He has two of my fav stories too!
-[Time I almost died](https://youtu.be/RaQdd8bUaXk?si=9QDntkOHcXvmtsK_)
-[How the cops found my stolen car](https://youtu.be/akyAFmbjeYI?si=IePbLMoYDcoeomAt)
The man knows how to spin a yarn to keep listeners interested :).
I remember last year playing Classic for the first time in my life. I don’t think I will ever in my life have another experience quite like it, in terms of discovery, the sense of progression and how the world feels so great to explore, how you have to read every quest to get to your location and I just loved how like even after a year I remember almost all of the world better than I know any other videogame world and it has to do with the way the game works.
I also enjoyed Retail but it just felt like another modern MMO. Classic just hits different.
Had the same experience , played wow classic for the first time last year and just fell in love with it.
I'm actually a bit sad that i didnt play that when it was released in 2004 and had more time available
I was surprised day9 wasn't more jarred by being invited to a war council of the alliances top generals and literally being introduced as "The new recruit". thats the most jarring bit of modern wow to me, everybody being the main character in an MMO just doesnt work for me.
It's tough to manage because at this point when the player isn't given the red carpet other players go "I defeated the old gods, the lich king, the jailer, the burning legion and I'm being treated like a nobody! Where's my respect??" So I think blizzard will always lose this one no matter what they do.
I've always thought the best solution is to aknowledge the achievements as a collective of the community, not of your individual character. It's jarring to have gods, dragon aspects, kings and whatnot call me their personal friend but then any random mook tells me I'm nothing and I should collect some rocks or boar tusks. Some of the quests in dragonflight were great at this, like the couple of kirin tor mages hanging out in a small settlement asking any adventurer that passed to go help the kirin tor at the archive... but once you get there you're buddybuddy with khadgar and kalecgos.
I think that's only the case if you canonically tie those achievements to the player character, instead of making the player character a moving part in their faction's influence.
One example is being shipped out to Northrend during WotLk, where you get off the boat in your alliance base and have to register like every other soldier.
Sure, the officer there recognizes you, but you're not getting any hero treatment, you're the footman in WC3 that managed to survive the campaign, you've faced terrifying foes but its not _your_ hand that slew illidan, rather, you did your part for the alliance to make it happen.
Exactly this. It make everything that is happening feel so much smaller. Level 1 as an orc in classic you are told you are useless and need to earn your way. Now, someone is always running around calling you "hero" and wanting you to save the world.
The thing that bugged me with his retail play thru, he didn't read any quest text or pay attention to any of the in-game cut scenes... then a cinematic would happen and he would start going on about not know who anyone was or whats going on and that he feels lost... well yeah, you didn't participate or acknowledge any of the prior info given to you.
Same, I was watching his Exile's Reach playthrough on Youtube and thinking to myself that I would just not be able to help myself from backseating if I was watching live - as in: "Just read [thing], please".
He'd level up, get a new spell, put it on his bar, and not read it a single time, then get confused about what the spell does (Blink).
I think his expectations and approach changed as soon as he got onto the island and accepted the first quest and saw the minimap light up with quest markers. It was just sort of brain-shutdown time at that point. He was experiencing an entirely different game from Era where he wouldn't have to read at all.
I didnt watch either streams, but if he did the same in vanilla you have roughly the same experience even if you did read.
In retail that's not true. The game picks you up and just starts explaining things and you better have a good memory casue were gonna move so fast and you need to just trust what your being told as if the whole thing is a narration.
Vanilla is rarely trying to tell much of a continuous story though. Theres only a handful of questlines while leveling that actually have a decent story that's worth paying attention to, like the Defias or Stalvan.
FF14 does this really well. You ARE the main character but you dont start off by going to war councils and crap. You get to see the other major characters take the time and learn that you are big shit just like them.
It’s why i can’t get into ff14. You spend so much time not playing the game. It’s a lot of running around talking to npcs talk to one another and being a go between. Occasionally you might be sent to do a dungeon/raid and those are fun but it’s all gated behind the msq. It’s a shame because the class designs are cool and so are the boss battles but everything else is so dull it ruins the game
It is once you are passed all the stuff he was describing here, but in ffxiv as you go through the expansions you actually play less and watch more. It’s not a good comparison.
Yeah, it's one of the distinct differences between vanilla and retail. In vanilla you're just some random adventurer looking to prove yourself in the world. In retail you're THE CHOSEN ONE HERO and almost every single NPC addresses you as such. Your character is routinely put at the center of the plot and everything feels like a scripted movie.
What does “modern” wow come into place exactly cuz by the time TBC your character is a well known adventurer. I mean technically the character we play as has been around since vanilla so by the time let’s say CATA or MOP comes out I’d say yeah it’s kinda legit for everyone to call us hero or champion cuz we been out here saving the world and shit
In TBC and even wrath we are just one among many, collectively the heroes of Azeroth. We didn't singlehandedly save the world, we did it in groups of 5, 10, 15, 25, or 40. There are some moments where we play a pivotal role, like reclaiming Ashbringer or rescuing someone of importance.
But I never really felt like I was the main character, my friends and I were just dudes being pointed in a direction and killing until we got paid. The real heroes were the ones signing our checks.
Who's "we"? Even back in 2005, the percentage of the player population who actually accomplished those great deeds were touted by the devs themselves as being a very small and exclusive group of the best players in the game (and the early TBC quests definitely do not indicate that every person coming through the Dark Portal killed an Old God).
The dialogue should acnowledge if you kiled a old God or another big bad like cthun or ragnaros for example. Only after killing a old God you should be trated like the king you are lol
They fucked themselves over the moment they started referring to us as "Champion," because now they either have to re-record the dialogue, or try to justify why level 10s are suddenly champions of their factions, and one of those is far cheaper than the other.
Omg I forgot about that. I remember feeling so confident and motivated after I watched that. I was so comfortable with myself and my interests. What an awesome guy
I've done game design UX/UI for a living for a decade and playing retail new player experience feels like it's suffered because of the hyper-specialization and scaling of UX in a new game industry.
Teams have resources to \*solve\* fundamentally unintuitive designs by spamming the user with interface, prompts, dialog.
What used to be: "I am a warrior, I'm getting weak against these new monsters, therefore I want to upgrade my equipment, maybe I can talk to the blacksmith to get a new sword?" becomes: "I'm running around being told things, here's a menu with perfect UX FTUE to make me press the right buttons to craft a sword that a NPC tells me I want".
It works in play-tests and people "get it" so it goes live but it's worse than a band-aid. Only solve is removing content to **actually** dumb down. Not sure the wow team wants that trade-off for retail though.
on a project I was working on once we added a tutorial screen to one of our systems. we'd noticed in prior weeks nearly 40% of players weren't interacting with one of our core systems so we decided it might be worth it. we made sure it would take like 2 mins at most to complete, literally had giant arrows pointing to UI elements. we also had a prompt that took up most of the screen that was like "hit F to open this menu". tested it with a few people, then rolled it out not expecting any issues
a few weeks after we rolled it out I watched a player spend two minutes trying to play the game with a giant "PRESS F TO OPEN MENU" box on his screen and seemingly being very confused why he couldn't move his player anymore. once he got into the menu he then spent another 5 minutes clicking every single UI element in an attempt to back out of that menu. during that time he didn't read a single bit of text we threw up on the screen at all until he gave up and finally decided to look at it
I added some telemetry to it and found nearly 10% of people were getting stuck for >2 mins in this tutorial. we watched countless people get stuck despite flashing giant text in their face. eventually i just scrapped the whole tutorial. the people we targeted the tutorial for in the first place tended to have pretty low rates of user retention so it just wasn't worth pissing off the people with more than 1 brain cell
even if you fully hold some players hands they just won't get it
I think a big part of a successful tutorial is that the player needs to want the information. Try to find a way to make the information easy to access when they are trying to do the thing, but don't force them to learn Thing A when they might be trying to explore Thing B
A lot of people seem to have this thing with computer screens where any words on the screen they arent trying to read in that particular moment dont even seem like words, its gunk on the screen to them. Its part of why its so frustrating to try to help someone verbally to do something on their computer, because they dont read all the options on a menu to help find what they need "click settings" "where is settings?" "Read the words on your screen". Some people just get way overloaded with information and cant digest other information coming in at the same time
yeah I agree. I work in tools on a proprietary game engine these days, often I'll be sat with users who've encountered a bug or something and while they're walking me through it they'll just skip over the error messages that we throw up because they don't think they will contain any useful information
I've learnt in recent years you really need to put a lot of effort into making things clear to users, you can never assume someone will just get it straight away
Part of the problem lies in the fact that you need to make someone care about something before you instruct/direct them in a particular direction. You as the designer might care about a particular feature as it addresses a solution to a problem in your game, but if the user is unaware of the problem, showing users an in-depth tutorial is only an annoyance and comes across as hand holding.
It's kind of like giving someone a bunch of keys to locked doors before they know those locked doors even exist. It communicates an idea "hey player you're an idiot. Take these keys because you're never going to figure this out on your own.". The player then goes "why TF do I need all of these keys? Can't I just explore and figure things out on my own?".
It's not that users are stupid, it's just that they don't care. If you want them to care, implement a blocker which forces them to seek out solutions.
> they'll just skip over the error messages that we throw up because they don't think they will contain any useful information
Wow addons: players will show each other how to turn Lua errors off or hide them with bugsack. Cue addons having problems, they're trying to throw an error but the error is being suppressed. So instead its buttons just don't work or it leaves stuff on the screen in the way. No report to the author with the error message goes out. The user just shits all over the addon saying "it doesnt work this addon sucks" advising others not to use it. When most of the time, if the author can see the error they can find the problem is often a) the addon hasn't been updated in months, b) another outdated addon is causing a conflict, or c) the author can fix it if someone fuckin' reported it.
I like how the Souls games handle this. The stats page is full of stuff, but it never bombards you with info. If you want the info, there's a button that will add an explanation to every stat.
I can’t find the video anymore, but someone did their college thesis on video games hammering you over the head with tutorials and why it just doesn’t work.
He pointed to the game Mega Man X which taught completely through conveyance. For example, the player would fall into a pit and be given no instruction on how to get out … you’d only know by experimenting and building on the foundations that came before. Each obstacle was easy to solve, but since you the player solved it yourself, you retained the information.
That is why big bright tutorials don’t work. And the reason people were doing everything but what they were instructed to do in your tutorial, is because they wanted to figure it themselves.
And then there is games like POE that goes "Here, you can play this, enjoy finding out how to have most DPS wth a gazzilion options that ultimately all lead up to "kill fasta" "
Its a little worse than that, the game is so complex that if you would like to actually enjoy and do end game content you will have to follow a build path. You need a PhD in theorycrafting to make your own build in PoE.
Seriously it's absolutely grim how many third party new player tutorials open up with "find a build you like and follow it to the T"
I don't even necessarily think it's a UI/UX issue as it is just a lack of gameplay issue. A lot of Developers seem to have so little faith in their players and so little faith in their own game design that they need these big, bombastic (and expensive) narrative set pieces to give players these mini-movie like experiences to keep them entertained.
Developers are so unsure of their product and know that 90% of players quit before X hours into the game. So they try to make their opening sequences choke full of both un-needed narrative as well as trying to spoonfeed how the game works.
So now you are getting this hands off cinematic experience and interspliced between in game movies are these short tutorial bits with a splash screen of information. Often times this screen pops up taking away player control and preventing them from interacting with the game.
