The World Of Warcraft is dying. Sure, looking at the numbers you’ll be forgiven for thinking otherwise given the still-hefty player base, but when you consider its latest expansion pack, Warlords Of Draenor, has seen a decline of nearly five million subscribers, a loss of roughly half its peak at the launch of the expac, then you can’t ignore the fact that something is wrong with modern day WoW.
And that’s just the thing, really: as the gradual evolution of the industry’s premier MMO rolls on, gamers are becoming increasingly less enthused with the decisions Blizzard have made with recent expansion packs – leaving the game in position that, frankly, very few are completely content with.
“WoW at the moment is in a diabolical state,” says Az, known for his YouTube channel Heelvsbabyface. “It’s atrocious compared to how it’s been in the past, and the whole attitude of the development team to the community. It’s really the worst state it’s ever been in in its near-11 years.”
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Az describes Blizzard’s “we-know-best attitude” as a significant reason that so many players have finally kicked their addictions. Subscriber counts will always rise and fall in line with the release of expansion packs, of course, but it seems Warlords Of Draenor was the final nail in the coffin for many – and that’s even including the publicly despised Mists Of Pandaria.
“Blizzard seem, at the moment, very driven by profit,” claims Az, “and they don’t seem particularly driven to looking after the community and making sure that they have things to do.” With that we’re reminded of the in-game store and the fact that, now more than ever, it’s abundantly clear where Blizzard’s priorities must lie: unique pets and mounts. That these are items that are considerably more detailed and varied than anything you can actually collect in game highlights just how cynical the WoW machine has become.
But more important is the fact that players do have so little to actually experience in the World Of Warcraft these days, a fact that YouTuber Asmongold is incredibly determined to see Blizzard change. “It’s a big problem,” he says. “Now that we have LFR, all roads leads to Hellfire Citadel. Everything you do, no matter where you start from, you end up in Hellfire Citadel.
“At a point it was always like that,” he admits, “raiding has always been the most difficult point in the game and it’s always given the best gear, but now the entire in-game experience is based around raiding. Blizzard needs to find more ways to encourage solo progression and other paths to moving your character forward outside of raiding.”
The blame, it seems, lies with the introduction of Looking For Raid. It doesn’t matter who you ask, if they’ve been playing WoW for a long time they’ll all agree that the game was at its ‘best’ before the release of Cataclysm – and most will point to LFR as the cause for its decline.
Fellow YouTuber Zybak used be a dedicated WoW-er, but his interest waned to such a point that now he’s quit completely. “I would say the lack of meaningful stuff to do,” states Zybak as his reason for quitting, adding that, “I’m someone who hates LFR for multiple reasons, but part of a game is having something to reach for and with LFR everyone can kill the final boss – that kind of just kills it.”
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You’ve probably heard such a criticism of WoW before, but it’s true: these days it is just far too easy, in all avenues of play. Zybak lists off a large number of elements that have been butchered by through oversimplification, stating features like dungeons, professions and even world content is almost entirely irrelevant these days either because of how little there is actually do with them or because they’ve all been taken over by the ease of LFR.
And it’s not that there haven’t been promising additions to the game either; Warlords brought with it compelling levelling with an interesting (and well-presented) story, and even the raids have been very well received. But the lack of extra things to tackle once you hit that level 100 mark is a detriment, while everyone quietly sits in their garrisons farming herbs they don’t need and sending followers off on missions simply for something to do.
So therein lies the biggest problem: by making the game too easy Blizzard seem to have done away with the nostalgia-soaked ‘good old days’. “If Blizzard are wanting to create content for lowest common denominator,” says Az, “they always have to create the content for that denominator. So whether they’re doing dungeons or raid zones, or bringing new areas into the game it – by their own justification – has to be doable by the worst of the worst players.”
“It is too easy,” he adds. “Call me old-fashioned, but I personally think that challenge is something that keeps me coming back to something because I know I do have something to work towards.”
It’s hard to know for sure, but it seems like Blizzard’s efforts have moved away from creating new and interesting content, and towards producing a system of scaling difficulty, a repetitive cycle rather than something new and fresh for players to jump into. It’s a system designed to keep players on life support, rather that tempt them to come back for more. Is Blizzard out of ideas, or is this just the beginning of the end?
