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Post by Plum on Sept 5, 2019 12:58:40 GMT 1
Is anyone playing WOW Classic? I managed to avoid it the first time around (I was in my final year of uni and realised that it would absolutely destroy my life!), but I've hopped in to try classic (EU Nethergarde) Anyone else?
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Post by Zejety on Sept 6, 2019 8:27:27 GMT 1
Yup! I've been really hyped for it, and I'm having a good time on EU Lucifron (a German realm). The queues are actually a decent tool to moderate my play time So far, the experience is pretty much what I've remembered, no rose tinted glasses here! However, I do have a strong feeling that nostalgia is still my main drive. I believe if I was playing in alien quest areas, I wouldn't find it half as enjoyable. So I am really curious how the game feels to a newcomer. Have you played modern WoW?
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Post by Plum on Sept 6, 2019 13:11:58 GMT 1
I haven't played modern WOW - after resisting the original WOW I fell into Warhammer Online and City of Heroes and they became my MMOs of choice (before WOW I'd been super into Dark Age of Camelot and graphical MUDs, so I made a deliberate effort to avoid getting addicted to WOW). It is very much as I expected it to be - an MMO from the early 2000s. Kill ten rats, deal with the bandits, spend thirty minutes running from A to B. I've added a bunch of addons which make it all more pleasant, something that I haven't had in my other MMOs - I'm guessing that modern WOW includes most of those conveniences by now. I'm not sure how long I'll spend with it - I'm no longer a young twenty something with far more free time than money, and I have plenty of other timesinks, but for now I'm enjoying it
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Post by Zejety on Oct 13, 2019 16:35:03 GMT 1
With a convenient flu that kept me home for a week, I'm now creeping towards the level cap. Time to decide whether I want to stick it out and try and stay Enhancement (a specc generally viewed as bad for raiding).
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Post by Plum on Oct 13, 2019 17:58:01 GMT 1
I played out the month but let my sub lapse. It did make me curious about what modern WoW is like, but it also made me realise that MMOs require a particular audience and I'm just not in that audience anymore
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Post by Zejety on Nov 10, 2020 19:23:14 GMT 1
Realized I've never replied to this, so let me necro it. Modern WoW is superficially similar but effectively very different from vanilla/Classic. The classes look the the same, the UI looks the same, the quest system is the same, etc. But overall, the experience feels much more designed.
The world feels more convenient. Quest hubs chain together in a way that means you rarely have to go off-course. In varying degrees depending on the content, enemies scale to your character level. You can queue for most activities without physically being present. You don't have to return to trainers or pay gold to learn spells. All of this feels like an upside form the gamedesign side, but it makes the world feel less lived in. I like to say it makes WoW a better game, but not necessarily a better hobby. It's also clear that Blizzard has acknoledged that for most players "the real game" starts at level cap, and have de-emphasized the leveling experience. Leveling goes by A LOT faster and easier and you will absolutely make new characters with the expectation of doing level-cap content with them. Whereas in vanilla, leveling itself was considered the game by many players (I never got a 2nd character to 60 before the first expansion). That has already changed in Classic though, as power leveling methods have become more prominent (e.g. paying max-level Mages to elobrately pull whole dungeons worth of mobs and AoEing them down for XP) Classes are more deliberately designed too. In Classic, most abilities have a function, and what you use in a given scenario emerges from the needs of the situation. Yes, that means Frost Mages would just spam Frost Bolt in single-target DPS situations. In modern WoW, DPS abilities are designed to create (some more, some less) interesting rotations. Stack this resource by casting A, spend it with B, and use C after you got a crit! Playing a class even in a vacuum can be moderately challenging! This isn't really a downside or an upside, it's just very prevelant. An actual downside in my opinion is that classes have become more focused, and lost a bit of out-of-raid utility and personality - to some degree it feels like their distinctiveness has been reduced to the minigame they play to do DPS. This *is* actually getting addressed in the new expansion though, which is cool! I don't think one is objectively better than the other, although I do think that the modern changes were economically sound. If your target audience is mostly old players, they don't want to spend weeks reaching level cap with another character. They are used to doing dungeons and raids. They would be bored to hell if they had pressed the same button in raids for 15 years. Classic works partially due to nostalgia, but also because it feels like more of a hobby than a game. You have to invest some time to boring shit (farm consumables) for the payoff. Ultimately, I can blame Blizzard for making it so tedious (and I look forward to the first expansion reducing that load), but it gives the game some weight. I wonder how much I would be praising this aspect if it wasn't for Social Distancing.
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Post by Plum on Nov 11, 2020 16:35:46 GMT 1
That all rings true with how I remember MMOs from back in the Golden Age. When I was 16-20, I'd think nothing of spending a whole evening in an MMO farming in a particular spot and it could be a week of that between levels. Nowadays my time is so much more valuable and my patience is much shorter - too short to put up with lazy design and filler. As a counter-point, take something like Hades - the pace of progression is glacially slow, but the actual core game loop is so much fun that it really doesn't matter. It's a world that I want to spend time in, regardless of whether I'm progressing quickly. I think the MMO that really broke other MMOs for me was City of Heroes/Villains. Creating a new character was so much fun, even playing at low levels was a blast and the sidekick system meant you could always play with your friends, regardless of level difference. It meant that at any point you could have a great idea for a new character and within an hour be back with your friends kicking ass. Then just throw them away and start over with your next dumb idea. Every MMO I tried after that just felt slow and restrictive
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