Scaling is a huge win honestly. But removing the level thresholds… That should be added back in.
So that lets you stay IN a zone past the entry level, but you can’t skip ahead.
Quite a few things…
- Scrap Exile’s Reach. The zone is VERY annoying and has a terrible & cringe-worthy narrative that is completely off-putting.
- Rework the starting zones to have a stronger narrative experience. A good story will do more to draw players in than having them roll their eyes at obvious mechanics tutorials. I’d probably use something like Gilneas for the Worgen or the Wandering Isle for the Pandaren as a basis, both are very solid starting zone experiences. The others need to be brought up to that standard.
- Allied Races start at level 1, and would be thrown into one of the racial starting zones; preferably the one which makes the most narrative sense for the race. For Death Knights in particular, they get the same starting experience as the baseline races. Just add a “changeable” NPC to match the allied race, and maybe a personal phase/instance for that one quest (you probably could do it for all races to make it uniform).
- NEW OPTION BEFORE FIRST LOGIN - “Story Mode (Recommended)” or “Adventure Mode”. The “story mode” is the slower and more curated leveling experience which will bring players through the whole of the story across multiple expansions and covers quests in a specific order to ensure continuity. It should include more “follower dungeons” for when they’re required in the story, as well as for a few raids where it makes sense. “Adventure Mode” is the current version of the game with accelerated leveling and no structure. The option to go from “Story” to “Adventure” should exist, but I’m not sure if it should be one-way.
I could easily elaborate on that, but that does cover the basics of what’s needed.
Right, and I agree that should be retained. But what about when you get sent to your first inn after you’ve spent about an hour surrounded by trees and elves, and now you’re surrounded by trees and elves again? Some people want to keep going with that, some want to get going with the rest of the game. The game should cater to both.
I don’t see a real difference other than the time of said group invested.
While obviously it would be nice to revamp every zone in the game to reflect the current story line, that isn’t realistically feasible, and becomes less so every new expansion where Blizzard has just have that much more to revamp. Recognizing the realities of game development is step one to solving the solution you’ve identified.
You’re correct, there is too much content for a new player to progress though all of it, so we need to cut it up and add some player agency and choice. Chromie time was a great solution but just didn’t go far enough, by limiting it to experienced players. As I said, utilizing the temporal story line of the bronze and infinite allows certain zones to be locked in time as they are and needing little if any further maintenance.
And yet that lack of discovery seems to be exactly exactly what is missing with
Cataclysm streamlined leveling is exactly the sort of gaming you are criticizing. There really isn’t any difference between this and Exile’s Reach other than the mandatory thing.
In the end I don’t see what it is you think you want. You want streamlining, but you want the world aspect of Warcraft. These are not compatible. You can’t say you don’t like Exile’s Reach questing, when that is the streamlining of starting zone questing. But you don’t like spread out quests, which is the opposite of that.
Player choice. Chromie time for any player is a great start. Really the worst flaw with that system was it locked you to that expansion’s dungeon pool.
But asking how to guide a new player is asking the wrong question. A player should be exploring. This is like asking why a player would go to Wetlands or Ashenvale in the old world. Desolace or STV? Loch Modan or Westfall? Let them choose, and if it doesn’t work for them, they can move somewhere else.
Basically this but with a caveat.
Do the same thing, but also push them through the story of the game itself. Streamline the setup, but make sure they get the gist of everything that has happened up til now. If someone wanted to do chromie then let it function as it does now. But personally, I would make a new toon if they did the this just to see everything at least once.
Exactly why you break out of the starter zone. You can run down the path to darn, jump on a ship to stormwind.
Currently it’s Exiles reach, random ship in the ocean. Quest through ogres and such then get dumped off at stormwind gates then funneled into dragonflight.
One you have to sit and spam in /1 to progress with questing, the other is optional dungeon content for better gear and a quest FOR the dungeon.
One completely ties your hands in the questline, the other is a tangent.
Not necessarily. That old system was ridiculously tedious. I want to play the game. Not spend 30 minutes running in 1 direction, then run back. Then go over there, then go over here. Oh I hit the new level threshold. Time to go back to a zone I thought I was done with 2 days ago.
It’s needlessly confusing and just scattered.
It was completely different. Cata organized the messy questing experience that was vanilla.
You could quest through darkshore. Then ashen and so on. You weren’t going from darkshore to ashen then back to darn. Then another stream of quests in darkshore. Then back to ashen. Op now I gotta go to stormwind for some reason… then back to ashen.
