My opinion but the last three wow expansions have been progressively getting more stale as they repeat the same worn out formula. Sure dragonflights an improvement on shadowlands but that’s thanks to the finer details and small gameplay additions not the actual gameplay loop which has remained unchanged.
Wows dungeons and raids will always be great but the content outside of those has been progressively getting worse while blizzard repeatedly try to mimic the success of the timeless isle with even more stale repeats of new daily quest “zones” each more forgettable than the last. The fact is you could take Korthia, Mechagon and Zaralek give them to someone with no concept of what a wow zone is and what wow mechanics are and the only difference they would spot is ones underground, one has robots and ones very brown.
Couple this with the lessening of importance blizzard places on these zones it’s gotten to the point the only reason to even bother interacting with the zone is to get mounts and maybe kill the world boss for travelers tendor once a month. It’s sad but you can play wow successfully without ever stepping foot in the emerald dream and you would miss nothing.
So I ask is it time for blizzard to change the status quo and maybe move away from the daily quest/rare spawn heavy mid expansion zones and try something a bit more creative? Even if it doesn’t work at least it’s changing a worn out gameplay loop.
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Nah, the forbidden reach is more alike to those than Zaralek Caverns.
The caverns were a failed experiment, it’s easily the worst part of the expansion (along with the Wrathion/Sabellion rep area).
And also, Mechagon was super fun…
There’s only so much they can do with the current engine. The formula is not stale, you just have way too many years playing this game. The issue is that you’re just basically old.
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I wouldn’t call BfA “stale,” but DF certainly is.
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I think WoW is just ‘too much of a good thing’.
it’s going too fast and we burnout on the formula.
we love quest hubs. they just haven’t made a good one in a long time.
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Sure I’ve seen the formula repeat itself what since the isle of queldanas back when I lived in England as the original daily quest hub and I’ve seen how that reached it’s zenith in timeless isle and I’ve seen the absolute monstrosities that where korthia and nazjatar. The engine excuse only goes so far when you repeat the same formulae with minor changes and never try to change anything substantial.
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To be fair, the Timeless Isle had pretty much everything. It had random world buffs to pick up to become an even bigger number monstrosity. It had a world boss, plus four smaller World bosses. It had rares, collectibles, and mounts. It had a Zone wide free-for-all PVP faction with its own rewards. It had a reputation faction to work on. Pretty sure it had pet battle stuff as well.
Can’t really use that as the benchmark when it was one of the better post-launch areas with the most varied incentives to engage in it.
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I mean that’s the benchmark they set themselves. What I should say is I loved interacting with the world of world of Warcraft but recent expansions have been the same 4 leveling zones and 3/4 smaller daily quest hubs which are watered down versions of the timeless isle each progressively less interesting than the last.
It’s sad to see something that was as hyped as the emerald dream was back in the day (to the point people wanted it as an expansion) released as a boring rare mob farmer. I’m not saying it’s bad like korthia was because it isn’t at all but it’s like bread inoffensive but kinda bland and you know if they just added some nice cheese maybe a bit of salami and lettuce you’d have something 1000x more enjoyable.
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I hope your right I don’t think I have another expansion in me of afking in the capital waiting for dungeons to pop. I actually want to be in the world doing something that will actually progress me in some way but it feels like those days are long gone.
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To be honest I have no idea how the superbloom attracts people as a game mode. Maybe people are there for the rewards. I did that a few times and it was the most boring thing I did in WoW, just fighting random creatures and clicking on stuff for no apparent reason while following a slow tree for 15 minutes. Lots of people were afking or not helping at all.
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Talking just about world content here:
Bfa was good imo
Shadowlands had good concepts but they dragged everything out far longer than they needed to. Multistage world quests, low rewards, high anima costs.
Dragonflight responded to shadowlands being tedious by… removing 80% of world content.
Now the world is empty and boring.
I really hope TWW actually puts content out in the world for daily play.
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Kinda, i think they need to do something about keeping older content relevant for longer.
Frankly speaking for me, doing 8 dungeons per season and 1 raid is just not enough.
