Blizzard Completely Ruined Questing

[MoanaLisa]

Not often you see a thread that looks like a necro from the first post. This all happened five or six years ago after all. It's complaining to be complaining and opinion masquerading as facts. You either like it or you don't. But complaining now about changes introduced that long ago is about the most pointless thing I can imagine. The questing experience improved in some ways and not in others. Water under the bridge.

[omeomorfismo]

maybe im a bit biased because at the time my english was very, very bad and questing with a dictionary was boring, but now, with the italian translation, damn the horde zones are amazing, all the forsaken's chain is awesome, and the quest to crossroad where you must defend the convoy alone is better than all old barrens.
maybe the ally zones suck, but the horde ones are strictly better, no match...

[Rivin]

Okay you clearly haven't played old Westfall for a long long time, or you never played it at all. Moving on.

Or perhaps you're retroactively applying a story where one wasn't presented. It's easy to read story elements from the bits and pieces that existed when you already know what the story was supposed to be.

And the fact that you "moved on" without addressing anything else is proof that you have no idea what you're talking about.

[Darsithis]

Okay you clearly haven't played old Westfall for a long long time, or you never played it at all. Moving on.

I have. It rambled and made no sense, but, then again, a lot of the old world rarely felt coherent.

[Deleted]

Questing takes far too long to reach max level, and at the same time provides too less steady content. 1-60 in 3-4 zones would be much better than 1-80 in 20 zones.

[Deleted]

I'm sure I recall Metzen or someone in that WoW documentary saying they regretted some aspects of what they did to the world with Cata, at the time I thought it was a cool idea but now I think I agree with OP, something good about the game was lost.

Biggest things that have killed WoW:

- Questing/levelling ruined
- LFR
- Homogenisation / change for the sake of change / pruning

[SodiumChloride]

Without good lore, quests become a grind because you simply don't care anymore.

Blizzard screwed themselves pretty deep with their neglect of lore.

[Deleted]

After experiencing the two 1-60 experiences thoroughly (I'm a completionist), I can now tell that the old experience was slightly better.
-The old is more adventure, creepy, has a more RPG feel. Reminds me pretty much of a very huge and immersive console game.
-The new is more "heroic", more polished, more streamlined, with very specific plots, with determined zones where we move in. STILL good.

Most of the song are still there, and the current composer got all my respect for his genius, but the music by Jason Hayes for the old world remains absolutely unbeaten.

What's a certainty, is that they should just add the old world back. Will make the game more complete, give more content to the newcommer. Obviously they have the data, let's not be naive.

What's strange, is that the moment the old world was removed, the subs started to completely decrease, strange isn't it

It's pretty clear to me :


Blizzard if you read that. Please fix.

Correlation != Causation.

A couple counter arguments off the top of my head:

1. Cataclysm didn't just change the old world. How do you know it wasn't any of the other changes that caused the decline?

2. Every game has a lifetime, where sales go up, steadies, and then drops. It looks exactly like the image you posted. How do you know that the decline then isn't simply because of how long the game has been around?

So yeah, it isn't clear to me that changing the old world caused the decline in subscriptions.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

If you think the 1-60 quests are WORSE than the classic versions you are clueless.
They added probably 3x more quests in Cata. That alone is enough to prove otherwise.
The more important thing that you are neglecting to realize is that grinding 1-40 was actually faster than doing said quests, and said quests basically dropped vendor trash.

Now you get real gear, real experience, and important story for each zone.
There are better in every way.
Saying otherwise is just nostalgia speaking.
Go play on Nost and you'll see how bad the quests 1-40 especially are.

[Deleted]

I too find alt tabbing whilst my paladin slowly whittles down one of the twenty bears I need to kill for this quest engaging and thoroughly more relevant to story and theme than its cataclysm equivalent.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

1.) Cataclysm ruined the dark nights feature. Totally destroys immersion, for one.

