Good Gameplay is not the point, Immersion is

[Dakara]

Honestly, not sure if I'm going to play Classic or not. I simply do not have the time these days like I did in the past...

That being, said, I really do miss the simpler times. I remember, when I first bought WOW, reading the lore behind every class and the roles they could fill. I decided I wanted to play a Spellcaster then chose my class based on the Lore behind each one. My first 60 was Mage.

Today, while I understand the need for diverse gameplay, I often find myself at odds between class design and lore. In some ways, I do miss the old 1-2 button specs of Classic because deciding on a main was all about aesthetics.

[therealbowser]

There is a way to have a game that is neither tedious nor devoid of immersion. You don't even have to 'strike a balance'. It's just a matter of picking the right features, and not cutting the wrong content. Just because an ability doesn't have a direct purpose, for instance, doesn't mean you need to get rid of it. Just because you have to click an extra button to view an NPCs goods after reading some flavor text, isn't a bad thing (hell, they could have made it a UI option). The list goes on.

Immersion is to some extent what you make of it. It also depends on the story, how in depth it goes and what parts of the story are revealed. How much do you know about Nightborne culture for instance? Do you know much about them besides they allied with demons and were mean to their own people? Do you know much about them besides the fact they like arcwine and look down on other races and have an addiction to arcane energy? What was life like in the bubble? What food do they eat? What are the major houses of Suramar, and how are they aligned? What happened to the people of Suramar after it was liberated, do any of them hold grudges against Thalyssra? What's the story behind Su'esh -- where and how did the Nightborne ever find a devilsaur?

It's not that Blizzard should answer these questions, it's that the story should prompt us to be asking these kinds of questions. Everything feels barebones these days and anything that's not a core mechanic or important part of the story tends to get overlooked.

All of this said, vanilla wasn't perfect. It didn't have the level of immersion people make it out to have. Running through Wetlands as a night elf didn't make people feel like "Well gosh, this is a really engaging experience being chased and killed by crocolisks!" What it did have, however, is more details, more flavor on little things, and less of a focus on an ongoing story which... for the most part, simply didn't exist in vanilla. It engaged us to ask more interesting questions, to look into the story of Warcraft III to see what's going on and what may yet be to come. Legion by comparison just has us being generic heroes without much to relate to.

Sadly it's difficult for me to really respond specifically to such a broad concept, but I really don't feel like tedium breeds immersion. It can help, and simplifying the game too much can coincidentally cut things that give the game life. Blizzard needs to be more selective of what it removes, and if something doesn't need to be removed, they probably should leave it the hell alone. Blizzard has a strange policy of 'fixing' things that aren't broken, and they've been doing this for years.

All of this said, if there was one single thing Blizzard could do that would improve immersion more than everything else combined in this game, it would be to cut back on the blatant pop culture references and use them substantially more sparsely. There are so many freaking 'clever girl' type responses about dinosaurs for instance that I'm wondering if I'm playing Jurassic Park Online sometimes, and don't even get me started on our good ol' buddy Harrison Jones. I don't really even want to cover this topic, just thinking about it gives me flashbacks of some of the worse quest chains in Cataclysm...

[Oneirophobia]

Gotta agree with you here. Can't tell you how many times I've said in gchat "Hey, isn't this the VA from such and such a game?" or "Did they change this mob's quotes?" and the response I get is "I don't play with sound."

Mhm. I switched to Horde 3/4s though the expac and out of a 15-man raid team, only one other person in our group knows the current warchief isn't Thrall.

When I was alliance, I started the expac and was like "oh shit Varian died!" and everyone in guild chat was like "oh no one of the guildies?" Uh no, the leader of the alliance.. "...the little kid?" No the little kid is 20 now, his dad. "Didn't his dad become the lich king" no thats bolvar, bolvar isn't the kid's dad. "I don't think so, I'm pretty sure his name is Arthur or something" OH MY GOD NO THAT WAS THE LAST LICH KING REEEEEE


It's a lonely story sometimes.

[Nefarious Tea]

No offense but anyone talking about 'how real something feels' in a game like WoW, which has never even remotely tried to embrace any kind of realism, is offbase from the start.

People need to stop trying to analyze that ONE REASON people love classic WoW so much because there is no single reason, no single unified feature that makes people feel the way that they do about it. Everyone has their own stories, their own moments where they were like 'this is on another level, this is magical', etc.

Having said that I do agree that the clunkiness of WoW classic needs to be preserved. The less changes, the better.

There is ONE REASON though. It was new and shiny. Nostalgia, much like karma, is a bitch.

[cparle87]

Mhm. I switched to Horde 3/4s though the expac and out of a 15-man raid team, only one other person in our group knows the current warchief isn't Thrall.

