World of Whorecraft: Battle for Asseroth

[felipepepe]

What really killed WoW for me was the Quest compass... I remember how cool and immersive it was to solve quests by talking to friends and random passerbys... felst like a world were there wasn't NPCs, just real players.

Then people started using those "follow the arrow" UI mods and quest guides... then Blizzard gave in and incorporated them into the official game... and it leaked into modern RPGs. RIP exploration.

 

[Metro]

I hated that fucking Quest Helper mod. Whenever I'd be in a group with someone it would constantly spam update: "Bat ass 1 of 5 collected. Bat ass 2 of 5 collected. Bat ass 3 of 5 collected."

Re: Summoning Stones. They always did something. First version was merely a stationary Warlock Portal and required two people to click. I though that's how they are now? At least that's how people use them to do Mythic Dungeons.

 

[Ninjerk]

Alts are essentially what made the Quest Compass desirable. Once you have your main in MC and your raid supplies are already farmed or bought, but you're still addicted to the game you have time to level another profession to make use of.

 

[felipepepe]

Did a quick check, the "follow the arrow" addons (mainly TomTom and Quest Helper) are both from early 2007 - right after Burning Crusade launched and added more UI customization options. Before that there was only addons like AtlasQuest, which displayed text tips for quests & quest chains.

It was only in December 2009 that Blizzard incorporated the Quest Compass into their UI, in the 3.3.0 patch, aptly titled "Fall of the Lich King".

But, of course, they all likely took this idea from our dear friend Oblivion, which released in March 2006 and AFAIK was the first big RPG with a quest compass. God bless you, Todd.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

The sad thing is, the way it was done in old RPGs, with NPCs giving you some hints and then you having to figure everything out, wasn't always perfect either, with at least some games and quests being extremely obtuse and forcing the player to resort to walkthroughs/guides or quitting. But I thought at the time that the way progress would be achieved would be by having more logical gameplay, with NPCs stating some general problem/goal, and then you following through, doing in-game research (perhaps in in-game libraries or universities, talking to in-game experts), exploring etc, using logic and common sense. This kind of gameplay would be similar to being a detective and would just be a joy for someone like me. Instead, modern games (MMOs and RPGs) just opted to replace it entirely with mindless follow the quest compass and perform distilled fetch tasks bs.

 

[Zetor]

Thing is, questing in even Vanilla was pretty streamlined with well-defined quest hubs and directing the flow of the player's advancement through a zone via breadcrumbs and whatnot (I seem to remember one of the Blizz designers bragging about it in a presentation... they had a slide with the Loch Modan map and little arrows indicating where the player was supposed to go as they progressed through the zone). It was almost possible to level up 1-60 just with questing if you had max rested XP, but there were some lulls where you had to grind on mobs unless you were using an optimized leveling guide or something. As alliance, I remember genociding turtles on the border between Alterac/Hillsbrad and the silverpine lake around level 29-31, and pirates in Tanaris in the low-mid 40s.

Speaking of which, shit like this existed even in early vanilla, and a lot of people used it... and there was a massive difference in levelling speed compared to a more organic "I'll just go from hub to hub, picking up and doing quests as I can" appraoch.

e: Darkshire comes to mind -- most new players entering that zone would just pick up quests from town and then do them in sequence, but that'd result in a lot of downtime just walking from hub to hub. It was WAY more efficient to start from the western entrance to the zone and ping-pong between the graveyard and the city, taking care of quest objectives on the way. You wouldn't know about this unless it was already your second character, though... or if you were using a guide.

 

[Havoc]

 

[Ulminati]

Barrens chat was born of the tedioum of grinding pig-men while everyone asked for the location of Mankrik's wife

 

[Hobo Elf]

Well, I am not saying every single thing in TBC or in WotLK was bad, but the overall direction of them was wrong. Look at vanilla dungeons for example, like Blackrock Depths or Mauradon, these were huge, non-linear places where you had to have knowledge to even know where to go, and could find a ton of side stuff if you wanted. In TBC, on the other hand, the dungeons were basically short linear corridors, where you run through a few rooms, collect the loot, and leave. Wasn't TBC also when they started introducing instanced PvP? I might be wrong, it was years ago. And by WotLK, they had phasing and all that other crap.

TBC had huge non-linear dungeons as well, such as Karazhan. I think you're looking at Vanilla with rose tinted glasses right now. Most Vanilla dungeons were linear corridors as well. Some were short, some were filled to the brim with trash (especially the level 60 dungeons where you didn't need the XP anymore) and a few of them were real dungeon crawls of any notable worth. TBC didn't alter that formula much at all tbh, just made the leveling dungeons less trashy in general. OTOH TBC dungeons weren't banal tank-n-spank shit like everything in Vanilla was since they made the encounters more mechanical and interesting.

 

[Ulminati]

I think it's widely accepted that boss fights topped somewhere in-between TBC and wotlk. Ulduar was genuinely fun and interesting, except maybe the vehicle section leading up to the first boss

 

[Zetor]

I'm probably a minority here, but individual encounter design in Cata dungeons was often much more interesting and demanding than earlier iterations. BRC in particular had the beam boss as a sort of mini-Netherspite, Halls of Origination had a few bosses that had pretty cool mechanics, and the reimagined ZG/ZA bosses were also fun.

