My most cherished memories of this game will always be riding through the Barrens on a Raptor on a character that felt powerful because I had just hit level 30-something and I felt like a badass even though my gear was mismatched and I had a simple nonglowing axe and bow.
The game was decidedly more grounded and low fantasy from gear design, quest design and plots. You played a character in a large expansive fantasy world where Orcish grunts clashed against human footmen and quillboar gatherings and defias thugs were serious threats; let alone those HUGE ones like a Dragon in Dustwallow named Onyxia!
Today all gear is glowing, oversized and has to come from an alternate reality to “feel cool”. Our plots concern time travel, jumping in to alternate dimensions and worlds of the dead and even the Burning Legion that was full of such mystique in W3 with human cults doing grim rites and rituals to summon them was reduced to a Mass Effect ripoff of aliens with spaceships shooting lasers.
Purely from a story and visual design standpoint I absolutely detest the direction this game has gone in and I pray for an expac where no alternate world or dimension or spaceships are relevant, just the old zones that people have cared for and loved for 18 years now.
It’s been 12 years since cataclysm. What’s happening in the Barrens? Elwynn? Duskwood? Durotar? Will the story EVER return to places and characters people genuinely care about or will next expansion be all about how we through new high-tech sci-fi development can create a giant new spaceship that can travel through black holes to take us to the alternate dimension from which the first ones came from where we will equipp jetpacks and laser rifles to shoot against more aliens with guns?
Comparing a TV show to an MMO is a dangerous thing to do but Game of Thrones was evidence that the big unrelatable threat will never be more exciting than the characters you’ve grown to love. People loved to hate the Lannisters because of Joffrey but they also loved to love the Lannisters beacuse of Tyrion. What family did you want to win? It was hard to say, cause there was someone you hated in each of them and someone you loved in each of them! It made everything genuinely interesting until the final few seasons, and this whole thing about the Night King was just a meh thing few cared thaaaat much about.
The Alliance and Horde could be the same way. Give the Horde interesting characters that people love to hate, but also characters people love to Love - and the same for the Alliance! Stop the sci-fi mumbo jumbo, please just return to the roots and make the faction war interesting again.
it would be good if the next expansion was much bigger, like instead a few new zones, we get a few new planets and a spaceship that can take us to the different planets like in stars wars the old republic, and you have to level up on all of the planets slowly like you level up in classic from 0 to 60, so a year later people are just starting to reach max level, at which point the end game can begin. There’s too much rush to end game these days.
there was a time when we were simple adventurers helping zones here and there as we moved across the 2 continents and discovered new settlements and their local storyline, until the reached endgame and joined the final raids.
several expansion later, we faced gods, archmages and titans, so obviously we cannot go back to that unless the jailer wins and recreate reality in a way that resets everything we know.
This is only half-true. Yes, you will never get back the feeling of being a total noob and experiencing everything from the first time. But you can definitely relive some old memories and create new ones on top of it, and just enjoy the game for what it is.
Unfortunately Blizzard couldn’t help themselves and added paid character boosts in TBCC (even though it didn’t exist in original TBC) and it has hurt the old world which used to be beautifully populated in classic.
Thing is, the only time people sync up is endgame. We can’t drag out the process of levelling for weeks or months because guilds will disband due to people being at completely different stages of the game.
And at this point, if a guild disbands; half the players just leave. They don’t go on to find a new guild and play again, because they were here for the people they knew, not for the actual gameplay.
Horrible money grind for fast flying mounts - many players buying 3rd party gold
Irritating (Zangarmarsh), ugly (Hellfire) landscapes with remarkably poor fps (Nagrand)
Boars, boars, boars!
Rep grinds for… what? Mostly involved waiting for things to spawn so you could kill them for beads
M+ not invented, so very limited party endgame
No phasing so we stepped through a portal and immediately found the towns that had apparently been built while we were in transit
Great raid mechanics
Reasonably fast raid release schedule
Gear from tier 4 being the best way to be ready for tier 5 meant content remained relevant and alts had things to work on
Raid attunements making it a chore to accept a new guild member who was behind your progression
Don’t get me wrong, TBC saw me join my first serious raiding guild and I had a lot of fun - but I also got very fed up with the horrible geography, the money shortage, and the real lack of in-game explanation of what the heck was a heroic dungeon and why would I go there? At the time I mostly questioned why someone had dropped a spaceship with holograms and lasers onto my nice little medieval swords and magic game. It felt very out of place to those of us who weren’t Warcraft lore buffs.
Suffice to say, I don’t look back on TBC with rose tinted goggles. It was ok, but we can imagine much better.
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