I’ve talked with a bunch of new players and they all have different experiences in the game so far, but one follow-through complaint I hear a lot is how hard navigating the world(s) is (are).
Some real examples:
Example 1:
Say you are browsing the appearances tab, and you enable tracking for a new piece of transmog you think looks really good. The item says it drops in the Vale of Eternal Blossom. You eventually find your way to Orgrimar and face-down a ton of portals, highlighting over each until you find a portal to “The Jade Forest” which upon looking it up is in Pandaria, which also is where the Vale is. You go through, and fly over, only to eventually (an hour later) find that you’re in a different instance of the Vale, a different timeline or something and you have to talk to an NPC to get back to the normal Vale.
Example 2:
Player is enjoying a relaxing time leveling the Dragon Isles. Eventually the player explores all of their tabs and starts researching some of the old zones they had missed. They decide to take a break to visit some of the Shadowlands zones they think look really cool - like Aredenweild! They do research on how to travel there, take portals, attempt various flight paths, and wander about until eventually they learn they have to do a very old campaign questline to unlock the ability to see the old zones. The start-up cost of having to do a bunch of old irrelevant quests to just see the zone in game turns off the player from exploring the zone.
Example 3:
New player is searching all of the mounts they don’t have. They come across one that is really cool to them - the Phosphorescent Stone Drake. They do research and watch a video that tells them to kill a rare in Deepholm. Easy enough, they go to Orgrimar and explore every portal in the portal room, each taking them to different areas, unmountable places, and past expansions. No portal seems to get them to reach Deepholm. They learn it’s under the Malstorm, they research how to get through the Malstorm, they quest, the get exhausted and realize it’s too much work to kill this rare. Eventually they tell me about this and I point them to all of the Cataclysm-specific portals and they reach the area.
My hope is that in coming expansions we can focus some more on old zones, tying all of WoW’s 20 year history together a bit more seamlessly. I think a major city rework would reduce a ton of the clutter and noise that gets in the way of doing things in the game. Also, it is weird to a lot of players that there are two versions of Dalarand that look very identical yet hold totally different things… and now a third that is blown to pieces.
Can we merge and organize old content together in some creative way, some way that doesn’t remove old content but combines everything into “one Dalarand”? It’s also weird that depending on when you visit Orgrimmar there’s a different Warcheif and different ancient things happening. It would be especially cool if everything was updated to be on a modern timeline, with old zones & things marked directly as an “old timeline” maybe with Chromie hanging out or something. Right now players have to imagine that Nzoth taking over a zone is just an old-timeline illusion or something, but it’s… weird.
Certainly a hefty challenge, one the gaming industry has never seen. Twenty years of content to manage! I know it’s very difficult, but I really feel like it would be worth it.
Thanks!