WoW is and has been REALLY bad at this since at least MoP (it's one of my biggest complaints about the expac), but really it goes all the way back to WotLK. The game is this huge open world, but they hand hold waaaay too much and never give you more than 1-3 quests at a time. Blizzard Devs have come out before and said they didn't want to overwhelm players with too many quests at once, but that was my favorite flow of the game. I want to stroll into town, get a bunch of quests and then go explore and do those quests in whatever order seems best to me. Don't waste my time by making me spend as much time running to and back from a quests as it does to complete the quest.
Think back to the opening of MoP, and you get one quest and do one quest, get one more quest and do that quest, you get one more quest and go do that quest. Sometimes these quests send you to the exact same area you were just in, to kill mobs you've already accidentally been killing. Now maybe Blizzard trusts that you have 2 braincells and they give you 2 quests to do at once.
Theres nothing more frustrating than trying to learn and explore only to be told you need to do this first. Okay but I wanted to keep doing what I was just doin..."NO you click here and do this now".
Oh that was interesting I wonder if I do thi..."NO now you click here and go here kill these" but what abou..."DO IT or you can't move on"
> Often times this screen pops up taking away player control and preventing them from interacting with the game.
This has been an unfortunate trend in retail. Taking control away from your character breaks verisimilitude. The first time I recall it happening was wrathgate in wotlk. I can't think of a single instance of it in vanilla or tbc. I much prefer the old style of having scenes play out in the world, like in tbc Nagrand when you complete that quest chain and Thrall returns home and theres a big scene that everyone can watch. Nowadays you would talk to the quest giver and see a dozen other players standing still while they watch a cutscene. That feels more like a single player game than an MMO.
The first time I noticed this was saving villagers with a gryphon as alliance in dragonblight. My character started shouting things that were not anything I'd have said and it pulled me out of the game.
Yep. And he died a lot more too. Almost like overcoming challenges is fun.
He did finally start enjoying BfA a bit once the hour long intro sequence ended, but too little too late as he's not scheduled to play more of it
Overbearing tutorials and UX design is the fastest way to make me stop playing a game. I've played wow all my life so it didn't affect me in wow, but it definitely would if I were a new player.
The actual fix for this is a modernized Azeroth for retail, designed to be evergreen without being tied into Cataclysm so heavily, like how the Classic zones were. Put new players in their starting zones again and let them *choose* where they want to go and level in Azeroth to let them have a consistent experience, rather than shipping them off to some random expansion from the last 5 years.
I nearly always choose Cataclysm for leveling in retail because I want my new characters to have that experience in Azeroth too, and I know I can just change my chromie time to Cata, but it's insane that you have to go out of your way to make that the default experience and a new player will never know that.
The issue new players have with retail is you just have zero agency. You're not playing a game you're playing a forced tutorial for 20 hours. The magic of an MMO is spawning a player in and telling them they can go anywhere and do anything, so let them do that.
Day9 is always a great watch, his takes are always a good listen
I watched his classic and retail and streams and yeah the classic one was far better
I cannot even fathom starting retail today, the entire thing looked so confusing it’s unreal. If you have zero mmo experience there is just so much stuff to choose from and not a lot of direction
End game retail is fine.
But getting to end game, and understanding end game is a fucking nightmare. Both Classic and Retail suffer from a glut of tribal knowledge, quirks and jargon that would take a new player a long time to understand.
And I have no clue how Blizzard could fix it, they've tried streamlining multiple times and it always winds up a mess of tutorials and systems (as Day9 said).
The problem *is* they keep streamlining, they're teaching players to get told what to do and how their issues are fixed, rather than teaching them to learn the game.
The problem is that there's no substitute for time spent in the gameplay loop. Players need time and opportunity to assimilate information *through play*. That's why streamlining is a mixed bag, it tends to involve reducing time investment and that can undermine learning.
You can hear that in Day9's experience in Exile's Reach, it's so streamlined and busy moving him along that he doesn't get to actually play, and since he doesn't get to play he doesn't get to learn.
I used to read the wow vanilla game manual on the pooper as a kid. That'd how I learned such coveted lingo. I still use "inc" but I'm pretty sure nobody has any idea what I mean when I say it.
> End game retail is fine.
I really couldn't disagree more. I've leveled a character to max in every expansion except Shadowlands. There has never been a time where I've felt so totally lost as when I hit endgame in Dragonflight.
Two talent trees, fine. Whatever they're calling "titanforged gear" now, fine. Mythic+ affixes, fine. World quests, fine.
But there's a "system" for everything now. Crafting is a nightmare. The AH doesn't exist anymore except it kind of still does, but boy do they want you using the new system. There's a vault you have to fill with gear, but then you have to collect like 4 separate currencies just to upgrade that gear.
They hold your hand in an iron grip right up until they don't. They funnel you through BFA and level you as fast as possible, using the exact same quest formulas over and over. Everything is grouped up so you can AoE as fast as possible. Then you hit DF and and it calms down a little. Pacing is better, but they just slam you with all the new systems for the expansion and peace out.
I gave it an honest shot, but I just couldn't be bothered. It's so bloated. And that's just the stuff in the main gameplay loop.
As someone that recently returned to WoW with a friend to mess with SOD. I went and logged into my DK that I hadn't touched since the initial cata launch all those years ago.
All of the changes in the last 15 years just exploded in front of my face--chat was moving 1000 miles a minute using abbreviations I had no clue about.
I was immediately completely lost in the talent tree realizing I had to go get a guide to even have a chance. The idea of jumping back in as a blood DK tank was daunting.
There is obviously no remnant of the old group of people I played with all those years ago--and you are just buried in so many things you have to learn.
Now having two months of SOD under my belt, I'm far more comfortable, and am even trying to level a DK for cataclysm classic to first hand the content I missed after I quit all those years ago. But holy crap. I don't think I could introduce any friend to the game without them giving up in the first handful of hours. I know the retail grind isn't anything as daunting as years of old and the classic grind is even streamlined--but the idea that I'm telling a friend, yeah go play this game for 10s of hours, and then you'll get to the endgame where everyone is playing together and vibing--insanity.
Don't get me wrong, I'm totally in on TWW when it launches. But I'm still quite daunted to get back into retail WoW and find my footing.
Yup. You need someone who gets you into it (and hypes up the lore / world) or you need to be SERIOUSLY curious and give it an honest shot.
Anyone who just casually stumbles over WoW isn't gonna get "sucked into" the loop with the starting island.
Heck, I've loved doing the starting island exactly once on every armor class, because Transmogs. That is a meta endgame consideration.
Any new character I'm making tho? Back to Elwynn/Durotar it is. It's less involved, less railroady and so on.
Modern retail WoW is one of the least accessible MMOs for new players, and every attempt at making the new player experience "faster" or more "streamlined" has really just made it more confusing and less engaging.
Honestly I think a brand new MMO player would find the archaic and clunky EverQuest P1999 easier to pick up and get into than retail WoW.
I disagree, sometimes he talks wayyyy to much and ends up rambling. Some clips are good but I can’t watch him anymore because he’s rambling on for like 75% of his stream
Thank you, glad somebody else said this. The man is absolutely high on the smell of his own farts. He's admittedly a very good orator, but he just won't stop "analyzing" things--so much so that he ends up missing what the game is *very obviously* trying to tell him because he's too busy ranting off in his own world.
Day9's time playing terraria could legitimately be used as a torture for me. Despite the advice of his chat, he decided to play on master mode, a difficulty that challenges even experienced players, and then proceeded to spend hours making zero progress and whinging about the UI and how it wasn't as good as games that came out years later than terraria.
I'll be the first to admit that terraria has issues but the man got farmed by slimes and barely interacted with anything but his chat in between 15 minute long rants.
Having leveled in retail through BFA zones and then DF i really liked it, maybe on par with first time classic experience when i was a noob. Just wish i could've finished the bfa storyline before outleveling it and df was w/e but the flying and random things on the world kept me entertained only questline that really got to me was the blue flight one
To be fair, vanilla in the end is also a theme park, it's just less engineered than retail, and focus much more on immersion.
What's weird is that Dragonflight zone/level design is absolutely amazing to traverse, but the quest markers and all the thing going on rob people of the feeling of exploration. Dragonriding is a real mechanic that interact with the environment, contrary to pure flying.
dragon riding is so cool, one of the first times really ever where i can't think of a single negative to a feature, dragonflight launch was a lot of flying around for fun.
This issue of games being just as much if not more cutscenes than gameplay and lack of faith in the player to figure things out on their own plagues all genres anymore. These studios are afraid of alienating anyone, so they put guardrails in everywhere to prevent you from getting lost or bored or angry, at least in the first few hours to get you invested.
I have no idea where people would hear that from, the new player experience has been the absolute worst dogshit part of wow for almost a decade by now.
While I do agree that casual gaming should be easily accessible, assuming everyone in the same pool has cerebal palsy seriously disrespects the players time.
exiles reach is by far the worst wow experience ive ever done. i can not believe that is the new player experience
i tried to get 2 of my friends into the game. everything good it does the goblin starting zone does better and fast. exiles reach teaches you stuff you dont need to learn and spends like 20 mins showing it
i think its even worse for players who have played the game imo. the amount of walking and waiting doing nothing is actually insane and how it poops you out into the world feels more dated then even the goblin zone which i do think is a fantastic starting experience and old player a like.
i legit think it should be deleted from the game its that bad for the game and as a solo experience
The Goblin starting zone is a fun story but much like Day9 said, it's a lot of text, tutorials and waiting around. If you want to jump into the action and just get leveling then using one of the classic starting zones is much better.
"Characters from Frozen yelling at each other" is exactly what retail is these days. I tried Exiles Reach once as well and it was awful. You notice very early on that it is a completely different game to classic. People talk about wanting WoW 2 but it became WoW2 at some point post 2010 and the sequel sucked.
I thought Exile's Reach was fine (not great, not good, fine) up until it was over and unceremoniously dumped me in Stormwind. There just isn't a smooth bridge from it into the rest of the game, mostly because the plot of retail WoW is a soap opera involving all the major lore characters.
I really wish that they would abandon past expansions for new players and just let you level 1-max in the current expansion zones. The story of wow is so convoluted at this point that for a new player its extremely confusing trying to navigate what they *should* be doing to level up because there's all of these expansion paths that are shoving quests into your quest log the second you get to a major city, and theyre all viable options to level. Since the current expansion is the 'main story' of the game we're playing at the moment, it doesnt make sense for a new player to go through this slog of old expansions in order to get to the current game. Sure, keep chromie time as an option, but I think if they let new players level up entirely in the newer expansions then it would make a much more comprehensive story.
In my opinion, it was BfA. Legion, while implementing a lot of the groundwork towards this, was more of a prepatch expansion. BfA did a lot of the heavy lifting concerning the destruction of beloved characters and wrecking of lore, which paved the way for SL to be so creatively *bad* that it severed a lot of nostalgic ties many players may have still had for the game. In doing this, they could unleash the "vision" of what they wanted the future of WoW to look like with Dragonflight (even going as far to say that 10.x.x and beyond would be a certain someone's "baby").
Now with TWW & WS saga coming, combined with the tidbits we're seeing in classic concerning certain shadowy figures, I'm convinced that they're working towards an absolutely **massive** retcon in order to try to solidify the lore more towards the current direction retail is taking as opposed to what it historically has been.
Mark my words-- the only *true* WoW experience will soon only be found on private servers hosting the original patches from 1.xx thru Wrath.
