The Shadowlands feel smaller than me, but the Barrens still makes me feel small

Community General Discussion
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As I worked my way through the Shadowlands, I felt that everything there existed only in that specific moment that my character was present, and only in service of the overarching narrative. The intent is to make the player feel involved and the scope feel grand, but it has the inverse effect. The world only exists to serve the current narrative demands. Instead of a living world that I can learn about and experience, it’s more akin to watching a movie - the rest of the world may as well not exist when it’s not “on screen.”

Meanwhile, I can still go to the Barrens - an absolutely desolate, barebones zone - and feel infinitely more immersed in the game. The Barrens and its inhabitants do not care if I exist. If I can help out, they’re all for it, but they have business to attend to regardless. I am simply one element of the greater world here rather than the sole focus.

Just a quick, stray thought. People always meme about putting the War back in World of WarCraft, but what I think they are missing is the World.

And no, increasingly grindy recycled world quests do not contribute to my immersion, at all. They’re shoehorned in to every zone - nothing is unique. It’s cut and paste design from Legion and BfA that only reminds me that I am experiencing a system rather than a setting.

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I preffered the original barrens. I definitely felt alone there.

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It’s a great point OP. Current zones feel frozen in a rather particular moment in time.

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I totally agree; When I go to places like Vol’dun or Tanaris, the zone feels BIGGER than it really is. It feels desolate, vast and unknown even if I know EVERY spot on the map. They’re wonderful spots to get lost in and maybe see something you didn’t notice before.

Korthia feels smaller than it really is: City of Secrets my ***. The place is VERY small.
Other zones before it were MUCH better:
-Can’t beat the Timeless Isles and how they made that island. It does seem smaller than I recall, but there is still a TON of things to do and find, even in the waters around the island.
-Tanaan Jungle is, well, a jungle. Aside from Hellfire Citadel being a noticeable landmark, the Jungle parts of the zone do feel fairly large, if not small in some regions.
-Argus was GENIUS; made into three zones to get the idea that you were on three critical points of an alien world. If you looked at the skybox you could even SEE the other zones at various points, which REALLY immersed you. The zones themselves were also fairly larger than they seemed thanks to the sheer size of the cliffs and Legion buildings.
-Nazjatar was DEEP. There were LOTS of seaside cliffs and nooks to explore, and with flying you could actually notice a TON of stuff that was easy to miss or hard to get to without flight. Mechagon also felt MUCH bigger thanks to all the clutter on the island, and its general layout. Sure Mechagon is about the ‘same’ size as Korthia, but with it also having a mega-dungeon it gave LIFE to the zone. Plus it was a fun place to be (at least for a bit, anyways).

Korthia?
It got boring Day 1.

Nothing really fresh was added and it feels like a grind one has to go through to really do anything.

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People used the roads so they wouldn’t be accosted by wildlife - I met a lot of friends crossing paths on those roads. Now? Roads are simply the boundaries of a jigsaw puzzle of points of interest.

When everything is a point of interest, nothing is interesting. There is no contrast.

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There is alot of truth to what you are saying keldar. I feel like classic wow and the modern game are 2 different breeds entirely. I definitely feel for the developers on the state of wow because i feel it is almost impossible these days to create the game to appeal to all the gamers it used to, while still retaining the veteran players, and keeping the game new and fresh upon each expansion pack release.

With classic wow for example, when it was released back in 2004, it was brand spankin new. It litteraly set the bar for what an mmo was set out to do. The overworld was very, very cryptic at this time. The internet was incredibly young still. Looking up where mankriks wife was was not just a wowhead or thottbott url quest look up. Most of this stuff did not exist yet. Usually you would find mankriks wife or some other quest by asking a friend, or asking within game. But usually you would get trolled.

Regardless, it made these experiences very memorable. Regardless of whether it was remembered as a joke, or for good or bad reasons, the original barrens was remembered. Mankriks wife quest was remembered. Gamon the orgrimmar punching bag, or hogger in elwynn forest. You do not see that kind of adversity in wow anymore unfortunately. But the truth is, everyone knows everything about wow now. Even more modern games that come out brand new, are instantly uncovered on the internet. Stuff just does not stay new for long anymore.

Wrath of the lich king was where knowledge of everything started to pick up. With this expansion, it was like, ok where is mankriks wife. Then you would go to wowhead to see where she was at. And at this time was when the quest marker addons were starting to pick up as well. Wow just exists at this point in time where it is harder to keep knowledge secretive for long. Wow functions more like a theme park, but i feel there are options to at the very least preserve the feeling of the old expansions in some way while playing retail wow.

Even if retail did some of those things classic wow did, where all the quests were fresh and new, and the gps and quest markers and the quest boards and all that stuff were turned off, it would still get eaten through quickly. Now all you gotta do is log onto wowhead and type in the quest name, and bam. No longer confused.

