I played MMORPGs for around 19yrs, and my first MMO was Runescape, then Warhammer, Rift, Terra, Aion, GW1 & 2, BDO, FF14 and ESO. So I have a storied history with them, and they are by far my favourite genre. My degree is in computer science and game development. So around three months ago, I decided that I would try World of Warcraft as for 16years I have heard many things, both good/ bad and wanted to see for myself.
Character Creation
The character creation of World of Warcraft is a disappointment in a lot of areas. The character creator has the utility of games which came out in 2009. Itâs mainly due to a limited number of cosmetic variability. The UI/ UX of the overall character creation is clunky, where one slider on a panel would suffice. You have windows upon windows for a simple eye or skin colour change.
The actual character models look and feel like planks of wood with clothes painted over them rather than having a dynamic armour system that MMOs pre and post-2012 had. In addition, there is zero variability in the height or width of a character model that limits the uniqueness of a playable character, making every person in the world seem rather cookie cutter and stale. The only thing that might differentiate a Blood elf is hair and eye colour for the most part, which is truly disturbing for a 16-year-old game.
The class restrictions based on racial preference are common in the MMORPG genre from 2004 as class variation usually has to do with the worldâs lore. Still, modern MMOs have resurrected the old way of allowing players to be anything and have turned away from limiting players via class and cosmetics or have allowed them to choose one and instilled different skill trees on top.
The good part of World of Warcraft character is the variety of races. However, when realising that newer races are still burdened with the same or even more limitations as the older races, it becomes disconcerting before you even get into the game as it feels cheap for a game you spent around ÂŁ50-70 on.
Grade: D
Next Steps: The Wow development team needs to invest in an entirely new model, animation and gearing team to upgrade WOW cosmetics and model utility to the current standards of games like ESO, FF14 or GW2.
Exiles Reach vs Cataclysm Zones
You would think as a newer player, I would prefer Exiles Reach, but itâs the opposite. The quality of the content from Cataclysm to the modern starting zone is stark.
I started my first and second character as Night Elf Priest. I liked the idea of using the light to heal and scorch my enemies. The Night Elf starting zone was in this massive tree a bit graphically outdated, but it was beautiful to behold.
The distribution of the lore to the player through the questing was well done. I learned about the mythology of the Night Elven people and how Dragon Aspects had refused them through the use of the Moonwells. I learned about how they value the balance of nature and how they had failed to stop the corruption of the tree that they called home. This questing eventually goes onto a fantastic interconnected zone storyline that teaches you what it means to be a Night Elf over multiple zones. It was awe-inspiring. When other players told me Cataclysm was a flop, I was surprised because the zone quests were terrific.
Cataclysm Starting Zone: A+
However, Exiles Reach was very constraining, and I started on a boat like most RPGs today. It was very linear, and this was my first character. It seems like I was already a soldier of some military force that I knew nothing about, surrounded by random NPCs that handheld me through about an hr of content that was highly condescending and boring. I had no idea where I wasâforcing me into a storyline I never accepted. I wasnât even taught the basics of my class competently by the in-game NPCs, which was terrible as a first taste of what the modern game offered.
The voice acting was excellent but introducing me to a terrible mother and an annoying son, the saying familiarity breeds contempt was ringing true here.
The world-building of the new starting zone was poor, and it introduced me to the Ogre race, which seemed more threatening until the cast of characters started to ridicule them and treat them as jokes which ruined the tension of the situation. After that, it went from trapped on a tropical island after a hurricane in the middle of nowhere surrounded by Necromantic Orgres sacrificing people to being on a tropical island with fish people and an enemy force that wasnât a threat. The most significant danger on Exiles Reach was a bear and walking porcupines.
The first dungeon you encounter doesnât prepare you for a dungeon experience. I met a new player who failed twice due to the friendly agents not following him up the tower and then leaving the game in frustration and embarrassment as other new players and guides âtryingâ to help them figure out the UI to get into a dungeon with a team member.
The more complex the content, the more problems, especially for new players into a world they have never been in before. If youâre going to have friendly agents escort new players, they need to work 100% of the time.
The new player zones also introduced me to the emoting system of this game which is terrible. I have not seen an emote system this neglected since the early 2000s, and these games are either free to play or are on maintenance mode as they came out in early 2005. Blizzard has done zero innovation on what should be a critical social element of their game. How can players take ownership over their characters if they feel and act like planks of wood?
Exiles Reach Zone: D-
Next Steps:
- Go back to the old Formula.
- Upgrade the tree and older zonesâ graphics.
- Make them evergreen content.
- Upgrade the emotes system.
Levelling pre-Shadowlands
The zone questing in the cataclysm zones is just fantastic for the most part. However, a lot of the zones are not to my liking due to their environments. Iâm ginger, so a wasteland scorched by the sun isnât for me.