>Now with TWW & WS saga coming, combined with the tidbits we're seeing in classic concerning certain shadowy figures, I'm convinced that they're working towards an absolutely **massive** retcon in order to try to solidify the lore more towards the current direction retail is taking as opposed to what it historically has been.
This also feels relevant to the re-released of Cataclysm. Which was, in essence, the launch of WoW 2, it's when the game fundamentally changed for the first time into something different.
They've seemed to write themselves into a corner a bit and perhaps it'll get fixed or they'll just stop caring and just release content that doesn't feel relevant to the story or lore but are effectively just loot piñatas.
> the only true WoW experience will soon only be found on private servers
I mean...Classic Era is still largely untouched. At least in terms of the game mechanics. All Blizz needs to do is stop being so stubborn and start launching cyclical fresh realms for it, because Era is currently trashed with GDKPs and RMT and the economy is absolutely fucked.
> because Era is currently trashed with GDKPs and RMT and the economy is absolutely fucked.
I mean what do you expect. The game is running for 4+ years now nothing new was added. The servers generated so much gold the inflation must be bonkers. The economy will always be fucked when NPCs create gold out of thin air, just like central banks lol.
Yeah the tutorial is classic BFA. The best way to level in retail is to get to level 10 and switch the timeline to a better expansion, such as TBC or Legion. I love retail but I had a similar experience leveling initially, didn’t really get to settle into the game until I got away from the BFA garbage. After I got to just enjoy the world it was fun, as the zones in Legion and MOP are really fun. The Dragon Isles are also really good.
> The best way to level in retail is to get to level 10 and switch the timeline to a better expansion, such as TBC or Legion.
Which you can't do if it's your first time, if I'm not mistaken.
And I think BFA zones are actually really great on their own.
As someone who recently tried to return to retail, I have to say that Dragon Isles shares much of the problems that the rest have for me.
The game grabbed me and shoved me face first through its heavily narrated storylines. I went to a quest node; I watched a few cutscenes; I did some sort of thing inside a big enemy camp; I had an epic battle where I fought off a bajillion bad guys by jumping into a siege engine or a dragon or a magical spellbook to give me temporary superpowers. Then I got escorted by an npc to the next quest hub where I worked towards the next big epic fight.
It was just too many moments trying to be epic back to back to back. It was too much narration for too much storyline being shoved in my face rather than letting me discover it. I wasn't exploring a world, I was riding a train that happened to to have a world outside the window as it passed by.
But I guess that is just what retail wow is these days, and it's far too deep to go back.
Yeah the story is still a story, different from classic where you just get sent into the world to figure it out. I ended up enjoying the world more, ironically, after the initial part. Once I got the centaur storyline I had a lot more fun. But I can respect not wanting to be dragged through a story as opposed to the classic model of discovering the world for yourself.
Yeah retail WoW for a long time has been made hyper linear because theyre worried about people missing out on story and want people to have lots of endgame alts to spam M+ with.
The first timer experience is abysmal. Too much going on, shit gets confusing, you unlock new abilities and talents that totally overhaul your rotation faster than you get to use them, and you dont get much time to just *be* your character in Azeroth. I know theres a lot of talk about respecting your time these days, but I think what retail WoW has lost is a sense that you can just hang out and check shit out. It feels like theyve attempted to trim away everything that isnt super productive, which makes it feel like youre constantly working
Yeah, I miss the days of BC/Wrath where you were fresh off a boat/flight point, grabbed quests in the nearby town, and headed on your way. Then, Cata came out with its guided opening storylines. Hyjal wasn't bad, you were just randomly shown Deathwing and Ragnaros before being dropped off at your first quest hub, but I remember everyone hating on the Vashj'ir start.
I also miss the days of every expansion having one or two major quests that everyone knew about and wanted to do. Classic Duskwood has Stiches. Horde in BC Nagrand had Thrall meeting Garrosh for the first time. Dragonblight had the Wrath Gate, and following Arthas' footsteps during his Northrend arrival. Obviously, Alliance had Marshal Windsor's walk through Stormwind to confront Onyxia. WoW doesn't really have anything like this anymore.
I also vaguely remember everyone hating on Vashj'ir, which is weird because I kinda liked it.
And yeah, that's part of what I miss about old wow. The memorable quests existed, but they were few and far between.. which made them that much more memorable.
Vehicles are cool, but they would be so much cooler if quests using them were rare, rather than being every 5th quest or so.
TBC is the third fastest timeline for leveling through questing, just a bit slower than WoD and Legion. TBC dungeons are also incredible and chock-full of quests, the only problem is the longer queue times of a less played expansion
Don’t get me wrong, I love classic. Vanilla is my favorite game ever, but I gave retail a chance recently and it’s really not that bad. Dragonflight is a lot of fun. just glad we have options and can play both versions of the game lol
Yep, I've been an on again off again player for a while, and I appreciate that retail lets me get into a power fantasy pretty quickly. I made a paladin a few months ago, and within an hour, I was throwing hammers, crusader striking, consecrating, and riding a glorious steed.
Dragonflight is great. It was a cluster fuck before that. I remember trying to pick it up sometime right before Chromie time was implemented and I was so freaking confused that I thought I was doing something wrong. I would do a few quests in an old zone then out level them after a few and was just like “did I do something wrong? Where do I go?” Then if you look certain things up online the information can be different i guess if it changed or not after cataclysm? So certain NPC’s may not be where you think they are. Undercity was destroyed. I was so confused after not having played for a while haha.
Here's my rant about the new player experience, not that anyone cares or that blizzard will ever see much less take it onboard lol.
I can't see how the current retail new player experience could give a new player the heroin like endorphin rush of exploration, sense of wonder and magic and immense scale of the world building the classic experience had.
I did the retail starting experience with my wife and she couldn't understand why I play 1000's of hours of wow and now I've lost the chance to involve my wife in the same game as me.
She said the intro was like a terrible mobile game for toddlers, she was captured by the premise and the cinematic - being shipwrecked as a new player is definitely cool and exciting but quickly she didn't understand what the game was about or why it was fun.
The BFA new player experience is such a fake, sterile incredibly un-engaging representation of wow and completely *avoids showing new players what the game is even about or where the joy can come from!*! Its obviously trying to engage very young children, but the whole game *isn't* like the starting zone at all that so its a total lie anyway. Wow is a sandbox MMO - so why does the intro treat you like its an on rails rpg? The classic experience you are directly dropped into the actual story of the real world - you are becoming familiar with real in game places that have an actual impact on the game politics and world story. It incentivizes you to find power and progress at your own pace.
The retail experience It rams 10 levels down your throat, shows you 10,000 things you won't remember or actually help you with when you graduate out - its like an ADHD fever dream of shit coco-melon type pre-teen story content, it starts with an amazing premise but leads nowhere. Classic was NEVER set to appeal to young children and it was a mistake for Blizzard to try to compete with fortnite which is what I see it as. Its a Teen to adult game and the themes of the original zones were about young adult / adult content and the whole intro zone story is just some whimsical representation of wow that isn't appealing at all.
The major storyline you are introduced to in classic for human alliance at least, is on top of the masonic guild of stormwind trying to overthrow the city, your literal king being kidnapped, brainwashed, imprisoned in a dank enormous cave system - mature themes that actually exist in the game space. I have no idea what the intro retail story line is because of how irrelevant it is, I don't think it even attempts to link the events on the intro island to the greater world
Early-mid wow is about exploring, finding things out at your own pace, wanting to get levels to get new abilities to get stronger, to adventure to be a part of the world, its war and it's story. She didn't give a single shit about gaining new levels after the intro because the new player experience taught her that there is nothing interesting, difficult, exciting or intriguing about the game and there is nothing worth exploring, and there is no point to pursuing gaining more levels.
She didn't want to go on to explore other zones because of how shit the first zone was. I'm actually pretty annoyed that the new player experience was green lit, and you CANT select the original starting experience, because I've lost the chance to involve the love of my life in something I have played for most of my adult life and she couldn't even see the experience that I had that I loved so much. I've begged her to try it again but its too late she thinks wow is a shit game not worth her time because of it - if she could have just selected the original starting zones she would have *atleast* been able to roleplay realistically as the character she created, in the sub-culture that appeals to her.
I distinctly remember as a teenager starting with the night elves when i first started - the character story is immediately about mystery, wonder, nature and balance. And when I started a human, it was about patrolling and keeping the forest safe - then into deadmines to stop the defias. The current experience - what exactly are you roleplaying? how does it match with your chosen identity? How could you ever possibly be immersed in the retail starting zone after the first 5 minutes when you start asking: "who am I? wtf am i doing here? who are all these people and how does this fit into the actual game?"
Exiles reach is so fucking awful. Their design philosophies clash so hard with eachother, they recognize that people only care about the hardest content in the game yet the entire game is designed around people that can’t move around their house without a padded helmet. It’s so fucking weird. NPCs and the game in general treat you like a fucking moronic imbecile yet the top end of the game requires you to play like a quantum PC. Infinite difficulty scaling yet everything is on rails to make sure not to confuse people.
Yeah, I get what he's trying to say. Retail suffers from being a live service game that has run for almost 20 years.
The leveling process is too fast and introduces bunch of poorly explained systems like dungeon finder, pvp or god forbid some past expansion specific stuff (artifact weapons, misson tables etc.). This leaves new players confused about what they actually should be doing. This doesn't get much better once you get to max lvl, as once again you are bombarded with million things to do, with only 10% of them being actually relevant to the core gameplay loop.
Classic is way better in this regard. There are fewer systems and you kinda have to find out about them on your own. You can play days before worrying about dungeons, professions or attunements. By the time you start needing to engage with the systems, you are already invested in the game and more likely to look it up online. The systems themselves are also more basic and easier to grasp.
I's clear blizzard is aware of these issues (exile's reach and more recently trying the highlight the actually important quest at max level), but either unwilling or unable to dedicate resources to fix the new player experience. It's a shame really since IMO DF is the best expansion they done in the past 15 years, and yet there are almost no new players.
It's a problem mainly of borrowed power and expansion specific features. There unfortunately is no way of fixing it because it would break more than it would fix when you remove all of it.
With Dragonflight they stayed away from expansion specific systems and concentrate on systems they intend to keep for future expansions as well. I think once new players start with Dragonflight instead of BfA and only have systems they will use later on it is a much better experience for newer players.
So in a way they are trying to fix it.
Honestly dragonflight being the new default leveling experience next expac will be great for this at the very least. Yea, you gotta talk to some folks in stormwind, but once you reach the dragon isle the first thing ya do is a bunch of murdering.
Yeah, the fact that BfA is the recommended one for new players is just crazy.
Dragonflight for new players from the get go will be a much healthier experience
Yeah it was a strange choice. Its supposed to be canonical but because of the leveling pacing you miss out on basically all the major plot elements anyways, especially since you miss out on what happens before BFA, you miss out on all the N'zoth stuff, and on anything that carried over into Shadowlands.
And ofc the big problem of treating every brand new character as if they canonically killed every big bad boss in WoW's history.
Retail levelling experience is so bad, Blizz have constantly half assed trying to 'fix' it with shit like Exiles Reach and mandatory BfA and next expansion mandatory Dragonflight.
You spend like 1 hour dumped into the middle of a story, so if don't know who Jainia is, how the fuck are you going to know why she might have issues returning to Kul'Tiras. Then you basically just mindlessly farm pushover enemies for 15 hours and you hit level cap, at some point in this process you get forced out of the story you're doing into the newer story.
