Hi, guys.
I’m someone who enjoys both Retail and Classic for different reasons, respectively. One thing Classic has that is WAY better than Retail is the leveling experience. Why do you guys think this is? What makes Classic leveling so much immersive and engaging?
Because of everything retail added
I think that leveling is a major part of the Classic game.
So much so that it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that for many people the leveling journey was their entire experience with WoW, and that’s enough to enjoy the game.
The HC experience and classic speed levelers like Joana come to mind.
Later versions of the game automate major parts of traversing and exploring the game world and interacting with players, which massively detracts from immersion for that style of gameplay.
Quality of Life at the expense of Quality of Game is one way I might express that.
Retail tried to appeal to nongamers. it lost its magic when it lost the sense of danger.
although classic does have you fish for RNG items at the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Desolance, Let’s not pretend the Barrens escort elf quest doesn’t exist.
I can sum this up in a single sentence: “Lack of convenience”
For me it’s many different things.
Classic is rather challenging and difficult. It’s a struggle to manage your limited mana, and you often can’t win in fights of two or more mobs, so you have to be more careful.
In retail you just aoe everything and theres no mana management and no challenge.
In classic your experiencing the story from the first zone to the end zone, and in retail it’s all over the damn place because there’s too many zones that don’t work with the current level cap, and you are allowed to level in any zone. What an incoherent mess.
The only bad thing about classic is without a dungeon finder, it’s almost impossible to find dungeon groups for non 60 dungeons, but w/e once you hit 60 it’s very easy to find dungeons and raids.
Because it matters.
For me it might be different to other players.
I miss the Warcraft in Warcraft. Warcraft used to be all about factions and their place in the world, with their leaders focused on supporting their people’s survival; leaders acting as real people do.
When you quest in classic WoW, you get that real feeling of traversing this world of fantasy politics disconnected from the real world.
There are moments you rise up and become a hero, a hero acknowledged, these are rare and come together at the end of a zone or raid boss.
Retail changed all this by making WoW a Marvel Avengers saga. You are always the hero, always the chosen one, its just a bit lame for me. Also retail story moments are primarily “epic” driven with micro details oddly “heroicized” for no comprehensible reason.
And the pacing of retail is not like other MMOs, you get pushed along with no real moment to explore and soak in the world. It’s not really a MMORPG, it plays more like a checkpoint 3d adventure game.
I agree with most of the points that have been made. But I think you nailed it for me with what you said about retail feeling more like a checkpoint 3D adventure.
I’ll answer this a bit more broadly perhaps:
Vanilla WoW was a game made in 2004-2005. This is well before microtransactions had plagued game development and game design. Well before “phone apps” had tainted how games “should” be made. Games were still being made for the joy of the game… transporting us to new worlds, taking us on adventures.
It was also fairly hard. Don’t get me wrong. Vanilla wow is also a very easy game. But it’s also a very hard game (take off your glasses looking at this game from 20 years into the future). It takes time to travel places, nothing is quick, nothing instantly rewarding. You earn things through time invested into the game. You earn things through natural exploration. It feels rewarding, and at the same time sufficiently challenging but not too hard either.
The game industry changed forever in 2010 when “apps” took over. Microtransactions were already starting to be introduced into games over the years preceding, but there was a huge shift in game dev around 2010. Games not only optimizing for microtransactions and recurring revenue, but also to a new audience of gamer. Pushing out the old school gamers in favor of a more casual, accessible, distracted, ADD gamer who plays primarily on their phone (have you seen how much revenue Candy Crush brought in for Activison Blizzard King??? Go look. You’ll understand why they don’t care about Warcraft once you see the numbers).
You can see this as Blizzard released SC2 around this time, and is arguably the last “pure” game they made. Every game and release since then has been designed around generating revenue for Activison Blizzard. It’s not enough to sell a game once for $50, or even to sell a game for $50 with a $15/mo sub. No no. The game must be designed to get there customer to open their wallets and spend more money.
That’s where the development and design resources were allocated. Not making the game, but rather optimizing on revenue for their shareholders.
Sadly this mentality plagued gaming at large imo. There’s still pure games out there (BG3 comes to mind) but many games today are so watered down, not exciting, not innovating, and are optimized to milk your dollars.
