20 years ago, you played to have fun and just spend some of your freetime with others, no matter the result of your session. If you did wipe all evening then you still had a good laugh and maybe made friends for a lifetime.
Today you play to impress others, to outplay them and to gain internet fame. You don´t look for long term relationships or friends, actually you hate everyone but yourself and only use them to get to your goals.
All of this applies to so many parts of our society today. I remember when folks did YT videos for fun, to share their knowledge or entertain.
Today people make YT videos about the weirdest stuff, just to gain fame. They talk others down, run political agendas and I literally saw a video where a guy drove on his bike rating all the women he came across. Seriously, WTF?
From my point of view, our society lays in pieces and it is a shame. You can argue that the movies, video games you name it were better, but the sad truth is, humanity was and that made our lifes so much better in the end.
A classic WOW with todays community is not anything like what we had in 2004. I felt Era and SOD are shockingly bad, not so much because of the game, but the people who I met there.
yeah, like. the fact that RP requires a strong community to thrive really does mean that RP servers feel more “lived in” than any other server. And you tend to explore the world of Azeroth just looking for nice new RP spaces for your next event or storyline, and that helps you understand the amount of love and effort put into this game. Do you know of how many cool places there are to RP in Jade Forest alone?
This is what homogenization does to a game. It’s also a slot machine/casino now. It’s unfortunate, but time like that long ago seem to have evolved and changes over many years because of a million factors. Although I miss the classic immersive feel of WoW. We’ll never get this back for it is an age of old.
Great video, but the problem is, a lot of retail players that are left playing the game, wouldn’t like the game being designed like this.
The old school MMO players left the game years ago, there is a few of us around, but it is mostly ultra casual collectors and hardcore gamers left in the game.
I finally got around to watching it and I’m trying not to be overly harsh, but it’s basically a madseasonshow clone where all they do is whine about the good ol days.
It’s already been said, but there is so much detail and flavor in retail if you actually take the time to stop and look around. If you notice in the video he keeps saying “I” as in I now care about raiding and ilvl and content. It’s not just the game that has changed, but the person as well.
I’ve said it before, but too much nostalgia is actual brain rot. It makes you blind to all the cool stuff currently around you because you are too busy stuck in the past.
Define “currently”. Shadowlands had great content but DF feels soulless and lame. They had to drag Metzen out of retirement because they (Ion’s cabal) don’t know what makes something feel Warcraftian.
But I suppose that’s a bit out of scope of Classic vs Retail.
LMAO hahaha. (I am not laughing at you as I know you are summing up the video and I am laughing at the person who made the video)
But, Vanilla WoW was 49078423 times more like a job than a game. To hit max level took an insane amount of time. Months. Also there were plenty of quests that took over an hour to do all for a small amount of xp. Not only that, once you finally hit max level, you had to grind hard for rep, resist gear if you raided, and if you raided then you needed to expect to likely raid 5+ nights a week at around 4-5 hrs a night. The list goes on and on.
WoW today, this expansion I stopped raiding in and just played casually and didn’t take long at all to get to max level. Finished the story and all other quests. Had a decent ilvl in a short amount of time etc.
So yeah, anyone who says WoW today feels more like a job than a game like Vanilla never played in Vanilla.
Yes, it was more in the context of say, running around in orgimmar in classic vs valdrakken in retail. It’s not even close in terms of detail and flavor like npcs interacting with each other. In the video his example was exploring empty buildings in Ironforge is somehow more compelling than doing the same thing in retail for some inexplicable reason.
TLDR : I miss when games were games and not this nitro-boosted-adult-children-RGB games.
My take : It’s a player problem not a game dev problem. No one is forcing you to raid and min-max and theorycraft. You can still chill and RP walk everywhere. If you need the game to force you to do this then you have substance abuse problem(wow) and are addicted to the dopamine.
What I’m doing now is just leveling back slowly and not caring about the weekly resets, seasonal stuff and fomo. Just play the game if you want to just play a game.
Remember that there’s a world outside the game and the point of you gaming isn’t to “achiev” things that don’t matter IRL. But to relax from your IRL and change your mind from real life and escape. If the game stresses you out, then it’s not a game anymore, and that’s your fault.
One thing that happened when Ion moved into the director’s chair was a shift in focus. Raids got a lot of focus and the over world design was based on Timeless Isle. Neither is necessarily bad. The reason for us going places and doing things was mostly the characters rather than us feeling directed by the world and maybe that is part of the lack of immersion for some?
Being directed by characters only works when the characters are genuinely compelling and well written but WoW does not exactly set itself up for super compelling characters. The writing in this game has never been excellent but the flavor was very fun.
As a counter example to WoW: Final Fantasy XIV uses characters to drive people forward. Its overworld is actually quite bad. LEAGUES worse than WoW’s. But the story and characters are very gripping and compel you forward.
I guess what I am saying is maybe with Metzen back in some of that flavor will come back and the game will feel a bit more like home to folks who have felt a bit “???” since WoD.
It’s both these days, the devs encourage that behavior (faster leveling and putting most content at max level with barely nothing in-between) and the players feels the need to rush to end-game so they don’t fall behind the curve and not be taken for runs especially when M+ inexistence. Hopefully delves will help with that, but we will have to see.
