After leaving WoW for several years and missing every expansion from MoP to BFA (I played through part of BFA in fairness), I thought I’d share my experience and suggest a new way of leveling.
WoW is about the story, for me at least. By that I don’t mean reading every quest in detail or speaking with that random NPC who needs milk. I mean who is the villain, where did they come from and how do I stop them.
When I returned, the learning curve was huge. I got dropped into BFA and didn’t know what was going on. After some time outside of the game researching, I really hate that this is a thing that is so prevalent in WoW but anyway, I found out about Chromie time. I was so pleased that I could play the past expansions and learn what happened to get me up to speed. Well, I’m sure all readers here wont be surprised when I say that isn’t exactly how it turned out.
I’ll group the experience as I tried this on a number of alts across all missed expansions. I completed the opening scenario, some dungeons and a number of quests in the first zone and then I hit level 60 and get booted out to go to BFA. When I started BFA later as an alt, I was able to complete the main story in the initial three zones of Zandalar before hitting 60 but I missed out on Kul Tiras and Nazjatar and don’t really know what happened with the main villain, I never got to a point where I received a quest to go into a raid.
Then, I can’t remember what event it was but it took us to the Caverns of Time. It was during Nov or Dec last year if I recall correctly. In there stood an NPC which showed you cinematics from the previous expansions. Whilst this was good, it didn’t explain the full story and I was left with questions like “That was cool, what events led up to that happening?” or “That was cool, what happened after?”. Then, when the event ended, the NPC was gone and I don’t know if it is still in the game or not.
So, my suggestion:
For first time players, this will be the only option.
For alts of a max level player, have it so they can choose from Exile’s reach, their race’s starting zone but also add the third option below.
- You start off in your capital city, Orgrimmar or Stormwind and complete quests relating to original WoW. EDIT: So as the old world does not exist in earlier Chromie timelines, either add this back in, though I think that might be too much work as it wouldn’t have undergone the re-model, or start off with a detailed cinematic, showing what happened during vanilla WoW, the good, the bad and the dead. Then move to point 6, keeping the principles of points 2-5.
- You will quest and travel in the old world but incidental quests are removed and the only quests available work to advance the story of that expansion. Consider free flights between flight paths to ensure the player doesn’t spend too much time running between points (particularly prevalent in the older world).
- Throughout this, incorporate follower dungeons for every dungeon available for that release. There should also be function to queue into it to play with others, with a small wait time. Much like how the dungeon works in Exile’s Reach.
- Finally, the story ends with follower raids which works in the same way as above.
- Ensure that by the end, the player has been given the option of gear appropriate for that level.
- Once completed, you move on to The Burning Crusade and follow the same path as above but obviously, within Outland.
- Rinse and repeat this through all expansion up to 10 level below the current max level. At that point, you’ll get whisked away to complete the current expansion.
- At that same point, you could re-implement all of the missed incidental quest chains.
- You could also enable a feature where players can then go back to their race zone to learn more about their history. Though some alterations would need to be made as I’m pretty sure some, if not all, have quests which teach you to use spells.
- Keep War Mode an option but remove the Exp buff as this would skew the pacing.
Notes:
- This wont be a quick fix
- Obviously, that is a LOT of content to cover which means some quest chains might need to be amended slightly, removed altogether or added to in order for them to flow better.
- There wont be a requirement to hit, for example, 10 levels per expansion. Just for the player to hit 10 levels below max by the time they finish the last expansion released.
- I would imagine this experience would need to fit into a sandbox environment, much like how Chromie time currently works. Therefore, you’d need to factor in the player choosing to do something different, like maybe re-running dungeons multiple times which will impact xp gains. I’ll leave you as the experts to overcome that. Do you control the entire flow like Exile’s Reach or allow them to drift out of it but by doing so, they’d receive a message saying if they continue, they will leave the story campaign.
- Allow all max level players the option to go back and complete this new chain. Remove item rewards and just give gold and maybe a new title as an achievement for completing it. Also allow it so that they can exit the scenario and re-join with their progress saved.
- There might be some complaints that this removes people from the MMO environment but I’ve completed Exile’s Reach a number of times now and see people there. Even working together to take down Killclaw the Terrible and complete the dungeon. In addition, for anyone who has used Chromie Time, it’s no different there, very barren. If anything, at least this has everyone on the same path, so more chance of bumping into people. Then finally, leveling is so fast that I think this thought is just looking back at the old days. It’s not like that anymore in those leveling areas.