I feel the decline in wow subs comes in 2 variations. One is that it is old. Some people just feel like it is the same experience, over, and over, and over again. I do not feel like blizzard can remedy that really. The second the second is just the fact that so many changes have been made to the game over the years, some good, and some bad. I am one of those players that is in this crowd. Like, i do not care about how old the game is, but i do feel like shadowlands has done a good job so far with that balance, but i do feel like there is more that can be done with the future of wow.

I was playing classic bc recently, and i noticed that it was not just about the nostalgia about classic wow versions, but also the way the game played. The way the classes played. For example, most classes in retail that use mana as a resource, do not even use mana in a dps specialization. It is litteraly a healing only mechanic in retail. I also noticed that mobs always seem to miss, dodge, parry, reflect, resist moves far more often in classic versions than in retail.

You also had less portals, a 60 min on your hearthstone, etc. I feel like combining what i said with the second reason for the decline of wow, basically by taking the classic framework of the classic era games of wow, and somehow incorporating them into retail at some point in the future, would honestly be the best foot forward to preserve the state of the retail game. Because there is only so long wow is going to be able to thrive on nostalgia alone. Like i said, i feel like the players who want something new every single time, and who just find the game to be the same old grind every expansion were always going to leave anyway.

The way my idea could work is it would be like the warmode on/off system. Some people hate pvp. Some people love the everlastting heck out of it. Basically blizzard could add this mode where the game functioned traditionally like it used to. I am going to use wrath as a bullet point for this, but i would imagine it would function like that. More travel down time. Portals removed. Since we have 60 lvls to grind out, it would be cool to see them have the mode have a traditional talent tree system, with each talent point added 1 by 1 from lvl 10 onwards. Cross specializations, and most classes functioning like they did back then.

Chromie time was a pretty cool implementation in this day and age of the retail game. It allows you to pick the places you want to level in the game. I feel it would be cool, as a part of the mode i just mentioned, to have the mobs pick up in difficulty a bit. It truly would make the experience better for me, and others i am sure. While this won’t ensure you will be able to hit all the zones you want to hit on your way your level 60, it would at least preserve the difficulty for those who want that. So if youw ant to be in scholazar basin for a few levels, as that is what makes you feel small, that is your supreme zone, it makes you feel cool for 5 levels. You can do that.

I feel that chromie time could also take a step forward beyond this. Each chromie time thing you join has a separate phase to each one. I do not feel this is needed. Just because you join chromie time in northrend, does not mean i won’t go to outlands for something later. I feel like i see less and less people milling about these days because of phasing. My only real gripe about cross realm zones is the fact you cannot do commerce in most cases. Like make these realms actually connected. This could apply to the normal mode of the game as well.

To add with chromie time, why not add the classic wow overworld 1-60 dungeons zones and quests back into the game. Some of the zones i loved the most in their pre revamped spaces are just completely gone. It was my one true gripe about shadowlands is that they did not explore this idea more. Classic wow overworld would be an awesome inclusion. I could still go to the zones i loved, and felt small and junk, while preserving the variety.

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Well stated. I agree.

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Yeah, I mean Blizzard has fundamentally shifted focus away from immersion and toward time played metrics. As much as I agree with you, Blizzard really doesn’t care what we think as long as they’re making money (a good chunk of which I would guess is coming from the classic clients).

This company used to be a beacon to gamers, now it’s just another trashcan.

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I think the reason for this is how quests were structured in SL vs the rest of wow.

Before SL (Talking BFA and Legion here), you had question hubs you would go to, and you would get a set of quests that radiated from that hub that you would go out and do, this way of questing had you running around large areas or even regular sized areas, so there was a lot of travel time to complete quests.

In Classic, and BC, you had a LOT of quests that spanned well across multiple zones and continents, so it made the world feel so much larger. The barrens as example would have you running all up and down the place.

Now lets look at SL, SL is very much a guided tour of a leveling experience. They do a lot of hand holding and you dont really have that ability to pick were you go to do your radial quests, you are very much guided from one quest to the next and there is no a lot of exploration in between.

So where EXP in the past were you being put out in an open fields and being told OK go explore, you had blinders put on you so you could only really see right infront of you, and were basically lead by the reins of where to go. So the world did not seem very big because at any given time, you only worried about a very small portion of it.

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I think WotLK/Cataclysm were in the sweet spot. They had strong overarching themes, a looming villain with a lot of presence, but the zones you visited weren’t utterly dominated by those parameters. They had their own stories to tell that were irrelevant to the overarching plot. As such, they were much more immersive.

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Yah i felt like cataclysm was ok and was not that bad in the beginning. I wish we had more under-appreciated zones like vashjyr. I absolutely loved vashjyr, but most players hated it. It was an experimental zone that paid off for me, and was quite unique comparatively to the usual questing.

