These people are all lying, they just want Blood Elves. Also TBC is when all the lorelol began, spaceships really?
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Flying destroyed TBC for me so it’s hard to detach that element from the equation. TBC was definitely more polished but I had infinitely more fun in vanilla.
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Be blood elves? nah… kill them? oh for sure!
And the whole ‘lol spacegoats’ thing doesn’t make much sense to me… It actually is a really good story. We can handle eradar space goats, a big bad god dude that travels in space and destroys worlds turning races into demons and sending the in portals to azeroth to hurt us…but the moment one of those races lands on azeroth for refuge then that’s too weird? Hmm
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I’ll say this…after reading the Chronicle Books on WoW lore…and getting a more holistic and complete understanding of the larger story arch…the TBC lore is easier to swallow.
I think it was a crazy jump for a lot of people when TBC came out because they weren’t aware of where things have been, and where they were going. People thought this was all just about a fight between two races and introducing goat people from space was just a little too much to swallow.
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The problem is that they basically had free range to write anything, with Thralls exodus of the horde, Kaels rise to power etc. All were solid in character development and introduced you to aspects of the story in a believable fantasy setting. With the release of Vanilla storylines had to apply to a collective rather than one person experiencing the story. Vanilla handled this exceptionally well by keeping the story somewhat static.
An idea would have been to make warcraft 4 an RTS and developed the story then made TBC into another static storyline.
I think they saw this in WoTLK and tried to mend it with some effect (direct Lich King narrative)!
Then 2010 came and activision bought wow and we got cata.
lol no, just no
Subscriber count was going up by attracting new players but pretty sure there was a churn of outgoing players too which they wanted to stem and make easier for players to return.
The trend became guild progresses to BT/Hyjal lose players (as is normal), then either:
a) recruit new players drop down a tier to attune and break any sense of prgression leading to more people leaving guild.
b) merge or poach players from other raiding guilds, alienating players that didn’t make the cut.
The progression paths were sending players further and further apart rather than bringing them together. That was the start of the current “participation trophy” everyone gets a reward style of current design (it was very subtle at first).
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That unfortunately wasn’t my experience at all with my raid gear lasting until level 70, not even close.
On my warlock and druid both I had some pieces from ZG and MC. One of the things that quickly turned me off to BC was how quickly my raid gear from Vanilla was replaced by ridiculous greens. I was replacing pieces in the early 60 levels. Some pieces that would have been an upgrade I didn’t even wear right away because I couldn’t stand replacing those hard earned epics for quest greens.
On topic, I much preferred Vanilla to BC for many reasons. I wasn’t personally a fan of BC, which is why I quit midway through. I didn’t like Outland, hated Hellfire Peninsula. I didn’t like the removal of the honor system and really disliked the reduction in raid size. That change broke many guilds on my realm back then. Ours survived it, but many didn’t.
BC is when the slow progress of homogenization and dumbing down of the game began. I remember when they started combining talents in the warlock’s affliction tree because players complained the rotation was “too hard.” Warlock was my favorite class from Vanilla and I saw early on which road Blizzard was taking with the game and I didn’t like it, so I quit for quite some time. I wasn’t wrong with my assumption. What the game is today only proves it.
Edit: I misread some of what you wrote. Misread the part where you said “past MC”. I don’t believe any of my gear was anything past MC or ZG. I raided ZG, Ony, MC and some AQ20 and 40 but didn’t get any pieces from AQ. I did raid some of BWL but was only able to go a little ways in that raid due to having a pc not made for the crazy aoe that was in there. I would crash repeatedly so was unable to really do BWL because of that.
Regardless, it was still disheartening and quite frustrating replacing my epics from ZG and MC with quest greens at around levels 62-63. Huge turnoff.
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Just going to start off here… vanilla’s story was all over the place. TBCs story was indeed static and based off one single event going on. Not saying vanillas story is bad by any means, but you have them completely flipped around if you are looking at criticizing tbc unless you are using ‘static’ in a very different way than what I am thinking.
TBCs storyline already came off of a lot of Warcraft 3s storyline so there is no point in making another warcraft to prolong the story because there is already the base of your story in WC3. If anything they needed to make WC4 after WotLK in order to make it feel better.
You really gotta tell me exactly by what you mean by static though. You mean like you don’t progress through the story through raids? Or do you mean it sticks to one single story.
Vanilla all the way! I miss Teldrassil!
