Atleast in classic the night elves still had something
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It just shows that some of us are annoyed enough about the current story that we’ll put up with less-than-ideal gameplay to get something better. Doesn’t mean that the Classic gameplay suddenly becomes perfect.
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More along the line of this part.
Indeed they have:
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Goblins of course. They should have been in there from the beginning.
Honestly, the factions should have been Humans/Dwarves/Gnomes/High Elves on Alliance and Orcs/Tauren/Trolls/Goblins on Horde. Night Elves and Forsaken should have remained their own factions.
EDIT: And I say “should have” as in this is how it would work in my perfect world. The reality is that this would have made the faction imbalance even greater, and without popular elves on Horde, I can’t think of any realistic way of addressing it.
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Ahhhhhh, I see now. They’re referring more to the game balance side of things, rather than the story. I don’t agree that it was “substantially more difficult” to level on the Horde side, but w/e.
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Well it’s also in just how much attention is paid to things.
Like when you walk into an Alliance town and it’s full of buildings and NPCs chopping wood, going about their day, and houses/inns full of bookshelves and knicknacks.
Then you go to a Horde “town” and the assets are much simpler. The insides of the homes aren’t even furnished aside from blankets, a fire, and beds/axes. Orgrimmar vs Stormwind is pretty stark.
One experience clearly got more attention, time, and resources than another. More polish, basically. Which makes sense They were designed first, among other things.
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The Classic story was more fleshed out because there wasn’t any big focus, for one thing, and the world itself was the main character. But we can’t forget that they worked on Vanilla WoW for much, much longer than they had time for any of the expansions after. Not to mention there was less of a focus on story in general.
Their quest writing has improved immensely. It’s not really fair to point to Classic and go “Ha, yes, reboot it from the start when things were good” because it… really wasn’t better, it was just different.
The writing only really started to fumble(barring a good chunk of BC) in Cata when they made a huge shift in writing focus and also put into play a ton of things that didn’t get resolved in the end because they stretched themselves too thin.
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I would point out what is wrong with the current Warcraft story, but I don’t see a satisfying conclusion.
If you look back to WC3, the game had a direction, there was a story that was being told. For too long WoW has just been wheels spinning, it doesn’t really have a narrative direction. There is just cause and effect.
They seem to being have this overarching narrative setting, but it’s not good. At the end of MoP Garrosh was defeated and then he escaped to AU Draenor and that launched WoD. Gul’Dan there was sent to the MU and that started Legion. Then Sargeras stabbed the planet and Azerite spilled out which began BfA.
It doesn’t feel like an actual story, just plot hook to plot hook.
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No, because I don’t trust the current writing staff at Blizzard. Sorry, but I don’t. People enjoyed BC, right? Some enjoyed Wrath?
Do you honestly want the people behind BfA writing new slop that would officially retcon pretty much everything?
Right.
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It doesn’t have a narrative direction because there is no direction.
Blizzard has stated that when they launched WoD they weren’t sure which expansion they wanted to come after it; Legion of BfA. They finally settled on Legion.
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Yes, I stand by everything I wrote there. I’m also a bit confused as to your point.
Classic is clearly better designed for Alliance questing, if you measure “better” in terms of being more complete, linear, and efficient. That’s just an artifact of the way the game was originally produced and the deadlines Blizzard hit back in the day. The bulk of the early work went into Eastern Kingdoms, and the human areas in particular. By the time they were working extensively on the Horde content, they were running up against deadlines.
There is still evidence of this in the live game: the reason that Stormwind is so much larger and more detailed than any other capital is that it was the first one they built and it kept getting iterated on throughout production.
So is Classic questing measurably more polished for Alliance, and especially human characters. Sure. But I’ll still take the Classic experience over the live one.
As we’re on the story forums I am more curious about your implications about the lack of Horde story content in Classic compared to Alliance, if you feel it does.
But over all:
This is my point and what I find interesting.
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I’m not sure what is so interesting about it. I’ve often stated that I think the current Horde story is a raging dumpster fire. The Alliance story, too.
