Precisely how I feel as well. The world was the main character for me. It isn’t any longer.
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I didn’t either. I offered feedback, an opinion on the people who gainsay the decisions that the developers make while offering nothing of substance to improve it; and then expressed my contempt for whiners.
None of this was directed at you. If I was referencing you directly, I would use your name. Should I have done so? I mean it’s not my fault or issue if you felt some of my comments resembled you.
The sole point where I reference you is on your opinion the game is lackluster. As you already pointed out. Opinions are just that. Opinions. I will however add on that I think your statement of the game being “a husk” is simply bombastic rhetoric with no real basis in fact.
Of course it could of also been a light jest, since we’re in the after-life. 
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This complaint is so interesting to me.WoW has always been on rails.
The difference is that now at least there’s a story to guide you through.
Before you just did random quests in a zone until you ran out or outlived stuff and then moved to the next zone.
Yes you got to choose the order at times, but you still weren’t moving on until you finished most all of them and few of them actually related to anything meaningful.
I prefer the story. WoW is an mmoRPG after all.
WoW is a theme park mmorpg. Always has been. Some people want it to be a sandbox, but it’s never been that.
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That lasted for a few weeks. And then enough players hit max level and we all realized there was nothing to do but spam lvl 56 dungeons.
So a guy spent a week scraping together a mega dungeon full of re-used assets and called it a “raid.” And another guy re-used some other assets to make wsg. The game has been max level focused ever since.
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I personally think the game was better without all the cutscenes and the forced campaign. I think they are wasting a lot of development time with this content when it could be spent on making more dungeons, fun quests, more zones, more transmog. You get what I’m trying to say.
The things that made wow great were the play of the class, the dungeon mechanics, and the raids. 99% of the quests have always been pointless garbage where you get 10 of these or kill 8 of these.
They had a great opportunity to tell an amazing story but instead make you do grinding tasks that for the most part only take time.
I remember my first time through MoP, the Jade Forest gave me breadcrumbs for Kun-Lai, Krasarang, and Four Winds. It wasn’t until I hit 90 and realized I needed Kun-Lai to open the Vale of Eternal Blossoms for the flight trainer that I headed up to the tiger temple, because there was more than enough to do in the southern zones to keep me busy.
Heck, until I decided I wanted Loremaster, there were entire zones in Northrend I’d never touched, despite leveling multiple characters to cap.
I’ve played since the beginning as well. Every single one. And I love the questing so far. Sharing a comp though so haven’t hit max level cuz my wife plays most of the time.
I’d say not having to wipe 100+ times on some Mythic content to down a boss made the game infinity more fun, and less chore. Raids were fun with challenges when it wasn’t about constant soul crushing mechanics and numbers. I honestly believe to this day that Mythic raiding really made such a negative impact in the overall direction of the game.
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A part of me thinks the “on the rails” comments are coming from folks that are only following the campaign and mostly ignoring the sidequests and the various activities in the zones (professions, pet battles, treasure hunting, rare hunting, etc).
I was questing merrily in Bastion, completed 3/4 of the zone, then learned covenants don’t unlock at 60. They unlock with reaching a certain part of the campaign. It caused me to abandon the zone and rush the campaign, because I was level 55 and still in Bastion, doing sidequests. I’m going to ding 60 and still have to quest to unlock my covenant choice. I do think leveling on alts will be much more relaxing and free (I hope).
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I might be in the minority, but I really don’t care for leveling anyways. If they gave me 4 hours of cut scenes to watch and then I came out level 60 it would have been even better. Whether it’s on rails or not does not concern me. I just want to get to 60, farm some dungeons and pvp rather than running from zone to zone doing the same quests just in a different zone over and over, regardless if I got to choose where to start or not.
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To be fair though, it was pretty easy to get lost and spend a lot of time not progressing your character in a meaningful way. Like seriously, if a player has to go find a guide to play the game, then there is clearly a miss-match between what the game offers and what the player wants. In highschool I could play vanilla and burn months of time. Now I wouldn’t even consider that model of game play.
That said, my favorite zone in all of WoW was Suramar as a rogue. Both expansions since legion have failed to reproduce that feel. I also enjoyed that zone when antorus was released. So I wasn’t spoiled by the time gating. Being lazy paid off :D.
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I’m not talking about Vanilla, which obviously had more than 5-7 zones. The game was never solely max level focused until a few expansions ago or so.
The story is not what makes a RPG. Fighting games have stories, adventure games have stories, action games have stories heck puzzle games have stories. The story should build the world to allow the player to play a role. Instead of world building the story has taken over.
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Short and sweet.
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I’ve played them all. Been playing since 05. I disagree completely. I’ve had a blast so far.
Just wait Autai, I got the most long winded post ever incoming. I have not played SL, but did level a character in BFA, and did play a little bit of the other expansions that came after Cataclysm. I do not think retail players suck, or that retail is the worst thing ever, and I am not criticizing anyone for liking SL/retail. Simply want to give my thoughts on why I personally do not like retail and somewhat agree with the OP.
Retail’s graphics are better than classic/TBC, the combat is fluid, and there is plenty to do. I had to question why I could not really get into it since retail seemed to check all the boxes of a good MMO. I think it’s that classic gave me a sense of discovery, and the world felt dangerous. I did not feel that whenever I played retail expansions.
To make a fair comparison we should imagine that we are a brand-new player that is not using a quest guide or addon.
