Blizzard announced "Classic" World of Warcraft

[Ravielsk]

TBC announcement made me want to compare tbc xpac to retail shadowlands

TBC has 16 dungeons, literally twice the number of shadowlands dungeons
TBC had 8 or 9 raids, BFA had 5 when it ended, wouldn't be surprised if shadowlands gets 3 or 4 since this xpac's a dud

wtf happened to blizzard? why's there like half the content in modern xpacs?

Partly because they raised the quality standards considerably since TBC. It used to be normal that a raid or a dungeon would feature two or three lines of voiced dialogue and no or only one minor fly over cutscene. Same with quests, most were rather simple almost copy pasted with no voice acting or cutscenes of any kind. These days however every quest chain feels like a mini-movie with a lot of long lasting effects on the game world, so naturally that sort of stuff takes a lot more time to make and bug test as opposed to making "kill X amount of something". Consequently that leaves a lot less time for dungeons and raids.

On the other hand I get the impression that Blizzard wants to step away from dungeons and raids as the main meat of the game but at the same time they seem to have no idea what to replace them with.

 

[SerratedBiz]

These days however every quest chain feels like a mini-movie with a lot of long lasting effects on the game world.

You're full of shit.

 

[Ravielsk]

These days however every quest chain feels like a mini-movie with a lot of long lasting effects on the game world.

You're full of shit.

Ok let me rephrase that. Most quests these days produce some kind of a change in the state of the game world a.k.a NPCs change locations, some mobs despawn/appear or even the zone is phased into a different state. Something being long lasting does not mean that its meaningful only that its supposed to be semi-permanent. My point is that even simple quests that move the NPC around the game world take longer to script than just "kill 10 boars" or "get me quest item X".
Most quests these days features at least a element of such complex scripting which exponentially increases the amount of time it takes to make them. You may not like the quests or how they are done but that does not change the effect they have on the game world.

 

[[UCHIHA]XxDarkSasuke420xX]

TBC announcement made me want to compare tbc xpac to retail shadowlands

TBC has 16 dungeons, literally twice the number of shadowlands dungeons
TBC had 8 or 9 raids, BFA had 5 when it ended, wouldn't be surprised if shadowlands gets 3 or 4 since this xpac's a dud

wtf happened to blizzard? why's there like half the content in modern xpacs?

Partly because they raised the quality standards considerably since TBC. It used to be normal that a raid or a dungeon would feature two or three lines of voiced dialogue and no or only one minor fly over cutscene. Same with quests, most were rather simple almost copy pasted with no voice acting or cutscenes of any kind. These days however every quest chain feels like a mini-movie with a lot of long lasting effects on the game world, so naturally that sort of stuff takes a lot more time to make and bug test as opposed to making "kill X amount of something". Consequently that leaves a lot less time for dungeons and raids.

On the other hand I get the impression that Blizzard wants to step away from dungeons and raids as the main meat of the game but at the same time they seem to have no idea what to replace them with.

I'd like to trade the cringe cutscenes and voice acting and stupid npc scripting for 2-4x the number of actual gameplay please yes sir

 

[Avarize]

Cutscenes are decline. What actually improved was the quality of the raid encounters.

 

[RapineDel]

Questing in modern WoW isn't just tedious because of quest trackers etc. it's because it's the exact same routine over and over.

You find a quest giver he gives you 2-3 quests, you follow a linear story and then you keep moving along, following a very linear path through the area.

Older MMO questing was far more satisfying. You'd get a town hub with quests that took you all over the map. Bonus points if you had to actually read to figure out where was what, but it often meant you explored the whole area whilst doing 9-10 quests and it felt like you'd been on a genuine adventure when you returned to town to hand everything in.

Apparently their stats must have shown the kids weren't getting enough regular dopamine hits/quest turn ins so they've opted for what they do now.

 

[J1M]

TBC announcement made me want to compare tbc xpac to retail shadowlands

TBC has 16 dungeons, literally twice the number of shadowlands dungeons
TBC had 8 or 9 raids, BFA had 5 when it ended, wouldn't be surprised if shadowlands gets 3 or 4 since this xpac's a dud

wtf happened to blizzard? why's there like half the content in modern xpacs?

Design by committee is what happened. Instead of one or two people making something cool, now every little thing becomes an hour-long debate with a bland result:

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Questing in modern WoW isn't just tedious because of quest trackers etc. it's because it's the exact same routine over and over.

You find a quest giver he gives you 2-3 quests, you follow a linear story and then you keep moving along, following a very linear path through the area.

Older MMO questing was far more satisfying. You'd get a town hub with quests that took you all over the map. Bonus points if you had to actually read to figure out where was what, but it often meant you explored the whole area whilst doing 9-10 quests and it felt like you'd been on a genuine adventure when you returned to town to hand everything in.

Apparently their stats must have shown the kids weren't getting enough regular dopamine hits/quest turn ins so they've opted for what they do now.

WoW quests never held a candle to old-style EQ quests with the text parser. One of those things that was lost during transition from 3D MUD to MMORPG, and it's sad because it's a really cool feature of EQ.

EQ had unsolved quests for years, and the devs regularly added new quest content without telling anyone. The only way to know was to actually talk to NPCs and pay attention to what they were saying. It also made it very difficult to datamine quest information compared to modern MMOs as all the information was kept server side.

