Seriously. It’s an MMO, an OPEN WORLD. Adventuring and exploring should be the main part of the game, ofcourse there’s gonna be suckers who look everything up on WoWhead but you can’t change that.
What I am getting at is, the quest design has been bad for several expansions now. RP walks, cinematics, voice acting, save that stuff for the special occasions. It’s a glorified theme park ride.
OPEN WORLD MY BUTT. I’m constantly getting my hand held by NPCs, escorting them, having to fight alongside them. What happened to the social aspect on MMOs?
Seriously though. There was a time where Blizzard could design bigger regions than the cramped up zones we’re constantly getting, where they told a story in the adventure and exploration. Now? NPCs constantly telling us what’s on their mind, what’s happening, what they’re feeling about.
Feels like I’m playing in a movie. We know this game is 12+ but must you make it so child like easy? There is literally 0 danger present. The story feels like I’m subbed to Disney+. I thought this was an expansion of the afterlife? We went to literal hell and all they’re doing is being mustache twirling villains.
Seriously, just give me a world to venture and explore into. Where I can get lost. I’m tired of handholding NPCs everywhere.
I understand what you are trying to say. It focus on story is not that important, its centered more on gamplay. But there are a lot things to explore.
While meveming in shafowlands you only visit 65% of the zones. You necer put a feet on the northern places of ardeweald, or bastion, nor the varius towns of revendreath. Or all the caves and cranys of maldraxxus.
There sre places to explore and some of them dangerous. I really like it. Except revendread, that zone needs a like 500 enemy npc less
Funny how you first start off with saying how great this single player, phased questline is (though I don’t mind with your opinion) but then you tell me to get friends? I don’t understand your reasoning.
We need lots of walk and talk time with the NPCs because otherwise we’d get lonely. The open world design with its limited, trivial spawns and still, in the year of our lord twenty-twenty, randomly non-shareable objectives, remains overtly hostile to playing in a group. The walk-and-talk quest design goes back to Wrath, but the game feeling like a single player game with a lobby is a consequence of the end of group-intended quest areas.
Anyone play classic and wonder why those dwarves south of Tarren Mill are impossible to solo? It’s because that game is an MMO whose innovation was a tolerable single player experience, while modern wow is more of a single player experience with some vestigial MMO bits.
Wow has always been a fairly closed loop MMO and was sold as a theme park MMO. Vanilla feels less that way because it has so many zones but compared to true sandbox MMO’s it’s always been a pretty guided ship.
It’s one thing I had to seriously adjust too coming from other MMO’s early on.
People have been calling WoW a theme park MMO since vanilla. Because it is. It has exploration but it has never been like Everquest or other sandbox MMOs
Yep and it had much more static spawns and such, not to mention the questing experience that guided it along.
All of us that came over from SWG chuckled and laughed at how hand held it felt and how basic it was. One resource in SWG had more stats than gear in WoW did.
I grew to like it for the most part but it took some adjustments. I can’t imagine how I would have handled it today with all of these systems. Probably would have quit because it would have felt insanely restrictive.
At least with regards to quest design, and garbage like the ol’ walk-and-talk* Wrath is pretty obvious to point at as a time when WoW moved pretty dramatically on the spectrum from MMO toward SP with lobbies. This was also a time when players gained a ton of power relative to the world, which was explained as a boon granted by better tech allowing us to have more enemies to fight. This was, of course, partially true, and Wrath was rad, don’t get me wrong… but it also led to today when the world is just too easy to justify bringing a friend, and that’s a huge failure in an MMO.
If I do everything in the open world alone, and only hang out with my friends in instances, the magic of the living world is dispelled.
*did you notice the innovation on the form we were served at the beginning of shadowlands, where we walked and talked while dragging stuff around? Staggering in its genius.