I am not a new player, but I can imagine that a new player would feel like this.
After being done with Exile’s reach, you get dumped into Stormwind, and it can get overwhelming. I almost always log out of my alt at that stage.
Also, when you go to Waking Shore in Dragonflight, you feel overwhelmed and feel like logging out as well.
If you are new player, let me know if this has happened to you.
There is only so much hand holding that Blizzard can do. You can’t expect them to be there every step of the way from level 1 to level 80.
You’re giving the basics to get yourself started, if you speak to the NPC once arriving in Orgrimmar or Stormwind.
One thing they DO NEED to do when new players is once they reach Orgrimmar/Stormwind is to have the damn trade & service channels turned off by default. A new player seeing the spam of boosters is annoying as hell for anyone.
It was fine for me. The problem is the story(it started with BFA for me in SL…) really weird for an NEW player.
and the timeline of story and how it’s booting you into new expansion.
I also don’t know why but I didn’t even notice trade chat. I probably didn’t notice or give attention to chat at all in the beginning.
Incidently i watched a video on youtube today, from a guy playing WoW for the first time and sharing his experience. His approach to the game was honestly nostalgic to watch, In spite of how much the game has changed, his experience was so much like my own so many years ago.
I really believe that experienced players overthink the newcomer experience, and lose sight of what its actually like to be new in WoW.
I will drop a link to the video below for anyone interested, its a long video, but a fun watch.
As someone who started two months ago, the answer is no. Why would I feel overwhelmed? WoW does not have any unique systems that other RPGs or open world games do not already use. Why would this be any different?
The biggest issue this game has, and I really mean it, is how it handles zone questing and the fact that tracking basic continuity between quests is a complete disaster.
Chromie Time and the XP halting system have been amazing, but the fact it ends at level 69 is a disaster.
Since joining, I have basically done a large part of Dragonflight, and honestly, it is terrible compared to TBC content, even though TBC has far less content overall. The modern game has huge problems when it comes to the warband system and questing structure, meaning you cannot track quest completion on an individual character level because it is all tied to achievements.
The story in the older expansions is far better. It is less intimate, but it feels more serious, even though it tackles a lot of the same subjects. I just unlocked Hero Talents on my Gnome Mage today and they feel awesome. Add-ons are also great. I only use four. One is ConsolePort, another is an extended wardrobe, one for tracking collectibles, and a questing add-on to fix the broken quest progression.
Exile’s Reach is honestly very boring and the characters are insufferable. You have a single mother going on about her kid being part of the Alliance rather than focusing on her own child. That made me instantly hate the character because she comes off as a psycho putting faction loyalty above family.
Honestly, the most overwhelming part of this game has been how poor the narrative has become as I move into the modern content. The frustrating part is that it seems to get worse the more attention the developers put on it.
Also, what is good but annoying about new content is the fact that I basically know everything about it because you can just deep dive on YouTube. For a live service game in 2025 with what is really a small to medium sized community, the amount of spoilers for basic things is insane. I basically know everything from Wrath, shadowlands and BFA just from watching entire lore dumps online. It genuinely amazes me how much time people have put into this game. The amount of lore and quest text you can just sit and read or watch on YouTube completely boggles my mind.
First time I tried WoW was towards the end of Legion. I did the northshire quests, got up to goldshire, saw like 4 quests on the map, one green quest marker I did not understand (and possibly a blue quest marker from a blingtron), probbabbly a bunch of tips popping up too. Felt overwhelmed, didn’t try again until almost a year later.
Not like the old experience was much better.
I stopped at Exiles Reach my first time, and I think it took me like two months to try again just because the voice acting and dialogue were horrible. I expected far more from Blizzard. I had just come off Diablo 4, so to see a massive decrease in quality from what was a game with 5/10 writing standards into 2-3/10 was very rough.
The questing in the game is then the worst part. I don’t even know what quests belong to which storyline. The map will say 0/8 dark wood, but then you just see a bunch of quests that are continuing on from the previous ones, but they don’t tell you why they are connected tasks or if you accidentally accept it, which questline they are from.
For what it’s worth, I don’t look at this the same way you do.
I think the change that the devs made to shoehorn all quests into a “Storyline” format was bad. Very bad. It degraded the entire value of the questing experience.
In Vanilla, and earlier expansions, each zone was its own thing. There were villages and outposts that needed help. There were local Bads and Bigger Bads, whom you would meet in the process. Often there was a Big Bad of the whole zone.
But it wasn’t laid out on mandatory linear tracks for you. There was an actual living WORLD out there, and it was up to you how you approached it.
They started the process of forcing structures on this in Mists, and by BfA it was done.
Confining quests into straight-line blinkered lanes really dumbed the whole concept down, IMO.
No I mean all of it even the new questing is bad. I do not mind individual story arcs or zone questlines but at least let me know which of the seven questlines per zone I am actually following. They still have not fixed this problem. I need to use an addon just to tell me which questline I am on so I do not get buried under random pop ups and lose track of what is happening.
I actually prefer the zone questing to this new structure because there is less story for them to mess up and it feels more grounded.
I understand.
And what I am saying is that the fact that you have to care which storyline you are on shows that entire concept that one quest belongs to one storyline is a bad thing.