As a Night elf player, you feel critical in the world as you mark it as an adventurer or âInsert Classâ. However, this changes around the Warlords of Draenor expansion, where you become the Alliance Commander, which ruins the immersion.
Many people do like being the chosen one which they made you in future expansions. However, they have to do it from the get-go and switching from a game where you can create your RP and socialise with other people around to the âchampion of Azerothâ is disappointing. The game loses something other games donât do, i.e. leave it up to the playerâs imagination.
Levelling can be confusing for new players around level 35. For example, you start to genocide areas with one ability. In addition, once challenging enemies are now a joke and no longer fun, which ruins the questing experience in a zone. Finally, it creates a mentality that the game is constantly telling you the content you are doing no longer matters, and the actual game is at the end game.
BFA questing content that came out three years ago is drastically worse in quality. The main storyline takes precedent, and side quests becomes collect nine furs because that random woman needs help with animal pelts. Or help this random group of people who are in the area to give you quests. It creates the mentality that side quests are just filler to get XP. You lose the importance of zone quests which once told you about the lore of the area and how the people lived, is now filled with irrelevant content, not making me want to do side quests anymore as they feel like a waste of time.
Content Post MoP seems highly experimental, offering neither a consistent gameplay experience nor reminding you what you once loved about the game due to how different it feels. WoW, legion feels utterly different to WoD; WoD feels different to MoP. Doing this ruins what people love about MMOs which is being a consistent world that grows over time. Every time you add a new borrowed Power structure into the game, you mutilate the memory of what onceâalienating older players and attracting a different target audience that mixes the social pool, causing tribalism and problems to arise at an existential rate. Since multiple communities over multiple iterations of the game want other things to do. To service all these different segments of the market, Blizzard seems to created mediocre content. Unity in purpose and principle keeps MMO communities alive, and when that is threatened, they become insecure and toxic to gatekeep that which they feel as sacred and entitled to.
Pre MoP Leveling: A+
Pre BFA Leveling: B
BFA Leveling Onwards: D+
Next Steps: Add an Alternative levelling system for people who want to be adventures and allow them to set up Adventures guilds in Outland, Northrend, Pandaria et al. and will enable them to get access to evergreen content, cultivate more of a casual audience by introducing a better crafting system, Player housing and other such features which increase social cohesion in the Wolrd and might help mend the social fabric of the game.
The Problem with Gearing and Crafting
Gearing in the early game can be good. You get gear frequently, which is nice, but it happens too often for it to matter. Gear acquisition is a massive problem from start to finish, and the pacing of the content in the game feels like a mess, so it doesnât help the situation. If you get a lot of gear which does not matter, the process of gaining equipment loses the ability to make you excited. Therefore, it ruins the experience of doing higher content and getting rewarded, or it numbs the desire to grind tokens to buy the best in the slot at the end game.
Shadowlands gearing is confusing and weird in so many ways it makes it feel arbitrary and over-complicated for no reason. You have conduits that add no actual gameplay changes except for general stat increases. Why this could not have been done through sockets or enchants is baffling to me. It also makes balancing a mess as Blizzard is not an Action-RPG studio. They have Diablo but not produced anything in years. They donât seem to have the talent that can balance these within a reasonable degree. The lack of talent here means that specialisations can have massive power gaps at the extremes, forcing players into a playstyle they donât want to play or causing people to be bitter. It creates a mentality that you need to look at every patch note to see if your class sucks this time around rather than just being consistently good (itâs not too much to ask for competent class balancing and design).
The lack of tier sets is felt, and there are no long intrinsic grinds; every grind seems to be patch specific, once again creating a mentality that only 5% of this game matters at any one time. My biggest question is why Blizzard is doing all these crazy experimental armour sets, such as Azerite armour(I found this online. Its conduits pre-set in armour). It didnât even work conceptually as it would conflict with item level. That is basic knowledge which they choose to ignore for an entire expansion. Instead of fixing the problem by adding in standard gear, which they did in shadowlands, they added essences for no reason other than having Perma slotted the necklace slot for two years. WHY? Who asked for this? The heart of Azeroth should just have been a quest item that took up an inventory slot for two years at worst. Holy cow.
Legendaries are insane. Collecting them and eventually crafting them is weird, arbitrary, pointless, annoying and insulting when your crafting system is dead. This should be the expansion long grind that players are working towards, not anima upgrades, not azurite power nor Artifact power or any other thing with power in the name get away from these systems.
Upgradable armour slots are pointless. Put in standard gear. If you need to give the casual player a unique long term grind doing it with their armour is not the way. Even casuals players want to progress their character, and that means even if you give them upgradeable armour sets, they will still want that mythic gear. Though they donât have the skill to do it, making what they are doing feel pointless unless they donât care about gearing, and if they donât care, they wonât upgrade it. A basic solution is to allow people to farm tokens to buy the end game gear and complete a mythic raid to unlock the corresponding transmog. This seems like the best solution for both casuals and raiders as they can get gear far more efficiently and donât have to be in millions of pounds of gold debt just to raid the world first. (I have never heard of this happening. It isnât very reasonable).