Well, hopefully neither. Legion is on its way and it all sounds promising so far: customisable weapons, a story that focuses on player-favourite lore, and separate PvP and PvE balancing – something that has been requested for years. In speaking with the players of WoW, it’s clear Legion is an “in case of emergency” deal for Blizzard, a last ditch attempt to win back subscribers’ trust after the likes of Mists Of Pandaria and – it seems – Warlords Of Draenor.
But will that be enough? Blizzard certainly has its work cut out. “The group finder has been a good step, and I hope they use that to phase out LFR and the very easy Heroics,” says Asmongold, adding that giving players more things to do to progress their characters is imperative. The social aspect of the game, he says, also needs to be rejuvenated “There’s always been content droughts – you know, ICC lasted a year or something like that – but people didn’t really notice it as much because they were interacting and playing with their friends every week.”
Zybak is complimentary of Legion’s separate PvP balancing, but still thinks more effort needs to come from Blizzard in responding to those changes. “One thing that frustrates me is how long Blizzard takes to do the class changes; they say they do it because they don’t want people to think their class is constantly changing, but why is that a big deal? If something is obviously horribly broken, why take three months to fix it?”
All the same, he acknowledges that there are just far too many faults with World Of Warcraft now, claiming it’s a “death by a thousand cuts” that can’t simply be resolved by outright removing the problems like LFR, limited socialisation or garrisons.
“I’m very critical,” says Az, “but that’s because this is a game I adore. I want Blizzard to open their ears, and to actually deliver. I want to see more varied content, I want to see more options, and I want to see a proper endgame. Though I don’t think we’re ever going to get back to the days of The Burning Crusade or Wrath Of The Lich King.”
These are all common criticisms, too; it doesn’t take much to hear the wails of disappointment from gamers – even those still subscribed – but it seems the solutions aren’t too unexpected. Blizzard needs more, varied content, it needs more challenging goals to strive for and – for all that is holy – it needs to find a better solution than LFR. We can only hope that Blizzard is aware of all this as they work on Legion but, as Az himself puts it, “they just don’t seem to want to listen”.
To the uninitiated, it might be a little tricky to grasp why it’s such a big deal that Blizzard are stripping down World of Warcraft to the state it was back in 2004 for the release of World of Warcraft Classic, but if you were to compare the current game, to the ‘Vanilla’ experience, there are so many changes and enhancements - from the graphics, to the mechanics, to the very lay of the land - that the game can sometimes be barely recognizable.
If you’ve spent any time at all in the past couple of expansions for WoW, you’ll have come across plenty of players decrying how far the game has fallen since its glory days, and how you just wouldn't be able to understand that sentiment if you’d never played old-school WoW.
This began as a very vocal minority, but has been bubbling ever-louder under the surface over the past several years, especially since Blizzard updated much of the old-world content back in 2010 with the release of Cataclysm.
But with the release of WoW Classic, those players are finally getting the chance to go back and rediscover what they believe made the game so great all those years ago. It’s been a year since Blizzard announced WoW Classic at BlizzCon 2017, and now at this year’s convention, both those attending the show and those with a virtual pass, had an opportunity to try out a limited Classic demo.
A vision of the past
You’ll see the word ‘nostalgia’ banded around fairly frivolously when it comes to any conversation about WoW Classic, but there really is no better way of describing the wave of emotion that flows over you as you log into the demo if you played WoW in those Vanilla, or even pre-Cataclysm years. The original title sequence boots up, with the now famous intro music and we’re presented with the original character creation menu.
Gone are the sleek updated models we’ve grown used to, and the jutting muscles and plasticine hairlines of yesteryear are back. Running around the world with the sharply defined character designs seen in WoW’s current expansion, Battle for Azeroth, would surely take away from the aesthetic Blizzard are trying to create here. Building an old-school character, complete with grimacing scowl and jerky walk-cycle, is a grounding preparation for the forthcoming gameplay experience.
For the BlizzCon demo, we only had access to two of the old zones, but both iconic in their own way. Horde characters play through the Barrens, and Alliance characters are thrown into Westfall. Both of these locales are where you’d find yourself once you’ve left your starting zones and gotten into the meat of the game.