Having said that, I do agree with you that if they are going to create these tracks, they should make following them seamless.
But it has always been that way. If I do TBC content or Wrath content and I am in the Storm Peaks and a quest is part of Defending K3 or the Harpy Problem, I would like to know which of the quests are tied to those so I can actually care. Right now they are just meaningless zone quests because you have 5-7 different questlines competing for my attention and I do not know which one belongs to which.
The effort of caring is not worth it when you can just accept them all, hand them in, be none the wiser, and then watch a YouTube video to fill in the blanks.
What is actually worse now is that those questlines are tied to achievements on an account-wide basis. So if I want to redo them on a new character, I have no idea what is what or if I have missed something without an addon telling me. It completely ruins the experience of playing through the story again.
But back in Wrath, “Defending K3” and “the Harpy Problem” didn’t exist.
Those names and the “Storylines” they stand for were invented and retro-fitted by the devs years later, in BfA I think. They took the quests that already existed, and grouped them into Storylines.
In Wrath, there were just quests; no storylines. If you wanted Loremaster, you completed some number of quests in a zone - not all, but mostly all. I found a funny thing years later. I had Loremaster of everything since Cataclysm, and I found in Wetlands that I had “not completed” one of the new Storylines, even though I had the achievement for Loremaster. 
And so, we weren’t counting up all the time “Have I completed this Storyline?”
So now, coming in as a new player, everything has been retrofitted with storylines and achievement trackers, but it all feels slapped on and disconnected?
I have no idea what quest belongs to what or whether I am halfway through something important unless I use an addon to tell me. For new players, it is a mess of overlapping questlines, random pop-ups, and fragmented story beats with no clear direction.
How am I supposed to care about the story or the zone when the system itself makes it confusing to even follow? If I need third-party tools just to understand the basic quest structure, why should I invest in it? It takes all the fun and immersion out of the experience.
To some degree is even worse at 80.
I obviously wanted to do the story content if chronological order but no the quest log wants you first to do the quest in Arathi.
Even in the order it should be last not first.
Yes. Exactly.
And as an older player, I see the whole “Storyline” structure thing as a forced, artificial, alien imposition, both in the old zones and in the new.
And it leads to things like you thinking about which boxes you are checking rather than about what effect you are having on the people of the zones.
Couldn’t have said it better myself! 
Yes this has been really annoying. Plus the game keeps trying to force me into TWW. I do not want to do the new expansion. I have not even finished the old content. It is frustrating because it does not feel like the game wants me to play World of Warcraft but rather just their new thing. But how am I supposed to appreciate the new content if I have not even experienced the old?
This is very perceptive, and very true.
The rationale of the devs, as I understand it, is that they believe that having a lot of people doing the same things at the same time is the best overall state for the game.
There are … um … about 60 zones in Vanilla, and 5 or 6 in each expansion, call it another 60, so about 120 zones in all.
They would much rather see people concentrated in the 6 zones of TWW - even better, see them all crammed into the latest released one - than spread out across all 120 zones. The world certainly feels more populated when you see lots of other players around you; there’s no arguing with that.
So they do nudge you that way, but to be fair they do provide the whole world for you if you prefer to do otherwise.
BTW, if you do want to explore all the expansions, I recommend you make a new alt for each expansion. The game looks very different when you play as a different class, and to a lesser extent a different race,
I am planning to level one character for each race and go through the zones properly. The zones do not take long, but I am starting to get into the lore.
That said, I have seen plenty of people in the old world doing quests, especially in TBC zones. I never really feel like no one is around. There are always people farming collectibles, running old content, or doing Timewalking. It still feels active if you pay attention.
I see more people in random zones than I ever did playing FF14.
I just finished the TBC zones, and thanks to the Timewalking event, I am now working on the reputations with other people around, so it has actually been a blessing that they merged everything at the right time to be honest.
This is one of the most sane topics i have ever read on this forum, especially because of Zinziphex.
I think, every problem described here can be easily fixed by blizzard by
Now you just go into your completed/uncompleted tab and check, that you have done every quest in a patch. Then move on.
This is a 2-bit, dirt cheap obvious solution right on the surface, that would improve the game in no measure to how easy it is to implement, so no hope blizzard will do this. In fact, they have actually CUT OUT completed quests, when relaunching vanilla.
So INSTEAD
Since there is no hope of blizzard doing this right.
Here is what you can do as a player, that wants to enjoy wow’s lore, individually
Also, to add on Zinziphex’s point
imho starting from Cata the story is usually a hehe haha 3+ meme , but from Legion inclusively reading quests is just a torture.
I have bitten the bullet for Legion and BFA, but for the duration of Schadenland i straight out stopped reading quests and subsequently had to take a ~2 year vacation from WOW.
world map is a joke too, its like a shelf in a grocery store, where you can pick any type of islands you want, here is a chocolate island, here is a light diet island etc.
TLDR. WOW’s lore is so bad now, it spoils the experience of playing classic and the original game. you just keep thinking, yes this is good, but then thinking of what happens down the line in later expansions… so yeah, cant even hide in classic from this rot.
You get actually dumped into Dragon Isles.
And Bellular made a video about the experience from a fresh account this week I believe.
The gear is the biggest issue. Followed by story and player agenda.