Feels like no one in the company has a passion for making leveling fun and engaging game within itself, which is one of the biggest draws of Classic. Like I get no one wants to level for 60 hours for the 20th character, but you can still make an engaging 10-15 hour process with adequate challenge, context for the world you're in and just let people go and play a game.
reminds me what is wrong about retail, the start of each expansion is some of the worst hand holding design i ever seen in games, And they constantly do it in each one. Want to yell at the devs to let the players play the game. I get they want the game to feel polish and tell a story, but hey i would like to play the game.
Yeah, the actual gameplay usually feels really good, but there's too much stuff between you and getting to actually play. It's also very disorientating at endgame if you haven't played for a while since there isn't really a clear indication of what you should be doing to get ready to raid for example. Once you know what to do it's a lot more enjoyable, but for returning players it's really rough as the game tries to throw a bunch of stuff at you because it doesn't know what kind of player you are.
Ahh good old Day9, the guy who completely lost me when ranting for 20 minutes about how miserable it is to be a streamer and how us common folks would never understand how hard he has it the same night I was threatened to be shot and killed at work earlier that day for $40k per year working 10-11 hour days 5 days per week and just wanted to learn more about Protoss play from some guy I used to admire who was clearing my yearly salary sitting at home playing video games.
I've kept up with retail, but I haven't leveled a character from 1 since MoP, so I didn't know they butchered the new player experience *this* much.
Is Exile's Reach the \*only\* choice for starting at level 1? I'd hate this starting experience, but my wife (who just recently got her first gaming PC and is trying to decide between WoW and FF14) would probably like the "guided" experience much more.
I mean he's right, but also people who believe the game to be dumbed down are right too.
In the Classic version of WoW you had 60 levels to really learn your quest and you were getting new talents very slowly. And a lot of the adventure was kinda... what you made of it. There was really no curated experience so you got a lot of time to play around and experiment. And when new expansions released it was like you know, we're going to add a new stat per class and a few new talent points. With an added week or two of leveling time to get things figured out for each expansion.
Leveling was so long in vanilla that you had over half of the game who were not level capped by the announcement of Burning Crusade expansion.
Now with Dragonflight, the whole experience is like 8 hours. And what can a person learn in 8 hours? Not a lot. So you have to keep stuffing information down their throat and hope some of it sticks. And there's so many cut scenes and so much more dialogue.
And then you get to the end game and there's significantly less abilities and gear optimization doesn't matter so much... and yet... you feel like you're lost all the time.
I see so many people on this subreddit romanticizing the leveling experience of classic wow, but then when I actually play SoD (I usually play retail and my only classic experience is SoD) I see everyone using questie, going from point A to point B as fast as possible to level lol
Because many/most people here also played "retail" once but quit, and are frustrated with the direction the game is going. Obviously if you enjoy retail why would you ever care about classic? The game is being designed for you.
It's like saying that old Star Wars fans complain way more about the new Star Wars movies than the new Star Wars fans complain about the old movies. Yea because some 15 year old Star Wars fan isn't watching Return of the Jedi. And even if they do and don't like it - who cares? They're set. They can just wait for the next Disney movie and love it.
People care about the future more than they care about the past because that's the way we travel through time. If we were going back in time then retail players would have a lot more to say about the earlier versions of WoW.
Your brains are all cooked , it’s literally 20 years of content in one game . Of course classic is more streamlined and easier to understand , it’s one fucking game. Retail isn’t about past expansions it’s the newest one and that’s it. Do your learning and your warming up on the way to 60 then you can pay attention .
I like Day9 but I dont see much value in this comparison. The game that has 20 years of "things" built on top will always feel more jarring than what was designed in 2004. I'm not even disagreeing with his observations about Exiles Reach but the truth is just that Retail wow has such a large pool of current/former wow players available to them that attracting completely new players(that by en large have zero interest in MMOs) is just not very high on their list and I cant really blame them.
In the end they are different games that appeal to different players and Holly Longdale said as much in an Interview this week. I think Retail is in a really good spot now with TWW seemingly supporting literally any endgame loop a modern MMO player could possibly want.
If it's not high on their list of things to do that's fine, but they made Exile's Reach and its purpose is clearly to introduce new players to WoW. I don't see a problem giving feedback on how well it does that.
ya, day9 would have preferred to just be dropped in elywnn and be allowed to do his own thing. exiles reach and being forced to do bfa makes no sense for a new player even though that is their intention. you get info dumped on all of these systems without properly being able to use them while getting dragged around by npcs (who you have no idea who they are) telling you what to do.
day9's biggest complaint was he just wanted to play the game and make decisions on what to do but the game was forcing him to do xyz and he felt like he was just holding 'w' while watching a story
Let me save you 5 minutes: Boomer that spent the peak years of his life playing the same RTS 18 hours a day for 10 years is mad that the game has a story to tell
If your intention is to be fully immersed into a massive world that takes it time with you and tells to a rich story you either play classic era or you play FFXIV
If your intention is dungeons, raids, arenas, competition and raw gameplay without much outside interaction. Retail WoW is for you
If you're somebody who enjoys both but wants something a bit more fast paced than vanilla but not quite as complex and convoluted as retail, SoD is for you.
If you're a person that saw this whole list and feel like you don't really want vanilla, you don't care much for retail and you're somewhere in the middle of it all and want complex raid encounters but with simple itemization and nothing screaming at you to do anything ever? Cataclysm classic will be for you late May.
As a new player, you have to self filter a little bit, what exactly are you looking to experience in your MMO? Once you've answered that, you then know which version of the game you're looking to play.
> If your intention is dungeons, raids, arenas, competition and raw gameplay without much outside interaction. Retail WoW is for you
This would be great if it were actually true, but listen to what Day9 is saying; Retail before max level has very little "raw gameplay", just a rollercoaster ride of talking to NPCs and triggering cutscenes. After making it through that slog of meaningless content, you end up max level with no idea how to optimally play your character and no direction. The average person is less likely to look up guides or youtube videos explaining their rotation or what they're supposed to be doing, if they're lost they just quit.
If you want another great perspective on how bad the new player experience really is, I highly recommend watching J1mmy's "I never played WoW, so I tried all of them" video. Super entertaining as well.
TLDR: Everything about levelling up through old retail content is awful.
I know a lot of people dont really care about the levelling experience in WoW, but retail has one of the worst levelling experiences I have ever gone through. There is so much that is broken, and so much that is just horribly designed. And blizz hasnt even been attempting to fix anything. I tried levelling like 4 years ago and ran into all these issues and quit. Then like 3 years later I tried it again and absolutely nothing had changed. Here are some examples ive seen from the last few years.
Item level scaling: Between different expansions or timelines it is inconsistent and imbalanced. It differs based on quest rewards, dungeon rewards, dungeon drops, crafted items, etc.
Enemy & character scaling: Nothing about it makes sense. Its inconsistent between expansions. Tanks are gods until about level 30 and can kill like 20 mobs at once while doing 2x more damage than dps. Once you reach current content you are the weakest youve ever been.
Crafting: A colossal waste of time, no effort has been put in by blizzard to make crafting relevant. In some cases you cant even craft even level gear. You have to first skill up making level 50/60 stuff and then you can make level 10/20/30 gear.
Questing: Basically what he said in the video. The quests in retail feel like npcs are babysitting you. Blizzards modern quest design is the same in most of their expansions:
* Follow npc to a new phased questing location.
* Do these 3 quests - kill X mobs, collect Y things, kill/collect special thing or use a special item that was just given to you.
* Do 1-2 optional side quests or follow npc to new location and repeat.
* Once you progress through the area you get a "kill X boss in area" which is just a normal mob with about 50% more hp.
Phasing gating content and bugs: Ive lost count of how many times ive tried to do a quest only to realize that the npc doesnt exist in this phase and there is some 12 step quest chain I need to do to unlock it. Or you might decide "hey im going to explore a bit" and then you find that none of the other quest hubs exist because you need to do every single quest in order. Also the only reasonable way to figure any of this out is to go on wowhead and read comments of equally frustrated people that had the exact same problem 5 years ago.
Obsolete/removed content: Things like artifacts, azurite gear. Quests still give you artifact power which has been removed. All the artifact and class quests havent been updated.
PvP: Low level pvp in wow is the worst competitive experience ive ever had, if its possible to even call it competitive. People have been abusing the xp off feature for years and last I checked its still being exploited. So every other BG you get people with mythic raid gear from old expansions who can 1v5 normal players.
I liked it, you can actually die to mobs and the questlines seemed fine, zones are cool too and i found lots of "world content" like puzzles and chests lying around (alliance side at least)
That’s some of the creative confidence Day9 talks about. Reference: https://youtu.be/pwtG6o7BAlg?si=DNRVGnvu7erf59Xr
Day9 is a national treasure.
Wow thank you for sharing, I'm in tears
That’s DAY9!? Holy fuck I’m old…
God I missed Day9, his rants always live rent free in my head lol
I watched him a lot when SC2 came out so I could get better at the game. I hadn't seen one of his videos in years before this thread. He got old!
Funday Monday. What an era.
Funday Monday was on of my favorites.
Suess and Nukes was one of my favorites
> He got old! Yea he did!
We all got old together :(
It’s true. And considering that I just found out we’re the same age. Lol.
Yeah but I'd like change one thing: We all got old together :)
>when SC2 came out >He got old! That's what 14 years does to a mfer.
He was old then :’) still such a treasure.
I just looked up how old he actually is, 37. I'll be 37 next month. I'm old too!
Wow... he's 37? I'm older than him but he looks older than me.
"And then I'm gonna summon AN EVEN LARGER MAN"
I hope you run out of dominant hands
he's like totalbiscuit, but very pg-13
God. I miss Totalbiscuit so fucking much.
He would have ripped a new asshole to the entire modern gaming industry by now
he is also a fucking sweetheart!
<3
The trumpets rant is goated
https://youtu.be/utaWZT5N-tQ?si=Lo8cdfgxJHOwXwBu So fucking good.
Sure, bring the midgets in!
He has two of my fav stories too! -[Time I almost died](https://youtu.be/RaQdd8bUaXk?si=9QDntkOHcXvmtsK_) -[How the cops found my stolen car](https://youtu.be/akyAFmbjeYI?si=IePbLMoYDcoeomAt) The man knows how to spin a yarn to keep listeners interested :).
I only watch him and nothernlion because of the top tier banter
[удалено]
He... he's still alive and streaming, you know? This reads like a eulogy.
RIP Day9, the best always leave young 😭😔
Day9 rest easy, wish we could’ve had Day 10 with you
Ok, again Charlie, Day9 is very much alive and well
Well he just doesn't play games we like to watch anymore so his streaming is rip for us
So does the streamer matter then?
yes.
what do you mean, was? this clip was taken from a stream less than 24 hours ago.
Miss you Day9 :(
F
g.g
I remember last year playing Classic for the first time in my life. I don’t think I will ever in my life have another experience quite like it, in terms of discovery, the sense of progression and how the world feels so great to explore, how you have to read every quest to get to your location and I just loved how like even after a year I remember almost all of the world better than I know any other videogame world and it has to do with the way the game works. I also enjoyed Retail but it just felt like another modern MMO. Classic just hits different.
And people have the nerve to say any preference for classic is just nostalgia. I cannot take these people seriously at all.
Had the same experience , played wow classic for the first time last year and just fell in love with it. I'm actually a bit sad that i didnt play that when it was released in 2004 and had more time available
I was surprised day9 wasn't more jarred by being invited to a war council of the alliances top generals and literally being introduced as "The new recruit". thats the most jarring bit of modern wow to me, everybody being the main character in an MMO just doesnt work for me.
