Looking back at another amazing RPG, Diablo II. That game’s first expansion didn’t increase the level cap, it added a new area to explore, and new endgame bosses/quests and it was amazing.
What if the level cap always stayed at 60, and each expansion just added new dungeons and raids to do for levels 50-60?
The weirdest thing about retail, there are bears in Kul’Tiras that can one-shot Onyxia.
Retail didn’t “fail” and it succeeded even more when the level cap was increased to 70 and again to 80.
Level cap was never the issue, bc and wrath were both excellent expansion even though the level cap was raised
D2’s levels were very different. I played d2 for years and never bothered to grind to 99. normally you could finish act5 hell at ~75 or so. a level cap increase wouldn’t have even made any sense.
But this… way of doing things only looked good in the short term. I always knew after WOTLK that things would start to get ridiculous after an over saturation of trade goods and completely irrelevant and obsolete raid content would just pile up non-stop.
As a miner, think about how crazy the Periodic Table of Elements looks like in Azeroth.
Retail has no identity because it has to re-invent itself every expansion.
That Is its greatest failure.
Allowing that content to become obsolete is the problem. If BC would of kept the ilvl of gear in leveling zones in check we wouldn’t of had that problem.
I think Everquest is the reason Blizz took the other path because they didn’t like EQ’s raid model. Basically your raid gear would start you up for the new raid in the next expac, raid gear replaced raid gear not greens replacing epics.
Greens replacing epics was a major letdown.
Increasing the level cap won’t necessarily result in a game’s failure, but the game mechanics have to be designed to be essentially infinitely extendable. The developers eventually realized that WoW’s weren’t, which resulted in some of the overhauls that have been seen – most notably, to my mind, the elimination of talent trees.
I have long thought that just continuing to add more levels is some of the laziest game design around.
Anyone who has ever played DnD realizes there’s not much game left after a certain character level is reached. You just killed a God and saved the world, now what?
Go kill 12 Murlocs again and then trade your epics for quest greens? That’s just a crappy remix of Vanilla set to new music.
This has always bothered me, after TBC all the vanilla raid content became useless.
They should have converted the 40 man raids in Vanilla to 5 man’s that you have to beat before allowed to level to 61.
Or even better, create an alternate leveling system at 60. Like each level gets you a stat point or something, max 100 stat points, only gain 2 a week max.
This!
It is why I quit when they first raised levels and why I will not buy a second month now! I do not see that they have learned anything after all these years. Still focused on the same things
Yeah… no. Increased level cap was definitely never the issue. It’s the long list of other things that led retail downhill.
Imo… Retail stopped focusing on enjoyable content and instead focused on walled content that required endless farming and meant just to keep you logging in every day, like Time-to-make-the-donuts and then log back out. Flying in expansions, new races, gear.
LFR/LFG, Clustered servers destroyed server community.
Scaling content (mobs always the same level as you), Daily Quests, ESports, Mythic dungeons… for me, just sucked all the fun out of the game.
and I don’t like that they continue to make everything in the previous expansion obsolete when a new expansion releases.
I loved some of the artifact effects and spent a lot of time obtaining them. Then Blizzard said oh… we don’t need those anymore. poof … worthless.
And then replaced them with an even worse system… and then added on to that already bad system with the essences… just terrible.
BFA should be set on fire.
So your not resubbing a 2nd month forClassic, because they raised levels in the other expansions? I can get why someone may have quit Vanilla because BC raised the lvl caps, but you are quitting again because they were focused on that in the past?
Level cap increases not only led to retails failure, but the entire MMO genre as they all monkey see monkey do’d and now every developer thinks you’re supposed to invalidate your entire MMORPG world everytime you release an “expansion”.
“Expansion” being the key word here.
ex·pand
verb
NOT
Reset the game and have less overall content than the original game.
I think level cap increase was fine, I do think the difference between levels is where they got it wrong.
Look at level 55 now and level 60. The power difference is big but not OMG different. Look at level 115 and 120, ITS HUGE…
And that was how it was… 60-70 power spike was incredible, when i was a level 70 i could go back to the level 60 BC dungeons and Solo them.
And each expansion was like that.
Try soloing a level 50 dungeon in classic as a 60.
I think if they toned down the jumps they would have been okay and we probably would still have Talent trees.
Shrugs… will never know now though… its all speculation
The problem with no level increase is the power creep that happens.
Naxxramas gear is already kind of broken, and as they add new content people would want a T4 raid with even better gear.
Imagine what happens when Holy Paladins get enough spell crit that they literally can’t run out of mana because of Illumination.
Diablo 2 worked without level increases because of several reasons that don’t apply to WoW because they’re two different games. Diablo 2 treats levels, stats, and combat in general differently from the way that WoW does.
At some point they needed to do something about how powerful gear was getting.
I have no problem with new levels, and new gear out pacing old gear. When I read people complain about that I have to wonder if they are even being serious. Did you MC items hold up into Naxx? Take it a step further, did that leather set you get in DM at 20 last until you hit 60? Of course not.
So why do people expect old items to keep pace with new?
WoW started to die off for me with the rise of CRZ and LFG. Bad storytelling also played a huge roll. But I would never want to spend the rest of my gaming time as a level 60. That is just insane.
i don’t think so.
Dark Age Of Camelot, released prior to WoW and after seven expansions still has the same level 50 cap.
There are ways to continue character progression without adding new levels in every expansion. Blizzard has used the same formula for all expansions… its losing its shine.
And how is DAoC doing? Didn’t think it was still around.
I played for a bit. But the forced PvP in empty zones and lack of class balance drove me and my friends away.