In the current WoW game they’d barely be a blip on your leveling journey, but for the old timers both of these locations were where WoW really began to open up (at least for human, and orc/troll players). Instead, you were thrown into a wide open space and trusted to explore that ‘world’ you’d heard so much about.
Lost in a wide open World (of Warcraft)
We logged into Westfall just as the demo began, and the sense of confusion amongst the player-base was palpable. In Classic there are no mini-map markers letting you know the locations of quest-givers, and only the slow-scrolling quest text to indicate where to find the enemies you’ve been asked to take care of.
For many, this complete lack of direction was clearly overwhelming. The global chat was a chaotic mess of players asking where to find gnolls and bandits, with many picking a random direction from the quest hub and striking out to explore the region, hoping to get lucky and happen upon the right kind of enemy.
The experience was most conspicuous when we logged in on the Horde side to check out the sprawling savanna of the Barrens. In current WoW, the zone has been split up into two much more manageable chunks, but in Classic it’s hard not to feel intimidated by the sheer size of the place.
With no mount to speed up our journey, and no markers telling us where to go, we were left to meander around the vast expanse, occasionally stumbling upon the raptors and tallstriders we’d been asked to take care of.
We’d been here plenty of times in the years since Vanilla, and knew the lay of the land, but with no directions to guide us we felt ourselves experiencing the Barrens as we did 14 years ago. The world suddenly felt big, and scary, and we were thirsty for more.
Fighting stubborn game mechanics
Logging back into Westfall, we vaguely recalled in which direction the decade-old Defias Brotherhood could be found, and managed to stumble across the enemies we needed to slay. It was when we entered combat with our Night Elf Hunter (and trusty pet boar) that it became clear how jarring an experience this could potentially be for modern gamers used to the quality updates WoW has seen over the past 14 or so years.
Nowadays, players running around the same area can band together easily to rack up the kills to complete their quests, but in Classic, if you’re not in a party and you’re not the first person to deal damage to an enemy, you’re out of luck.
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You get no credit for the kill - and no loot when the enemy is felled. It was a frustrating couple of minutes trying to get the first hit in on a bandit surrounded by dozens of others trying to do the same, but we eventually joined forces and partied up with a Gnome mage, and everything became smoother.
World Of Warcraft Size
We let off an Arcane Shot from our gun, tagging the bandits, which gave the Gnome time to let off a fireball with a long cast time. It was a key moment that stood to highlight the camaraderie of an MMORPG, that ‘massively multiplayer’ aspect of WoW that critics said had been lost amongst all the updates.
We casually chatted to others we’d picked up in our party about what they thought of the demo, and about BlizzCon generally, and recalled the friends we’d made questing in almost identical circumstances all those years ago. Yes we were battling against the game’s mechanics, but we were tackling it as a group.
Still, each fight felt like a slog. As a Hunter – WoW’s most popular class - you’re supposed to be using ranged abilities, but if an enemy comes within five yards of you, you’re unable to fire your weapon, meaning we had to go through the motions of firing off a Concussion Shot to slow down the bandits’ movement, while constantly running backwards away from the fight to keep them in the ranged sweet spot. It all feels very archaic, and serves as a reminder that some of this stuff was changed for a reason.
Overall, the consensus in the global chat was pretty apt. Half the people were loving the nostalgic experience, but half were shocked at the many seemingly illogical antiquated mechanics, and among the jokes asking when Blizzard were adding pandarens to Classic. There was a feeling that most people checking out the demo would dip their toes into old-school Azeroth, but it’s really only a dedicated, but admittedly still sizable, handful of players who’ll get the most out of the Classic experience.
The slower, much more immersive gameplay is definitely an attractive proposition and it’s easy to get lost in, but alongside that rose-tinted view of the past, you start to see the cracks in the decade and a half old game design.
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Adding up all the land masses in the game, Kalimdor, Eastern Kingdoms (including Vashj'ir), Northrend, Pandaria, Outland, Draenor, Deepholm, the Goblin Starting zones, and the Panda starting zones, how many square miles do you think the world is?
This doesn't take into account things being scaled down from how big they are actually supposed to be in the books or lore (apparently its a full days flight from Stormwind to Karazhan). This is just taking a look at the models of the world in game. I would have no clue on where to even start to make a well educated guess.
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