You must be confusing this for weather.
If it was night out, I'd show you what night looks like in Classic.
The WoD Darker Nights for select zones is WAY darker than the game ever was.
Ever.

[Daedius]

Blizz have removed a lot of the inconveniences of questing... like grabbing quests, or quest chains, resulting in needing to do something in a dungeon... or traversing across numerous zones to turn in or do a quest. I'm 90% glad they did this, but 10% sad that it removes the immersion of the game.

[Jinpachi]

At least the 1-60 areas, anyway. They are awful now. They are far worse than the old quests before Cataclysm came along. Man that expansion really was the beginning of the end for this game.

I want to make a human Paladin to play, but I want to level him the classic way. I'm not fond of the mindless heirloom+spam dungeons type of leveling. I wanted to take my time without heirlooms and read each quest.

But the quests are HORRIBLE. Blizzard removed so much of what was good and serious and replaced it with idiotic memes, jokes, and references. Blizzard was clever with this in their old games but just went way overboard in the Cataclysm revamp.

1.) Cataclysm ruined the dark nights feature. Totally destroys immersion, for one.

2.) The ease of quests means that even without heirloom quests, you are two-shotting almost every mob. It completely undermines the sense that you are a fledgling adventurer when you start out. It undermines the long path you need to take to get to level 100 and be recognized a hero.

3.) They replaced interesting quests with meme quests. Example: Tirion's questline in EPL, a fan-favorite and personally one that always touched me, is gone. Now we have replaced the entire theme of zones to cater to stupid memes and references. Example: Redrige Mountains. I don't care about Rambo, and I don't want to follow him around while he kills 6,000 orcs with a rusty butter knife. That is idiotic, it's not funny.

Westfall was a fantastic zone about the rise and fall of a legendary kingpin, and displayed a moral grey area for the faction you were playing under. Redridge seemed quaint and tranquil but underneath it you knew it was a desperate situation for the people of Lakeshire, boxed in on all sides by Gnolls and Blackrock Orcs.

I'm doing Warcraft 3 right now, and enjoying it immensely. The serious tone and comparatively great writing is really pulling me back into the lore and universe of Warcraft. But I know when I want to take that excitement and transfer it into a character in WoW, I will be met with Hogger memes, Westfall 2 electric boogaloo, and Rambo.

Why? Why ruin it? It can't even be fixed now.

This entire rant was completely subjective, you offered no factual evidence to support you assertions, merely opinions. You are free to level a horde character if you would like to discover the lore from a different perspective. Otherwise i'd suggest playing a different game if it's that bad for you.

[Balazzar]

I will be honest that as Horde leveling my first guy in early early TBC, I really only knew vaguely what the "plot" was in each zone. Leveling was such a feat that I more or less left a given zone the instant I fell into the level range of a better zone. The exceptions being the starter zone and Barrens--because on a PvP server in those days, a newbie like me did everything in the safe zones they could possibly do before stepping foot into contested zones.

I do agree that pre-Cata EPL was very sinister and grand. Even at level 70 in Kara gear (which most players had, at best, during TBC) you could get wrecked savagely in EPL if you pulled too many elites. There was a questline in Blasted Lands that ended with you and your party getting portaled on top of a plateau where you battled this demon. I only ever did this at level 68 with a level 65 and level 61 buddy. It was insanely hard for us as newbies.

Stuff like that is more or less gone. Which is kind of sad. But at the same time I wonder how many players even did this content.

[Tuesdays]

Lack of content has people complaining about content changes that took place almost 5 years ago...

Netflix / Amazon + questing = good stories, and fun game play.

[Deleted]

Questing takes far too long to reach max level, and at the same time provides too less steady content. 1-60 in 3-4 zones would be much better than 1-80 in 20 zones.

Thats true if all you want is to get to max level.
Think OP wanted to say that journey is what he is interested in, not destination.