Wow has a lot of content but barely any is relevant at all.
I want more and more m+ dungeons in the rotation, i would like to see the keystone system being changed into a torghast like system where you unlock the difficulty and do it whenever you want, i want to see older raids added to the game as relevant content that gives slightly lower ilvl gear than the current tier. etc etc…
And especially i don’t like this seasonal mmo idea. An mmo is not fortnite or other seasonal games, i want old content to be actually playable, especially dungeons that they ALREADY REWORKED TO FUNCTION IN M+! Wtf is this garbage with only having 8 dungeons per season? 8 dungeon for 5/6 months or 12 for 2 years?? Same thing really, you are gonna be bored of the same thing regardless at a certain point, and 5/6 months is more than enough.
This expansion feels like WoW was trying to iterate on a concept of “what would GW2 events and travel look like in WoW?”
Dragon riding is a combination of Griffon and Skyscale mount from GW2.
The zones have some events going on in them, similar to GW2 meta events (see below for examples of how many they have , and these are generally pretty big events where you need dozens of players and some can last 45 minutes plus.)
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Event_timers
Also, GW2 has races, but there are no faction barriers. All 5 races can be played together in dungeons and PvP and open world. And wow opened cross faction content this expansion (in PVE at least).
I think these are smart changes.
This game has been stale for a long time now.
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Dragon-riding is a start, at least.
This game sorely needs content that isn’t related to combat.
Something FF14 has in spades, and why it’s generally considered a better MMO for casuals.
I think they kinda tried with professions (also stole ideas from FF14), but ended up making them more convoluted than it’s worth for regular players. I miss BoEs lol, and crafting station is a failure I’d say.
Going into DF, I was thinking we’d get actual multiplayer races as timed events with rewards.
What a fool I was, for thinking they’d go in that direction.
We just got time-trials instead and they called it a day. Actual multiplayer racing is dead.
While I don’t necessarily disagree that blizzard relies heavily on certain gameplay loops with varying degrees of success, I’m not sure what else they can do. Especially if you look at it from a broader perspective and realize most mmos function in a similar fashion. Would you happen to have any examples of what you would do to make things more creative?
Blizzard could (and should) actually encourage people to do what Blizzard does well - the raids and dungeons. (Not so much the dungeons, imho.)
The repetitiveness of doing only 8 or so dungeons is why I could never really get into M+.
Well that, and some of the terrible affixes.
Having played a lot of Diablo 3 years ago, the Mythic + system is literally Greater Rifts, copy-pasted into WoW, and it became popular lol.
I guess I was burnt out easily because I could see the treadmill for what it was- I had already grinded on it in another game.
Last time I really did Mythics were before Mythic + was even a thing, it was just harder heroics and I enjoyed it, back in Legion, wish that what it was kept as lol. It felt way more approachable, now no one does M0, it’s just a stepping stone like Heroics.
Not really interested in PvE that scales infinitely, especially now that I’m not familiar with tanking routes and whatnot. Since I didn’t keep up with the scene, I don’t feel interested in trying to get my foot in that door anymore.
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It got stale after Wrath…
First up, Vanilla (until AQ) had smaller scale bosses which, would perhaps affect bits of the world, and as adventurers it was up to us to stop it, whilst the in the grand scheme, the greater powers (Aspects, Titans, etc) had their own power plays…
Then in the first patch of Wrath, we killed the Aspect of Magic… I mean this was going from city-breaking threats to planetbusting grade… After that, we had a scale of WoW which just had to keep upping the ante, over and over…
People in General Discussion don’t like to hear it, but what really made the game stale was that they kept adding easier and easier and easier tutorial-mode-level versions of all the content.
If you wanted to fight Illidan, back in Burning Crusade… you had to fight Illidan. There was no “easy mode Illidan where he forgot most of his abilities”.
So now people do faceroll mode and say “lol that was easy” while refusing to do the challenging versions, then complain “I’m bored! CONTENT DROUGHT!” and demand that Blizzard rush out the next seasonal crap.
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