Mate, you’re delusional. There were literally thousands of games out on many different platforms. Stop trying to make up idiotic arguments just because you want to win an argument. You’re not. You need to make sense before you can do that.
Yeah, now I know you’re a nutter. /enddiscussion
There are some pretty obvious improvements WoW could make.
Blizzard could voice a lot more of the story.
It is pretty absurd that in the year 2025 we’re still getting most of the story in WoW through reading a lot of text in tiny boxes.
Voicing more story would also allow Blizzard to have more dialogue between NPCs, which would add a sense of realism to the world, as opposed to the text we’re given now which gives a sense of reading a story rather than experiencing it as it happens.
Blizzard could stop hand-holding players so damn much. It is absurd that if a questline consists of 3 objectives, then you get 1 small quest followed by another followed by the last one. You have to complete them chronologically and you have to go back to the NPC after doing each little objective. It’s hand-holding to the extreme. The Diablo II example I gave with the Den of Evil would be a much better design for WoW. Give players a lofty story goal and then update the quest objective dynamically as players go through the adventure. There is no reason why players should go back to the NPC all the time. And if the NPC is so important, then have them tag along on the adventure!
And Blizzard could also just get rid of all the tiny meaningless quests that do nothing except add volume to the game. I just got a quest now for the K’aresh ritual. But rather than just doing the ritual, I am tasked with finding the ingredients for it. Why?? It adds nothing to the story that I have to fetch the water and the flowers. It’s just busy-work to occupy the player for more time.
Less would be more. Diablo II had 6 quests per act and that was plenty to tell a captivating story with just as much scope and size as any story in WoW. There is no need for these filler quests anymore. I truly don’t understand why Blizzard feels it’s necessary to have hundreds and hundreds of quests in a zone in order to tell a story. It is such an outdated design.
And they could follow their own design philosophy of show, don’t tell.
Most of the quest text I’m reading doesn’t really further the story at all. It just exists as a form of instruction and over-explaining what’s going on and what I’m going to do – as if I am a moron!
The questing experience would improve dramatically if Blizzard just stopped treating the player as an idiot and instead trusted that they understand the story context of the quest they’re given and that they know where a nearby place is without having it spelled out meticulously by the NPC.
It is almost offensive how stupid the quest designers at Blizzard assumes I am. It is as if they don’t think I know how to play their game, because they go to such insane lengths to overexplain everything in it. And what’s worse is that the questing experience is as simple and straight-forward as anything can be.
But yada yada, Blizzard does as they’ve done for 20+ years. It is what it is.
I couldn’t disagree more with everything you’ve said.
Agree 100%
It would add so much immersion.
As for quest design in general: I really don’t mind quick short quests to fill out the experience.
What annoys me sometimes though is when you have to do something, but then you have to do it 8, 12, 20, 50 times. If I can do something 1 time, or okay let’s say 3 or 4 times, then I sure as hell can do it 12 times, so at that point it’s just wasting everyone’s time (which is WoW’s purpose, sure, but I’d like the wasting to be fun). So if there’s a repeating job in a quest, please just limit that to 3 maybe 4 times, tops.
For example: In Tazavesh I did this quest where I had to click a rat, follow it and then pick up a gem. 12 times! Come on…
I am playing almost everything as Resto, but I also play with my sibling. So we’re 2 people. Enemies with 8 million HP die before I get to even cast Lava Burst after Flame Shock, in like literally 2 gcds. The majority of enemies don’t get to reach any of us, those that do are scrapping us for around 2% of maxHP per hit maximum, and even then that damage is passively healed by Earth Shield or passive self-healing out of combat while running to the next enemy.
But even when playing alone, the only difference is that I get to do a “full rotation” of (precast) Lava Burst → Flame Shock → Lava Burst → Lightning Bolt which kills every non-elite enemy. There has not been a single occassion outside of trying to solo the 60M+ hp bosses where I even felt the need to cast Riptide on myself. Even the 10M hp rare enemies don’t deal enough damage before they die to make me want to selfheal. And as dps, those bosses don’t even get to do a 2nd or 3rd hit.
Hell, in Season 2 I was killing the Underpin Well Connected friends from full HP (with Brann as tank) without them getting to complete a single cast (Lightning Lash, Double Capacitor Totem, Hex, Thunderstorm). The Crowd Control tools we have available are way too much.
The fact that enemies of the overworld are designed for characters with item level around 620 (since story quests reward 642) while even many of us Delvers are at 660+ doesn’t help. It’s one of the reasons why we have been asking for optional harder overworld that tries to maintain reward per time spent roughly equal (so if it takes 3x as much time to kill something, it should drop 3x as much gold). Imagine how even easier it will be at 700 that we will get from Delves.
We used to have that too pretty much in days of old in WoW, but in a different form. We would arrive at a new camp or hub, we’d take 10+ quests that took around 3-4 minutes to read in their entirety, and then we’d go on a trek to complete them. Including any additional quests encountered on the way, it could take more than 1 hour before we returned to hand in! It felt like an adventure, and the cumulative reward of those quests felt very rewarding.
Nowadays it’s always 1, 2 or at most 3 quests, where reading them still takes 2-3 minutes, travel time is 2-3 minutes if we include the travelling from enemy to enemy, and actual combat / gathering time is distilled into less than 1 minute. It’s not combat-centric any more like in the past.
You know why you have no answer? Because I am right.
You should calm down. Denying reality won’t do you any good.
Ok. So I started doing world quests and regular quest in Karesh.
Jesus Christ, most of those quest are so horrible. People who design and implement those clearly do not play the game. Quests like Grub Stompin or Endangered Specimens are prime examples of that. Super low spawn rates, quest objectives not shared with other players. It’s depressing to try to do those quests.
What were you thinking blizzard? And there are so many awful quests in that zone, it’s embarassing.
The quest where you chase little rats, the one where you collect some plants, or the one where you need to farm 40 items. There’s so many of them. It’s unbelievable.
Clearly there is no QA department at blizz.
Blizzard should issue apology letters to the players.