I just was not a fan of the phasing. Phasing really took off this expansion. I also did not like how the revamp replaced the old overworld. It should have complimented it, as an option to do one or the other. EVen now in shadowlands i wish this was a thing for chromie time. Cross realm zones was annoying as well, and still is, especially considering that you cannot trade with anyone on a server different from your own server. Like they are not fully connected.

Cataclysm had an ok start, but entitlement took over. Everything was either considered to easy. Or to hard or whatever. I felt like tanking and healing were the only hard components. Dps was actually not that bad. Just not stand in junk, Crowd control when needed, do decent dps, and interrupt and block moves as needed to prevent a wipe. I always felt like the tanking and healing roles should be designated to a different crowd altogether. Kind of like how in the real world, only certain folks are allowed to manage. It takes a certain level of responsibility to be able to tank or heal.

I feel like it was disconnected as well. Especially since we did not have a new continent altogether to explore. Would have been nice to have a different dominion to explore altogether, kind of like how arthas had northrend, or illidan had outlands.

This expansion also started the class ability pruning and class homegenization. Warriors to me just felt like glorified rogues without stealth. I spammed abilities to generate rage, and then used another move when my rage bar was full to dump the rage. In previous expansions, you were usually starved of rage and had to attack with basic attacks to power your other abilities, each required rage to use.

While the talents were ok this expansion, it would be nice to see these types of trees again in retail shadowlands, especially since we only have 60 levels to grind now. It could work. And adding all the original class abilities back in as they once were, even the cosmetic ones.

I also felt like portals were way to common, and alot of old dungeons were revamped, or nerfed entirely. My favorite example is blackrock depths. It only counts the first 5 bosses. It is just annoying to me to have a dungeon with 20 odd bosses in it, but only having to kill like 5. Ruins my immersion while leveling. Or wailing caverns having an entire section removed. Then again, i am probably one of the few players in the retail game that actually plays it consistentantly with how i played it back then. I take forever to level for progression. Most peeps can level in 2 weeks play time, which is insane.

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Cataclysm still had the right spirit, though. There was a desire to innovate. It had a scope unlike anything that came before it. There was a degree of ambition there that just isn’t present anymore. Regardless of how successful you believe their ambitions were, you do have to respect that they have the courage to do what they did.

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DAE Grizzle Hills?

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The Barrens was an example of zone design made to suck up your time. All the back and forth fetch quests around poorly designed minecraft mountains. It had like 30 trees in the whole zone and 20 bushes.

Big boring zones are exactly that, boring. Don’t get me wrong though, I know I’ve spent hundreds of hours in the Barrens, but I’m not going to lie to myself into thinking it’s anything other than what it is: A boring and bland timesink.

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but but but…the knights tells us that that is gud contentz. lol.

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and yet…for some reason, I continue to WANT to go back and play that content for the 200th time over playing in SLs and especially the maw and now Korthia.

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Regrettably.
But then, I USED to see Activision or Blizzard on the game packaging and just know I was going to love the game.
Today, however…

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I think your analysis is a little anachronistic. Yes, it is a timesink running around. But was that the intent of the design? I think not. The geography was plotted out long before WoW was a twinkle in Blizzard’s eye. They simply realized that geography.

If the Barrens was designed today, it would simply be a jigsaw of the few points of interest that exist, probably 1/4th the size, with a zone-specific daily/reputation grind that is specifically designed to be a timesink.

And boring does have its merits - boring is immersive. And by contrast, the mundane makes the things that are supposed to awe you just that much more awesome.

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You think you do, but you don’t.

Who cares about intent of the design, when we know that A) the game wasn’t even fully formed until Burning Crusade and B) death of the author, it doesn’t really matter what the intent of the design is when players interact with the content. It seems nonsensical to give a pass to Barrens for being %%%% design because “they didn’t mean for it not to be fun” (who intends to design unfun content???) .

This is pure nostalgia.

And it’d probably be more fun.

So immersed while I’m alt-tabbed watching a video because the auto-run is five minutes back. Those 2004 videos were so friggin immersive bro.

The absolute insanity.

Just an FYI, the infamous “Playing Ret Paladin one-handed” meme was from back in the day, a vintage meme. People absolutely tabbed out of the game if they were bored, and that’s absolutely anti-immersive (it feels weird I need to explain this).

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No, it definietly isn’t an outdated view of the topic. Even during vanilla, it was constantly complained about as being an obvious form of time gating to milk an extra month out of the average player.

Lots of other geography has been as well, and they didn’t implement it the same way ingame.

No they did it even better: Broke it up into two zones, which it always should have been(felwood should have been as well).

Except it’s not. It’s forgettable and only inspires memories of disliking the slog.

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