I love Blizzard for making the Follower Dungeons, the Story Difficulty for Raids, and Delves. It’s all great stuff.
But for true world players like myself, who for whatever reason can’t stomach the repetitive nature of most of WoW’s gameplay systems (including Delves) and just want to be able to roam the world… well, there’s not a whole lot to do at max level.
Professions have become quite complex and require you to take part in other forms of gameplay if you want to fully unlock them. It’s not enough to just run around and click things. So you’re basically left with a half-finished skill tree and can’t make any of the cool stuff. I’d like to see them dumbed down. If you run around and gather things in the open world, you should be able to become the best craftsman.
Gathering is useful for a bit, then gets overrun by bots once a patch has been out for a while. It’s also not really supported in older expansions’ zones as a current endgame activity, which gets limiting. Why not offer a daily and weekly quest from some NPC that rewards you with Renown if you go to Elwynn and pick some flowers, or Highmountain to fish up some trout?
Pet Battles haven’t changed much over the last decade. They did experiment with Pet Dungeons, but beyond that? Could we perhaps overhaul the skill system or offer new types of pet battles instead of the old 3 v 3? Perhaps waves of little “trash mob” pets leading up to a boss?
Archaeology is no longer supported in new zones. I’m really not sure Delves can serve as a replacement to this feature. Why not re-instate it? It was fun to see all the lore and to just run around old zones to click things.
World Quests are decent, but they have become a bit overly complicated in recent years. Instead of just “go here and solve this puzzle” or “visit this place and kill this dude,” you typically have to stick around for a few minutes and look for mobs to kill and fill a progress bar. I think all of them ought to be as straight-forward as the ones for flying, climbing, or taking pictures. Perhaps the Weekly Quest pop-up dialogue could let us choose which types of World Quests we’re interested in?
Why have World Bosses become pointless? I recall basically every expansion up until Shadowlands or Dragonflight as having really fun loot pinatas in the form of World Bosses. You’d get a cool item every other week, or at least your alt would, and it worked great. In recent years I have barely gotten anything from them, and they just feel bad these days.
The fact that Skyriding is so effective means that you tend to mount up and fly between every little destination. This means you miss a lot of what’s going on below. You don’t spend as much time soaking up all that atmosphere, smelling the flowers, or enjoying the scenery from a normal POV. Why not offer little perks that can only be obtained if you’re walking, running, or using a ground mount? For example chests and special gathering nodes that can’t be seen from above.
Use the Hero’s Call Board! It’s right there in every major city. Instead of just having it point towards breadcrumbs for old zones’ campaign questlines, why not offer interesting activities through it? Perhaps a note that offers a quest if you head to the other side of the world to clear out an old dungeon or kill an elite mob hiding out in some cave. Maybe even offer to do extended questlines in different zones, like for example asking us to visit Northrend and do all the quests in the Grizzly Hills for a beefy reward. Could be a new location every week so it never feels stale.
Similar to PvP Mode for the open world, perhaps offer a “Hardmode” for PvE that you could toggle for an extra challenge while roaming the world. Tough mobs could appear and go after you sometimes, and mobs in general could have higher stats. Perhaps there are additional treasures to be found like back when they used to drop all those chests from the sky in Battle for Azeroth.
Anyway, I could go on and on. But please consider this Blizzard.
I’ll echo the sentiment somewhat. I remember prior to The War Within being announced that Ion Hazzikostas was slightly hyping the prospect of what was to come by talking about the segment of players who didn’t do raids or dungeons or arenas, and how Blizzard felt they were a bit underserved.
And I think in the community that translated to Blizzard doing something about the open world gameplay and really lifting that up to be a greater gameplay experience than it was.
But then they announced Delves.
And initially it felt like they were trying to sell Delves on the idea of them being open world gameplay. You know, they were this seamless transition into an instance with no loading screen, and you’d just randomly stumble upon them whilst adventuring.
But I’m not sure if the segment of players who like to do open world gameplay feel like Delves was what they dreamed about or really wanted.
I don’t think so.
At the end of the day, Delves just feel like a Dungeon that you can run solo. And it’s very clearly an instance and in a fixed position on the map.
So you still have this open world with the same gameplay as always, that is now older and feels even more outdated and in more need of some tender, love, and care.
And that same segment of open world players still sit around and wait for whenever Blizzard may decide to put some design emphasis on the open world.
