I suppose you could look at like the difference between walking around New York city or walking around a small town that happened to be the same geographic size as New York city. This imaginary giant-sized small town would have the same variety of stuff, only it wouldn’t have the sidewalks crammed with people and streets filled with honking cars and noisy machinery.
I tried the MoP beta and by that point they had added all those whizzy, flashy “help cues” and what not and I wondered why they felt these things were necessary given how literal millions of everyday folks had clearly managed to play the game without them for years. I mean, we’re talking people from kids to adults here, so really who is all that stuff actually for? I’ll tell ya who: it’s for the person or people at Blizzard who needed something “new and cool” to present in a meeting to get noticed. Sadly that’s how many companies operate, Google included, and it’s why “change for the sake of change” and other dumb stuff happens in a lot of products. I think WoW has suffered from this a lot over the years.
Expanding the breadth of content is great, but continuously adding new systems while invalidating prior content is probably not the best approach. It actually seems like a waste of company resources. Think about the starting zones in Guild Wars 2 that ArenaNet made once and that are still used every day by max level characters, because they have fun and useful content. That’s money well spent and for the players it’s a familiar, consistent bit of content that occasionally sees a new event or collection, etc. get added to it (some zones had beetle racing courses added to them when mounts were added to the game, for instance).
“Less is more”, but less doesn’t have to mean nothing at all, I guess.
To be honest like… I like WoW right? And I realize that retail can’t possibly be like classic. After 15 years, new content needed to happen. Not just new zones but new everything faster everything, stronger everything. I get it. But if I’m being honest, I like how in classic I don’t feel over powered. The mobs are all challenging. In retail I feel like a god. I don’t even need groups for hard quests. Anything beyond a dungeon, you can’t die.
I love arenas. I also enjoy mythic + and raiding is ok but I mainly only did it for the gear. In retail there’s a lot to do but you also feel mandated to do it because of all the rng on “potential bis.” Warforging, while smart in keeping people playing, is mentally exhausting.
I guess I just like the simplicity of classic. I like how every little thing matter. The gear you wear, the button you press when you press it, your positioning, everything. You’re so vulnerable all the time and progression is so meaningful. Not end game progression, but individual character progression. You feel like you’re controlling your own personal soldier in the war; because you are. In retail you’re controlling “the chosen one.” You just feel too strong.
The part for me that makes classic feel better than retail (which admittedly does have more to do) is that the class feels better. There is a higher skill cap on playing the class… that’s an important distinction.
Tanking as a warrior I am pressing way more buttons. Having to tab through enemies and use all these fun little combos with stance dancing, blood rage, beserker rage or jumping away from a fleeing enemy so I can get my intercept charge stun off before they run too far, timing my weapon swing so I can pop into fury stance just as I’m getting enough rage to whirlwind and dance back to dstance to grab aoe aggro and avoid damage from sitting in fury.
As a tank in retail its all about getting aggro (which is easy) and kiting in high level m+. There is very little “tanking”. In classic its about if I can keep my APM up and keep aoe threat up.
My biggest issue with retail was being locked into some 2 hour tutorial / cinematic before i could play. I found the lore, story and gameplay so dumbed down and boring during those hours that i stopped playing after i finally landed on the islands. And easy, man was it easy. I just wanted to play i don’t need all this hand holding. I hate how game companies assume everyone is a moron.
Am chef IRL. When the above quote actually happens we call it “cooking with no soul”. Grandmother’s recipes, on the other hand, look awfully rustic and simple but fill you up body and soul when you eat them. Call Classic WoW “comfort food”.
You missed the bigger point in all of that. Although you summarized Retail well enough.
The biggest problem WoW had was that rather than settle for being really good at being an MMO, they sought to “broaden their audience” by introducing E-Sport Arenas into the game, and a number of other lesser features. Which resulted in their watering down the MMO_RPG_ side of things in order to balance the Arenas.
As WoW was still growing, rather than “settle” for being really good at what they were already doing, Wrath brought in even more changes, and more features in pursuit of that much vaunted “wider audience” which in turn started to alienate their existing player base as those changes to “appeal to more players” made the game less appealing to existing players.
They further compounded this mistake moving into Cataclysm, and again with MoP.
IIRC, in the 2007 BlizzCon, one of the Blizzard dev panels spoke about the concept of “concentrated coolness” (as well as “be prepared to iterate” but that’s another discussion) and that is perhaps the single biggest flaw that the Retail game has today. Because their focus is on such a broad and diverse player base, one with divergent and often directly conflicting wants, they’re unable to concentrate on one thing, or short lists of things.
Classic WoW gives them a chance to get back on that course. You don’t try to appeal to everyone. You try to understand the playerbase you have, and concentrate on making sure you continue to do well on what you’re already doing. Don’t worry about mass appeal, a well made game will speak for itself.