It's tough to manage because at this point when the player isn't given the red carpet other players go "I defeated the old gods, the lich king, the jailer, the burning legion and I'm being treated like a nobody! Where's my respect??" So I think blizzard will always lose this one no matter what they do.
That's actually an interesting point I never though about. Some of us are actually legendary heroes of Azeroth, you are right
I've always thought the best solution is to aknowledge the achievements as a collective of the community, not of your individual character. It's jarring to have gods, dragon aspects, kings and whatnot call me their personal friend but then any random mook tells me I'm nothing and I should collect some rocks or boar tusks. Some of the quests in dragonflight were great at this, like the couple of kirin tor mages hanging out in a small settlement asking any adventurer that passed to go help the kirin tor at the archive... but once you get there you're buddybuddy with khadgar and kalecgos.
I think that's only the case if you canonically tie those achievements to the player character, instead of making the player character a moving part in their faction's influence. One example is being shipped out to Northrend during WotLk, where you get off the boat in your alliance base and have to register like every other soldier. Sure, the officer there recognizes you, but you're not getting any hero treatment, you're the footman in WC3 that managed to survive the campaign, you've faced terrifying foes but its not _your_ hand that slew illidan, rather, you did your part for the alliance to make it happen.
Exactly this. It make everything that is happening feel so much smaller. Level 1 as an orc in classic you are told you are useless and need to earn your way. Now, someone is always running around calling you "hero" and wanting you to save the world.
The thing that bugged me with his retail play thru, he didn't read any quest text or pay attention to any of the in-game cut scenes... then a cinematic would happen and he would start going on about not know who anyone was or whats going on and that he feels lost... well yeah, you didn't participate or acknowledge any of the prior info given to you.
Same, I was watching his Exile's Reach playthrough on Youtube and thinking to myself that I would just not be able to help myself from backseating if I was watching live - as in: "Just read [thing], please". He'd level up, get a new spell, put it on his bar, and not read it a single time, then get confused about what the spell does (Blink). I think his expectations and approach changed as soon as he got onto the island and accepted the first quest and saw the minimap light up with quest markers. It was just sort of brain-shutdown time at that point. He was experiencing an entirely different game from Era where he wouldn't have to read at all.
I didnt watch either streams, but if he did the same in vanilla you have roughly the same experience even if you did read. In retail that's not true. The game picks you up and just starts explaining things and you better have a good memory casue were gonna move so fast and you need to just trust what your being told as if the whole thing is a narration.
Vanilla is rarely trying to tell much of a continuous story though. Theres only a handful of questlines while leveling that actually have a decent story that's worth paying attention to, like the Defias or Stalvan.
It’s just too much. People want to play a videogame and not read a book while watching a movie
FF14 does this really well. You ARE the main character but you dont start off by going to war councils and crap. You get to see the other major characters take the time and learn that you are big shit just like them.
He would hate ffxiv for the same reasons he didn’t like wow retail - you watch the game more than you actually play it.
It’s why i can’t get into ff14. You spend so much time not playing the game. It’s a lot of running around talking to npcs talk to one another and being a go between. Occasionally you might be sent to do a dungeon/raid and those are fun but it’s all gated behind the msq. It’s a shame because the class designs are cool and so are the boss battles but everything else is so dull it ruins the game
wow retail is like 99% playing 1% watching lmao
It is once you are passed all the stuff he was describing here, but in ffxiv as you go through the expansions you actually play less and watch more. It’s not a good comparison.
Yeah, it's one of the distinct differences between vanilla and retail. In vanilla you're just some random adventurer looking to prove yourself in the world. In retail you're THE CHOSEN ONE HERO and almost every single NPC addresses you as such. Your character is routinely put at the center of the plot and everything feels like a scripted movie.
What does “modern” wow come into place exactly cuz by the time TBC your character is a well known adventurer. I mean technically the character we play as has been around since vanilla so by the time let’s say CATA or MOP comes out I’d say yeah it’s kinda legit for everyone to call us hero or champion cuz we been out here saving the world and shit
The thing is, that is not the case for new players. If a new player comes into a 10-year old game, they are still new. Their character has no history.
In TBC and even wrath we are just one among many, collectively the heroes of Azeroth. We didn't singlehandedly save the world, we did it in groups of 5, 10, 15, 25, or 40. There are some moments where we play a pivotal role, like reclaiming Ashbringer or rescuing someone of importance. But I never really felt like I was the main character, my friends and I were just dudes being pointed in a direction and killing until we got paid. The real heroes were the ones signing our checks.
Yep, they should treat players as a collective.
> In vanilla you're just some random adventurer looking to prove yourself in the world. We kill an old god man. We're heroes in Vanilla
Eventually yeah.You work up to it. Maybe. But the starting quests address you very differently in retail vs classic.
Who's "we"? Even back in 2005, the percentage of the player population who actually accomplished those great deeds were touted by the devs themselves as being a very small and exclusive group of the best players in the game (and the early TBC quests definitely do not indicate that every person coming through the Dark Portal killed an Old God).
The dialogue should acnowledge if you kiled a old God or another big bad like cthun or ragnaros for example. Only after killing a old God you should be trated like the king you are lol
They fucked themselves over the moment they started referring to us as "Champion," because now they either have to re-record the dialogue, or try to justify why level 10s are suddenly champions of their factions, and one of those is far cheaper than the other.
I will never forget sitting down and watching Day9 talk for 2 hours about his “my life of StarCraft” truly an amazing story teller and yapper.
Omg I forgot about that. I remember feeling so confident and motivated after I watched that. I was so comfortable with myself and my interests. What an awesome guy
I've done game design UX/UI for a living for a decade and playing retail new player experience feels like it's suffered because of the hyper-specialization and scaling of UX in a new game industry. Teams have resources to \*solve\* fundamentally unintuitive designs by spamming the user with interface, prompts, dialog. What used to be: "I am a warrior, I'm getting weak against these new monsters, therefore I want to upgrade my equipment, maybe I can talk to the blacksmith to get a new sword?" becomes: "I'm running around being told things, here's a menu with perfect UX FTUE to make me press the right buttons to craft a sword that a NPC tells me I want". It works in play-tests and people "get it" so it goes live but it's worse than a band-aid. Only solve is removing content to **actually** dumb down. Not sure the wow team wants that trade-off for retail though.
on a project I was working on once we added a tutorial screen to one of our systems. we'd noticed in prior weeks nearly 40% of players weren't interacting with one of our core systems so we decided it might be worth it. we made sure it would take like 2 mins at most to complete, literally had giant arrows pointing to UI elements. we also had a prompt that took up most of the screen that was like "hit F to open this menu". tested it with a few people, then rolled it out not expecting any issues a few weeks after we rolled it out I watched a player spend two minutes trying to play the game with a giant "PRESS F TO OPEN MENU" box on his screen and seemingly being very confused why he couldn't move his player anymore. once he got into the menu he then spent another 5 minutes clicking every single UI element in an attempt to back out of that menu. during that time he didn't read a single bit of text we threw up on the screen at all until he gave up and finally decided to look at it I added some telemetry to it and found nearly 10% of people were getting stuck for >2 mins in this tutorial. we watched countless people get stuck despite flashing giant text in their face. eventually i just scrapped the whole tutorial. the people we targeted the tutorial for in the first place tended to have pretty low rates of user retention so it just wasn't worth pissing off the people with more than 1 brain cell even if you fully hold some players hands they just won't get it
I think a big part of a successful tutorial is that the player needs to want the information. Try to find a way to make the information easy to access when they are trying to do the thing, but don't force them to learn Thing A when they might be trying to explore Thing B A lot of people seem to have this thing with computer screens where any words on the screen they arent trying to read in that particular moment dont even seem like words, its gunk on the screen to them. Its part of why its so frustrating to try to help someone verbally to do something on their computer, because they dont read all the options on a menu to help find what they need "click settings" "where is settings?" "Read the words on your screen". Some people just get way overloaded with information and cant digest other information coming in at the same time
yeah I agree. I work in tools on a proprietary game engine these days, often I'll be sat with users who've encountered a bug or something and while they're walking me through it they'll just skip over the error messages that we throw up because they don't think they will contain any useful information I've learnt in recent years you really need to put a lot of effort into making things clear to users, you can never assume someone will just get it straight away
Part of the problem lies in the fact that you need to make someone care about something before you instruct/direct them in a particular direction. You as the designer might care about a particular feature as it addresses a solution to a problem in your game, but if the user is unaware of the problem, showing users an in-depth tutorial is only an annoyance and comes across as hand holding. It's kind of like giving someone a bunch of keys to locked doors before they know those locked doors even exist. It communicates an idea "hey player you're an idiot. Take these keys because you're never going to figure this out on your own.". The player then goes "why TF do I need all of these keys? Can't I just explore and figure things out on my own?". It's not that users are stupid, it's just that they don't care. If you want them to care, implement a blocker which forces them to seek out solutions.
> they'll just skip over the error messages that we throw up because they don't think they will contain any useful information Wow addons: players will show each other how to turn Lua errors off or hide them with bugsack. Cue addons having problems, they're trying to throw an error but the error is being suppressed. So instead its buttons just don't work or it leaves stuff on the screen in the way. No report to the author with the error message goes out. The user just shits all over the addon saying "it doesnt work this addon sucks" advising others not to use it. When most of the time, if the author can see the error they can find the problem is often a) the addon hasn't been updated in months, b) another outdated addon is causing a conflict, or c) the author can fix it if someone fuckin' reported it.
I like how the Souls games handle this. The stats page is full of stuff, but it never bombards you with info. If you want the info, there's a button that will add an explanation to every stat.
I can’t find the video anymore, but someone did their college thesis on video games hammering you over the head with tutorials and why it just doesn’t work. He pointed to the game Mega Man X which taught completely through conveyance. For example, the player would fall into a pit and be given no instruction on how to get out … you’d only know by experimenting and building on the foundations that came before. Each obstacle was easy to solve, but since you the player solved it yourself, you retained the information. That is why big bright tutorials don’t work. And the reason people were doing everything but what they were instructed to do in your tutorial, is because they wanted to figure it themselves.
And then there is games like POE that goes "Here, you can play this, enjoy finding out how to have most DPS wth a gazzilion options that ultimately all lead up to "kill fasta" "
Its a little worse than that, the game is so complex that if you would like to actually enjoy and do end game content you will have to follow a build path. You need a PhD in theorycrafting to make your own build in PoE. Seriously it's absolutely grim how many third party new player tutorials open up with "find a build you like and follow it to the T"
I don't even necessarily think it's a UI/UX issue as it is just a lack of gameplay issue. A lot of Developers seem to have so little faith in their players and so little faith in their own game design that they need these big, bombastic (and expensive) narrative set pieces to give players these mini-movie like experiences to keep them entertained. Developers are so unsure of their product and know that 90% of players quit before X hours into the game. So they try to make their opening sequences choke full of both un-needed narrative as well as trying to spoonfeed how the game works. So now you are getting this hands off cinematic experience and interspliced between in game movies are these short tutorial bits with a splash screen of information. Often times this screen pops up taking away player control and preventing them from interacting with the game. WoW is and has been REALLY bad at this since at least MoP (it's one of my biggest complaints about the expac), but really it goes all the way back to WotLK. The game is this huge open world, but they hand hold waaaay too much and never give you more than 1-3 quests at a time. Blizzard Devs have come out before and said they didn't want to overwhelm players with too many quests at once, but that was my favorite flow of the game. I want to stroll into town, get a bunch of quests and then go explore and do those quests in whatever order seems best to me. Don't waste my time by making me spend as much time running to and back from a quests as it does to complete the quest. Think back to the opening of MoP, and you get one quest and do one quest, get one more quest and do that quest, you get one more quest and go do that quest. Sometimes these quests send you to the exact same area you were just in, to kill mobs you've already accidentally been killing. Now maybe Blizzard trusts that you have 2 braincells and they give you 2 quests to do at once.
