Vanilla Questing: Was it Good?

[deniter]

The new game experience was like 80% of Vanilla. You're not going to discover it a second time without having a stroke first, people can claim it's gonna be dope as shit but it most likely isn't.

I've been playing vanilla for 8 years now. There's no new game experience anymore, that much is sure, but i'm still living and kicking and not going to quit anytime soon. Looking forward to Blizzard classic servers as well. I have tested every single MMORPG since 2010 but none of them gives me the same experience than vanilla WoW.

[Deleted]

It was amazing on his days, now is very time consuming, and slow game, but has its charm.

[Akka]

Honestly, I would not mind if they would get rid of levels altogether and would come up with a totally different way of character progression. Like, if you complete important milestones in a storyline of the expansion, you will get a specific skill or spell which you have learned because you have participated there. Or if you reach exalted with a faction, they teach you some kind of secret technique or whatever. But this is not everybody's thing.

That'd be a very valid change to be applied to current WoW, where leveling is pointless, and made even more so with the generalisation of level scaling (which literally removes the entire concept of levels from the game).
But it wouldn't be valid in Vanilla, in which levels are very much a core feature with massive effects on gameplay and in the entire design philosophy.

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With more low-key quests it's easier to have a suspension of disbelief about the activities.

Simple and to the point. I like low-key and down-to-earth adventures and design. I like how warriors were just people who knew how to handle weapons and use them, how rogues were more an approach about how to fight with cunning and agility. I like that what happens to me was a handful of guys in a dark corner - with possible relevance, but ultimately something human-scaled.

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Nothing beats the Indian Jones quest lines in Uldum. Questing has evolved 100 fold since Vanilla and is much better

Funny, I found these quests to be the least enjoyable aspect of the entire Cata expansion. I purposedly avoided them in all my subsequent characters.
Maybe you should get a hint and not mix "your preference" with "objective quality".
Oh, and about that :

tldr: The objective legit answer is while they maybe good quests and quest philosphy in vanilla, actually questing was garbage

It seems that one common (and very irritating) misconception of the Vanilla-bashers is their tendency to not be able to make the disctinction between "objective" and "subjective".
Either the arrogance at thinking they define objectivity, or the lack of intellect making them unable to see beyond their own limited vision.

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Being before the map built in markers, you generally either tabbed out to thottbot and the like constantly (IIRC WoW hated being tabbed out back then and glitched. Hopefully that was just my computer back then or that will be a paaaaiin) or used addons to do basically the same thing.

Or you played the game and explored and most of the time found what you were looking for after a while (I won't like, I DID use Allakhazam a few times, but usually I could manage by myself).

[Zerenty]

I was very young when playing in Vanilla, and had not mastered the english language yet.
So i had a hard time understanding quests and it took me ages to complete them, so i grinded my way to 60 the first time around (did a few quests here and there).
I think the rose-tinted goggles helps most people in having fond memories about vanilla, but in my eyes , questing was dreadfully slow and complicated.

[Akka]

It was so amazing that most people chose to ignore quests beyond a certain point and just grind mobs for hours on end because the quests were so awful and so far apart that they weren't worth the time it took to do them.

Ah, the usual bullshit "I will claim that most people did something they didn't to give my argument weight".

[Castrum]

No. No, it wasn't. Why is this a question? Who thought spending 2 hours collecting super-low droprate Bear Asses was fun? I mean, hell, even the guy who made those quests admits they were garbage.

[llubtoille]

I'd probably say it was more engaging. Not really more entertaining, but you had to pay attention (or know what you were doing) to get anything done.

[Akka]

WAR, SWTOR, and the holy grail of questing and leveling GW2.
They all did it better, and most importantly, they made it fun.
While in WoW it always felt like a chore and a waste of time.

SWTOR has a rather engaging leveling due to well-written quest with choices and dialogue in them, and heavily scripted stories. The gameplay is absolutely abysmal though (it's nearly impossible to actually die during leveling, making everything you play more or less pointless as you can literally be in auto-mode) and it makes replayability pretty low.
War I didn't play.
GW2 was so utterly boring, it felt so much a game with absolutely 0 immersion, I couldn't even drag me through the leveling. I can't see how it can be considered the holy grail of questing when I found it probably the single worst leveling experience in all the MMO I tried.

[Deleted]

Green.
Hills.
Of.
Stranglethorn.

Never again.

[Deleted]

It was great for its time. Hasn't aged well tho.

[Specialka]

SWTOR has a rather engaging leveling due to well-written quest with choices and dialogue in them, and heavily scripted stories. The gameplay is absolutely abysmal though (it's nearly impossible to actually die during leveling, making everything you play more or less pointless as you can literally be in auto-mode) and it makes replayability pretty low.
War I didn't play.
GW2 was so utterly boring, it felt so much a game with absolutely 0 immersion, I couldn't even drag me through the leveling. I can't see how it can be considered the holy grail of questing when I found it probably the single worst leveling experience in all the MMO I tried.

