Man, if they ever made a classic leveling experience with modern graphics and xmog, I’d never touch retail again outside of the new story content.
But as someone who does log into classic at times to level characters, I’m going to be honest, it’s not the same. I want that experience, but I want it to look new and feel new, I want new content to come with it.
Replaying an old game, one that has nothing left to explore, isn’t what the OP is talking about.
I do not believe so simply because it was not so much the state of the game as the state of the player base. The game back then by todays standards would be seen as very easy with a raid or die attitude. Players now complain plenty about it having a raid or die attitude with not enough casual content… it was definitely not in a better state by those metrics back then. So no, this game will never recapture that feel because the players themselves have changed.
WoW was garbage in TBC tbh lol. People today would lose their s**t if some of the stuff you had to do in TBC was in SL.
But no, WoW will never be the same as back then as gaming as a whole isn’t like that anymore.
Your tokens, store transmogs and paid carries are here to stay.
Hunters feeding their pets was great class flavor. Though overall it was just annoying if you didn’t care about the rp factor. I think they should add it back but don’t tie it to your characters performance. Like a little icon that your pet is happy or hungry but doesn’t do anything if you just want to play the class for raiding
Pallies doing their mount quest chain, Shaman doing their totem quests, Hunters taming a pet to learn a new attack to teach to their main pet… I loved this. But not every class had truly unique flavour and instead of expanding they took it all away.
Levelling was a challenge. Dinging a level in the 50s meant something. I went to TBC at 59 on a toon and it was brutal. I regretted it but didnt go back. I pushed to 60 and geared through dungeons.
I remember getting the ship to (somewhere) when wanting to run Deadmines and jumping off and swimming because it avoided a higher level zone.
Lots of it was hard just because of bad design but there was flavour. Now its all the same and gear dictates everything. If we dont have purples while levelling we are doing it wrong.
There is so much which would still be good.
I would hard disagree with that. It’s a better game than retail I’m sure it would be doing better than retail.
Ya no… I’m absolutely sure that won’t happen. The same way I will never think that way about bfa even though I played the crap out of it.
The past two expansions have been abominations they need to fix the game design going forward.
There are only 2 things that make WoW good at any given moment:
The big aspect was the playerbase was huge and they were all horrible
The concept of “so many choices” for talent literally only mattered cuz everyone was horrible and didnt know what the best talents were, moment you got decent at the game it was just pick the best talents 0 choice involved
The new talent trees just got rid of the illusion of choice, cuz we still just taking whatevers best
So no, the game won’t get that level again cuz the games information is too wide spread
When have i asked for things to change? I don’t understand some of you guys its crazy that SOME ppl put words in my mouth like jesus just read and ive said multiple times if you read that i do play classic and enjoy it a little more than retail
That illusion of choice is a myth. Sure there will be a best spec and rotation for each interaction for your character in the game but this spec isn’t as good on this fight as this fight so you still had to choose what you want wanted to be good at,
Or even leveling for example im in my 20s as a rogue in tbc and my talent choices are take extra parry and dodge or a shorter cd on my sprint where one will keep me in combat longer but one will cut down on travel distance.
What I am getting at is that talent choices did matter a lot and did provide different meaningful things for where you wanted to put your points into.
They could easily make the game as fun and even more fun than it has ever been. But they are going to have to fire whoever has been designing the game since legion.
Wod sucked because it came after mop and MoP was great. There was major prunes going into wod from mop that made the gameplay way worse.
Wod was basically what bfa was too legion.
Going from wod to legion, the whole game got a major re work in gameplay and some how in legion classes did feel good to play.
I’m talking every class was fun in legion. It felt like everything was well thought out and it felt like a final form of the classes almost.
Even if they weren’t the same amazing classes and gameplay I remember from MoP it was still good all around.
It feels to me the classes have only had scraps left from legion… the game is still basically legion… but some how they have just made every class worse since legion…
They need to invest their money resources into a major legion style rework and that’s what I’m hoping they did for the next expac
I couldnt agree more
You can never replicate a new discovery. Wanting to just sets you up for disappointment.
Yea you are right… i just wish i couldve experienced it back then, nothing i can rly do now
Yeah, no it wasn’t. Leveling was excruciating in both of those. You need look no further than the fact that in the next two expansions (Cata and MoP) they lowered the “new” levels to only 5 per expansion. There was a reason for that.