(I’m currently playing sod so I’m living this in real time)
But back to that original thought. Cata organized the mess into a cohesive questing experience that you could go zone to zone without all the sidetracking we saw previously.
I don’t really see how that is a flaw. Otherwise, you’d have 10 diferent xpacs of dungeons flooding the queue line.
Pick your poison. Hit those zones and dungeons.
If anything, you should be able to swap at an inn or something.
This is because post cataclysm questing everything is a quest line, where classic quests mostly are one offs, or end of that particular chain as a group/dungeon quest.
That has to do with the mount and various transport systems in classic. The world is far more accessible today. There is no location I can’t get to in under 15 minutes. If not for the relative isolation of the east coast of Kalimdor I’d say under 10. It really isn’t an issue with the current game
Generally in vanilla you can bang out most quests without leaving the zone as long as you’re wiling to deal with the issue of out leveling quests, which again is not an issue with the current game. Quests that took you all over the world were largely breadcrumbs and still exist even with cataclysm, though actual chains were more prolific Alliance side admittedly. Cataclysm is just more streamlined about those breadcrumbs and doesn’t feel bad because you can fly and use portals when a one sends you somewhere new.
Which is exactly what Exile’s Reach is! 
The dungeon themes are already pretty divorced from the leveling experience. Again, telling the player they are some sort of time warrior going to something not of the current era validates that disorientation they already experience. I bet if you asked a new player to explain any dungeon they get in a random queue they would not be able to.
The problem is the starting experience doesn’t pull you in. Exile’s Reach is pretty generic, and as I said, feels like a boot camp because that’s what it is: WoW boot camp. This is only a flaw because you’re mandated to do it. Giving players the option to do it at around level 6 when they are leaving the start zone would make the zone feel a lot better because then it becomes a choice.
It’s not even close. It’s a random island and story completely detached from the game. Then you get dumped at sw gates.
There is nothing cohesive or seamless about exiles reach.
Yup. That has been my main point.
It’s a random island and there is nothing memorable about it.
And you could implement this same concept into a normal racial starting zone.
Separate it just like exiles reach in that you can choose the veteran route or the starter mode route.
Like I get why they did it. It cut a lot of work from having to redo or add onto preexisting starter zones and just funnel everyone into the same zone and story. But it’s lazy.
This is exactly what Uldum was. The whole story of the discs and whatnot from vanilla was tossed for a sphinx race and desert pyramids. Some ogre necromancers on an island make way more sense.
Don’t take this to mean I think Exile’s Reach is good. Forcing everyone onto this island is terrible and negates one of the first choices players make when they start: Their race.
It is quite a bit of laziness of not revamping the supremely outdated Cataclysm remaster of the old world. You won’t catch me defending this, I agree this needs to be either put back to the wow classic timeline, maybe with some Chromie time to let us have access to both, or totally remastered again in a way that doesn’t tie it to a specific expansion. There have been rumors of this for a couple expansions now, but nothing has materialized.
Ultimately, I think the original classic leveling experience was best* because it prevented a new player from being led by the nose and blitzing through content. It forced them to take in the world and become attached to it. A more experienced player leveling an alt knows where all the quests are, and knows the ones that take them out of their way and the ones that can be completed quickly. That is part of what being “experienced” is.
*not including those quests with a 5% drop rate or such silly grinds, or the round robin quest item loot. These are positive changes.
As I’ve said, Alliance side might have had too many side quests in vanilla that take you to another zone, but for the most part the game would provide you with half a dozen quests to do from a centralized hub and an experienced player could play around those remote ones, accepting and completing them along the way.
I’d add an extra action button that appears in dungeons - when pressed it warps you up to the tank .
Sounds like that should be a baseline dk ability 
1 Like
I like the idea of a cinematic that recaps the story of classic to current expansion. That way new players can get a run down of major lore and story points. And after that cinematic they can choose to level in a classic format or choose to go to Chromie time and level wherever you’d like.
Leveling is really quick and that’s nice for me in this stage of my life, with limited playtime
2 Likes
Honestly I dislike the racial starting zones.
Purely for the fact that if two people decide to start the game together, picking separate races means they can’t party up for a fair while without going to extra ordinary efforts requiring more advanced knowledge of the geography.
I didn’t know how to get from one to the other when I started and I didn’t know the sources to get that information.
I do like the idea of exile reach and the mechanisms for introducing class features.