And not about immersion, questing, storyline, character development? I know there’s always been raiding, and dungeons, etc. and always high end gear, but quite literally the focus of the game these days is “rush to 70 and do some end game content”.
This is why the game feels so hollow so much, it’s no longer an mmoRPG, it’s now simply a seasonal mmoAction game, with a minimal amount of rpg. When the game developer doesn’t care about the first 87.5% of the game, it’s clear it’s not about development and story. I’m honestly surprised they still even have levels in this game. I mean, why? Don’t get me wrong, I know why (boost selling), but the reality is it’s a rush you to end game, where you can then spend over a year at max level.
Just cut out the middle man. Start at 80. Have us increase by gear. That’s all that’s happening anyway. Folks go from 70 to 80 in a few days (or less). Leveling is frankly a waste of time in this game. It simply shouldn’t exist anymore. If it weren’t for the above-mentioned profitability of it, I doubt it would.
Somewhere between TBC and Cata. Hard to pinpoint exactly where, but Blizzard were all in on turning WoW into an Esport during WotLK. They really wanted Arena to take off, and this is also around the same time RWF became something the public started to care about.
The game is 20 years old now. Who wants to start playing it and worry about the lore or story telling? I’ve been playing the entire 20 years and now a days most “new” players are only here because someone talked them into trying “crack” one time and now they only want to get to max level and actually play with the people they PAYED to play with. It’s a simple concept in reality…
I started wow because it was an immersive RPG.
I world to discover and explore.
I love questing I love exploring I love finding Easter eggs that tell a story.
Unfortunately I think either 2 things have happened;
Peoples brains have rotted and they have the attention span of a fish. They don’t want to put in “work” for anything, as if questing and exploring is “work”, to me that’s the entire point of an RPG.
Also
The current people inc charge of this game have disrespected and butchered what wow was to the point the story is reconned so much and changed at any whim it could hurt someones feelings.
These new devs are catering to people who don’t even care about RPGs.
I think it was that period between Wrath and Cata. During that time there was only raiding or dungeons to do. Dungeons became easy put together with LFD and easier to complete with how people over geared them do to JP farming. On the raiding side raids were easy to pug and you could do 10 and 25 man because they had different lock outs of memory serves correct. A lot of bad habits were made at that time that bled over to Cata and over time this is what the game has become.
It is nice to see that Blizzard is trying to bring back some of the RPG feel so I have hope.
Well for a very select and very noisy group of players who believe they are the elite this is true. However despite their firm belief that they represent and speak for “the community” of a few million players, they don’t.
I’ve been playing since The Burning Crusade. The game has always been like this.
The game also always allowed for the questing and exploring and storytelling you mention. I was just doing it this morning.
Yes, the game is designed to get you to endgame quickly because that’s what the majority of players asked for. But what makes questing or exploring different at max level? Yeah, I prefer to not 1 shot level 5 mobs the whole time, but I can still explore whatever I want and collect and see the story.
They can improve the experience, but we can say that about every part of the game. The things you are asking for have always existed and co-existed with the things you dislike. This isn’t a one or the other scenario. We can and do have both.
The design since TBC has been focusing on max level gameplay.
This is where the dev time has been prioritized.
Just like how you have spoken out before against shaman issues being fixed. You must realize then that this is just and fair. If there were enough people caring about the leveling experience they would focus there.
But obviously there aren’t. So, per you, they shouldn’t.
I agree on the chore that is having to get the 10 levels for the current expac cap but I see it as a bone that blizz throws to the fans in the crowd, the competitive community may be the most vocal but everyone else has a voice too.
That said, for better or worse the code has been cracked and its the natural course to optimize( the fun out of )everything.
I’d say it really took off in the later half of Wrath.
Official hardmodes, heirlooms, large reduction in time to level, BoA shoulders enchants, zerg aoe dungeons, GDKPs become rampant, arena (started in TBC), achievements (like ones exclusive to clearing heroic raids, etc.).
Mid/late Wrath to me was really the transition tipping point to retail.
3.3 was also the patch with the RDF tool, which was a critical in the coffin for the social ecosystem below level cap. There were a lot of following changes that pulled WoW out of the core RPG genre, but it has to be said that I think this is one of the most critical and earliest of them.
RDF basically said ‘yeah you don’t need to socialize to fully experience the game’. IMO the MMORPG genre is basically strictly worse than cRPGs or aRPGs if you’re looking for a single player experience, so it’s tough for me to say that RDF made the game better as an artistic product, even if it did have huge mass appeal. RDF allowed players to have an inferior experience with the game, even if it was more comfortable.
Give me a Dark Souls or Baldur’s Gate 2 any day of the week before you make me play an MMO with no guild or playgroup.
This reminds me of Everquest. Before Planes of Power & Lost Dungeons of Norrath, Everquest was a run to the dungeon/raid or pay for a port from a Wizard. PoP introduced headstones that served as a “portal room” making wizard ports essentially obsolete for the most part. LDoN introduced the first iteration of what is essentially m+ dungeons.
What happened to cause Sony Online Entertainment to choose player convenience over “putting in the work and earning it”? Low subscriptions numbers. The average fan base of WoW are between their 30s and 40s, have full time jobs (and in the US that means working often 50-60 hour weeks), have a partner/family, and a life outside of video games (incl. other video games as well). Convenience is how you keep subscribers aside from exciting new gameplay (competitive gameplay tends to be more compelling than the elements of an RPG).
if you were to talk content wise, is all content in game a representation of that one difficulty setting in a raid ? Like is killing a 10 quest mob in world as hard heroic or mythic raids ?. How much of this content is not actually mythic raids .
If you look at it that way the amount of content around competitive gameplay is nearly zero. . Tts just a difficulty setting of an existing raids with scaled mobs and few extra mechanics . Its mechanics and scaling that’s it.
It was probably with the addition of arena or more focus on raiding. In classic as u can experience rn, there’s a journey to leveling. This is slowly gone in tbc and wotlk. Tbc, you literally sit in Shattrah. But I also think it was inevitable, everquest went the same until wow’s ease of access and convenience took over. Unfortunately nobody has innovated since because of how tall an order it is to make a brand new mmorpg.
First of all, this is a false dichotomy.
You are lumping way too many things into one.
WoW has never been a game dedicated to immersion, see the OG Blizzcon bear. But we did get Drustvar.
WoW hasn’t been about questing ever since we left Vanilla, because folks realized questing as an endgame activity isn’t fun.
The game and universe has great storylines! … but WoW as a MMO has always focused on gameplay first, which is what makes it feel so good in PvE.
And I have no idea what you are smoking to say that we don’t have character development in-game or in-universe!
Hint: When the OG “rush to 70” occured … is when this change took a primary and established place and made WoW a MMO that has stood the test of time.
The change occured back during TBC, and has then just been iterated and improved upon.
WoW is a traditional MMO. Not an action mmo (or a mmo-action) and it hasn’t been a MMORPG as a primary focus for decades because it made no sense to force it to be one. Folks hated attunements but loved raiding.
RPGs love things like attunements because “you work your way up to be able to face the big bad” when… folks have just for decades wanted to play the game. Not “play the tedium” of it. There’s a reason why we have a choice where to level now’a’days and don’t need to reach level 160 or 170. Because the game is better now that we can focus purely on the gameplay and have fun with it.
WoW doesn’t have a dedicated RPG fanbase and likely haven’t really ever had one.
. Tts just a difficulty setting of an existing raids with scaled mobs and few extra mechanics . Its mechanics and scaling that’s it.