Leveling has been a MUCH better experience since WoD (one of the few things WoD did RIGHT) and that was carried on since then. So, yes, it’s a good experience NOW. Back then it SUCKED.
“Casual” and “solo” players are not necessarily the same thing. Don’t conflate them.
I disagree, I feel like the game is more casual than it has ever been. There was a time when getting high-end gear could only be done through raiding or some SERIOUS PvP grinding.
Now there are other sources. Dungeon grinding was unheard of back then for gear. You did dungeons to get enough gear to start raiding and then you just didn’t do dungeons anymore. And even now, you can do dungeons for one piece of gear and completely convert that gear to a tier piece, completely skipping the idea of trading entirely.
The game wasn’t casual back then. It was about as anti-casual as you could get. You geared up ONE character and you played that, and if you didn’t, you’d fall behind and your guild would drop you from raiding, and you weren’t likely to get back in. Your choices then were sit and wait for the next raid or next expansion, find another guild that maybe wasn’t as far into the raid as your current guild, or start leveling a different character and hope you could get a “fresh start” the next time one popped up.
And here folks, are those “rose-colored glasses”.
No, TBCC is NOT a better game than retail. It was good when it launched because we didn’t know better. Today, it’s just crap. Wrath was only SLIGHTLY better when it launched, but the leveling was horrible. The only saving points were the dungeons and raids were pretty good overall (Ulduar and ICC were actually amazing raids), but OVERALL, TBC and later Wrath were not as good as what came after that.
I don’t disagree with the idea that the game needs fixing going forward, and that 10.0 really needs to knock it out of the park to make up for ALL the missteps they’ve made in BfA and SL. However, to say they were “abominations” is some REALLY hard hyperbole.
What really happened in BfA and SL is they had a story to tell, and rather than making the game good while telling it, they decided to carry over a lot of what they had done in Legion as far as gameplay went, tweak it a little bit, and run with it. This was where they misstepped. They saw people liked the Mage Tower, so they tried to make Torghast emulate that. Didn’t work, and they ended up changing it. Twice. They kept the same system of grinding a currency (AP to AP to AP) to level “something” up. Players called them out on it this time and they changed that in SL. They tried to get away from tier sets and instead game us a weird gem system (they didn’t bother to include Jewelcrafters in in any way, because screw professions, apparently) that players didn’t like and they scrapped it after one patch.
But if you compare ALL of that to what TBC and Wrath had COMBINED, it was still more overall content, AND still more customization attempts than they ever gave us back then. They TRIED.
Your biggest problem is really that they FAILED. Agreed. But if you aren’t giving them credit for the ATTEMPT, then you are just selling Retail short and loading WAY too much praise on your “simpler time”.
Simpler is not always “better”.
Enhance was more fun than it was previously, but once you lost the weapon(s) the gameplay was missing something.
Enhance is finally getting to the point where it’s good WITHOUT that crutch. I’m sure there are other specs like that as well (and some that still need those tweaks to get them there).
How is that any different from what we have today? People will all jump to the meta spec regardless of personal preference just to chase a score on warcraft logs.
For retail?
Nope. Never.
Not unless they shut down this E-sports fad.
The population in the game has also changed. Back in those days it was easy to tell who the “children” were in chat and gameplay by the way they acted. Now, many people have moved on, and many of the children have grown older, but did not grow up.
Blizzard created a system that is supposed to give a player 3 choices per layer that are all supposed to be roughly equal to each other.
I can’t think of too many specs where they’ve achieved that even on a single layer (though you could argue some layers are just different forms of movement or personal healing).
With the Talent Trees, it was MUCH easier to completely mess up your character and make them so weak as to be unusable and it was (at first) harder to fix them. This system is BETTER, but Blizzard needs to do a better job on making each layer of each spec more equal. Some of the powers on some layers are just obviously the “right” one to pick.
I would also add to this it’s harder to spot them because of how easy it is to pop in and out of groups, and the lack of necessity to even talk to your team. I just did a dungeon today where no one typed a single word in chat. Just plowed through the content and disbanded.
The burning crusade wasn’t bad. Wrath was good but it was also the start of all this crap you hate.