I actually think its why vanilla feels so damn good, and why I don’t burn out on it like I do with Wrath+
/shrug and there’s nothing stopping you from playing TBC or Wrath like that, if you don’t care about the world building you can very much treat them just like vanilla.
Well there’s a lot more leveling to do in vanilla but end game is pretty much the same.
Goated it’s a part of my core addons for Vanilla now.
Tbh I feel blessed to have grown up in the era of the dawn of the internet and the golden age of MMORPGs. Those old virtual world based games before social media and internet making people act crazy were wild af. It was like sword art online where you genuinely had a second life and friends/enemies in a video game in a way that just isn’t around anymore in the modern world/market.
Well end game is kinda meh in WoW in general if you don’t raid and PVP; it has always been sorely lacking.
Original Vanilla end game wasn’t leveling as much as the adventure. The majority of players at max level never downed Rag before TBC launched. Classic is just a nostalgia ride and the raiding is so easy today compared to the original on old pentium computers with dial up internet that the raids just fall over.
True a lot of that was simply that WoW was the first truly popular MMO RPG so it had a ton of players who’d never touched the genre before. But that was more a function of the player base than the actual gameplay itself, which is why classic failed to badly to recreate the original experience.
I have some ideas on how a more modern era MMORPG can be made that might (not proven) be able to capture this again…
The problem a lot of these modern games (even TBC+) fall into is that the classes are all way too good, have answers for every situation, tools for every situation, and overall things have become way too streamlined and “made for everyone”
The real trick is to build games for an audience of players rather than build a game that makes streamers / gold farmers / rmt happy.
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Check out monsters and memories when you get a chance it’s a fan made project by MMORPG gamers from the golden age tryna recreate that kind of virtual world game
Will do… sounds promising
But that’s literally what made vanilla so successful in the first place, it was a game for everyone. Most of it was easy enough that everyone could do it, there were no real penalties for dying, anyone could face roll and eventually hit max level.
It was still focused on RPG players, it was not designed to attract pokemon trainers.
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Remember when all of you fought against me having RDF to level my alts? Enjoy your mythic+ social experience.
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Ik you got to be young cus that sounds like the exact opposite of how the original vanilla went lmao. Casuals new to the MMORPG genre had a real tough time getting to 60 and most people did. My first 60 took like 4 months playing like a fiend after school. It was just a different time. Also like I said dial up and computing power made it harder than it seems now too. Literally something as simple as an interrupt mechanic is hard af when you’re on 600 ping plus constantly
I do that in retail. I just raid log on Wrath like a normal person.
That’s kinda what end game always ends up in … and why “End game” as raid only focus was a big mistake.
there always should have been a lot more to do.
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I didn’t say it didn’t take a long time to level I said anyone could face roll their way there.
And plenty of people did. It was a huge part of it’s appeal and why it got so many subs, it was super casual friendly for new MMO players.
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Yea, raids in EQ were a social experience with 72 players you’d have healers going in and tagging out OOM healers and you’d chit chat while meditating your mana back outside of the fight lmao. In many ways WoWs success and Activisions greed really ruined the genre for years. Wrath’s designed was copied and used in a dozen WoW clones that all died super fast cus wrath’s design is so deeply flawed. Then you have games like ESO/FFXIV that were more clones off of cata design and now cata design is the mainstay for what an MMO is to many younger folks. I imagine the riot MMO will be just another reskin Cata clone.
They died because why play a clone? People just ended up coming back to wrath because it was simply better.
Well…
Here is the thing about wrath… Yes you’re both right and wrong…
Mechanically each class is superior to vanilla, and the game is way more streamlined so yes on the surface you’re right its a more refined product.
BUT on the flipside of that, this is actually why Vanilla is a better game, because its not refined, and because of that its in a very strange way more fun.
There is so much that goes into good class design and the one biggest lesson I have learned from WoW is that classes that can do it all or can almost do it all and where every class has similar stuff or comparable stuff are doomed because of that homogenization.
Games where the classes are wildly different with very unique abilities that are both intuitive, simple on the surface to use and don’t require 3 layers of setup to execute are just overall more popular, have better player retention, and are overall more fun to play.
Now I know everyone is different, and that not every game is for everyone, but games made for “Everyone” are made for no one, and that’s why they just don’t have the staying power like more focused games.
TBC and especially Wrath were departures from the focus of a “Fun MMORPG” and that changed into an “Action RPG / Everyones Game”, Far more so with Wrath than TBC…