Using Chromie Time to Deliver a Good Lore & Leveling Experience to New Players

Community General Discussion
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I was thinking about some of the most fundamental problems with retail leveling and what it’s like for a completely new player to enter this world. Considering the vastness of lore, both explored in-game and out of game, it’s impossible given the leveling speeds for a new player to cover even a fraction of all this stuff that feeds to Dragonflight, our world as a whole, and the end-game experience.

How did this universe begin? What have been the major highlights? What’s light and void? What’s arcane and fel? What’s holy and shadow? Who’s Illidan? Who’s Gul’Dan? Who’s Sargeras?

If you choose a single expansion to level, you might get through 2-3 zones within that expansion and once you’ve hit the level at which it’s time to go to Dragonflight, you might not have learned a single relevant thing where the current game is concerned, or, even a relevant thing where that particular expansion is concerned. Even if you don’t want to explore all the surrounding lore (like how the universe began or how the titans / old gods influenced Azeroth), you couldn’t even cover more than a few zones within an expansion before you’ll hit Dragonflight.

So, idea I had was you enter a sort of “academy” that’s provided by the Bronze Dragonflight.

Trying to keep this post short, the idea would effectively be that you consume a more high-level concept of the expansion as a whole. Suppose this takes about 2-4 hours, and you get 20-30 levels in that time. Could be a combination of scenarios, quests, and culminating in a mini-raid, perhaps in which you’d fight the final bosses of each of the raids within that expansion (of course a simpler / easier version).

Think this concept and leveling speed could apply to other facets of the game as well. What about the War of the Ancients? It’s not an expansion, but it was a major occurrence within WoW lore. maybe that could be a ~10 level 1-2 hour experience.

I just think there’s so much to explore in this world and the way the leveling system is currently set up, you’ll consume a micro amount of all of it by the time you’re max level and onto the current content. I thought this would be a better way to highlight the important historical occurrences while providing an efficient way to tweak leveling speeds as needed.

Ultimately, where I think leveling fundamentally fails is it doesn’t do a good job of opening the world up to you. Most of the experience will be either invalidated or entirely irrelevant to the modern world, and most of the questlines constitute relatively unimportant historical events.

I think it would be far better to offer an opportunity to sort of “package” up x expansion or y significant historical event into a pathway that the player can explore that only covers the really important elements.

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nobody like dis :confused:

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Chromie Time needs to be removed straight up. It killed world content by introducing way too many phases.

Bring in a new leveling experience that either sums up the story so far so new players can get right into whatever the latest expansion is- or if we’re getting another revamp, make a new leveling experience that contextualizes the “new world” we’ll be playing in.

Then stop making expansions that require you to have played the previous one to fully understand- and definitely stop making playing the last expansion the only way to get to the level required to play the newest one. Nobody wants to play Shadowlands and nobody is going to want to play dragonflight to get into TWW.

This never ending cycle has got to stop. Imagining trying to explain to a new player who just got out of the forced BFA leveling why Malfurion needs to go to this “shadowlands” place they’ve never heard of for Ysera would be a nightmare. “WEll the shadowlands is the afterlife-” “Ysera is dead?” “Yeah died in the legion invasion-” “THE LEGION INVADED???” “Yeah that was a while ago- they’re all gone now” “Okay so where’s Sylvanas” “Oh in the maw” “What’s the maw” “Uhh Hell” “HEll exists?” “Let’s get back onto the current topic” “Oh right- so we can go to the afterlife and bring whoever we want back by trading places?” “Erm well kinda yeah…” “What’s that seed?” “Oh that’s for the night elves to grow into a new world tree” “New world tree?” “Yeah Sylvanas burned the last one” “When did she do that?!” “Oh before the BFA expansion so you wouldn’t know anything about it-”

Nightmare. This “continuous story” since Cataclysm has gotten way too long and intricate. You can’t understand the story unless you play every single raid, do multiple expansions story quest lines- AND participate in limited time event quests that don’t exist anymore. THE ENTIRE BURNING OF TELDRASIL QUEST-LINE IS REMOVED. YOU CAN’T PLAY IT ANYMORE. WTF?

The leveling experience is utterly destroyed and Chromie Time is a band aid onto a gaping wound that only serves to get in the way of healing it.

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The Lore is too big for any new person to just experience it all. Best way for a person to learn all that would be to watch a few videos.

I saw one a while back that told the entier story starting from about 10,000 years ago. Also reading the plot notes in the Wikipedia articles about each expansion will give a general overview.

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This predicament is exactly what I’m targeting. More than two decades down the road, is it even possible to summarize in a single leveling experience all the lore that’s come before?

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It’s just not wanted enough. I’ve seen hundreds of threads like this that just die.

Good ideas that would definitely bring in new players. Just ignored :frowning:

A campaign going over the story so far would be an amazing optional leveling experience. But we got exiles reach instead.

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Yeah, if you could take the high concept approach of exiles reach and apply it to various significant chapters in wow history, I think leveling would be a lot cooler.

Like if the developers want to approach leveling as some minor hurdle to get over as opposed to a fundamental part of the mmorpg experience, the least they could do is let the leveling tie into the end-game, or explain how we got here

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The only franchise with a level of lore and continuity as Warcraft would be something like Doctor Who, and they basically put in a cut-off and said “all of the lore prior to this point? Don’t worry about it, if it matters we’ll catch you up on it”.

They didn’t try to speed run 10 seasons of fiction. That will never work.

The problem is that modern Blizzard is absolutely terrible at doing soft reboots. Warcraft 3 was a soft reboot of Warcraft but Blizzard seems unwilling / unable to let go of the baggage in that same style. They refuse to do a time skip, they refuse to move on from the angst of events several expansions back.

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This is what the game needs.

Here’s hoping the World Soul saga is the attempt to wrap up everything on Azeroth and with that we get a enormous revamp that lets us start a new story. Hell send us all to a new planet. Do SOMETHING so we’re not beholden to Garrosh’s story and lore that started being relevant at least EIGHT expansions ago and should have ended one expansion later.