But this is a different game than it was 19 years ago, tastes, goals and values can evolve.
It’s like demanding from a music band to only ever stick to the same genre without experimenting or changing over the course of their lifetime.
The industry changed, the world changed, the players changed, so the game has to follow suit and I’m all here for that.
Can I ask what are the dimensions of your monitor?
Thanks!
There was a lot less going on in Classic. The game has evolved. And it’s not as if addons didn’t exist to show you where things were.
I think it’s great personally.
My main monitor that I game on is 34 inch LG Ultrawide
They have amazingly wide monitors these days but I’ve had this years.
I find it astonishing how complacent some people can be. When someone praises their changes as a brand-new, cutting-edge marvel, I frequently hear this comment. However, it’s objectively inferior most of the time and doesn’t accurately reflect people’s current preferences—rather, it reflects the preference of a minority who believes or wishes that this is also the preference of the majority, which it’s not.
A change is not good if it’s new, but good if it’s good.
I’ve thought about this comment frequently (because it comes up a lot), and the more I’ve thought about it the more I’ve realized how utterly meaningless it is.
It’s basically exactly like this argument: “It’s insert current year here, how is this still a thing?”
It’s never quite clear what it means. Did it get better or worse? Did it follow trends? Did it follow trends well? Is it setting trends? Was it a good or a bad trend for World of Warcraft? What is World of Warcraft anyway? Are people staying or leaving? Is the audience a different one? Where are the original players? Would they still be interested if this hadn’t changed? Etc. etc.
There is absolutely nothing about the number 2024 that should imply that everybody wants to follow a GPS tracker. Just because we’ve got it on our phones does not mean it makes for a great exploration experience in a fantasy video game world.
Nobody would expect an artist not to experiment. That would be terrible.
No, this is like calling out experiments that don’t work well.
But the interesting thing here is that it isn’t an experiment at all. They’re just copy-pasting Assassin’s Creed mechanics into WoW. It’s about the least experimental thing you can do.
Well, let us take leveling in comparison between Retail and Classic WoW.
I tried classic WoW. I absolutely hate leveling there. It is so slow for me it discourages me from playing itself.
Others LOVE it, so they keep playing Classic.
Doesn’t necessarily mean that either side is wrong.
Blizzard merely understood that many Retail players prefer a more modern approach that isn’t super time consuming than die-hard fans of WoW classic want.
To them, faster leveling in retail is a bad change. To others and me, it is a good one.
And so it is with many other changes made to retail over time.
I have been suspecting for a long time now that all these third party websites will be slowly integrated to WOW with the info they provide.
I am with you in that I value discovery and getting lost and finding my way again etc. But game is not so much about discovery anymore for a lot of people, it is just about getting from A to B as quickly as possible.
In a very bizarre way, the game has started to resemble (rush hour) real city life in this aspect.
Too many fundamentally confuse what they want to play with what their objective in the game is.
When discussing class design they’re thinking about how to get things that makes a fight easier rather than thinking about the flow of combat for their class and for people who fight their class.
When discussing quests they’re thinking about how to complete them, not about what experience and lore they can get out of it.
And of course, when discussing the world, they’d rather know where everything is so they can get through it all in record time instead of thinking about the awe of exploration and the mysteries of the world.
This is a very dangerous set of things to get mixed up, because it means you’ll ask for “convenience or UX improvements” that fundamentally destroy the whole experience the game sets out to make.
And yes, you are right - loading WoWHead into the game itself is basically the ultimate expression of that mentality. An example of that would be RestedXP. Sure, for some people that’s all they wanna do - they just wanna go to the modern equivalent of GameFAQ’s and get their walkthroughs, and that’s fine. I can’t stop them. But I insist that Blizzard should try not to shovel a walkthrough into everybody’s mouths. Most people don’t want that.
Each of WoW’s 4 core design pillars come with an associated challenge. One of them is sense of world, and the associated challenge is finding the things you need to strengthen your character. The game should give hints and pointers that, if you learn the lay of the land, will carry you forward to find the things you need to find - so they learn the world and the lore. If you just tell the player where everything is before they even ask for it, you short-circuit that whole layer of the design and create something truly bland.
I think we start to have a bit too many types of quests. If I were a new player, it would probably take time for me to figure out which is what in practice. One can get used to it over time, I suppose.
Uh oh, sorry to be the negative one but the WQ / Bonus q icons are a bit hard to tell apart at a glimpse… Would be great to have more distinct icons. Otherwise great 
Are the icons in the Legend toggles btw? Like, can I turn off a specific category if I want to de-clutter the map?
We’ll see about it today. I personally prefer it because it makes it much easier to read than this formerly, tiny window we had.
I’m largely indifferent about it. I open it when I set up or change my bars, and that’s pretty much it. In general I like that I get more information at a glance.
why is the spellbook taking up my entire screen?? is this some kind of mobile game ui joke or? i cant even drag a new spell onto my action bars because the spellbook is taking up so much space its literally blocking 70% of my bars
There’s a little arrow in the top right to help you with this. Makes it half size.
That said, I completely agree with you. These full-screen panels are a meme. They should be gotten rid of - they completely take you out of the experience. There’s a reason the panels weren’t a full screen system, other than the map, in the first place.
half the size horizontally yes, but it stays exactly the same size vertically, my bars are in the center of my screen, which means the little arrow does absolutely nothing. why is the spellbook not moving to the left side of the screen when you press the arrow button, why the FK is it still dead center?? who designed this what the actual F
Ahhhh.
Try this:
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/demodal
Think it’ll really help your situation in general if you have bars in the middle.
But the thing is: you don’t…
You get a bunch of empty, wasted space at a glance…
the amount of dead space in the new spellbook is probably at least 70% lmao, this is literally mobile game ui design
There’s not enough space on a phone screen - usually phone UI’s are very compact, so it’s not phone design.
It’s also not TV design - TV would try to get out of the way to let you enjoy your content which, in this case, is the game world.
It’s also not desktop UI design - desktop UI design uses the precision of the cursor to its advantage, making a small UI.
This does approach into the realm of tablet design.
But WoW is not a tablet game and its UI should not look like the iOS lock screen.