Same?? I don’t know if I’m just burned out on WoW or what but Xalalalath is neat and all but I’m kinda just meh about it. Oh whoopie doo another scheming bad guy with super duper secret schemes and stuff.
Now, warbands and mog collecting and dragon riding on older mounts and collecting new battle pets, that stuff I’m pretty happy and excited about. Outta my way nerds, I got a weird mud skipper I need to collect in every colour.
I hope they have something similar like the snail guy in Zaralek Cavern. That was fun collecting snails and leveling them and then showing off my snails and impressing the snail guy until he gave me a snail mount said no one but me.
It would help if the game wasn’t large enough now that it feels like we’re playing in a fractured timeline.
Like I legitimately feel bad for anyone who was born in the past 20 years, because if they decide to try WoW now they are going to be ridiculously lost. Especially if they roll as a Horde character but Alliance doesn’t escape it either.
Depending on what content you do in what order, the Horde is ruled by a Council, but also by a Warchief. That Warchief can either be Thrall, Vol’jin, Garrosh, or Sylvanas depending on quest and location (Did they ever fix the Throne Room bug in Ogrimmar where you have to go talk to the Warchief but the Warchief isn’t the Warchief but the Warchief standing off to the side of the existing Warchief?)
Blue-side, you’re either dealing with King Varian or Anduin, but if you go to the Stormwind Throne Room some goober named Turyalon is there and you aren’t going to know who that is.
Honestly we need WoW 2 not simply due to the age of the game but because the weight of the content is getting unruly.
I think they are kinda fixing that by making DF the main leveling experience for new players which I think will drastically improve the new player experience.
I’m not disagreeing with you though, it is a jacked up mess but I think making DF the new leveling content for new players is a smidge improvement.
I recently watched a video about a guy trying WoW for the first time. He did exile’s reach and then was thrown into Stormwind and went from everyone calling him recruit to champion and had like 30 talking heads talking at him to do this or that. He started playing in BfA and was like, I have no idea why I’m even here and then once he hit 60 a buncha talking heads told him to gtfo of BfA and go to this new place and he’s like, so what about what I was just doing?
Heck. I’ve been doing my homework on DK’s so I don’t make a major lore mistake and yet still be able to make this alt MY DK. Last night I was shocked to discover that there are actually 4 different generations of raised death knights.
The walking War Crimes that were the First Generation are all exclusively lost/transformed into Liches as per WarCraft 3 and Early WoW lore. They fled to Draenor at the end of the Second War and were part of Ner’zhul’s inner circle that got captured and tortured by the Burning Legion (Hence why Gorefiend was in Outland). So there’s not much of a chance of RPing as a OG Death Knight unless you get super creative and specific with your character history.
I noticed over the weekend that now with all my characters together onto one log in screen, I’m feeling more encouraged to do something with all those alts sitting around level 22. I actually logged into several of them and I leveled a Forsaken mage for a few levels (it helps that she looks like a goth).
I do wish Blizz would STOP updating gear with the same update constantly. Do it once at the beginning of each expac and then stop.
Yeah I don’t think DF’s leveling was terrible or anything but its plot is still going to be basically incoherent for a new player, and if they come away with the impression that WoW is primarily about dragons and centaurs and tuskarr they’re just gonna be even more confused when they move on.
The decision not to do some kind of setting reboot and start re-introducing the old world and its people after Shadowlands was unfortunate, and I guess the whole setting is just doomed to become this ridiculous byzantine mess which makes, like, the Star Wars Expanded Universe look concise by comparison.
We’ve basically had a mechanics reboot of sorts in the past few years, where we’ve done away with some onerous old systems like faction/server restrictions, and with warband the mechanics will feel basically as modern as any newer online game, but the setting hasn’t really gotten the same treatment, and the only way people will really “get” the setting is if they go play Classic for a while.
I had a friend return to WoW a few months ago and promptly quit again because the game was radically different than when they stopped playing - I think it was Legion. Dragon riding put them off. They couldn’t find portals. Quests were separated into too many different icons. Stuff like that. By the time I knew they were playing, they were already over it and quit again.
I think if they logged in again today with the new log in screen and the quest icons changed yet again, they’d never look at the game again. Blizz should offer an option to return to the old UI.
So my wife and I discovered something new last night. Now after the patch it is apparently nearly impossible for lvl 70’s to play with lower levels in DF openworld content.
We were leveling some alts and she was two levels ahead of me, soon as she dinged 70 she phased and no amount of grouping/party sync whatever would allow us to continue questing together.
WoW’s advanced age comes with a lot of obvious drawbacks (dated mechanics, less-efficient game design, graphics, etc.), but no one really mentions that the older it gets, the harder it has to try to innovate and the harder it tries, the less it looks like what it was.
I think just keeping some things the same would be enough. How many different shaped/colored quest markers do we need, anyway? Make yellow ! for regular quests and magenta ! for main story quests, with no weird markings around them. Just no. Just leave them right like that. No need to get fancy with the triangles or whatever. And the circles with the three seashells (I know they’re dots, but I’m calling them the three seashells bc it’s slightly more amusing to me) - why even? Just leave it as a gray ? until the quest is completed. The whole thing seems like overthinking. Or a weak attempt at marketing: “Oh look, we updated the game.” No, you didn’t. You swapped out some icons unnecessarily.
Well, my position has always been that we should just start over.
A meteor hits Azeroth. Somehow, Gul’dan has returned. Or we zoom out and all of Azeroth is just within a snow globe held by Anduin.
For some reason, though, my desire to see all progress destroyed in a fiery inferno hasn’t caught on in popularity.
The systems that started WoW are still very solid. But they just keep getting added onto or (as you say) tweaked until they don’t really function anymore. Now it’s like watching someone keep piling garbage atop an overflowing garbage can.
I tried to keep windows looking like windows XP, the glorious operating system of my childhood, for far too long, so I get icon attachment to a degree. But I do think that if weird quest markers were a dealbreaker, you probably weren’t that interested in getting back into the game anyway.
Most of the big visual/UI updates were sort of painful (most notably, the character models, but the DF UI change was big too), but they did kinda have to happen, and I think maintaining a spiderweb of legacy options might be just as confusing in the long run.
But yes, I agree that meteor-hits-azeroth is a great idea. It is plot bloat that bugs me a lot more than mechanics bloat, and the story from Shadowlands onward has just felt like the the aforementioned overflowing garbage can. Give me a few years of Kalimdor and Dun Morogh or whatever before you bring out the cosmic powers chart again please
I got a new gaming laptop to go with my gaming desktop from a couple of years ago. 2 different Windows versions. I can deal with the one from a couple years ago. This new one wants to do all sorts of things that make me go hmmm.
I don’t think they’re gonna reboot because if it killed off everyone’s characters with all their toys, pets, mounts, achievements, etc., people would riot or simply drop their subs.
I’ve always imagined a reboot as existing in the same game, just re-introducing the setting. There’s no real benefit to actually deleting existing characters, and we’re accustomed to basically re-setting our power each expansion and replacing our Mega Holy Apotheosis Ashbringer with adventurer’s common green sword after 2 levels.
But plopping our characters in time dilation and coming back out after 50 yrs with all the NPC characters replaced with a new generation and Kalimdor and EK looking different enough that there is no expectation for new players to memorize the succession orders of various different poorly-phased deposed warchiefs could work