When I was alliance, I started the expac and was like "oh shit Varian died!" and everyone in guild chat was like "oh no one of the guildies?" Uh no, the leader of the alliance.. "...the little kid?" No the little kid is 20 now, his dad. "Didn't his dad become the lich king" no thats bolvar, bolvar isn't the kid's dad. "I don't think so, I'm pretty sure his name is Arthur or something" OH MY GOD NO THAT WAS THE LAST LICH KING REEEEEE


It's a lonely story sometimes.

Oh man that was an incredible laugh. I had a buddy who was in a world top 30 raiding guild in MoP, and I had to explain to him who Garrosh was, what he did wrong, and why we were raiding Orgrimmar to him. When I became totally frustrated and asked him if he ever bothered to pay attention to a single word of quest text or npc text he said "Hey man, I just kill stuff."

[therealbowser]

Community and Immersion are 2 of the biggest reasons why I feel Vanilla is better than retail.

Now community is something vanilla has a direct advantage over live on. Cross-realm anything will always weaken server communities. That's just inevitability. Was it worth adding cross-realm? Honestly... probably. But I miss the community, for sure.

[stomination]

This is taken from the Warcraft sub-reddit page, and given the amount of arguments going on right now, I personally think this is a proper time to post this:



I experienced vanilla WoW myself and the phrase "slow down, enjoy the view" really stands out to me looking back on that experience.

If you're going into Classic with the same gaming mentality that currently persists at the moment, you will be missing out.

Also, it could be that the mystery is gone. That players who have played for years know this game inside and out to really feel immersed. Classic will offer you a chance to "wipe the slate clean" perhaps?

Nah. it isn't going to do the same as it did for me in 2004. I cant relive the days where you spent most of the time farming mats to go do a raid anymore. The only ppl who were still getting in that immersion stuff was the who needed extra time to just get thru questing.

Its an old story that abruptly ends.

[Nitros14]

It's tricky, not sure if I'm alone here, but I always found the sound balancing to be pretty poor in WoW. Some abilities are just way louder than others, and it's tough to balance the audio around that, especially if you're in content that demands communication. Even without that necessity sometimes it can be refreshing to tune out and listen to music instead.

I turn the game sounds down to zero but dialogue to full. I don't miss hearing a million sword smacking noises and grunts, but stuff like this is nice:

https://youtu.be/Rtf5qHpxTCI?t=3m57s

[Deleted]

I turn the game sounds down to zero but dialogue to full. I don't miss hearing a million sword smacking noises and grunts, but stuff like this is nice:

https://youtu.be/Rtf5qHpxTCI?t=3m57s

That's not so bad. I played paladin and some of our ability noises are incredibly loud for some reason.

[Deficineiron]

Now community is something vanilla has a direct advantage over live on. Cross-realm anything will always weaken server communities. That's just inevitability. Was it worth adding cross-realm? Honestly... probably. But I miss the community, for sure.

Was cross-realm worth it depends on to whom.

Blizzard never merged US/EU servers, and still charges the fee to transfer, so keeping as many realms as at peak is a good thing for blizzard, but they did need to 'do something' about very empty servers. I would think the transfer fee revenue stream was at the TOP of their list of things to keep in mind when sorting out how crz would work.

for players, was it a good thing compared to what? to no change, I don't know. To appropriate mergers of 2 or 3 low-pop servers into a single new faction-balanced server? compared to that, crz is a cheap cop-out.

[Soon-TM]

Was cross-realm worth it depends on to whom.

Blizzard never merged US/EU servers, and still charges the fee to transfer, so keeping as many realms as at peak is a good thing for blizzard, but they did need to 'do something' about very empty servers. I would think the transfer fee revenue stream was at the TOP of their list of things to keep in mind when sorting out how crz would work.

for players, was it a good thing compared to what? to no change, I don't know. To appropriate mergers of 2 or 3 low-pop servers into a single new faction-balanced server? compared to that, crz is a cheap cop-out.

CRZ is Blizz's cheap way to mask the amount of low pop servers without actually merging them, because that might give a "bad image" (lul) of the company. Same reason that they no longer report sub numbers, and instead go with F2P metrics such as MAUs.

[Deficineiron]

CRZ is Blizz's cheap way to mask the amount of low pop servers without actually merging them, because that might give a "bad image" (lul) of the company. Same reason that they no longer report sub numbers, and instead go with F2P metrics such as MAUs.

I suspect xfer fee revenue was more important than the image issue,. Money first.

[Oneirophobia]

Oh man that was an incredible laugh. I had a buddy who was in a world top 30 raiding guild in MoP, and I had to explain to him who Garrosh was, what he did wrong, and why we were raiding Orgrimmar to him. When I became totally frustrated and asked him if he ever bothered to pay attention to a single word of quest text or npc text he said "Hey man, I just kill stuff."

