemies to avoid, and which enemies to surgically take out.
And after reaching your objective, the next trick to finding your way back out of there. It’s surprisingly entertaining, with the right mindset.
And someone finally catches on.
To be quite honest, I don’t have much issue with the War Campaign being mandatory… I just wish it was better, and didn’t force me into any sort of raiding (even if it’s just a single LFR run every so often, that’s usually the most unpleasant part of it).
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Its impossible. The reason the game is the game today is because the people have made it so.
The “experience” is what it is because you experience it that way.
Blizzard can’t force you to be a noob again and experience everything with wonderment.
You basically admit that I am accurate here. Nothing new, yet you still find joy in doing that nothing. That’s nostalgia.
There is no adventure in something you have already done dozens of times, and its not something Blizzard can design.
They haven’t made some conscious choice to remove the “adventure” from the game.
You just moved past it.
I have no idea what you mean with this “metric-driven” stuff but either way, Classic is what it is because it was made 20 years ago.
Whatever you think is effecting Classic negatively, just didn’t exist back then. That’s why is not in the game. Not because they choose to disallow it so people would have a better “experience.”
I hope you realize how this overly general discussion is just frivolous.
If you don’t have actual specifics to suggest then it should be abundantly obvious that there is nothing substantial to this topic.
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You’re trying to make it sound like Assassins Creed, but that’s a euphemism. What you’ve described is still wading through trash.
It’s not though.
To me, wow feels small due to how every expansion negated the previous content instead of, you know, actually expanding it.
Hey i can do better
"As big as the ocean but a depth of a puddle "
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An interesting allusion, surprisingly accurate too.
But seems like you have the concept of “wading through trash” stuck in your head and aren’t open to the possibilities.
Yep, definitely don’t have the right mindset for that approach.
If you want to be open to the other angle, stop looking at the destination so much. Focus on the journey, and use your imagination and creativity to enhance it.
There’s PLENTY of ways to make the game world more fun, you just have to figure out how. And no, I don’t mean any sort of “make-believe” situation solely within your own head. I’m talking along the lines of imposing little mini-challenges and objectives for yourself, things like:
- Make it through to this enemy camp without being aggro’d (especially for non-stealth classes), or at least as few enemies as possible.
- Getting in and out without having to stop and eat/drink for health & mana (more Classic than modern WoW).
- Simply finding the fastest and most efficient way of getting through, preferably without charging in and aggro’ing everything.
- Soloing that one elite mob in there.
I know during Vanilla, one of my own personal challenges was fear-kiting and soloing various high-level elite demons (farming felcloth for a really good crafted robe) on my warlock, some of which were in areas which were nothing BUT elite demons.
Preferably without aggro’ing more elite demons (fear making them run into others is tricky to manage), as it becomes close to unmanageable if you have more than two (banish one, fear the other).
And I got good at it, and I was able to tackle foes by myself most people wouldn’t dare touch without a full party.
… that and I liked to kite Stitches and Mor’ladim (elite enemies, about level 35 in Duskwood) all the way to Sentinel Hell in Westfall.
Not better by any stretch of the imagination.
The version I presented (though hardly original) can be said in a sing-song fashion, makes it FAR more memorable.
Yours just sounds… awkward.
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WoW traded an immersive RPG experience for a highly polished and focused endgame experience as it got older.
I honestly believe that WoW is a better -video game- for the typical audience today because of this. For someone looking to hop on and kill some time on a game, it’s better. It’s polished, it’s accessible, and you have clear paths.
But it’s a worse -experience- for those who care more about losing themselves in a world than they do about hopping in a lobby to jump into a 30 minute game as if it were a multiplayer FPS.
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Honestly I think it was just the new feeling you’re chasing. It was an adventure then for me (and many others I suspect) because we had never played an mmo before.
In RuneScape I remember being dumbfounded just walking around the f2p world. It seemed huge, but only because I didn’t have a map or know how to navigate in game. Even with a whole new game with plenty of zones, so long as you have a map and are probably looking stuff up too, it will never feel like much of an adventure.
I think a game with no map and minimal help navigating from in game systems would be really fun, and bring that sense of adventure again.
