The devs seem to believe WoW’s combat system is more fun than it actually is. Ion expressed in the Preach interview that the devs were upset that players spent more time traveling to the quest than doing the quest. They have increased mob density and made quests longer so people spend more time fighting than flying/riding.
The mistake is this: WoW is NOT Diablo. The combat in WoW is and always has been painfully slow and boring. It is not exciting or engaging. Waiting 1-1.5 s to use abilities means it never will be. People play and do the game in spite of and not because of the combat.
In almost every RPG, you spend the vast majority of your time traveling and not fighting. Consider The Witcher 3. That game has some pretty boring and uninspired combat. But most of the game is spent traveling or watching dialogue. And it was an incredibly fun and rewarding game to play.
On the flipside, you have games like Dark Souls where combat difficulty is more the focus of the game. WoW is not Dark Souls. One of the things that makes Torghast so miserable is the amount of mobs to fight. The time spent fighting in WoW nowadays is just far higher than past versions.
Now the devs removed a lot portals to try to make players have to travel more and experience the world. But they did so in an awful, artificial way where the player is aware the devs are wasting their time. This ruins immersion and any sense of fun. The game should not feel engineered to waste your time even if it is.
The Onyxia quest chain was a giant waste of time, but it felt built into the game. Legion has long campaigns that send you back and forth, but it didn’t feel painful. The mistake the devs are making is they think people actually like the combat of WoW and want to be fighting most of the time. In reality, most do not, and it is in fact characteristic of most RPGs to spend most of your time traveling or experiencing storyline with short bouts of combat here and there to keep things fresh.
TLDR: More combat time rather than travel time is NOT better, contrary to what Ion said in Preach interview.
Strongly disagree with this. WoW’s combat and end game structure are the main reasons I will always come back. I really enjoy Eso and Swtor as side games but the combat in both of those is absolutely terrible compared to wow.
All MMO combat is boring compared to something like Diablo. WoW is too slow to make combat the focus of the time. Raids are more engaging because of real time reaction to boss abilities. But they tried to make Torghast mobs have abilities to dodge, but players just feel overwhelmingly bored because of the sheer number of mobs to kill. The mobs also aren’t all that cool to fight. Sidestep and move out of swirly. Interrupt. That’s it. And wq mobs are nowhere close to as interesting or engaging as raid bosses.
Historically, the vast majority of time spent in WoW per quest was in travel. And it worked a lot better than this. And it is typical of RPGs to do this.
Even in a game like GTA, you spend the majority of your time traveling and not fighting. Unless your combat system is very engaging and interesting (WoW’s frankly isn’t), the quests should not be made to emphasize combat time over travel time.
Torghast and WoW’s combat are two sperate issues. My main issue with with torghast is that my monk has a very fun build with 0 cd touch of death compared to warrior which just has generic damage increases. I’d like more over the top fun and crazy builds for every class.
What I’m arguing is that Legion’s style WQs where you flew around for a while and then killed one or a handful of mobs was superior to the current system where you (also still spend a long time traveling) then spend more of your time killing mobs. The mobs are not all that interesting. WQs designed where you go somewhere quickly and kill a single interesting elite are a lot better.
If you watched the interview, you’d understand the point. Try to keep up. The devs honestly believe it is more fun to fight mobs in WoW than to travel to a destination in WoW. This is in my view, very wrong and bad design for an RPG. I’ve given plenty of examples to illustrate this. It is actually better to have more time spent on travel than combat.
I believe it is more fun to fight stuff then sit on a flight path too.
I don’t think you are going to find many people that enjoy greater travel time. In fact one of the largest complaints is too much travel time already. Making WQ faster like Legion won’t change that.
It’s to make the point that the assumption that more combat is superior to more travel time is false from a design perspective. The old wqs actually felt better, and Blizzard solved an imaginary problem and made it worse.
I don’t think you get the point at all, and it isn’t worth replying to you. For Legion’s WQs, the majority of the time was spent traveling and not fighting.
Ion, for some reason, thinks that design was a failure. He wants people to spend more time fighting than traveling. But he’s so wrong, and it is in fact characteristic of most RPGs that are not action RPGs to do this. And WoW is not an action RPG. The combat is too slow to make it the focus of the time.
Yes, but that is not why people enjoyed them more. They enjoyed them because they got their rewards faster. They would have enjoyed them even more if they had been able to instantly teleport where they wanted to go.
Travel. has. nothing. to. do. with. it. Combat. has. nothing. to. do. with. it.