Vanilla WoW did so, and Classic WoW seems to be doing exactly the same thing 15 years later.
Limit the customers choices, if you give them too many, you increase the chances they’re not going to buy.
Of course, your trade-off is the retail game also has the complaint about the gameplay “happens on rails” unlike in Classic, where you did have choices as to where to go quest and when you did so. Of course, we’re talking about entirely different kinds of choices at this point.
I have played since early Vanilla on-and-off, and I suppose having played at least a little bit of each expansion made the changes seem more gradual for me. Now that I’m going back to Classic, I appreciate all of the RPG elements and group-encouraging elements of the game a lot more.
To your point, in its current iteration, retail-WoW barely runs on minimum specs on the old laptop I use - and more importantly, like many have said, the game feels like a theme park. Very little (if any) time is spent wandering around or exploring, it feels like a completely controlled experience at all times - all quest zones, hubs, and mob areas organized into compartments, everything displayed on the map, etc.
One downside of the Dungeon Finder for me was that I never got to know the geographical location of the dungeons in the world in order to understand their context.
As a slightly older player who is trying to get the most out of what little game time I have, I like to read quest text so I can get immersed in the story of the game. This simply isn’t possible when your Dungeon Finder group has already started to kill enemies - but in Classic, you would have gotten those quests out in the world and know their backstory.
Sorry for the rambling post, but I mean to say that I agree wholeheartedly. Retail-WoW has gotten so far away from being an MMORPG that it seems more like a pick-up-and-play hack-and-slash with voiceovers that come from nowhere and a story that focuses on each player as an incredibly powerful champion. The polar opposite of the vanilla/Classic-WoW experience.
The types of choices one can make are important. I very much enjoy the freedom we have in WoW Classic to travel wherever, provided we can get there without being eaten/beaten by something mean and ugly. Likewise, I enjoy the structured, yet open ended nature of the professions, as simple as they when compared to the game I have played the most, Star Wars Galaxies.
Not only did I play SWG, of and on from 2003 until 2019, I’ve also put hundreds of hours of development into as well, in the form of SWGEmu server mods (100% guarantee I can be DOX’d by that comment…). I took a break from building a new game play system in fall 2017 and when I came back to it this year, despite my fairly decent documentation I threw up my hands and declared it to be too much to continue on with. Too much real work for a hobby project and too much complexity for something that seemed cool at the time I started. So I passed the documentation to another developer and she took it and ran with it, making a system waaaaaay better than I had intended and massively more detailed to boot. Yet as much as I loved the game and as pleased with the results of her hard work as I am, when I sat do to try the new system the whole thing felt too overwhelming to get into and as a result, I have yet to put any time into it. I feel kind of bad/lazy, but the amount of hours it would take to build up a base level of “stuff” to start using the system and then to maintain that level of stuff really is overwhelming. Still amazing work though - some people are brilliant AND productive (I’m just an “advanced dullard” tbh lol…).
Sorry…
The purpose of that wall of text was that absolutely none of WoW Classic is that complicated. Some of it is complex, but none of it is complicated nor is it convoluted (like the Legendary Crafting system in Guild Wars 2, for example). Blizzard very much hit the nail on the head with that balance when they made Vanilla WoW and I think that’s probably why people find it so easy to get into.
You made some excellent points, Katerina. Thanks for sharing! Thanks to the rest of you in the thread as well!
Classic is just on the first phase. We’ve seen how awesome the leveling journey but I’ve start seeing some boring parts … the level 40 mount grind and the level 60 mount grind. I was so sleepy one time that I switched back to BFA to do an M+. Once my adrenaline pumped up, I continued the mount grind. I know there’s more to come as I was a Naxx40 player in Vanilla.
We are comparing Retail’s weakness (leveling) to Classic’s. We havent seen the Classic’s weakness (max level and endgame) where I feel Retail is much stronger.
I would love to face Ragnaros and Onyxia again. But what do I do while waiting for next raid? I love PvP when I am on top of the foodchain. Hardcore/No Lifers are on top who I was in Vanilla… but now I am the casual (less play time)… less geared, a free kill for hardcores. I dont know if I would love to PvP again. At least in Retail right now, the difference between casual and hardcore is not much.
In Classic, what else to do other than raid at max level? Grind for rep? Oh no, not again.
Oh Mythic+?! In Classic, 5-man runs in 1 difficulty? Although I love the 45 min Strat run, the first Mythic+ of WoW. Retail has M+2 to +25.
My biggest disappointment in retail had to be how boring they made fishing and cooking. In classic not a day goes by without someone in Trade asking where they have to go to level past 150. I tell them and instead of the “Well, that’s stupid!” like I’d expect out of the retail trade channel they’re thankful and seem to think it’s cool. Especially when I tell them if they buy a few extra books they can make a small profit on the AH.