On top of that, I think the overall story direction, with the players becoming ever more incidental to plots that are really about the NPCs, is problematic.
And on top of that, I think that the overall game is much less fun to play. The gameplay and balance are better now, but the core identity of WoW is as an MMO, and the modern game fails utterly in that regard. Classic takes us back to a game where the other players were the point.
So I’m not sure what the big mystery is. Classic has its problems (I mean, I’m a passionate paladin player, FFS), but it’s still way better than what the game evolved into.
Tell that to Wall Street.
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It’s interesting because it means that the Horde didn’t need to get anything you thought it lacked in comparison to the Alliance to be enjoyable.
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That’s not… really a useful point to make. Things can be enjoyable with relatively little. People were able to find enjoyment all the way back in the stone age after all. That doesn’t mean that getting new things was ever unwanted.
Sure you can be happy with a piece of string, some imagination, and a bit of time on your hands, but I’d still like to get a Nintendo Switch with Breath of the Wild if my neighbor has one, and would consider it pretty unfair if I was given the former, while they got the latter.
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Okay? I’m not sure why you think that is an interesting point.
I’ve stated two propositions that are not mutually exclusive.
Proposition A: The Alliance has more quests, more zones, and more streamlined quest paths in Vanilla/Classic. I don’t think anyone seriously disputes this.
Proposition B: Classic WoW is more enjoyable for me, and evidently for a great many players, than current WoW.
That’s it. You seem to be implying that proposition B somehow invalidates proposition A, but that’s not how logic works.
Incidentally, in Classic, as in Vanilla, I play mostly Alliance because I really like paladins.
But here is a problem that I do find interesting: if, as seems likely, Classic WoW becomes the default version of WoW for most players, for how long does Blizzard justify dumping huge resources into current WoW?
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I think people are talking past each other. Yes Classic Alliance questing is slightly superior to Horde up until later level brackets where both factions share zones. But the primary reason a lot of Horde players feel refreshed and enjoy Classic over Retail is the fact they are not forced to do mass murder and destruction for a horribly written cast of over dramatic idiot leaders.
I mean Classic Horde has WC3 Thrall, the best Warchief the Horde ever had. You can walk up to him and read his speech on how his Horde ain’t demon fueled lunatics or mindless Scourge laying waste to everything. Compare that to all the Garbage in BFA and see how far Blizz has fallen chasing asinine plots and ‘epic’ shocking moments.
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Joana got the fastest to 60 back in the day on Horde. Horde also have pretty good flight paths for a variety of dungeons even if their quest lines are not as linear or coherent. I think Classic while not perfect balances itself out in various ways between factions.
The situations aren’t equivalent. Back in the days when Classic was all there was, Horde players obviously weren’t escaping from BfA, so they didn’t have the "At least it’s better than that!" factor to get them through the less-than-great bits.
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I had an idea to give new content to classic where a new raid is opened that establishes that, surprise, this is an alternate universe.
The level cap remains at 60 no matter what. Content that are taken from later expansions are scaled down to 60. Item levels, set bonuses, etc. never go far beyond Naxx’s level to help subdue power creep.
The Caverns of Time become accessible with the TBC and Wrath-era dungeons, as well as a new raid against the Infinite Dragonflight. From that we learn of the incoming Legion Invasions, the Lich King’s plans, Deathwing’s coming, etc. The story turns to adventurers acting proactively to stop any such things happening before they ever come to pass, such as killing Putress and portalling to the peak of ICC with a concentrated dose of blight to kill a weakened Arthas, or finding Deathwing before he can recover and have the plates attached to him in order to kill him.
I suppose Blood Elves and Draenei could possibly be added, though I think that’d need to come to a community vote. Everything that happens in TBC would need to go differently, just about. I’d also say Paladin and Shaman stay exclusive to their original factions to keep the spirit of Classic, and even take that a step further by later adding classic-appropriate Death Knights and Demon Hunters as classes exclusive solely to Forsaken and Night Elves respectively.
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