Where this relates to retail wow? I just don’t think they really care about the players game experience. They care about how to get you to spend more money in game. They add safeguards and guard rails to make things easier, to make things have more instant gratification, designed to keep you hooked and ideally spending more money. I realize that M+ and such is out there and not for the novice player, which could be a counter argument. However I still believe that at large it comes down to how development resources are allocated, and what matters the most to the execs and shareholders.
Sadly this isn’t just seen in WoW. Perhaps I’m just a jaded old dwarf… but the state of the video game industry since 2010 has been on a consistent decline. There’s a reason indie games had such a massive impact during this time too — they are typically games made for the sake of the game. People miss that and want that. We just won’t see it from these big blockbluster studios anymore (save you a rare game like BG3, or maybe a new GTA entry, or what have you).
You are comparing a game that the story is made based on LotR from JRR Tolkien vs a game that the story is designed by some random LGBT zoomers.
Technically, retail is a game, people login, teleport to a dungeon, kill the monsters. Vanilla is a world, people have to run to a dungeon, in order to finish a quest, may have to travel to different maps for specific purpose that is because how the real world looks like.
Vanilla is Game of Thrones 1-4 with based on well-received novels. Retail is obviously GoT 5-8, the story is made by the directors in hours, how do we expect the stories to be good?
But anyway, some people don’t care at all about the story or the stuff/grindings that make players run around the world, they just want to kill monsters. I highly doubt if any zoomers would appreciate another BRM map or BRD dungeons. Blizzard doesn’t have the ability to write such a story/lore in 2024, no one can, that’s Tolkien’s legacy.
Takes more then 2 brain cells to level in classic is my guess lol.
I would have to say that it’s the community and no flying. That’s why I like classic leveling.
The community is a double edged sword in that regard.
I found my recent classic toon, a mage, hit a brick wall around level 25 - every quest I had was elite, dungeon, or otherwise impossible to solo.
Which is where other players come in, as it should be.
… Except that’s kinda hard given the low population of OCE servers. It would have been fine when Classic was fresh, and everyone was doing those quests, but not years after the fact when the servers are dead.
That’s why people who smugly say “of course you can’t solo it, get a group, it’s an MMO” infuriate me so much, because they’re privileged NA players who think you can just click a button and beam a group into existence. Because in NA servers, you can. Ask a question and four of the 50+ people in your guild will come help you. “Everyone on my friends and guild list is offline” isn’t something NA players experience.
TLDR - classic levelling works well for the way it was designed, it just hasn’t aged well to account for low population servers and catching up is extremely difficult. BC onward fixed this problem. And no, I’m not asking for it to be nerfed.
I know you were making a deeper point, but i just want to point out that there are most likely easy to solo quests but you probably need to go to the ‘other’ zone.
This can also be done with 5-10 starting zones and the 10-20 ones as well, which is highly recommended on hardcore.
In the current versions there are tons of quests to get you all the way to 60 
What you are experiencing is Disempowerment. Retail provides you with the tools and heirlooms to ZERG your way through groups of mobs with often no downtime.
Classic leveling (especially solo) also forces you to engage in improvised combat tactics such as kiting, leashing mobs and chain-CC’ing.
I disagree slightly on this. Blizz tried to appeal to people who don’t like RPGs. Thats why 90% of the game is dumbed down. Thats why they added fast twitch style gameplay like dragon riding.
I agree with the second paragraph, but your mileage may vary on the first. I for one very much enjoy cleaving through mobs as a fury warrior and looting large amounts at once in retail. I don’t so much enjoy having to drink for 30 sec after killing two mobs as a classic mage.
Again, not asking for anything to be nerfed.
I agree with ya there! If you’ve got an alchemist, definitely try to keep an ample supply of mana potions. If ya don’t have an alchemist, these can at least usually be found in chests and when fighting human enemy NPCs.
The enchanter’s mana oil is really good and so is the lesser sagefish. If you’re not feeling like fishing, then definitely keep a stack of stam+spirit food on hand.
I like rushing into Arcane Concentration for early leveling and maybe even Arcane Meditation just to help with sustain. Then from there branch into your element of choice. (Yeah, 0.5 sec longer cast times till then lol).
Yeah, I’ve literally never run into the problem this poster is referencing: