Does retail wow still feel "open world"?

Community General Discussion
1

Hello,

Returning to retail after quite a while and I was wondering if folks could explain how the end game feels in terms of the open world experience.

I jumped back on my level 34 paladin and so far the experience has been very incoherent while at the same times it feels very on the rails / linear.

When I jumped in it tried to make me go to war for Azeroth then I went to chromie time and selected legion. It took me through the legion prologue and then back to SW and then it took me to shadow lands. I was incredibly confused as to what was going on.

I’ve been playing through shadowlands campaign and so far I feel like I’m playing a very linear, campaign focused RPG rather than sandbox open world MMO.

I haven’t bought dragon flight yet as I wanted to jump back in but I’m losing momentem as the experience is not what I was hoping for, especially after spending a few months on classic era.

The graphics are great, the combat feels great in retail compared to playing a paladin in era but I’m not sure if the gameplay as a whole is right for me so if anyone can provide insight into the dragon flight experience that would be great.

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Um. Long and complicated answer.

Shadowlands is a bad example to choose. It had the most linear and forced process ever, and the disjointedness of the four landmasses + Maw.

At least Dragonflight has a better and more pleasant world to be in. And it’s all one continent. Lots of Northrend vibes, including Tuskarr, and a Grizzly Hills-lite area within one zone.

From what I read, Final Fantasy FFXIV has a strong Main Quest Sequence (MSQ), being an apparently excellent linear storyline that weaves through the game from level 1 to the end. And the WoW devs seem to have developed MSQ-Envy. They WAAAAAAAAAAAY overdid that in Shadowlands. It is very very forced and artificial, and it bars you from participating in any end-game activities, even World Quests, until you have eaten up all your vegetables with it.

Dragonflight is similar in principle, but softened a bit. You do still have to eat up all your cabbage by completing all the Campaign Quests - the ones with a brown shield around the exclamation mark - in each of the zones. Then you work your way around the four zones to the capital Valdrakken, and unlock World Quests and the other stuff.

The open world content in Dragonflight at max level, though, is much less, thinner, less rewarding, and less interesting even than Shadowlands. We’re talking Draenor-level bad.

Blizzard have resorted to dumping random Rares that can’t be soloed at random spots all over the patch areas, and timed events you have to wait for and can usefully do only once a week. They removed 85%+ of max-level quests after the first week because of the tears of raiders who never needed to do them anyway.

If you’re looking for an open-world experience, I’d spend as much time as possible getting caught up with whatever expansions you missed, and then starting Classic Wrath. Maybe the next expansion will be better.

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Thank you for the detailed response that was very helpful. I might hold back from returning for the time being and stick with era as that is more of the experience I am looking for.

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I think this is one of those situations where it’s a dial rather than a switch. In Vanilla the dial was set to almost no storyline and in SL it was set to everything is on a main quest chain. Bot are too extreme.

Vanilla and TBC had very little by way of a main story quest line. It was more of a theme or general threat.
By MoP there was some shape put to the story and there were chapters. You weren’t on rails though and could skip some storylines or zones. Alts could level doing different quest stories or zones too.
Legion started with Campaigns but each class had it’s own so alts got an unique story to play through. These campaigns were less of your xp than later expacs.

BFA and SL were almost all campaigns with little by way of free range questing.

I think the range of free range vs storyline questing between Wrath and MOP were a good setting on the dial.
Edit to add that Dragonflight has definitely dialed back of the campaign focused questing. There are a lot more side quests and if you don’t finish one chapter it doesn’t always block you from doing later chapters. I haven’t done the dungeon quests but I can still access Forbidden Reach and Zaralek Caverns. I might not get the next chapters on the Tyr story though as I’m roadblocked at the Fourth Protocol of Tyr which is a dungeon quest.

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I missed this altogether. As a non-raider, are there a lot of quests that I could be doing that have been zapped?

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Well that’s because WoW has always been a linear campaign focused MMO and not a sandbox.

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Yes.

We had a full roster of quests, though without Emissaries, in the first couple of weeks. Then the raiders and runners wept so piteously that they would feel compelled to do them, even though they gave no significant rewards.

And so Blizzard simply stopped refreshing the quest list every day, and left us with 2 days’ worth per week. When you also take account of a couple of other minor adjustments, that comes down to about 1 day’s worth.

Emissaries, of course, held things together, and game more worthwhile rewards. Without those, both the feeling of progress and satisfaction also took a hit on top of that.

