I’ve heard so many times how vanilla WoW had “not enough quests” and you “had to” grind mobs. Now, I played vanilla (from Spring 2005) and I didn’t remember this being the case, at all.
Yes, it happened when, let’s say a level 30-40 zone was out of quests and I was still only, let’s say level 35, but there was always another zone to find, and of course at least 2 different dungeons at every level range. I honestly think, for a lot of people it was laziness and not knowing where else in the world they could find level-appropriate quests, aside from doing zero dungeons.
I much prefer this to pre-7.3.5 WoW where you outleveled everything before finishing a single zone in a level range, let alone multiple ones.
So now with Classic out, can we all agree that this “not enough quests” notion was way overblown? (And yes, I am aware that there were a few zones like Silithus and EPL where the majority of the content wasn’t there for 1.1, but honestly, at those levels you can start running the endgame dungeons anyway)
I was a kid back then, i think i spent 50% of my time doing dungeons because i wanted to look like that warrior i saw running past me the other day.
Took me ages to reach 60 but i ended up grinding 58-60 in silithus because i ran out of quests.
It’s probably my fault yes, but this is how many experienced it, thus the myth.
I’m way ahead of my quests in terms of leveling right now on classic, because i grind just about everything on my path.
In general a lot of us just finished zones, and went to the next, whereas now i find myself in a new zone every few levels, only to come back later to finish the followups.
the reason why they said there was not enough quests is because they were going in straight line - for example sepulchers, brill , silverpine forest , hillsbrand , arathi highland → etc etc
No. The reason people are saying that is because there were no quests at some level ranges that were added it later patches. But it’s been like the very first months of the game or so, and for majority of game’s life span that problem didn’t existed anymore. Don’t act like people were totally clueless back then, there were guides, websites etc.
So I guess I was just playing too slowly/casually, and by the time I reached the higher levels (BGs were definitely already in the game when I was in my 40s) all these quests were already there?
Fun thing is that from the very start of developing blizz didn’t even wanted to make quests, they thought people would just grind mobs, but they changed their mind and made a lot of them before launch, but maybe not enough, which they fixed a bit later.
There wasn’t enough quests to begin with, they added more. We are playing the version with more.
Originally in vanilla I was grouping shy and ran out of quests in the 30’s having only missed some (not all) dungeon quests and exp. Alts levelled in later vanilla after quests were added didn’t have the same issue in spite of also not entering a dungeon.
Yeah, to be fair the game was only released in Europe in February 2005, and there were limtied copies to buy for a while to prevent server overload. I remember only getting the game in the second wave. So I guess, we Europeans got a less incomplete version of vanilla even at launch.
I didn’t know that! I do get it tho, as one of WoW’s main predecessors, Everquest, only sparingly had quests and those supplied a very little amount of xp compared to what was needed. The rest was one big mob grind, I can imagine it may have been part of the inspiration for Blizzard’s original stance.
Seems like many of early WoW’s bad ideas come from Everquest (including the huge hybrid tax), which they discarded, some as early as Beta, and some as late as TBC.
I think you’d have to blame things like D&D for that haha, in essence a lot of it was based on those kind of roleplaying systems . WoW took a lot of the great from EQ, tweaked crappy things and added some amazing conveniences that made the game a lot more forgiving and enjoyable (even tho that depends maybe on who you’d ask :D). But there were some things in EQ that I’ve never seen as well executed after in another game.
This depends on the zone, and i guess your level. When i hit 41 i went to Badlands for some questing and there were 4-5 available. That was it. Then i traveled to Dustwallow March at 42 and there were three available.
Finally the place i’m now at level 43, i went to Feralas and here we had loads of quests and followups.
Just to be clear, I wasn’t trying to trash EQ. I’m sure it was groundbreaking for its time. So much so that I guess MMO developers took a lot of its quirks as granted, whether they made sense for WoW or not.
Oh yes, for sure! We’ve come a long way since then :D.
But to get myself on topic instead of being shameslessly off it, I do remember when I started in april 2005 some areas were rather devoid of quests and got fixed later. But I definitely wasn’t the most efficient leveler at the time, I’m sure I missed quite a few quests I could have done.
The vast majority were clueless, or young and dumb. Not everyone was a cave dwelling swill bucket nerd like yourself. Get off your high horse. Or better yet, peel yourself off that cheeto dust incrusted desk chair.
. WoW took a lot of the great from EQ, tweaked crappy things and added some amazing conveniences that made the game a lot more forgiving and enjoyable (even tho that depends maybe on who you’d ask :D). But there were some things in EQ that I’ve never seen as well executed after in another game.