Crafting gear in this game is pointless, and the crafting specialisations are dead, unwanted by the development team, and itâs rotten to the core. I did a bit of research and saw that Blizzard did rework crafting in shadowlands, but itâs unfortunate to see nothing changed, and the general lack of utility, interest or even fun is not there.
The development team had two years every single expansion since it died to rework the system and didnât even put in the effort, it seems, when revising it. It seems they need to have an internal discussion on whether or not to make things like potions available from vendors and whether or not they should scrap the crafting system altogether as itâs just not needed by the majority of people. Gold is given out so fast in this game that itâs not even required to be rich, which is ridiculous because crafters must feel like theyâre wasting their time unless theyâre high-level raiding.
Gearing Grade: U (at least you can barely use it).
Crafting Grade: U-
Next Steps: Make a consistent, simple gearing system that you had previous iterations of the game. Either allow people to get gear in the content by creating a loot hierarchy within the content or allow them to farm tokens to get the best in slot gear which would be preferable, and make the tokens account-wide for alternate characters. I have never seen such a mutilated and dumb crafting and gearing system in 19yrs of MMOs. Free to play Korean MMOs, which were a crash grab, have objectively better gearing than this game. Black Desert Online has better gearing in this game, and that games gearing is an insane RNG fest.
Mythic +
I feel so sad for people who have to go through this game mode to get gear from an RNG slot machine called the vault. Why does it exist, and who asked for this?
The mode is a massive disappointment and is akin to the nightfall system of Destiny 2 with none of the upsides. The rewards you get for it is disappointing and donât reflect the months of work that is put in. The non-seasonal affixes are boring at best and make me not want to play the game at worst.
The seasonal affixes can be fun, but if the seasonal affixes are terrible, you are stuck with them. They have to produce an equally great affix; otherwise, it will feel like a step back in quality. With each new affix, though, it means that two things happen the developers balance the content around the classes they have, or they balance the classes around the content. Meaning every change in encounter design can screw your specialisation with every patch or hotfix as they donât have the skill to balance anything in this game proficiently, and with conduits/soul binds, itâs a mess.
The levels of mythic + are terrible. Who thought 15 levels of difficulty were the numbers just scale was okay? Itâs tiring to look at and just makes me think no thanks. This tells me only a small amount of dedicated players like raiders will do this content, which then begs the question, what are the casual players doing? Just the look and feel of this content of the bat is off-putting as there will be no natural progression of difficulty from a +1 to +2 or a +2 to +3 if youâre competent. If you stop getting rewarded at +15 and players are still pushing keys higher and higher, why not just cap it at +5? Attach a scoreboard for the time/key, and get rewarded with a title for being the best.
Who thought a timmer was a good thing for mythic + its lazy development that causes needless stress and promotes speeding through content that seeps down to the casual versions ruining new player/casual experiences.
The person who thought putting raider IO in this game mode needs severe disciplining as that was not the right call. The addition will be great for people who enjoy the game mode as it will make their life easier, but they already enjoyed it or played it out of spite. However, this addition will gatekeep and intimidate newer players and doubles down on a style of gameplay that is inherently bad for the gameâs health. It also shows that the developers will not take the time to rework one of their critical systems to promote a newer, more fun and healthier form of gameplay that could welcome casuals into the mode and allow for a more forgiving system. Instead, this will stunt this game mode as more experienced players leave the game, and the culture of mythic + remains the same or becomes more severe over time. It also promotes a style of gameplay where you need to be on top form 100% of the time, which is unreasonable at best and unhealthy at worst.
Next Steps: The fact that I have heard people saying can we get a mythic + style system in other MMOs is profoundly worrying. Still, chances are other MMO companies could do a better job by removing the non-seasonal affixes adding different mechanical variants of the bosses per level of difficulty like almost every other game in existence with a hard to nightmare mode.
Grade: F
Raiding:
Good actually, the environmental and mechanical design of the raids is awe-inspiring, thatâs it. Raiders are probably the only people in this game with something unique and fun to do when the patch comes out.
My biggest problem here is that raids are a plot device for the story, which ruins the raiding and story experience. Instead, make raids a side activity happening in the shadowlands. Remove the trash packs and get to the boss fights quicker; I know it can be good to give people a breather between encounters but give them a waiting room before they go into the arena to spar against the boss. No one is the sanctum to kill a grunt.
The mechanical design of the raids is both beautiful, distressing and causes game wide problems. The mechanical design is 100% top-notch, with no issues with how the fights happen, except some bosses can be over or under tuned.