The questing in vanilla did consist of a bunch of “collect 10 bear liver” type of quests that would end with a reward of a little silver or a green item. However, every now and then I would accidently stumble across a quest chain that would send me across the world and lead to something unexpected. Many times, I would be travelling through higher level zones on foot dodging enemies and getting killed just to get to the next quest giver. The first time I did my Onyxia attune I had no idea what it would lead to. I almost missed getting the first quest (Warlord’s Command) and would have if I were not paying attention. I never felt that way in retail. The quests were given to me in convenient quest hubs, it was clear what I had to do, and things felt much more linear. Whether that is a feature or a bug is up to the reader to decide, but I enjoy the more chaotic and less streamlined approach to quests.
The vanilla world seemed bigger and more dangerous, especially to a noob. I remember being a new player and going into Westfall. Me and everyone else were getting murdered by the Defias Pillagers and Reapers. Having to fight murlocs was always risky. Silverpine Forest had elite Sons of Arugal wandering around that would just delete you, and even if you got away you’d probably still die from their curse. Un’Goro had the Devilsaur. TBC had the Fel Reaver. I never felt any sense of danger in retail’s open world. Even as an undergeared warrior I could AOE myself out of any situation I found myself in. Retail’s zone progression also feels more streamlined. The game seemed to really push you from one area to the next. There was some of this in vanilla, but it didn’t seem so heavy handed.
There were some cool areas I found in retail, but vanilla seemed to have more unique and weird things to discover. Sometimes I would wander into a cave and it would be huge or filled with unique monsters like the mining pits in Searing Gorge, or the naga cave in Feralas. On the same island in feralas, I stumbled across the path into the interior of the island and came across a bunch of elite chimeras. I knew I couldn’t kill them without a group, but I really wanted to go back someday and see what was going on in there. As a new player I just never knew what kind of weird or potentially dangerous thing or place could be around the next corner.
Classic has been fun, but it’s true that you can never get that initial sense of wonder back. Most classic players know everything there is to know about classic. The problem is that retail expansions don’t seem to offer that same sense of excitement that vanilla offered players back in the day. I can recognize that retail is a very well-made game, but it’s boring to me when it comes right down to it. Everything feels optimized and convenient. I believe that many of us want Blizzard to create an expansion where we can feel that same sense of mystery and excitement while leveling. Where leveling will take a lot of time, and not be optimized or convenient, but it’ll be okay because leveling will actually be fun again.
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I have been saying and will continue to say.
There is a reason, probably by someone very high up, that this expansion takes place in the after life of wow.
I wish, with my entire being they would kill the game after 1, 2 more expansions max.
OR
Fire the entire team and rebuild warcraft from an earlier design philosophy with the old tier gear, tokens, raids. And original server systems.
War mode sucks. Portal craft sucks. Borrowed powers major suck. 300% flying everywhere sucks. The current iteration of class design, incredibly bad
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They can’t.
A part of it is what you said: the game is known. The mechanics are known. And due to the internet in 2020, the content is all known by many players before they set foot in it. The level of knowledge in 2020 is not comparable to thottbot and 2004. It’s a whole different level, and you really can’t make games that are surprising any longer.
The second is the era. WoW vanilla was coming from the EQ era of MMOs. It was at the time considered noob/easysauce by veteran MMO players (hard for players today to believe, but that was the case) because regular players could reach level cap in a month or two (in EQ it took a year or more) and most of the content was playable solo (not much of anything in EQ was). So the whole thing was already moving in the “lets make MMOs more casual friendly” from the beginning, it’s just that “casual friendly” looks different when your starting point is EQ, as compared to when your starting point is vanilla/BC.
In other words, the expectations of the market for an MMO are vastly different in 2020 than they were in 2004. Heck they were very different in 2010 already than they were in 2004, because WoW brought in all the casuals, the solo players, into the genre … folks who had been shamelessly excluded from EQ and similar games prior to WoW. Along with them came serious competitive gamers from other gaming genres who never touched MMOs because they didn’t like the extreme time sink aspects, and that their superior leet gaming skills could not be adequately displayed without paying their time sink dues … they wanted a quicker path to the top, and so WoW was attractive to them as well in a way that EQ was not.
So, Blizzard found already in 2005 and 2006 that it had a game with a different playerbase than MMOs had enjoyed prior to WoW: a mix of casual, solo oriented players, on the one hand, and serious hardcore competitive skillz players on the other hand, and not that many of the “classic hardcore MMO” types who preferred the EQ type of design (these folks still exist, by the way, and they still more or less play EQ). So WoW’s design moved progressively away from what vanilla was (which was intended to be a casualized EQ), toward a game that was more oriented to WoW’s new MMO playerbase, which was a combo of casuals and hardcore/skillz, and not EQ type MMO vets. The game became more easy in/easy out, because this caters to both casuals and skillz types, at the expense of MMO vet explorer/classic types. The further and further you get from 2004, the further you get from a design that was supposed to be a casual EQ, and the more the game goes in its own direction to be the ultra-accessible game that appeals to casual soloists but has scalable content that appeals to skillz gamerz. And so that’s how WoW has come to be designed. That is not going to change. Classic style design is not coming back, because this isn’t 2004, and the playerbase is different now.
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And then once you hit endgame you are stuck with an on-the-rails covenant grind or grinding legendary mats in an infinite dungeon.
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