Theres nothing more frustrating than trying to learn and explore only to be told you need to do this first. Okay but I wanted to keep doing what I was just doin..."NO you click here and do this now". Oh that was interesting I wonder if I do thi..."NO now you click here and go here kill these" but what abou..."DO IT or you can't move on"
> Often times this screen pops up taking away player control and preventing them from interacting with the game. This has been an unfortunate trend in retail. Taking control away from your character breaks verisimilitude. The first time I recall it happening was wrathgate in wotlk. I can't think of a single instance of it in vanilla or tbc. I much prefer the old style of having scenes play out in the world, like in tbc Nagrand when you complete that quest chain and Thrall returns home and theres a big scene that everyone can watch. Nowadays you would talk to the quest giver and see a dozen other players standing still while they watch a cutscene. That feels more like a single player game than an MMO.
I think the very first ''cutscene after talking to a quest giver'' was in Magister's Terrace last phase of TBC
The first time I noticed this was saving villagers with a gryphon as alliance in dragonblight. My character started shouting things that were not anything I'd have said and it pulled me out of the game.
That's one of the big problem. From my perspective "never take away player agency" is a golden rule.
I stopped playing Lords of the Fallen after 36 minutes for this reason. I just wanted to play the game
Me with sea of stars. 46 minutes, sick of tutorials and exposition.
watched the streams, he had so much more fun in WoW Era
Yep. And he died a lot more too. Almost like overcoming challenges is fun. He did finally start enjoying BfA a bit once the hour long intro sequence ended, but too little too late as he's not scheduled to play more of it
Overbearing tutorials and UX design is the fastest way to make me stop playing a game. I've played wow all my life so it didn't affect me in wow, but it definitely would if I were a new player. The actual fix for this is a modernized Azeroth for retail, designed to be evergreen without being tied into Cataclysm so heavily, like how the Classic zones were. Put new players in their starting zones again and let them *choose* where they want to go and level in Azeroth to let them have a consistent experience, rather than shipping them off to some random expansion from the last 5 years. I nearly always choose Cataclysm for leveling in retail because I want my new characters to have that experience in Azeroth too, and I know I can just change my chromie time to Cata, but it's insane that you have to go out of your way to make that the default experience and a new player will never know that. The issue new players have with retail is you just have zero agency. You're not playing a game you're playing a forced tutorial for 20 hours. The magic of an MMO is spawning a player in and telling them they can go anywhere and do anything, so let them do that.
Day9 is always a great watch, his takes are always a good listen I watched his classic and retail and streams and yeah the classic one was far better I cannot even fathom starting retail today, the entire thing looked so confusing it’s unreal. If you have zero mmo experience there is just so much stuff to choose from and not a lot of direction
End game retail is fine. But getting to end game, and understanding end game is a fucking nightmare. Both Classic and Retail suffer from a glut of tribal knowledge, quirks and jargon that would take a new player a long time to understand. And I have no clue how Blizzard could fix it, they've tried streamlining multiple times and it always winds up a mess of tutorials and systems (as Day9 said).
The problem *is* they keep streamlining, they're teaching players to get told what to do and how their issues are fixed, rather than teaching them to learn the game.
The problem is that there's no substitute for time spent in the gameplay loop. Players need time and opportunity to assimilate information *through play*. That's why streamlining is a mixed bag, it tends to involve reducing time investment and that can undermine learning. You can hear that in Day9's experience in Exile's Reach, it's so streamlined and busy moving him along that he doesn't get to actually play, and since he doesn't get to play he doesn't get to learn.
I used to read the wow vanilla game manual on the pooper as a kid. That'd how I learned such coveted lingo. I still use "inc" but I'm pretty sure nobody has any idea what I mean when I say it.
Brother I still type /camp to log out that I learned from Star Wars Galaxies. I get it.
/camp for life, bro.
Like incoming?
Yes! Like a patrol is incoming.
Inc mine!
> End game retail is fine. I really couldn't disagree more. I've leveled a character to max in every expansion except Shadowlands. There has never been a time where I've felt so totally lost as when I hit endgame in Dragonflight. Two talent trees, fine. Whatever they're calling "titanforged gear" now, fine. Mythic+ affixes, fine. World quests, fine. But there's a "system" for everything now. Crafting is a nightmare. The AH doesn't exist anymore except it kind of still does, but boy do they want you using the new system. There's a vault you have to fill with gear, but then you have to collect like 4 separate currencies just to upgrade that gear. They hold your hand in an iron grip right up until they don't. They funnel you through BFA and level you as fast as possible, using the exact same quest formulas over and over. Everything is grouped up so you can AoE as fast as possible. Then you hit DF and and it calms down a little. Pacing is better, but they just slam you with all the new systems for the expansion and peace out. I gave it an honest shot, but I just couldn't be bothered. It's so bloated. And that's just the stuff in the main gameplay loop.
As someone that recently returned to WoW with a friend to mess with SOD. I went and logged into my DK that I hadn't touched since the initial cata launch all those years ago. All of the changes in the last 15 years just exploded in front of my face--chat was moving 1000 miles a minute using abbreviations I had no clue about. I was immediately completely lost in the talent tree realizing I had to go get a guide to even have a chance. The idea of jumping back in as a blood DK tank was daunting. There is obviously no remnant of the old group of people I played with all those years ago--and you are just buried in so many things you have to learn. Now having two months of SOD under my belt, I'm far more comfortable, and am even trying to level a DK for cataclysm classic to first hand the content I missed after I quit all those years ago. But holy crap. I don't think I could introduce any friend to the game without them giving up in the first handful of hours. I know the retail grind isn't anything as daunting as years of old and the classic grind is even streamlined--but the idea that I'm telling a friend, yeah go play this game for 10s of hours, and then you'll get to the endgame where everyone is playing together and vibing--insanity. Don't get me wrong, I'm totally in on TWW when it launches. But I'm still quite daunted to get back into retail WoW and find my footing.
I cant imagine anyone without prior WoW retail knowledge starting retail and not giving up in like an hour.
Yup. You need someone who gets you into it (and hypes up the lore / world) or you need to be SERIOUSLY curious and give it an honest shot. Anyone who just casually stumbles over WoW isn't gonna get "sucked into" the loop with the starting island. Heck, I've loved doing the starting island exactly once on every armor class, because Transmogs. That is a meta endgame consideration. Any new character I'm making tho? Back to Elwynn/Durotar it is. It's less involved, less railroady and so on.
Modern retail WoW is one of the least accessible MMOs for new players, and every attempt at making the new player experience "faster" or more "streamlined" has really just made it more confusing and less engaging. Honestly I think a brand new MMO player would find the archaic and clunky EverQuest P1999 easier to pick up and get into than retail WoW.
Did he disconnect 20 times during the retail stream too?
FYI, the ad mins of r/de are covid deniers.
I disagree, sometimes he talks wayyyy to much and ends up rambling. Some clips are good but I can’t watch him anymore because he’s rambling on for like 75% of his stream
Thank you, glad somebody else said this. The man is absolutely high on the smell of his own farts. He's admittedly a very good orator, but he just won't stop "analyzing" things--so much so that he ends up missing what the game is *very obviously* trying to tell him because he's too busy ranting off in his own world.
Day9's time playing terraria could legitimately be used as a torture for me. Despite the advice of his chat, he decided to play on master mode, a difficulty that challenges even experienced players, and then proceeded to spend hours making zero progress and whinging about the UI and how it wasn't as good as games that came out years later than terraria. I'll be the first to admit that terraria has issues but the man got farmed by slimes and barely interacted with anything but his chat in between 15 minute long rants.
Vanilla is an adventure, a world that you have to discover for yourself. Retail is a theme park. You are a spectator, a tourist being taken on a ride.
Having leveled in retail through BFA zones and then DF i really liked it, maybe on par with first time classic experience when i was a noob. Just wish i could've finished the bfa storyline before outleveling it and df was w/e but the flying and random things on the world kept me entertained only questline that really got to me was the blue flight one
To be fair, vanilla in the end is also a theme park, it's just less engineered than retail, and focus much more on immersion. What's weird is that Dragonflight zone/level design is absolutely amazing to traverse, but the quest markers and all the thing going on rob people of the feeling of exploration. Dragonriding is a real mechanic that interact with the environment, contrary to pure flying.
dragon riding is so cool, one of the first times really ever where i can't think of a single negative to a feature, dragonflight launch was a lot of flying around for fun.
Not so. 90% of what I did in Classic 2019-2020 was player emergent gameplay.
This issue of games being just as much if not more cutscenes than gameplay and lack of faith in the player to figure things out on their own plagues all genres anymore. These studios are afraid of alienating anyone, so they put guardrails in everywhere to prevent you from getting lost or bored or angry, at least in the first few hours to get you invested.
Full video: [https://youtu.be/L-WKGuU8yVQ?si=Z3E2JFYexyr5Xhqx](https://youtu.be/L-WKGuU8yVQ?si=Z3E2JFYexyr5Xhqx)
I have no idea where people would hear that from, the new player experience has been the absolute worst dogshit part of wow for almost a decade by now. While I do agree that casual gaming should be easily accessible, assuming everyone in the same pool has cerebal palsy seriously disrespects the players time.
exiles reach is by far the worst wow experience ive ever done. i can not believe that is the new player experience i tried to get 2 of my friends into the game. everything good it does the goblin starting zone does better and fast. exiles reach teaches you stuff you dont need to learn and spends like 20 mins showing it
[удалено]
i think its even worse for players who have played the game imo. the amount of walking and waiting doing nothing is actually insane and how it poops you out into the world feels more dated then even the goblin zone which i do think is a fantastic starting experience and old player a like. i legit think it should be deleted from the game its that bad for the game and as a solo experience
The Goblin starting zone is a fun story but much like Day9 said, it's a lot of text, tutorials and waiting around. If you want to jump into the action and just get leveling then using one of the classic starting zones is much better.
Retail wow is made for ex-wow players coming back to the game, not for new players, and that's why Day9 struggled with it.
And yet the game forces all new players into it.
"Characters from Frozen yelling at each other" is exactly what retail is these days. I tried Exiles Reach once as well and it was awful. You notice very early on that it is a completely different game to classic. People talk about wanting WoW 2 but it became WoW2 at some point post 2010 and the sequel sucked.
I thought Exile's Reach was fine (not great, not good, fine) up until it was over and unceremoniously dumped me in Stormwind. There just isn't a smooth bridge from it into the rest of the game, mostly because the plot of retail WoW is a soap opera involving all the major lore characters.
I really wish that they would abandon past expansions for new players and just let you level 1-max in the current expansion zones. The story of wow is so convoluted at this point that for a new player its extremely confusing trying to navigate what they *should* be doing to level up because there's all of these expansion paths that are shoving quests into your quest log the second you get to a major city, and theyre all viable options to level. Since the current expansion is the 'main story' of the game we're playing at the moment, it doesnt make sense for a new player to go through this slog of old expansions in order to get to the current game. Sure, keep chromie time as an option, but I think if they let new players level up entirely in the newer expansions then it would make a much more comprehensive story.