Every fight mechanic is unique means that there is no common mechanical vocabulary amongst the player base. The difficulty spike between open-world content where the game is mediocre and unthreatening can be a real challenge as players might have to turn on their brains. However, the problem here is that if they donât read how the fight works from the raid journal, they will have no idea how the fight works. In other games, boss mechanics are seen in other content to allow for players to visually know what is going on in high-pressure situations and act accordingly.
So the raids are fantastic, but if the majority of the player base cannot do them, they are ultimately a waste of development time, especially when you can tell itâs the only piece of content the developers care about. Itâs distressing to see how well these bosses are done in terms of mechanical design when your average mob only has 1-2 moves, and an auto-attack or a Torghast boss can only AOE or stun. It might be better to take resources away from raids, reduce the difficulty and focus some of their attention on the other parts of the game since it needs a lot of love.
Grade: B+
Story
Take the main story quest or leave it; itâs a marvel reskin void of imagination. But, unfortunately, WOW, thinks itâs the next coming of D&D when it hasnât earned any of its story beats. I would say itâs an MMO(there is no RPG), but the story for GW2, FF14 have proven that concept wrong and the world-building of ESO drowns WOW in a bathtub.
Time gating on the story feels terrible. What you do get is almost nothing. The cinematics is nice but isnât needed, and they could probably tell a better story if your character was included, but due to how they do the story, itâs not going to happen. You are not the main character of the game when it matters, so you feel unfulfilled, and your character might as well be the janitor, the first ones put in the universe to clean up their mess. Itâs almost like your character has a perception filter over them from Dr Who, people can see you and talk to you, but the minute they turn away, they forget you were ever there.
The semi in-game cutscenes are laughable compared to the competition, and they should just stop doing them. There are many better ways to tell the story and a lot more of it which would probably be far more interesting for the casual audience.
Also, stop with the books; youâre a video game company, not a lifestyle brand. We all know your clothes and toys probably come from China or Vietnam. Focus on the game. It needs it desperately.
Grade: D
Reputations and World quests
Itâs a world quest tracker x however many factions there, reputations from earlier iterations were more like reputations in FF14 but have been neglected like much of the game as time has gone on. There are also too many for me to care about doing even one.
Grade: U (No effort at all)
Development Team
What team? WoW has two years to produce an entire polished expansion. Instead, they create one patch and charge you a triple-A price tag for a promise of a finished product and then hold that promise hostage through an unearned sub fee which they then try to collect with a unique store mount showing they put in more effort when they can smell the money. The sub fee is more profitable than ever due to cloud and edge computing. They have no excuse for charging you this amount, and producing so little content when producing content is easier than ever. The fact that this company hasnât been sued for false advertising is beyond me.
They probably do listen and probably donât care about what you have to say since the people they seem to be servicing are the addicts, raiders and whales. This is funny because their payment model is also highly incompetent if theyâre trying to get more money. If they need inspiration for that, Iâm sure they can talk to a few of their colleagues at Bungie. I have never seen a company do an in-game store that pisses more people off. The whole point of a store is trying to make you go in, not drive you away.
Grade: U(do they even try?)
Conclusion
Three months of this game, I am already this disgusted, and I cannot imagine what people who have spent 2-16 years must feel. It must feel like watching a family member die of a diminishing disease, watching who they once loved grow frail over time, or they understandably feel betrayed. The developers in four expansions have somehow mutilated their game. I cannot recommend this for anyone, and it wouldnât be able to hold its current population for much longer. Lesser MMOs have died for a few of these factors but what seems to be keeping this game going is people who generally like the game and residual goodwill. Itâs regrettable because a key few fundamental systemic changes and the desire to go to an older philosophy while using a few modern implementation techniques could truly save this game. I hope to god they do because too many people have wasted years on this game for them to fail.
Overall grade: 3/10
Next Steps:
- Full original story in the game, no books.
- Fix Mythic+
- Fix normal dungeons
- Make average content harder
- Increase mob mechanics
- Get rid of conduit energy (why is it even in the game?)
- Side quests should be interesting
- Donât make force players to do content. It should be an option, i.e. Torghast
- Stop borrowed power systems
- Bring back tier sets.
- Simplify your currencies. Anima should have been the shadowlands version of gold and soul, and stygia is unnecessary.
- Scale characters down in the older zones. Donât scale them up.
- Introduce a consistent gearing system.
The list could go on, but this game either needs to be remade or a lot of investment. A competent game director and producer must be in charge because the team running this game feels like they donât have MMO experience, and getting the Q&A team, a PTR is embarrassing. Your not an indie company. The fact that you think its standard players are angry is telling I have never seen a product in such a bad state when you should have 16 years of experience in dealing with these issues, but since the gameâs staff has changed so many times, it feels like that knowledge has not been passed on.
