Here is the brief synopsis. I have played this game on and off since early 2006. Obviously in this time the game has changed a ton. I have been there for every push back from the community on changes and expansions. However, it took playing classic again for the first time in almost 15 years to really highlight why we have seen retail warcraft take the direction that is has.
As many veterans of the game will agree, there is something fundamentally wrong with how retail WoW presents itself these days. You can point to very specific changes and blame them exclusively, but I think there is a fundamental design change that overrides all of the single individual changes. That is, the move towards the theme park mentality.
This becomes most apparent when you start leveling in classic zones as compared to retail versions of those same zones. In retail, there is lots to do, yes, but that comes at a cost. That cost is clutter. When you do the direct comparison, it is hard to feel like you are in a tangible world when on retail. There is so much clutter that it feels like a virtual theme park. With all of the directed content taking up all of the conceivable space there is no room left for creativity to breathe. What I mean by this is that there is so much to do just in quest line content on retail that you feel railroaded into only doing quest content when leveling used to be so much more than that.
For example, on classic when you get stuck on a quest or you run out of quests in your area that you can do, you simply move on to working on professions to help you advance. Typically working on those professions not only gives you an advantage, but will level you to the point where you can pick back up in the quest lines you could not do before. This opens the door to creative mind set by giving the player multiple paths to victory instead of railroading all players down the quest lines because it is the only tool that is given any space to breathe.
This is why leveling in classic WoW was such a treasured experience for many players. Players created their own journeys. In retail, that is no longer possible because the quest hubs have pushed out all other forms of content that could be used to progress.
Bottom line is, it’s fun to go to Disney World every once in a while, but if you lived there you would grow sick of structured rides. This is what retail has become more and more over the years. A structed ride with no possibility for creativity. Player creativity is key for creating a captivating world and it is now obvious to me that the death of that creativity is why the open world in retail WoW is so dead.
I also dislike that retail has CRZ and all that nonsense, also dislike that retail has some arbitrary game mechanics that remove the intuitive nature of the game engine from the equation, this is something that sorta started in wrath.
I also dislike that retail tries to disguise big damage behind gimmicks and really manufactured build ups, and I also dislike that they have managed to turn several classes into a really bad mashup of vanilla rogue / ret paladin, its not exciting in the least.
I also strongly dislike the over emphasis on absurd amounts of RNG and very obvious and intentional class balance rollercoaster for the use of keeping people playing because their game is lacking in a lot of ways.
Retail fails because your progress is constantly wiped every patch and there is almost no community. The bonds you make in dungeons which lead to guild formations is what made classic WoW special. Forming guild rivalries and meeting people you despise out in the world adds a depth retail could never capture. Almost everything in retail is a time wasting chore that removes the fun of working towards a goal. It’s a soul less world that has too much going on that makes you feel like you are always behind which has to be by design.
I agree with everything you said. I also think there are other reasons why classic is so much better. Personal loot was such a bad change for wow because it removes a lot of the anticipation and social aspect of loot distribution. Now it’s just an RNG roll between you and the game rather than something you need to arrange with your guild and talk about
Classic isn’t really much different if you’re going to compare. As you’re leveling you’re still going from one zone to another–and the fact of the matter is that Classic WoW is even more of an egregious railroad than even Retail is. Each zone is placed logically so that by the time you hit a certain level, you’re either preparing to head into it or you’re about to start it. There’s some variation in what zones you might progress to, but the outcome is that no matter what you can only go to certain zones because you’re within its level range.
At least with Retail, the scaling allows you to pick and choose whichever zone you want to go to, even if the idea itself is weirdly executed, and stay in it until you complete its story so that you can then move on to another one of your choice. Yeah, it all leads to the same place, but acting like Classic is any different is just you looking at it with the same lens as you had when you were younger and naive about the game.
And about needing friends? That might be true, but it was also the most common complaint as WoW was growing was that due to how the game was designed, being in a group was actually more of a detriment to overworld questing as quests were designed to provide loot in a “round-robin” manner–which they fixed by Cataclysm/Mists of Pandaria to allow anyone to collect the loot as long as they were a member of your faction.
So TL;DR? Classic is still very much a theme park. It was a world designed to get you in by its pretty sights and running off of your nostalgia for Warcraft III. You still go in a straight path from point A to point B with little deviation (besides maybe another zone or two that you can go to). Once you hit 60, the game still remains the same.
The thing that Retail did wrong was continue existing when there was no compelling lore left or real compelling reason to continue existing other than to milk whatever little money Blizzard still could out of the Intellectual Property. Retail is the epitome of a dead game and has been for years regardless of whatever pitiful population numbers it still has.
Retail sacrificed community and social interaction in favor of convenience. No more having to talk to other players, just click a button and the game automatically groups you with 4 other strangers from other servers that you will never see again after the silent dungeon run ends.
And in general, the gameplay has just been streamlined way too much. Everything is painfully simple and straightforward. Nothing requires any amount of thought or effort, the game holds your hand the whole way and shows you exactly where to go and what to do.
And yeah, every single raid being a gear reset isn’t all that fun either. On top of gear itself being boring because for the most part, “higher ilvl = better” is how it tends to work.
Retail is less than a shadow of what WoW once was and that’s objective fact.
Vanilla, TBC, and WOTLK took the online gaming world by storm, most actual current online gamers don’t even know when a new WoW expansion comes out it’s pitiful how much of the market share they’ve lost to newer and better games.
i like the old rpg feel of weapons and armor having unique names. everyone knows the warglaives of azzinoth, atiesh, thunderfury, thori’dal, sulfuras, blackened defias gear, robes of arcana, robe of the archmage, robes of arugal, etc etc.
I ended up playing Shadowlands for like 2 weeks after getting kind of bored of the stuff in Classic so I was raid logging. I thought “Oh this is ok”.
Then I came back to Classic and started doing some PVP again and yeah, I still like Classic.
It’s still the community for me. There is a server community in Classic which is the biggest thing and always has been for me. I like that in Classic there are little pockets of communities everywhere. Your guild, server community, PVP community etc. You make friends and know people.
I did join a guild while I played Shadowlands and that part was ok but the rest of the community stuff was missing.
I do not like CRZ, never have.
I also like that in Classic you are part of a world. You being the hero all the time when everyone else is also the hero makes no sense.
Retail absolutely does hold your hand and walk you through everything. They have put in every type of arrow and map doodad possible. They have in game guides for everything. They have CRZ groups for everything. This is not to say that the high end Retail content isn’t a challenge, it is. To me challenging content is not the core of what makes a MMORPG game fun.
I’m not a smart man, so I can’t say what the reasons are. All I know is that while retail is beautiful, and technically amazing, it just doesn’t have the soul that the early expansions had.
When I first played vanilla I was instantly hooked. I felt like I had entered a new world. Retail doesn’t give me the feeling. It’s just another game. Fun for a while, but ultimately not something I want to stay with long term.
Basically the retail designers don’t trust us to know what’s fun. They have designed a bunch of self generating programmatic systems and they’ve designed systems that lead you to those systems. For years they’ve been trying to build the perfect mouse trap and anyone who enjoys a sense of freedom and agency is going to be repelled by that. The hand holding is at disgusting levels.
Yes, so treasured that the common path to leveling for over the last year has been to obtain gold to pay people to boost through dungeons while tabbed out of the game.
WoW has never been a sandbox MMORPG, not even close.