Most recent thing was "why is an elf leading the undead? why don't they have a zombie leader"

She IS a zombie.

"What?! She doesn't look like a zombie!"

And then I figured out he was referring to Alleria cause he thought she and Sylvanas were the same person cause apparently the only bit of text he absorbed was "Windrunner."

[cparle87]

Most recent thing was "why is an elf leading the undead? why don't they have a zombie leader"

She IS a zombie.

"What?! She doesn't look like a zombie!"

And then I figured out he was referring to Alleria cause he thought she and Sylvanas were the same person cause apparently the only bit of text he absorbed was "Windrunner."

I had a brief argument with a guildie a few days ago who got Valeera and Vereesa mixed up. I kept trying to explain that the former was Varian's ally and a blood elf, the latter Rhonin's wife and a high elf. Ended up having to post links to wowpedia to get them to believe me. Headcanon is hard to break.

[Nomads]

It just went straight over your head, hey? How most classes only have one viable spec for pve?
Don't speak without thinking.

So? Who cares if one spec is intended for PvE and another for leveling/farming and another for PvP?

You play the class. The spec is secondary.

[Stardrift]

So? Who cares if one spec is intended for PvE and another for leveling/farming and another for PvP?

You play the class. The spec is secondary.

What's the point then? Everyone bitches about today's customization options, and the limitations we have.

[God Save The King]

It's hard to take the OP seriously when he tries to use a big word, quotes the wrong definition, and ends up using it wrong. Comes of as extremely pretentious to me. The actual content of the post I tend to agree with. People asking for Classic WoW care less about the quality of the gameplay, complexity of rotations, smoothness of mechanics, etc. They want a virtual world again.

[MechaCThun]

It's hard to take the OP seriously when he tries to use a big word, quotes the wrong definition, and ends up using it wrong. Comes of as extremely pretentious to me. The actual content of the post I tend to agree with. People asking for Classic WoW care less about the quality of the gameplay, complexity of rotations, smoothness of mechanics, etc. They want a virtual world again.

I had to look up verisimilitude when I was originally reading it, lol.

But now I wonder:

"People asking for Classic WoW care less about the quality of the gameplay, complexity of rotation,s smoothness of mechanics, etc. They want the virtual world again."

What age range of players are the majority of these people? I can't imagine younger WoW players wanting this; it would have to be the older, more mature WoW players?

And IF that was to be the case, how many of them are there to warrant?

[Maudib]

You can slow down now and enjoy the game more than by rushing through it. For me, story is immersion. Which will be a problem in Classic WoW. There won't be any surprises. If you've been around the game long enough you know how it is/was. So that's a strike against it.

There's a general feeling expressed here that more difficulty and taking longer to make levels and checking off a bunch of fiddly skill/class boxes will make for an immersive game. I hope that works out for them. I think it's less likely than they imagine. But I do hope that everyone looking forward to it finds what they're looking for. It's very hard to find and then sustain whatever it is that makes a game worth playing for hours a day. It's that much harder when it's a retread of something from 12 years ago.

Looking forward to Classic WoW but am not blind about the problems with the idea.

Have you never read a book twice? I read the Lord of the Rings Trilogy twice. Once when I was 15, and again when I was 35 just before the first movie was released. It was a little different between the two times... but not much. Yeah I had experienced it once, but the second time through I remembered much and loved it (nostalgia) and yet there was more revealed to me the second time through.

I believe WoW Classic will rpove to be just as magical the second time around... for may of the same reasons and for some new reasons as well.

If you subjectively compare it the game WoW is now, it is very different. And to this old fart, Classic is a superior gaming experience overall.

[God Save The King]

I had to look up verisimilitude when I was originally reading it, lol.

But now I wonder:

"People asking for Classic WoW care less about the quality of the gameplay, complexity of rotation,s smoothness of mechanics, etc. They want the virtual world again."

What age range of players are the majority of these people? I can't imagine younger WoW players wanting this; it would have to be the older, more mature WoW players?

And IF that was to be the case, how many of them are there to warrant?

Well, I imagine people asking for Classic WoW would have to have played it, so yeah I think they're older. If it wasn't clear, it was just my feeling after reading most of the threads on this sub form (since I moderate it). I'm not sure about age range, but since Classic ended about 11 years ago, I would imagine 22 would be towards the bottom of the primary age range, more realistically probably around 25. I agree that Classic has little appeal to modern young gamers, but I do not think Classic is aimed towards them. Blizzard has a whole host of games that appeal to the primary gaming demographic; Classic is more of a pet project with hopes to become successful on the back of veteran players.