So you can apply to yourself your precious advice. Kthxbye.

[maccajoe]

It was fun and enjoyable because it was new, the world was new the game was new, it brought more people into the MMO sphere but design wise no it was not good. I would much prefer the quest design now placed back into vanilla with everything else just the same.

[Bakis]

I hated some quests, like the one in Barrens to get 8 swords, shields, staffs or something from those gnolls or whatever those were but overall questing was so much fun cos of the sheer size of content. Sure the traveling could be tiresome at times but hiking around, even finding some herb to upgrade skill on was just fun overall.

The community as well, the scale of the interaction (mostly due to spawntimes on mobs) to group up have a chat with people etc all was lost of that after TBC.

[scoobysnacks]

Coming from DAoC, it was brilliant the first time I levelled to 60. The quests were fun, the zones full of character... It's only when I look back that I realise it was just better than the rest. That doesn't equate to good now.

As much as I enjoyed playing WoW in 2005, I think I'd hate playing it today which is why I won't be bothering with Classic.

On a side note, who else remembers how much of a pain in the arse finding groups were? You could spend an hour spamming /1 or /2 and finally manage to get one, and then someone would drop group because no one wanted to hoof it to the summoning stone.

[Waltzinblack]

What people mentioned here already about quests being a bit more over the place actually made Vanilla questing much more fun, as you had to think about what to do, and in which order to do the quests. I'm gonna say it, questing now is fucking shit. Yeah it's real fun picking up 6 quests at a hub, going 5 yards past hub, completing all 6 quests in short vicinity and then go back to hub to pick up same 6 quests but at a different location. Vanilla had quests that brought you to new locations, some half way across the map, quests that were much harder than the other quests in the area that you either had to leave for later or pull some shit from your sleeve to get done successfully now, dungeon quests, group quests, and long and cool quest chains that took place over the entire continent. We don't really get these long chains anymore unless they're a specific part of the main story for an expansion.

[Akka]

So you can apply to yourself your precious advice. Kthxbye.

Someone is butthurt here.

[ldev]

That quest for Aged Gorilla sinew in STV was never something I like to call fun, it haunts me to this day lol :P

Zhevra hooves. I came from Lineage 2 and was surprised that questing was easy and actually gave exp, but then - barrens. And collecting zhevra hooves. Oh man, felt like insane Lineage 2 grind. Then there were mobs sharing spawn locations in E/WPL (don't remember), so basically you have only A mob walking, but you need B mob, so you kill all A mobs and hope for B mob to respawn instead of A...

[Battlebeard]

When WoW came out it was amazing cause it had no competition. But if you compare WoW with todays game, some things haven't aged good.
I will still play Classic since I LOVED the game, and some things were better back then, imo, regardless how you look at it:

- Gear was hard to get and epics were epic. Legendaries were truly legendary as well. No charity gear, you had to work for it and when you finally got something good, it felt really, really rewarding and awesome.
- Speaking of gear, there was no TF of WF crap. What you saw was what you got. Gearing felt less RNG. You either had the gear or you didn't.
- No achievements and no gearscore or ilvl! Todays game is plagued by this "link this", this was not an issue here. The game was more including and everyone, who at least put some effort, were often welcome to join.
- 40man raids were amazing! If it was up to me, there would be 100 man raids, or even bigger. I just love big fights where you control an army rather than a party. 40mans was the closest thing and the raids felt so big and epic.
- No raid sizes and attunements! Today, everyone get to see every raid with easy LFR and normal modes etc. Here, there was just 1 difficulty, or rather the raids themselves were the difficulty. This made the raids more epic. You had to start from scratch and work your way up and I remember the feelings like "wow, one day, one day I might be able to set foot in Naxxramas". That feeling doesn't exist today, as any pleb can kill any boss in LFR.
- PvP was AMAZING! There could be huge war-like battles in the real world, or day-long AV fights. While some people didn't like it, I loved it. It was truly big and epic battles.

There are tons of other things that were good. However over the years they added amazing things like flying mounts and transmog, but overall, Vanilla was crazy good.

[Deleted]

Most were just awful but there are a few gems here and there.
I personally liked many class-related quests the most, especially the ones for the Paladin and Warlock mounts.

[Snookiwooki]

Classic questing tended to send you all over the continents from zone to zone which was a way of introducing new areas but also was an enormous time-sink especially when travelling on foot.

Also you get a lot of quests that are clearly way above your current level, knowing which to avoid until later or skip entirely could make a huge difference in levelling speed.

Other than that you still had to collect non existent animal parts or kill x mobs etc.