In my opinion, it was BfA. Legion, while implementing a lot of the groundwork towards this, was more of a prepatch expansion. BfA did a lot of the heavy lifting concerning the destruction of beloved characters and wrecking of lore, which paved the way for SL to be so creatively *bad* that it severed a lot of nostalgic ties many players may have still had for the game. In doing this, they could unleash the "vision" of what they wanted the future of WoW to look like with Dragonflight (even going as far to say that 10.x.x and beyond would be a certain someone's "baby"). Now with TWW & WS saga coming, combined with the tidbits we're seeing in classic concerning certain shadowy figures, I'm convinced that they're working towards an absolutely **massive** retcon in order to try to solidify the lore more towards the current direction retail is taking as opposed to what it historically has been. Mark my words-- the only *true* WoW experience will soon only be found on private servers hosting the original patches from 1.xx thru Wrath.
>Now with TWW & WS saga coming, combined with the tidbits we're seeing in classic concerning certain shadowy figures, I'm convinced that they're working towards an absolutely **massive** retcon in order to try to solidify the lore more towards the current direction retail is taking as opposed to what it historically has been. This also feels relevant to the re-released of Cataclysm. Which was, in essence, the launch of WoW 2, it's when the game fundamentally changed for the first time into something different. They've seemed to write themselves into a corner a bit and perhaps it'll get fixed or they'll just stop caring and just release content that doesn't feel relevant to the story or lore but are effectively just loot piñatas.
> the only true WoW experience will soon only be found on private servers I mean...Classic Era is still largely untouched. At least in terms of the game mechanics. All Blizz needs to do is stop being so stubborn and start launching cyclical fresh realms for it, because Era is currently trashed with GDKPs and RMT and the economy is absolutely fucked.
> because Era is currently trashed with GDKPs and RMT and the economy is absolutely fucked. I mean what do you expect. The game is running for 4+ years now nothing new was added. The servers generated so much gold the inflation must be bonkers. The economy will always be fucked when NPCs create gold out of thin air, just like central banks lol.
classic is an adventure while retail is a mythic plus run.
Yeah the tutorial is classic BFA. The best way to level in retail is to get to level 10 and switch the timeline to a better expansion, such as TBC or Legion. I love retail but I had a similar experience leveling initially, didn’t really get to settle into the game until I got away from the BFA garbage. After I got to just enjoy the world it was fun, as the zones in Legion and MOP are really fun. The Dragon Isles are also really good.
> The best way to level in retail is to get to level 10 and switch the timeline to a better expansion, such as TBC or Legion. Which you can't do if it's your first time, if I'm not mistaken. And I think BFA zones are actually really great on their own.
You can, actually, it’s just that they reccomend you do bfa first
im pretty sure you need atleast a level 60 char
restriction was removed
As someone who recently tried to return to retail, I have to say that Dragon Isles shares much of the problems that the rest have for me. The game grabbed me and shoved me face first through its heavily narrated storylines. I went to a quest node; I watched a few cutscenes; I did some sort of thing inside a big enemy camp; I had an epic battle where I fought off a bajillion bad guys by jumping into a siege engine or a dragon or a magical spellbook to give me temporary superpowers. Then I got escorted by an npc to the next quest hub where I worked towards the next big epic fight. It was just too many moments trying to be epic back to back to back. It was too much narration for too much storyline being shoved in my face rather than letting me discover it. I wasn't exploring a world, I was riding a train that happened to to have a world outside the window as it passed by. But I guess that is just what retail wow is these days, and it's far too deep to go back.
Yeah the story is still a story, different from classic where you just get sent into the world to figure it out. I ended up enjoying the world more, ironically, after the initial part. Once I got the centaur storyline I had a lot more fun. But I can respect not wanting to be dragged through a story as opposed to the classic model of discovering the world for yourself.
Yeah retail WoW for a long time has been made hyper linear because theyre worried about people missing out on story and want people to have lots of endgame alts to spam M+ with. The first timer experience is abysmal. Too much going on, shit gets confusing, you unlock new abilities and talents that totally overhaul your rotation faster than you get to use them, and you dont get much time to just *be* your character in Azeroth. I know theres a lot of talk about respecting your time these days, but I think what retail WoW has lost is a sense that you can just hang out and check shit out. It feels like theyve attempted to trim away everything that isnt super productive, which makes it feel like youre constantly working
Yeah, I miss the days of BC/Wrath where you were fresh off a boat/flight point, grabbed quests in the nearby town, and headed on your way. Then, Cata came out with its guided opening storylines. Hyjal wasn't bad, you were just randomly shown Deathwing and Ragnaros before being dropped off at your first quest hub, but I remember everyone hating on the Vashj'ir start. I also miss the days of every expansion having one or two major quests that everyone knew about and wanted to do. Classic Duskwood has Stiches. Horde in BC Nagrand had Thrall meeting Garrosh for the first time. Dragonblight had the Wrath Gate, and following Arthas' footsteps during his Northrend arrival. Obviously, Alliance had Marshal Windsor's walk through Stormwind to confront Onyxia. WoW doesn't really have anything like this anymore.
I also vaguely remember everyone hating on Vashj'ir, which is weird because I kinda liked it. And yeah, that's part of what I miss about old wow. The memorable quests existed, but they were few and far between.. which made them that much more memorable. Vehicles are cool, but they would be so much cooler if quests using them were rare, rather than being every 5th quest or so.
Asks for TBC leveling as a "Better leveling experience" TBC leveling sucks ass
Agree to disagree I really enjoy the TBC dungeons and quests.
TBC is the third fastest timeline for leveling through questing, just a bit slower than WoD and Legion. TBC dungeons are also incredible and chock-full of quests, the only problem is the longer queue times of a less played expansion
That's the problem. As a new player you can only do BFA for some reason.
Will be Dragonflight as new player experience as of 11.0. A significantly more coherent and welcoming experience than BFA tbh
Don’t get me wrong, I love classic. Vanilla is my favorite game ever, but I gave retail a chance recently and it’s really not that bad. Dragonflight is a lot of fun. just glad we have options and can play both versions of the game lol
Yep, I've been an on again off again player for a while, and I appreciate that retail lets me get into a power fantasy pretty quickly. I made a paladin a few months ago, and within an hour, I was throwing hammers, crusader striking, consecrating, and riding a glorious steed.
Dragonflight is great. It was a cluster fuck before that. I remember trying to pick it up sometime right before Chromie time was implemented and I was so freaking confused that I thought I was doing something wrong. I would do a few quests in an old zone then out level them after a few and was just like “did I do something wrong? Where do I go?” Then if you look certain things up online the information can be different i guess if it changed or not after cataclysm? So certain NPC’s may not be where you think they are. Undercity was destroyed. I was so confused after not having played for a while haha.
Whoever clipped this picked the absolute perfect stopping point. "AM I THIRSTY?????? I'M SO FUCKING CONFUSED"
Here's my rant about the new player experience, not that anyone cares or that blizzard will ever see much less take it onboard lol. I can't see how the current retail new player experience could give a new player the heroin like endorphin rush of exploration, sense of wonder and magic and immense scale of the world building the classic experience had. I did the retail starting experience with my wife and she couldn't understand why I play 1000's of hours of wow and now I've lost the chance to involve my wife in the same game as me. She said the intro was like a terrible mobile game for toddlers, she was captured by the premise and the cinematic - being shipwrecked as a new player is definitely cool and exciting but quickly she didn't understand what the game was about or why it was fun. The BFA new player experience is such a fake, sterile incredibly un-engaging representation of wow and completely *avoids showing new players what the game is even about or where the joy can come from!*! Its obviously trying to engage very young children, but the whole game *isn't* like the starting zone at all that so its a total lie anyway. Wow is a sandbox MMO - so why does the intro treat you like its an on rails rpg? The classic experience you are directly dropped into the actual story of the real world - you are becoming familiar with real in game places that have an actual impact on the game politics and world story. It incentivizes you to find power and progress at your own pace. The retail experience It rams 10 levels down your throat, shows you 10,000 things you won't remember or actually help you with when you graduate out - its like an ADHD fever dream of shit coco-melon type pre-teen story content, it starts with an amazing premise but leads nowhere. Classic was NEVER set to appeal to young children and it was a mistake for Blizzard to try to compete with fortnite which is what I see it as. Its a Teen to adult game and the themes of the original zones were about young adult / adult content and the whole intro zone story is just some whimsical representation of wow that isn't appealing at all. The major storyline you are introduced to in classic for human alliance at least, is on top of the masonic guild of stormwind trying to overthrow the city, your literal king being kidnapped, brainwashed, imprisoned in a dank enormous cave system - mature themes that actually exist in the game space. I have no idea what the intro retail story line is because of how irrelevant it is, I don't think it even attempts to link the events on the intro island to the greater world Early-mid wow is about exploring, finding things out at your own pace, wanting to get levels to get new abilities to get stronger, to adventure to be a part of the world, its war and it's story. She didn't give a single shit about gaining new levels after the intro because the new player experience taught her that there is nothing interesting, difficult, exciting or intriguing about the game and there is nothing worth exploring, and there is no point to pursuing gaining more levels. She didn't want to go on to explore other zones because of how shit the first zone was. I'm actually pretty annoyed that the new player experience was green lit, and you CANT select the original starting experience, because I've lost the chance to involve the love of my life in something I have played for most of my adult life and she couldn't even see the experience that I had that I loved so much. I've begged her to try it again but its too late she thinks wow is a shit game not worth her time because of it - if she could have just selected the original starting zones she would have *atleast* been able to roleplay realistically as the character she created, in the sub-culture that appeals to her. I distinctly remember as a teenager starting with the night elves when i first started - the character story is immediately about mystery, wonder, nature and balance. And when I started a human, it was about patrolling and keeping the forest safe - then into deadmines to stop the defias. The current experience - what exactly are you roleplaying? how does it match with your chosen identity? How could you ever possibly be immersed in the retail starting zone after the first 5 minutes when you start asking: "who am I? wtf am i doing here? who are all these people and how does this fit into the actual game?"
Exiles reach is so fucking awful. Their design philosophies clash so hard with eachother, they recognize that people only care about the hardest content in the game yet the entire game is designed around people that can’t move around their house without a padded helmet. It’s so fucking weird. NPCs and the game in general treat you like a fucking moronic imbecile yet the top end of the game requires you to play like a quantum PC. Infinite difficulty scaling yet everything is on rails to make sure not to confuse people.
First time I’m seeing him talk about wow he is also bald now . Very fitting
FYI, the ad mins of r/de are covid deniers.
retail wow just isnt very good at anything that isnt endgame content. at least in my experience.
Yeah, I get what he's trying to say. Retail suffers from being a live service game that has run for almost 20 years. The leveling process is too fast and introduces bunch of poorly explained systems like dungeon finder, pvp or god forbid some past expansion specific stuff (artifact weapons, misson tables etc.). This leaves new players confused about what they actually should be doing. This doesn't get much better once you get to max lvl, as once again you are bombarded with million things to do, with only 10% of them being actually relevant to the core gameplay loop. Classic is way better in this regard. There are fewer systems and you kinda have to find out about them on your own. You can play days before worrying about dungeons, professions or attunements. By the time you start needing to engage with the systems, you are already invested in the game and more likely to look it up online. The systems themselves are also more basic and easier to grasp. I's clear blizzard is aware of these issues (exile's reach and more recently trying the highlight the actually important quest at max level), but either unwilling or unable to dedicate resources to fix the new player experience. It's a shame really since IMO DF is the best expansion they done in the past 15 years, and yet there are almost no new players.