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Let me re-phrase…flying mounts killed what semblance of world PvP there was left. More importantly, it killed player immersion.
Being able to fly in to a spawning location of quest monsters, gather your 10 moldy mushrooms, mount up and hit your cruising altitude of 30,000 ft to the next quest location removed all world PvP opportunities that used to exist where players of opposing factions run into each-other while out in the world. Flying limited your exposure to player combat while traveling around in the world.
Flying also allows you to skip all the hard work & detail put into creating zones…the art work, the terrain, the mob placement, etc.
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Yah Ill take that as a better view of its effect on what remained of WPvP, but 100% no on the second as player immersion is 100% different for each person.
Lol no, you have to land to to do anything and you can still enjoy the artwork.
It also showed just how niche an activity it really was, if people really desired it, nothing would have stopped them, but a lot of people would rather do BGs or Arena than bother with wpvp.
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Burning Crusade, hands down.
Looking at subscriptions and fun levels, Burning crusade by a long shot.
After Vanilla, BC was a breath of fresh air,
- Flying YES! yes! yes …. and yes!
- Better Talent trees - for all class/specs
massive improvements - Paladins can Taunt!
- Flying!
- Heroic Dungeons! with Key attunements!
and 6. Flying!
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I barely hit 60 before TBC launched, so I honestly missed a lot of what Vanilla was. I tried a few classes, before levelling a fury warrior to 60, then TBC dropped. I levelled my fury warrior to 70, before being told that no-one wanted fury warriors. I had to respect to protection if I expected to play a warrior…which was not what I wanted to play. I was levelled. Seriously?! I just levelled a warrior…to 70…for nothing. None of you could tell me this before now? Thus, they started raiding, and I…I levelled a Warlock. But! In the so-doing, I fell in love with Battlegrounds (and Warlocks), and decided, that this was going to be my end-game. And so TBC went by with battlegrounds and alts.
TBC was where stat inflation really started. Arenas started. Flying started. And don’t get me started on space ships…As for the world itself…I personally didn’t care for how they simply just floated in a void and just ended. I get the whole “plane” thing, but it was a turn off for me. I felt it was just poor.
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None of the main hero characters from Warcraft 3 had major story development. The main playerbase were introduced to the world through WC2/3 - people were invested in the narrative, so they knew they’d have to be careful (static approach to the main storyline).
It’s difficult to write for this because the factions split the playerbase in two. The writers become confined in parallel narratives where both sides were always under equal threat from an outside entity in which the story in the end had to always reflect the equality status quo, personal interactions with characters are lost in a battle of identity (in RTS you assume the role of a hero, in MMO you are the hero which interacts with RTS heroes which you previously also were).
In WoTLK they tried to mend this by having the Lich king get all personal with you, whispering you every now and then.
TBC shotgunned you with expositional onslaughts. The plot was hardly linked to previous events, besides the premise laid down by WC3, there was no character development. I would have like to seen Kael slowly losing his mind in his own reflections on a personal level or Vashjs feelings toward the return of the Draenei and how it would effect the Naga race - her plans moving foward.
Instead of that we got new plot without much backstory or anything to carry it over. Draenei? Yea we found some survivors and also beings of light but its not the draenei you know, its a new draenei where everyone is pretty dealwithit.png (cough Strange Accquintances - friend of mine linked me).
Like I understand why it was done, but I think it could have been done better with the mix of RTS as it allows that 1 on 1 with the story and allows for significant change.
I’m no writer though/game dev, just my 2c.
My main issue with BC was how small it made the world feel. In Vanilla there was so many random things without a group all over the entire world that was useful at Max level. I contributed a LOT to a raiding guild without myself doing hardcore raiding.
At 70 in BC you ran out of non-group content very quickly and it was raid or die.
I had an on-call job so being on the main raid team was basically impossible. Doesn’t mean I wasn’t the All Star ALT Raid stud and the main raid showered me with BOE’s because of all the mats and transmutes I did for the team.
TBC introduced arena and flying, which at the time seemed really cool, but we didn’t realize how those two things would change the game over the long term.
Arena eventually contributed to the homogenization of every class in the game, and flying disconnected us from the sense of discovery that we had in vanilla.
Great expansion, but we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into. I have decided that I will be playing vanilla and TBC versions of Classic if both are released, but only to experience missed raid content.
I definitely prefer The Burning Crusade, but Vanilla is right after it.
Both are extremely enjoyable.