I agree with you in a lot of ways. Take ESO for example. No matter a persons level all of the content scales up with them. So their adventure is never simplified or stream lined. While sure they create expansions and content it is never forced upon players. If a person wants to go to morrowind and complete the quest line there, they can do just that without feeling pressured to get the new expansion.
I tried bringing up this point in a recent thread I made but I think I did it poorly because everyone thought I was trolling. /shrug
I think you have a good point.
I like the wow maps but dislike what it has become after mop.It needs to go back to level up max level,buy flying because questing maps are obsolete other than mats,gear up dungeons,gear up heroics and finally raid for gear.
I honestly feel like this is a relevant comment even if not quite the same line of thinking. I have been traveling to all the old content and even so much as War mode in BFA main zones and I noticed something… I can’t find a single person.
When I was in TBC Hellfire, a /who revealed no other Horde. In a WORLD where there are millions of people playing at a time, all this content is fading away into wasted nothing.
I felt so alone and isolated that it was quite sad for me but also for this amazing work that had been created and I wish there was something to do about it.
An excellent summary of the situation.
… and pretty much the core problem.
While I wouldn’t call myself an “immersion purist” by any stretch, getting invested in the game world is definitely a huge draw for the RPG genre. I’m exploration focused in particular, and I do enjoy finding various secrets (no matter how small and insignificant) and doing a myriad of self-imposed challenges for my own entertainment.
In other words, I like to be able to make my own sandbox-type gameplay. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the focus of the game… the game just can’t be TOO intrustive about its various systems and stay out of the way a bit.
Actually… the irony is that this makes the World Quest system (though I haven’t really objected to this before) one of the worst ideas ever conceived, at least from that perspective. WoD has the basis of that system with the “found objectives” and various daily apexis “fill the bar” quests you could get from the garrison… but they did stay out of the way more. So instead of getting out and exploring the world, you just run out and do whatever object there is instead of making your own fun. It make the world more gamey.
Looking back at previous arguments, this is one of Legion’s strengths as well… as well as why WoD and BfA struggled so much.
The one thing is that few will argue against improving the minute-to-minute gameplay. You can’t really say that gameplay and balance of Vanilla WoW was any better than it was in Legion (with BfA, I’d say there’s an fair argument, even if my bitterness towards the changes are a factor), but the world itself has been slowly stripped away to become more “gamey”.
Perhaps the process started rather early, with certain factors coming up as early as WotLK (LFD) in an attempt to solve certain issues some saw with the game.
But up to and through MoP, it wasn’t much of an issue. WoD appears to be the clear sign of a downtrend, but the gameplay was still holding up at the game as a whole. Legion moved the game back on course, or at least preserved enough of the immersion-focused content to make it seem like it was moving in the right direction.
BfA was the tipping point.
They finally went too far.
Between the shift to WoD’s structural issues and the horrendous back-tracking of the gameplay progress (as I’ve said, it’s arguable that Vanilla gameplay is more enjoyable)… yeah, BfA was the point they actually did go too far.
They do have plenty of content relative to WoD, but it’s so OBVIOUSLY gamey that no one is fooled anymore.
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That’s a lot to take in during a lunch break. TLDR version?
WoW has a lot of world and adventure, but cramming all of the new content at the end of the expansion forced players into the mindset of having to reach the end as fast as possible so they can enjoy the game (IMO)!
And since that mindset brought the fastest results while leveling, we also do that with endgame content.
We miss the whole adventure, the reason why you’re doing what you’re doing is all in the quest texts, along with the depth of WoW.
Definitely with you on this one OP. The game has lost the majority of what made it great in the name of QoL, accessibility, and internal cost. It is flat out easier to design the game the way it is, it costs less, and it takes less time.
It is more accessible to the general population because everything is available at the click of a button.
And in the name of QoL, every dungeon can be finished within a timer that varies by up to 10 minutes, because if any dungeon was significantly larger or more complex than another, it would ruin their M+ e-sport formula.
It’s like a themepark that is half under construction, all of the inner workings and secrets revealed as they (literally) disassemble the old rides to make the new ones.
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