Hello, this is sort of a long post, the sole purpose is to offer feedback on how to make WoW better for the future (from my point of view) as my subscription runs out in a week or two and currently I don’t think I’ll be back for War Within.
I used to play Blizzard games a lot, not as much as some, but quite a bit, and I feel like that kinda started to decline around the time of WoD. However, I didn’t totally give up, I just played a lot less, and then less, until finally with Shadowlands and BFA I basically waited 4 years and then played all the main story content over the course of a couple weeks and that was that.
Now, I waited around another year and once again I basically just have played the main story content of Dragonflight, but this time, I can’t even finish the final zone or do the extensive amount of content that was added like Amirdrassil and stuff, even though I really want to. So if I want, why don’t I?
For me, the reasons why are simple, the gameplay has just become very straightforward and unsatisfying. I want to see where the story goes and what the characters are going to do, but the gameplay underpinning how I get to all that just doesn’t work for me.
I stray away from using the words “not hard enough” because that’s not nececessarily what I mean. I think Mickey Mouse’s Magical Quest on SNES is a fantastic game, and no one considers that really hard at all, but I think it’s very “engaging” is the term I would use. To succeed, you can never really check out and just let the rotation or buttons do the work. The jumps and enemies are simple, but you have to earnestly confront them, and challenges change over time to the point where it’s just that, engaging.
I think many Capcom Disney games from the early 90s are this way IMO.
On the other hand, you can have games like Rhythm Heaven Fever for the Wii which (and this isn’t a challenge) I think many WoW mythic and raider players might not necessarily be able to beat, or at least certainly lose patience with it, especially the third level’s megamix. On the other hand, it’s got addicting and direct gameplay that engages you and just sort of “feels” right.
Of course, WoW is built as an RPG, well, I think so, mainly at any rate. In it’s RTS days I think it was certainly engaging, but Blizzard has had problems for a long time, even in the early days, on creating really compelling gameplay.
If you go way back, to RPM racing, IMO it’s kinda just bad, like just really broken and unfun. In the Blackthorne era, it’s improved, but still feels sort of elementary to me.
Blizzard’s success was really based on copying existing things, like command and conquer RTS games or Everquest MMORPG games, the overall format, and then injecting it with Blizzard Wizardry.
The Wizardry is there, it seems to be at max in my opinion, but, and I don’t mean to offend the game designers that work on the game, they aren’t even still really doing an honest job fulfilling the gameplay elements of the genre they’ve taken inspiration from.
The game at this point feels like just basically an apology for a lot of WoD era decisions like pruning and stuff that stripped even the basic satisfactions of an RPG like selecting what equipment to use or managing inventory or playing a class for a unique skill.
It’s the same thing that happened to SWTOR, when that game out, you had to manage carefully what you were doing and play it like a proper RPG and that meant building your class carefully and close calls with your comapanion on kind of “boss level” fights in the questing.
Then, they nerfed everything and turbopowered companions so you can just wander through everything without paying attention and it’s completely fine. Now, the story is still there, there’s NPCs that will talk up a storm and it’s all like wow this is so immersive and -wait, I didn’t really do anything to beat those bad guys I just pressed like 4 buttons and that was that, this isn’t really satisfying.
IMO, there are many games that go beyond basic RPG satisfaction and create more action or even sometimes just highly eccentric RPG systems like I guess Path of Exile even though I kinda just think they’re ripping off FFX’s sphere grid like a lot of games did.
The thing is, I don’t need that, I just want like more of a Rob Pardo era of like, well we want to make rogues cool so we’ll make them asssassin’s and also with trickery and thieving skills. That’s cool, that’s great, just basic D&D class fantasy.
At this point, all the classes just have different button and aesthetic combinations to produce the same results, for the most part, and the trinity reigns supreme of course.
I played a mage to level through Dragonflight, and the 60 boost made me pick frost so I played frost and all I ever did over 30 hours was basically gather up multiple mobs, use frozen orb, blizzard, comet storm. Or if it’s a single target ray of frost. Also, in both instances, just sorta hammer flurry and ice lance, at just any enemy, however you want.
Now I guess people can say well the point of WoW is the endgame or something but for me the mass of story content is in a lot of the SP questing and stuff so that needs to be the foundational area where gameplay is fun, and then you can build naturally to end game final boss level stuff which is more complicated as it is in most games.
I felt the drain when I played a Rogue through all of BFA and Shadowlands questing, just kind of a, bizzare disconnect where the quest giver is like, giving me those intense dark fantasy story where the stakes are horrible and we are on the edge of war, but then the gameplay is just sorta point point click like a mobile game. It’s just so disconnected, I mean, heck, let the story team design some gameplay stuff, or something, I don’t know.
I could go on about how all of this sorta began when raiding happened in Everquest and then those designers wanted to emphasize raiding in WoW and then raiding became the focus of everything and overtook all the true heroes of WoW’s gameplay design IMO which were the humble people placing mobs in a quest to make it unique and interesting and we’ll never really know who those people all were.
But um, that just goes way far back and I hope I made the simple point which is just make WoW like an RPG again or a classic MMORPG and not this auto-power up simulator thing and I think that will be good for the game.