Who at Blizzard decided it was a good idea to time-gate the Story Progress in The War Within?
I just learned that there are 4 Discs with Lore, that we’ve gathered for Dagran. But apparently, these quests are gated to only show up every 2-3 weeks, and if you don’t do them, you’re simply left behind on Story Progress.
So now we’re punished for not playing actively. Great to know, that even the Story is becoming FOMO
Welcome to modern gaming
Story being gating is nothing new
That the Story is gated by Patches. No.
But having Story Quests show up as the Weekly Rotation quests, that is new.
So we’re basically forced to pay an entire months subscription, to do the Story Quest when it pops up. Or we get left behind on the story progression.
People who quit the game for a few months and comes back to play through the story in one go, will be punished for this. As they will hit the same wall, saying “Sorry, there is no story progression weekly quest this week.”
Remember tomb of Sargaras? A new story quest weekly for 12 weeks? Shadowlands and df had it gated by renown. Prob more examples too. But sure it’s brand new and outrageous blah blah blah
I actually complained about the Tome of Sargaras Weekly quests back in the day too, arguing that all the released quests should be available to not time-gate people on the Story.
And while Shadowlands Story was gated behind renown, it will still part of the games progression. You had to progress to a higher renown to continue the story, that isn’t time gating, as you could always go a farm renown, even if in tiny amounts.
But here, the quest is part of the Weekly Rotation. It’s not guranteed that I can get the quest next week, like the Tomb of Sargaras quests. If I for some reason can’t play the week the quest is active, too bad.
Renown was fated two per week
I also dislike how the campaign has rep gates too. I hit one for a while, I had to do some side quests to reach Renown 4 with all the factions before the story would continue. Didn’t take long or anything but still, it’s the principle of it. I’d like to do all the main story in one go. Then I’d do side quests (either on my main or an alt).
I used to hate dungeon gates too but at least now they have Follower Dungeons so that’s a good move. Although I’m stuck on Dawnbreaker as I can’t do last boss with the flying and my mate hasn’t played for a while (his sub probably out for now). Wish they’d done this in a way the followers could have done the flying with me as a Ride Along.
I’m feeling less enthused about doing the story now.
Yes, it was gated 2 per week, for everyone. But once you could get to 10 for example, a new player could go and go directly to 10 through farming. He didn’t have to wait 5 weeks to gain 2 renown levels each week to catch up, while everyone else progressed onwards to 20.
Those Discs are the laziest form of storytelling in a video game in a long time.
It’s really just Blizzard throwing text at the player to get them up to speed on a plot Blizzard couldn’t be bothered to flesh out through gameplay, whilst at the same time recognizing that there’s so much text that players would likely fall asleep if they got it all at once - alas it’s paced out over weeks and months.
Even the delivery is completely silly. Champion, go out and find some random Titan rocks, then we’ll jam them into this computer device, and somehow that’ll make the audio tape play! And oh yeah, to listen to the next track we’ll need more random Titan rocks, because reasons.
It’s so ridiculously dumb, even for a fantasy story.
The titans had really boring record collections, seems they mostly liked podcasts.
Whats the punishment you speak of?
This iPod is broken!
Go to the nearby junkyard and find some random parts of electronics.
Then we’ll jam them into the iPod – because that’ll fix it.
If we want it to play more than one track, then we’ll have to jam some more random electronics into it.
Because that’s how this works.
But we will only Jam parts into it, once every 2-3 weeks, when we feel like it.
Yeah, and only yours truly can go look for 'em, even though not too long ago we all visited the nearby beach that’s filled with those parts.
But only yours truly gets to collect random parts every other week.
Because reasons.
Are you sure that it wasn’t the same during SL too? That was one of the reasons why I stopped playing
I’m not really too bothered since it sounds like it’s a bunch of text and what not, but I really had no idea that the ‘discs’ quest was what progressed the story - I have just ignored that quest.