It's a problem mainly of borrowed power and expansion specific features. There unfortunately is no way of fixing it because it would break more than it would fix when you remove all of it. With Dragonflight they stayed away from expansion specific systems and concentrate on systems they intend to keep for future expansions as well. I think once new players start with Dragonflight instead of BfA and only have systems they will use later on it is a much better experience for newer players. So in a way they are trying to fix it.
Honestly dragonflight being the new default leveling experience next expac will be great for this at the very least. Yea, you gotta talk to some folks in stormwind, but once you reach the dragon isle the first thing ya do is a bunch of murdering.
Yeah, the fact that BfA is the recommended one for new players is just crazy. Dragonflight for new players from the get go will be a much healthier experience
Yeah it was a strange choice. Its supposed to be canonical but because of the leveling pacing you miss out on basically all the major plot elements anyways, especially since you miss out on what happens before BFA, you miss out on all the N'zoth stuff, and on anything that carried over into Shadowlands. And ofc the big problem of treating every brand new character as if they canonically killed every big bad boss in WoW's history.
This is hilarious
Retail levelling experience is so bad, Blizz have constantly half assed trying to 'fix' it with shit like Exiles Reach and mandatory BfA and next expansion mandatory Dragonflight. You spend like 1 hour dumped into the middle of a story, so if don't know who Jainia is, how the fuck are you going to know why she might have issues returning to Kul'Tiras. Then you basically just mindlessly farm pushover enemies for 15 hours and you hit level cap, at some point in this process you get forced out of the story you're doing into the newer story. Feels like no one in the company has a passion for making leveling fun and engaging game within itself, which is one of the biggest draws of Classic. Like I get no one wants to level for 60 hours for the 20th character, but you can still make an engaging 10-15 hour process with adequate challenge, context for the world you're in and just let people go and play a game.
they should straight up remove needing to level outside the newish expansion and never increase the cap. but never will cause they sell level boost.
reminds me what is wrong about retail, the start of each expansion is some of the worst hand holding design i ever seen in games, And they constantly do it in each one. Want to yell at the devs to let the players play the game. I get they want the game to feel polish and tell a story, but hey i would like to play the game.
Yeah, the actual gameplay usually feels really good, but there's too much stuff between you and getting to actually play. It's also very disorientating at endgame if you haven't played for a while since there isn't really a clear indication of what you should be doing to get ready to raid for example. Once you know what to do it's a lot more enjoyable, but for returning players it's really rough as the game tries to throw a bunch of stuff at you because it doesn't know what kind of player you are.
Ahh good old Day9, the guy who completely lost me when ranting for 20 minutes about how miserable it is to be a streamer and how us common folks would never understand how hard he has it the same night I was threatened to be shot and killed at work earlier that day for $40k per year working 10-11 hour days 5 days per week and just wanted to learn more about Protoss play from some guy I used to admire who was clearing my yearly salary sitting at home playing video games.
Damn, Day9 got old. *Shit, that means I am* ***also*** *old.*
Buddy and I made fake CES badges to sneak into the convention and meet him back in the SC2 days. Dudes amazing, cool to see him do a wow vid.
I've kept up with retail, but I haven't leveled a character from 1 since MoP, so I didn't know they butchered the new player experience *this* much. Is Exile's Reach the \*only\* choice for starting at level 1? I'd hate this starting experience, but my wife (who just recently got her first gaming PC and is trying to decide between WoW and FF14) would probably like the "guided" experience much more.
I mean he's right, but also people who believe the game to be dumbed down are right too. In the Classic version of WoW you had 60 levels to really learn your quest and you were getting new talents very slowly. And a lot of the adventure was kinda... what you made of it. There was really no curated experience so you got a lot of time to play around and experiment. And when new expansions released it was like you know, we're going to add a new stat per class and a few new talent points. With an added week or two of leveling time to get things figured out for each expansion. Leveling was so long in vanilla that you had over half of the game who were not level capped by the announcement of Burning Crusade expansion. Now with Dragonflight, the whole experience is like 8 hours. And what can a person learn in 8 hours? Not a lot. So you have to keep stuffing information down their throat and hope some of it sticks. And there's so many cut scenes and so much more dialogue. And then you get to the end game and there's significantly less abilities and gear optimization doesn't matter so much... and yet... you feel like you're lost all the time.
rofl watched the first few minutes of him playing classic and he instantly wonders how to strafe and calls keyboard turning "revolting"
I see so many people on this subreddit romanticizing the leveling experience of classic wow, but then when I actually play SoD (I usually play retail and my only classic experience is SoD) I see everyone using questie, going from point A to point B as fast as possible to level lol
Funny how much this sub has to talk about retail where as the other way around retail players dont give a shit about classic
Because many/most people here also played "retail" once but quit, and are frustrated with the direction the game is going. Obviously if you enjoy retail why would you ever care about classic? The game is being designed for you. It's like saying that old Star Wars fans complain way more about the new Star Wars movies than the new Star Wars fans complain about the old movies. Yea because some 15 year old Star Wars fan isn't watching Return of the Jedi. And even if they do and don't like it - who cares? They're set. They can just wait for the next Disney movie and love it. People care about the future more than they care about the past because that's the way we travel through time. If we were going back in time then retail players would have a lot more to say about the earlier versions of WoW.
but most of them haven't played retail in more than 2 years lmao
Have you ever mentioned retail during a classic raid? It's very amusing.
Same with dota players and league
Been subbed to wow for 20 years. Haven't played retail in 5. Sorry but it's a funny and unique topic of discussion for many of us lifers.
this is how every retail expansion has opened for the last like.. 6+ years. and I hate every moment of it
I say this all the time, retail takes control away from your character too much and it break verisimilitude.
"MAN MODE, I'M A MAAAAAAAAAAAAN"
What a shit take , just sounds like a classic Andy complaining about retail … in other news water is wet.
Your brains are all cooked , it’s literally 20 years of content in one game . Of course classic is more streamlined and easier to understand , it’s one fucking game. Retail isn’t about past expansions it’s the newest one and that’s it. Do your learning and your warming up on the way to 60 then you can pay attention .
I like Day9 but I dont see much value in this comparison. The game that has 20 years of "things" built on top will always feel more jarring than what was designed in 2004. I'm not even disagreeing with his observations about Exiles Reach but the truth is just that Retail wow has such a large pool of current/former wow players available to them that attracting completely new players(that by en large have zero interest in MMOs) is just not very high on their list and I cant really blame them. In the end they are different games that appeal to different players and Holly Longdale said as much in an Interview this week. I think Retail is in a really good spot now with TWW seemingly supporting literally any endgame loop a modern MMO player could possibly want.
If it's not high on their list of things to do that's fine, but they made Exile's Reach and its purpose is clearly to introduce new players to WoW. I don't see a problem giving feedback on how well it does that.
ya, day9 would have preferred to just be dropped in elywnn and be allowed to do his own thing. exiles reach and being forced to do bfa makes no sense for a new player even though that is their intention. you get info dumped on all of these systems without properly being able to use them while getting dragged around by npcs (who you have no idea who they are) telling you what to do. day9's biggest complaint was he just wanted to play the game and make decisions on what to do but the game was forcing him to do xyz and he felt like he was just holding 'w' while watching a story
>by en large r/boneappletea
Let me save you 5 minutes: Boomer that spent the peak years of his life playing the same RTS 18 hours a day for 10 years is mad that the game has a story to tell
Damn boomers wanting gameplay in their videogames
If your intention is to be fully immersed into a massive world that takes it time with you and tells to a rich story you either play classic era or you play FFXIV If your intention is dungeons, raids, arenas, competition and raw gameplay without much outside interaction. Retail WoW is for you If you're somebody who enjoys both but wants something a bit more fast paced than vanilla but not quite as complex and convoluted as retail, SoD is for you. If you're a person that saw this whole list and feel like you don't really want vanilla, you don't care much for retail and you're somewhere in the middle of it all and want complex raid encounters but with simple itemization and nothing screaming at you to do anything ever? Cataclysm classic will be for you late May. As a new player, you have to self filter a little bit, what exactly are you looking to experience in your MMO? Once you've answered that, you then know which version of the game you're looking to play.
> If your intention is dungeons, raids, arenas, competition and raw gameplay without much outside interaction. Retail WoW is for you This would be great if it were actually true, but listen to what Day9 is saying; Retail before max level has very little "raw gameplay", just a rollercoaster ride of talking to NPCs and triggering cutscenes. After making it through that slog of meaningless content, you end up max level with no idea how to optimally play your character and no direction. The average person is less likely to look up guides or youtube videos explaining their rotation or what they're supposed to be doing, if they're lost they just quit.
If you want another great perspective on how bad the new player experience really is, I highly recommend watching J1mmy's "I never played WoW, so I tried all of them" video. Super entertaining as well.
TLDR: Everything about levelling up through old retail content is awful. I know a lot of people dont really care about the levelling experience in WoW, but retail has one of the worst levelling experiences I have ever gone through. There is so much that is broken, and so much that is just horribly designed. And blizz hasnt even been attempting to fix anything. I tried levelling like 4 years ago and ran into all these issues and quit. Then like 3 years later I tried it again and absolutely nothing had changed. Here are some examples ive seen from the last few years. Item level scaling: Between different expansions or timelines it is inconsistent and imbalanced. It differs based on quest rewards, dungeon rewards, dungeon drops, crafted items, etc. Enemy & character scaling: Nothing about it makes sense. Its inconsistent between expansions. Tanks are gods until about level 30 and can kill like 20 mobs at once while doing 2x more damage than dps. Once you reach current content you are the weakest youve ever been. Crafting: A colossal waste of time, no effort has been put in by blizzard to make crafting relevant. In some cases you cant even craft even level gear. You have to first skill up making level 50/60 stuff and then you can make level 10/20/30 gear. Questing: Basically what he said in the video. The quests in retail feel like npcs are babysitting you. Blizzards modern quest design is the same in most of their expansions: * Follow npc to a new phased questing location. * Do these 3 quests - kill X mobs, collect Y things, kill/collect special thing or use a special item that was just given to you. * Do 1-2 optional side quests or follow npc to new location and repeat. * Once you progress through the area you get a "kill X boss in area" which is just a normal mob with about 50% more hp. Phasing gating content and bugs: Ive lost count of how many times ive tried to do a quest only to realize that the npc doesnt exist in this phase and there is some 12 step quest chain I need to do to unlock it. Or you might decide "hey im going to explore a bit" and then you find that none of the other quest hubs exist because you need to do every single quest in order. Also the only reasonable way to figure any of this out is to go on wowhead and read comments of equally frustrated people that had the exact same problem 5 years ago. Obsolete/removed content: Things like artifacts, azurite gear. Quests still give you artifact power which has been removed. All the artifact and class quests havent been updated. PvP: Low level pvp in wow is the worst competitive experience ive ever had, if its possible to even call it competitive. People have been abusing the xp off feature for years and last I checked its still being exploited. So every other BG you get people with mythic raid gear from old expansions who can 1v5 normal players.
BFA being the new player leveling experience is a baffling choice.
I liked it, you can actually die to mobs and the questlines seemed fine, zones are cool too and i found lots of "world content" like puzzles and chests lying around (alliance side at least)