I think the issue is still that it’s condensed.
Players looking to experience WoW’s story and lore are going to want an journey which covers the essential points but does so as a reasonably placed narrative that makes logical sense.
Ultimately, it should be a curated campaign of what’s existing… and will likely involve inevitably slowing down the rate of levelling. Optional questlines should still be accessible, but will be marked as normal. Follower dungeons should also be expanded to cover a lot of old content, and something needs to be done to allow old raids to be completed when and where they fit into the storyline.
For a point of comparison, FFXIV’s main story will currently take 160-200+ hours to do; and it’s notably still compelling for the majority of that run-time. While I can’t expect WoW to make that the default experience, there is more than enough to match that length in the content currently accessible in-game.
As a tangent, I’ve been running an “experiment” of sorts where I’ve been trying to take an alt through (most) of WoW’s narrative and quests… and there’s definitely issues.
One key thing I’ve tried to avoid is the absurd damage multipliers if you outlevel content… which means the “ignore Chromie Time” option didn’t work. I didn’t mind the less XP from level 30-34, but instantly one-shotting EVERYTHING at level 35 nearly killed the attempt because it was boring.
I’ve salvaged the character by taking the “XP lock at 69” approach, but it requires Chromie Time and is nearly static for character progression… and I think I was about halfway through Eastern Kingdoms when I hit that mark, without touching anything else.
It does include a lot of “filler content” at this point, mostly because it’s functionally indiscernable from the central campaigns; though I could argue that there’s been surprisingly little for filler so far… either that or it’s ALL filler. Wetlands and Arathi Highlands were kinda filler zones with how disconnected the whole thing felt.
The only other approach that could work (within the current systems) is XP locking for the nominal level ranges for each expansion… and I think that’d be dull, mostly because the the player gets stuck with a very lacking toolkit for long stretches with no means of progression intil they’re done with a long bit of content; at least at level 69, nearly every class is fully-featured.
Anyhow, something with “slow & steady” progression while covering most expansions (leaving out TBC and WotLK because of time bubble shenanigans) would be ideal.