 

[[UCHIHA]XxDarkSasuke420xX]

Apparently their stats must have shown the kids weren't getting enough regular dopamine hits/quest turn ins so they've opted for what they do now.

it's the stupid rotations in modern now too. now they split frostbolt into some epic 5 seperate hotkey combo that you need to spam in some order so people have buttons to mash every quarter second
but in classic its just frostbolt n CHILL

modern wow has no CHILL

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Apparently their stats must have shown the kids weren't getting enough regular dopamine hits/quest turn ins so they've opted for what they do now.

it's the stupid rotations in modern now too. now they split frostbolt into some epic 5 seperate hotkey combo that you need to spam in some order so people have buttons to mash every quarter second
but in classic its just frostbolt n CHILL

modern wow has no CHILL

all it resulted in is raiders using rotation bots to maximize their dps

 

[Avarize]

You have to be some type of troglodyte to enjoy classic mage gameplay.

all it resulted in is raiders using rotation bots to maximize their dps

Almost no one does that, certainly nobody any good at the game.

 

[[UCHIHA]XxDarkSasuke420xX]

You have to be some type of troglodyte to enjoy classic mage gameplay.

all it resulted in is raiders using rotation bots to maximize their dps

Almost no one does that, certainly nobody any good at the game.

well, literally all raiders in retail use bots to blow airhorns in their ears whenever the epic dragon boss drops a circle of death to help them coordinate their boss fight synchronized water polo routine
and the only difference between classic mage gameplay and retail mage gameplay is that retail forces you to press 5x the amount of buttons to get the same result as classic. it's not like there's added tactics or anything, all they did was split one ability into 5 and add procs. at least in classic fireballs don't hurt manifestations of fire

retail UIs be looking like this btw LOL

 

[Delterius]

You have to be some type of troglodyte to enjoy classic mage gameplay.

polymorph is all i need

 

[Avarize]

the only difference between classic mage gameplay and retail mage gameplay is that retail forces you to press 5x the amount of buttons to get the same result as classic.

And pressing all those buttons clearly makes it too challenging for most players. If it didn't they wouldn't be doing shit damage.

 

[Cromwell]

And pressing all those buttons clearly makes it too challenging for most players. If it didn't they wouldn't be doing shit damage.

its the wrong kind of challenge. In the end theres still just the fucking frostbolt flying at the enemy but you now have to hit 20 buttons in between the first and the second in the right order to get the second to become 1,35% stronger than the first. Challenge should come from the enemy and how you react with the tools at your disposal to whatever it throws at you instead of always doing the same and just more of it.

 

[Delterius]

im having such a great time reading all the newest lore, blizzard's brilliance makes me cackle so much my neighbors are wondering if i'm ok

 

[Avarize]

And pressing all those buttons clearly makes it too challenging for most players. If it didn't they wouldn't be doing shit damage.

its the wrong kind of challenge. In the end theres still just the fucking frostbolt flying at the enemy but you now have to hit 20 buttons in between the first and the second in the right order to get the second to become 1,35% stronger than the first. Challenge should come from the enemy and how you react with the tools at your disposal to whatever it throws at you instead of always doing the same and just more of it.

Which is exactly what you do in modern WoW, unlike classic. There are many, many things vanilla did better but this definitely isn't one of them. Anything to do with challenge is better today than back then.

 

[Delterius]

And pressing all those buttons clearly makes it too challenging for most players. If it didn't they wouldn't be doing shit damage.

its the wrong kind of challenge. In the end theres still just the fucking frostbolt flying at the enemy but you now have to hit 20 buttons in between the first and the second in the right order to get the second to become 1,35% stronger than the first. Challenge should come from the enemy and how you react with the tools at your disposal to whatever it throws at you instead of always doing the same and just more of it.

Which is exactly what you do in modern WoW, unlike classic. There are many, many things vanilla did better but this definitely isn't one of them. Anything to do with challenge is better today than back then.

I'm sure there's a sweet spot between the simple chilling around with friends nature of Vanilla, casting frostbolt over and over and the overdesigned hell of retail WoW's 27 step rotations and DDR encounters. But if I'm forced to choose between the two I'd go with Classic without a doubt.

 

[Ravielsk]

I'm sure there's a sweet spot between the simple chilling around with friends nature of Vanilla, casting frostbolt over and over and the overdesigned hell of retail WoW's 27 step rotations and DDR encounters. But if I'm forced to choose between the two I'd go with Classic without a doubt.

There most definitely is a middle ground here and the ground work for it was technically setup back in Vanilla. For example one that immediately comes to mind are elemental resistances which they could have leveraged to make enemies that cycle through various states of damage immunity(like an elemental that switches between fire and water) to force players into alternating their rotation or simply make a lot of enemies with different levels of resistance to certain attacks(so one mob group is ice resistant, another is fire resistant and so on). Or how about making certain enemies deal a specific type of damage that only some classes could tank, so say Warlock would be highly resistant to shadow so they would tank shadow bosses, mage would tank arcane, rouges could have to leverage their high dodge against low hit chance but high damage on hit... you know to make the class break out of its routine and make it good for more than just one thing at a time. Of course for that to work they would have had to completely redo how resistance work since the gear based system could never carry this sort of mechanic.

Problem is that even a partial implementation of what I just described would require Blizz to accept the possibility that some players would have a harder time with certain sections of the game and that is a big no no in modern game design. And since they are no allowed to make any system that could create any kind of real hardship(for everyone, not just a few try hards that check the hard mode in the options) in the game they also cannot design a system that would be both simple and stimulating. The current "press 10 buttons to do what 1 used to do" is the best they can do under current conditions.

 

[Avarize]

Complexity is not the issue retail WoW has.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

It's not complex, it's tedious.

 

[Delterius]

It's tedious because its complexities do not achieve much.

 

[Avarize]

Wishing for a single button rotation tells more about your own lack of ability than the state of class design. If anything it was better during MoP when the gameplay was even more "tedious".

 

[rusty_shackleford]

if I wanted to mash 500 buttons to do a single attack I'd go play a fighting game

 

[Avarize]

Sounds like Auto Chess is more your speed.