Leveling is dead. Unfortunately. I don’t even think it can be saved. But let’s be creative.
How about going into all of WOW, selecting all the most important quests, optimizing, basically the vision is you have a zone, it should take 2-3 hours to complete all the story quests, all quests that are too slow should be remade, all quests that are pointless filler should be removed. You could engage in doing the quests in said zone in the dungeon finder or through another system.
At the end you’d get an armor set or a cosmetic or a cool skin for your weapon or gold etc.
Remember Blizzard, there is a TON of old content that could be repurposed and molded into something cool that could be used in a myriad of ways.
This is just a idea I had in 5 minutes, you can think up 1000 such ideas, my point is that I think there’s a lot that goes to waste in the game currently. Also we need more gear, updates for old gear models, etc. Currently WOW is much older than say your competitor FF14, yet FF14 with less budget, a smaller team and less time manages to make better cosmetics than you do. You should think about this very seriously.
reworking old content it would require a massive work. this is why they introduced classic.
in retail the old content is good just for mogs and achievement.
It’s terrible, their competitor ff14 managed to pull it off. They can as well. It is a lot of work but not designing new stuff, it’s a lot of busy work to restructure and rework. Nothing that a good team shouldn’t be able to do.
As it currently stands a new player would be completely and utterly lost in current wow’s leveling system. They would understand 0 of the story and be 0 involved in this.
In reality what I suggested is minor, just make scenarios out of the old zones, use the content you have there to make something short and fun people can do to see the story in the zones in question.
This is the least they should do. In reality a complete overhaul and rework of the game is needed. All levels should be meaningful and you should need to do all the game to reach the end game. It should all take a while but not too much. The story should be presented cinematically and fully voiced. Otherwise. Well I’m sorry your competitors deserve money more.
But what I am saying is that at the very minimum old content should be used in some way. Otherwise, what’s the point. Just let this game die and make another game. It’s ridiculous to have 15-20 years of unused content that’s just there to rot.
I would be fine with leaving it alone but the problem is. IT IS UNUSED. Okay so don’t force old players to do it but new players? Why don’t they do it? Do you realize a new player has no idea, NO CLUE about what he hell the story is in this game? It’s just well frankly, it’s pathetic. It needs to be used somehow. And frankly, to make it relevant to leveling seems a bit too much. Therefore what do we really have here, the zone and the zone story. That’s what I need to be able to do and fast so I don’t get bored. 1 zone, remade, repurposed for 1 hour of gameplay, in total you would get what, 100 hours of gameplay that a new player can get through at a fast pace?
Guys I am just some guy who throws crap against the wall, the real point is that blizzard and their very well paid team can and should be able to come up with better ideas.
It’s used for levelling and a minimal amount for events. The re-use of the Vale and Uldum didn’t really do any storytelling of old, it was all part of that expansion.
It is not really possible to coherently do the story of WoW in one levelling sitting (there have been a lot of expansions since the game started), that’s why Chromie time lets people break it into expansions. So they can experience the story of those expansions past choosing a different levelling route as they wish.
Although that’s presuming people want to see the story. Many new and old players don’t care for the story. They just want to play the game.
I think an easier / cheaper way would be to have an AddOn similar to AutoPilot that leads you through a Storyline. There could be multiple Storylines in there. Some could just be The Lich King which would be mostly set in Northrend and tell the expansion story. Some could be the Dragon Story so would have bits of Dragonblight, Cata and DF. Some could be abot the Orcs and cover Outland, Draenor, Escape of Dunholdt and similar.
I’d leave all the old quests as they are for those wishing ot explore and see some world building.
They want to do this. And I want them to do it too. I think it’s just a case of finding out ways of doing it that will be realistic and entice enough players to go for it.
I think they can easily do it with existing questlines
imagine entering chromie time and heading to barrens, once you’re there a zone specific mini campaign pop us on your screen and gets attached to your map that leads you through a main zone questline and ends with a dungeon.
when you finish the entire questline and dungeon you get a bag that can contain an expansion themed mount/pet/heirloom/leveling gear etc…
now repeat the same thing for every zone.
from each zone they pick 1 main questline and 1 dungeon
they can do a lot with existing content with minimum effort.
Blizzard doesn’t even care enough to give you access to dungeons that you can’t queue to anymore in timewalking.
Cataclysm has 5 heroic only dungeons as well as the heroic only Vanessa fight in the Deadmines. Only one of those dungeons is available in timewalking.
Legion has 6 heroic only dungeons (if you count Karazhan as 2) and only one of those is available in Timewalking.
BFA has Siege of Boralus, Kings’ Rest and both wings of Mechagon and I’m not too hopeful for an upcoming BFA timewalking this expansion.
old content/old areas really needs visual update so i don’t think blizzard would just add something that makes people realise how old the graphics actually are. don’t get me wrong they’re great for 20 years but the game needs a graphic update(especially the old areas) , if they want wow to last even longer, they should make the next expansion with a complete overhaul like with an updated graphic engine
They need more then that
some old quests are just straight up broken and rather than fix them, they made easy work arounds.
“call of duty” the intro quest that takes you to the water zone in cata just skips the entire boat ride last I did it for instance.
Loremaster is more like doing every quest in every zone.
Which is fine to do once.
But there are other ways, either by doing a curated story which could do some quests in several zones in several expansions. Like my Dragon example, there are Dragon quests in Blackwing Lair from Vanilla, from Dragonblight in Wrath, plenty in Cata and DF.
Or doing a free range just wander around picking and choosing which quests you like the look of and which you want to ignore.