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This one-sided biased narrative that you trying to push is very funny.
Aren’t quests no longer restricted to max level and you can pretty much do anything you want pre 70? Atleast you certainly can when leveling an alt, I noticed it when leveling dk, I can choose any zone that exists here, pretty much I can ignore quests and level through wqs and dungeons without losing anything, and I haven’t noticed shortage of side quests compared to legion or BFA too

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I think that in this case, (as in many others), the answer goes down to : what do you want to do, and what are you willing to do to get what you want ?

If you want to loose yourself, starting 2 quests here and 3 more there, going off rails, you 100% can. If you just want to follow a path like it’s on rails, you could also do that.

The game is so huge that I feel like there’s something for everyone.

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When levelling second and subsequent characters, you don’t have to repeat the MSQ. Agreed. Where did I say otherwise?

But you do have to complete it the first time.

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the game has an open world but it’s boring, dull, mostly recycled quest patterns from previous expansions that neither give good gear nor good cosmetics. it’s there if u want to do it for the achievements etc. but it’s really not worth the time and again, boring. also, this is what majority of the players want since they only care about instanced content so i can’t blame blizz if they have enough resources for only one type of content.
these are all my opinions , you don’t have to agree.

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I just heard something about being able to go to zaralek without completing campaign idk.

Btw

It’s not excellent, far from it, story itself is good I guess but pacing is problematic and you are basically forced to run around and do chores until the point where story starts to actually progress and then again run around and do chores, and yes it has lame anime cliche “explaining lore through dry monologue”.

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Your alts can absolutely go to Zaralek. At 70, after your main has completed the DF MSQ and completed the Reach questline, and the Zaralek entry questline, they can even do WQ there. But they can’t open the Niffen without repeating the entry storyline themselves.

P.S.

BTW, I am not personally terribly upset by the mandatory MSQ thing, as long as it is not as bad as SL. I think it’s an ego-imposition by the writers, and it would be better in the style of, as Gram said, Wrath to Mists, but DF wasn’t overly burdensome.

I think that’s a problem, and they should change it, but it’s not disqualifying, at least as applied in DF.

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10.1 offers the most boring, empty, and lifeless world i have seen in my history of playing this game.

However combined with 10.0 content that you have not done yet, you might just find the type of sandbox youre after.
Maybe not though as reward wise, 10.0 content is behind 10.1s stuff.

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The levelling isn’t that bad. Decent classes, decent gameplay, decent zones, pretty meh quests, but still within the margins.

The problems really kick in at 70.

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Yeah the levelling was a lot of fun.
And while 10.0 at level 70 was on the empty side, it had potential to be built off of.
It had things like the hunt and tuskar fishing which while not substantial, meant there was something you could get on with while you waited for the events that were on timers.

And while the content is still there, participation isnt going to get you much in terms of character progression. Like you could do the storms, but you wont get anything out of it. The seige is still there but the rep gains are tiny and again, the rewards terrible in a 10.1 world.

Really all that 10.0 content is good for these days is rep for those who do not have it, and flightstones for those that lack them.

And then with 10.1 content… take all the potential that 10.0 had, throw it in the dumpster. On reset you get 3 hours of content, and every other day less than 10 minutes. With no fun repeatable activities given to do. (Unless you count rares and events that require groups and is random if they will even spawn. Hope you like sitting around doing nothing! :stuck_out_tongue: )

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I don’t rate 10.0 as highly as youdo, especially after they removed 85% of it, but it’s true that they did have quests, and maybe could have built something on top of them.

We are in complete agreement about the sheer dumpsterness of everything after 10.0.

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They removed some of the ‘make you play metrics’ for DF. Those that didn’t like having to complete a load of chores daily before getting to play, enjoy the change where world quests only refresh twice weekly. Zaralek cavern rotates slightly differently with two world quests appearing daily. Those who play world quests as their end game content aren’t as happy.

Legion introduced a hefty grind for player power. DF is like a breath of fresh air in this respect. But not for everyone.

Yes you have to do the main storyline through each zone on your first character but ALTs don’t have to and side quests can be ignored.

It’s a shame you missed out on the play DF for free weekend. Hopefully they’ll have another at some point. It’s always great to be able to try before you buy IMO.

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i still think the issue is about the rewards. it’s not rewarding , yeah %90 of wow players are m+ pushers and raiders and they don’t want to get gear from anywhere else but open world could at least give good cosmetics , the only cosmetic i like that comes from df open world is the zc set , the rest is so bad (imo) . if you’re gonna keep the game as it’s own gearing system at least make open world rewards look cool . people collect most of the things because they love collecting stuff, not because they look good , this is my observation

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You don’t like the new upgrade system that allows you to boost things up? Or just that you don’t like the looks.

I don’t really like the Pala tier set this time round. Priest is amazing

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