OTOH even as the design of boss fights and trash packs improved, the actual dungeon-ness of dungeons evaporated to what eventually became Corridor Simulator 2008-2016. This was a trend even during BC, where the IMO best-designed dungeon (Magister's Terrace) is essentially just one long hallway of static encounters.

 

[Xor]

I think it's widely accepted that boss fights topped somewhere in-between TBC and wotlk. Ulduar was genuinely fun and interesting, except maybe the vehicle section leading up to the first boss

One night in a drunken haze I got together with a few guild members and we 7 (or maybe 8?) manned the 25 man version of that fight. This was before ToC came out so we were still in T8. It took a few attempts but it made the fight pretty fun.

 

[Cromwell]

What really killed WoW for me was the Quest compass... I remember how cool and immersive it was to solve quests by talking to friends and random passerbys... felst like a world were there wasn't NPCs, just real players.

Then people started using those "follow the arrow" UI mods and quest guides... then Blizzard gave in and incorporated them into the official game... and it leaked into modern RPGs. RIP exploration.

Storytime from my time as a gm there:

There once was a problem in wotlk where, if you had a questhelper addon, you couldnt log in while being in dalaran. So naturally a lot of players sought our help. So we told them whats up and that they had to delete theese specific addons (cant remember wich ones where popular at the time). They screamed at us for demanding to delete questhelpers and just did not log out in Dalaran anymore. I even had a Player who couldnt use his mount thanks to the addon (fuck me if I know why that happened) and he also did not want to delete it because he desperately needed id, flamed me and just declared he will not use his mount until he finds another working questhelper or the adon dev fixes the issue.

 

[SionIV]

TBC -> Wrath -> Vanilla -> Cataclysm -> MoP ->>>>> WoD in my opinion.

I enjoyed TBC more than Wrath, but Wrath was most likely the better game.

 

[felipepepe]

Blizzard introduced their own "Quest Helper" in December 2009. Here's Curse.com stats on the addon by then:

36 MILLION DOWNLOADS, with an average of 42K PER DAY.

For reference, the most downloaded mods on NexusMods have less than half of that:

Imma write a rant on this for Gamasutra, it's too juicy of a subject to ignore.

 

[Cromwell]

Seeing as people have the tendency to rate addons given on what they think brought the decline... I started there at wotlk launch, Blizzard didnt give a fuck about player satisfaction then (meaning how a player rated his gm experience). The rating as there but largely nobody cared about it as long as you did good work (and didnt slack), that was a good time. After that they started to give more weight to customer satisfaction whoch meant you had to kiss the players ass and you could se that in the stuff they implemented, so I would sy wotlk was the start of the decline.

Many things they implemented (which I found unecessary) were things they did to lessen the gm workload. For example:

One of the things we did the most was swap loot for players who where idiots and where the tank loted the priests robes and stuff like that, that got a lot worse with lichking and with the introduction of zul and the bear run players started to just clikc the loot as fast as they can knowing that gms will fix that. Instead of showing the players who did stuff like that the middlefinger and tel them to fuck off do it again and loot right this time, we had to swap that shit. Even more players caught on and after they noticed it generated a huge workload (taking time away from players who needed help because they were stuck or stuff like that) they implemented the ability to swap loot whle still being in the instance. They did a lot of that stuff to "please" players and thats why wow is where it is now.

 

[DDZ]

I found out I was still paying for my account, so I decided to fire it up.

Leveled a disc priest healing instances, and to be honest, they made that a really fun style of healing.

 

[SionIV]

I found out I was still paying for my account, so I decided to fire it up.

Leveled a disc priest healing instances, and to be honest, they made that a really fun style of healing.

*Wand specialization, not Discipline.

 

[you know what time it is]

Killing private servers, that's a new low.

 

[rashiakas]

Insert some edgy one liner to jump on the blizzard bashing bandwagon to look cool.

 

[hivemind]

insert shitslurping to look smart and contrarian

 

[Veelq]

WoW was an MMORPG once, whats left is O.

 

[rashiakas]

Why do you lie?

 

[SionIV]

It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that it ended up like it did with WoD.

 

[Beastro]

The sad thing is, the way it was done in old RPGs, with NPCs giving you some hints and then you having to figure everything out, wasn't always perfect either, with at least some games and quests being extremely obtuse and forcing the player to resort to walkthroughs/guides or quitting. But I thought at the time that the way progress would be achieved would be by having more logical gameplay, with NPCs stating some general problem/goal, and then you following through, doing in-game research (perhaps in in-game libraries or universities, talking to in-game experts), exploring etc, using logic and common sense. This kind of gameplay would be similar to being a detective and would just be a joy for someone like me. Instead, modern games (MMOs and RPGs) just opted to replace it entirely with mindless follow the quest compass and perform distilled fetch tasks bs.

http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=769