[Deleted]

After experiencing the two 1-60 experiences thoroughly (I'm a completionist), I can now tell that the old experience was slightly better.
-The old is more adventure, creepy, has a more RPG feel. Reminds me pretty much of a very huge and immersive console game.
-The new is more "heroic", more polished, more streamlined, with very specific plots, with determined zones where we move in. STILL good.

Most of the song are still there, and the current composer got all my respect for his genius, but the music by Jason Hayes for the old world remains absolutely unbeaten.

What's a certainty, is that they should just add the old world back. Will make the game more complete, give more content to the newcommer. Obviously they have the data, let's not be naive.

What's strange, is that the moment the old world was removed, the subs started to completely decrease, strange isn't it

It's pretty clear to me :


Blizzard if you read that. Please fix.

Or it was because of the lack of content we where getting from patchs and the start of the lets just add dailys mixed with panda hate and the wod mess ? plus you can add the fact the games getting dated system wise compared to other games that are out now. Once again its a nostalgic view point it fades if you do the old quests acouple times.

[Ryzek]

I leveled a toon with out heirlooms and mostly through questing and I enjoyed the questing much more then my first toons in BC. I wouldn't mind 5 man quests and strong elites back though to go with how questing is now.

[Alydael]

Most people don't read any of the quest text and have no idea about the story. When I talk to people about the lore- they never seem to know why certain things are happening or who certain NPC's are or their significance.

I also like the occasional joke quest but Blizzard definitely "jumped the shark" with a few of them. My favorite joke quest is on the horde side, when you get to play the quest giver and three players come to you for quests. One guy is a total newb and the other guy is all decked out in heirlooms, it is pretty funny. overall, if I had a choice, I would chose the old world/quests- they were more fun.

- - - Updated - - -

I leveled a toon with out heirlooms and mostly through questing and I enjoyed the questing much more then my first toons in BC. I wouldn't mind 5 man quests and strong elites back though to go with how questing is now.

Yeah, I miss those tougher quests. there should be a couple in each zone at the climax of the zone story line.

[Cæli]

Correlation != Causation.

A couple counter arguments off the top of my head:

1. Cataclysm didn't just change the old world. How do you know it wasn't any of the other changes that caused the decline?

2. Every game has a lifetime, where sales go up, steadies, and then drops. It looks exactly like the image you posted. How do you know that the decline then isn't simply because of how long the game has been around?

So yeah, it isn't clear to me that changing the old world caused the decline in subscriptions.

1. Because it's the only profound change. It was a fundamental change. There is no other thing that can explain such long term disaster. It happened right at the start.
Cata had max level content, it had class changes, just like wotlk.
The old world is litterally the only thing that was changed...and removed. Players did not recognized the game they liked. They saw it, had fun, then moved on, because they concluded that in the end the game will never be the same despite the quality of the new zones. Changing something is always risky. You take the risk of players not liking it. Given the drops, something happened.

Does the length of a content draught cause a decrease ? No, the wotlk content draught was very long, I was there, and they even added a mediocre raid, Ruby Sanctum. The numbers stayed strong. Why ? Because the game was solid. The base game was there.

2. Yes it looks like a product lifetime. The drop only occurs when something bad happens. Cata happened, the subs dropped from then.
How do I know the decline is not because how long the game has been around ? The drop was just too hard for it to be true. If it was just boredom and the age of the game, the subs would have still been strong for longer. Cataclysm was just catastrophic... I liked it though. The new world definitely was worth experiencing.

Or it was because of the lack of content we where getting from patchs and the start of the lets just add dailys mixed with panda hate and the wod mess ? plus you can add the fact the games getting dated system wise compared to other games that are out now. Once again its a nostalgic view point it fades if you do the old quests acouple times.

Any lack of max level content was a direct cause of Blizzard taking the time to re make the world entirely. The drop started after the Cataclysm, Mop and Wod happened quite a bit after this. Age of games have nothing to do with their quality.