Because leaving it in the chaos it is in now is better? Them trying to do something this impactful at least shows us they are willing to make some serious high end changes beyond BfA.
Maybe someone is scared just how much better the leveling experience is in Classic and they feel getting the current game back to that kind of experience is what they need to do to save it. Not that the game needs saving but if majority of your player base ends up preferring a 14yr old version of your game over what you currently release. You are doing something wrong.
A better talent system, modifications to class design/ability progression, and overhauling professions would all do much more for the game than changing the level and scale of the entire game.
The absolute best case scenario is that you level faster, that’s it. A squish won’t fix anything wrong with this game’s leveling. It’s a little more complicated than that.
The absolute best case scenario is that you level through a revamped Vanilla designed so that each zone has a timeless, self-contained story and then skip all old expansion content and go straight into the current expansion.
No, it’ll still be Vanilla 1-60. It’s only after that that everything’s up in the air.
I’d argue that’s a separate issue that squishing the levels doesn’t address, unless they made other changes in addition to the squish, but then it’s still not a squish issue.
It’s a chicken & egg thing. You don’t squish to fix levelling (because that wouldn’t do much), you remove expansions, which necessarily means you either reduce level cap or make vanilla be 1-120. And the first option is the easiest and least likely to mess up.
Except that creates its own mess of issues. Especially in regards to story. Which is already a big mess.
Say you skip straight from lvl 60 vanilla and right into bfa. As a new player you have no clue why anyone acts the way they do. You’re completely lost and don’t understand the story. And this is an RPG. When you say “throw out the story just so people can level” you create a mess of explaining “why” a player should care about certain events. They lose their emotional impact.
The only way to pull that off would be to create scenarios or the like explaining what happens during each bypassed expansion. So that new players have at least a cliff notes version of what exactly happened.
Are you kidding? That FIXES the story! Level from 60-90 as a new player then tell me, who’s the Warchief? Your whole premise rests on the notions that anyone ever gets a sense of ANYTHING from expansion story lines as a new player.
You level up in 60 Vanilla, then you get a summons from Silvanas and a cutscene about Azerite and how important it is, and the war starts. How is that confusing? No one’s confused by “Red vs Blue”. WoW’s story is convoluted, not complicated.
No one cares what happened in BC and Cata and MoP. And new players don’t need to know that to understand what’s going on in BfA or any expansion.
Except you don’t understand how things transitioned from Thrall as warchief to Sylvanas as warchief. You don’t see how the Horde has changed. Numerous characters have undergone massive growth.
Alliance side if you jump straight from 60 to bfa you don’t understand why Anduin is king. You don’t realize the pressure he’s under. His father died a hero. That’s pressure he’s under.
You also don’t understand that what Sylvanas wants may not be what is good for the Horde.
There’s tons of details like that which a new player would miss out on.
All of which they could do without a level squish.
So I still don’t see the point. They could put in more talents now, if they wanted to do so. They could put in glyphs now.
The only reason for a level squish would seem to be so I see that I’m 60, instead of 120. What would be the point? Those levels would also all seem much longer, while currently “leveling up” can at least give you a feeling you are progressing.
But that’s is sort of what I am saying. With a level squish they get to redo a better talent system. They get to take another stab and making the experience faster yes but while making everything more meaningful if they so choose. Especially if this squish also brings about keeping the entire world relevant and getting away from each expansion being compartmentalized.
You’re dramatically overestimating both the importance of those things in an expansion that boils down to “Red vs Blue, the Purple attacks!” and how much actual story you can get from doing 1.5 zones in an expansion when you’ve never played the game before. I started in Wrath and I didn’t have any clue what was happening in BC until Legion.
And you’re trying to say that people who enjoy RP don’t matter. Your very idea would crush the RP community who enjoy the story. Even if it isn’t the best story around.
Isn’t that how it is on these forums? I mean it seems more often then not that the only reason to come here and post is to complain. Those who don’t care or are content don’t even come here and the few who bother to come here in support are few and far between.
RPers matter. I’ve done some RP myself in my day. But RPers often don’t follow the official story, are ok with going out of their way to understand what’s going on, and will look up things they don’t know on the interwebs. RPers don’t need to be forced to jump around from world to world, slingshotting back and forth in time through disjointed and inconsistent game mechanics every 10 levels for most of their levelling experience.
Levelling through expansion content is a bad idea. We’ve got 8 of those. If you go through enough of the content to understand what’s going on, it’ll take weeks or months to level. If you don’t, then they’re just confusing as Hel.
Old expansions should be optional content that’s AVAILABLE, but not mandatory, especially for new players.
Better to start them off in media res, then when something happens they don’t understand, have them look it up and start to discover the backstory. That’s a much better way to pull new players in.