There is progress for players that enjoy overworld progress as their endgame: Worldsoul Memories and Delves. These come in addition to the existing World bosses, World Quests, weekly events like the Theatre Troope, Awakening the Machine and Lighting the Beacons. The reason Delves don’t look the part is because they all take place in caves or enclosed areas, all 12 of them right now. If we had some Delve with the sky above us, it would give a better impression of “openworld-iness”
It’s because the new zones are actually huge. And they are huge because skyriding exists… It’s really stupid.
Try going back to Kalimdor or any old world and see how much it takes you to cross one zone while dragonriding. They seem tiny in comparisson. Because they were designed to be done on foot, or with a 60% ground mount. On foot, when I actually quested there, they also seemed huge.
But now every new zone is stretched up because you are like lightning with the dragonriding. Why that is a bad thing, I don’t know. It’s a strange chicken and egg situation. What I know, though, is the new zones are so big, that if we didn’t have skyriding from the start and were forced to do them on foot first, there would have been an OUTRAGE. They really should shrink new zones a bit from now on. Because it takes forever to get to an NPC or objective on foot/ground mount. And because of that, people mount up for every 2 cm of movement. And because of that, Blizzard continues to stretch zones more and more. It’s a self-feeding neverending loop. That invalidates ground mounts and on-foot exploration.
I agree. I love delves personally and I think they’re an awesome addition, but they don’t entirely scratch that world itch because they’re really not open world play, exactly.
I think the world by and large is too easy and isn’t threatening enough, and in particular it doesn’t scale far enough.
And don’t take that to mean that all the mobs have to scale better to gear levels! Gods no.
I think what we need is a progression system that serves open world players with increasingly hard areas and associated quests. Like vanilla levelling actually, but without it getting in the way of other end-game activities.
I think this is what artifact power tried to be, but because it didn’t power you up enough and the world didn’t have enough hard areas and because raiders needed to farm it, it all ended up creating a destructive loop that led to its demise. Perhaps the solution is actually a special type of renown, but a type of renown that’s a bit like AP that only works against mobs by increasing your weapon and defense skills in the open world, causing mobs that otherwise are impossible to kill to be much easier over time and with effort. Then the activities you do week to week changes as you progress and the problem may be solved.
It took them 20 years to get us follower dungeons and delves so don’t hold your breath
I like pet battles but they could do with updating.
I would love archaeology to come back; there were some problems with it at one stage and I think that may be when they stopped it for new expansions.
For me world quests are fine - I don’t want everything on a plate and I enjoy working out what I should be doing as opposed to what I am doing.
Agree re World Bosses. Getting no loot at all most weeks isn’t really encouraging to go back the next week.
I love the Hero’s Call Board idea. It would connect us to old Wow and previous stories but with updates for current content.
Worldsoul memories are fun but half the time I don’t know what’s going on and 95% of the time I’m the only person in it so don’t have a hope of getting to and killing the big nasty at the end.
Great ideas for us open world players. I like delves myself as it gives me a challenge as a solo player unlike a lot of the open world stuff. I’ve been going up one level each week and it’s been really good for me to discover exactly what I can and can’t do.
Also this. There was a real feeling of jeopardy in vanilla if you accidentally strayed into a high level zone as a low level with really big bad mobs and often not a hope of getting out alive.
Finally I think, partly because of all the addons, we’ve lost the fun of exploring and discovery just for the sake of it. The example that always comes into my head is on a big bridge (possibly going into Arathi Highlands) and there’s a little guy hiding under the bridge who calls out for you to get him a beer. Or something like that … my memory’s not great. Back then there were virtually no addons or sites that would tell you exactly where to find interesting stuff. I know we can’t roll back time but a few surprises and discoveries in the open world would be great.
TBH - and from my pov only of course - your post is not making much sense.
I consider myself a very casual player as well and when i log in i am basically overwhelmed by the amount of things i can/could do When i log out i usually am frustrated because i didnt have time to do this or that
(id love to have your stuff as a “super casual” as well btw )
I feel these two sentences are a bit more oxymoronic.
If you are a “super casual” why are you then trying to min max your travel time? Wouldn’t you exactly as you say, use your ground mounts and take in the scenary, athmosphere etc.?
If even you as a super casual can’t be bothered and are just flying around, then whatever they use to incentivize you “rare ores” etc. will lead you back to this:
Professions are just terrible, I never maxed any of mine ( I had all BTW ) in DF or TWW…
I am ilvl 604 and got ALL the mats to upgrade my crafted ring from 602 to as high as possible but…guess what ??? I can’t because I need to raid to get the crests WTF
I still remember crafting my Waist from t5-Serpentine cave for my Rogue in Tbc.
That item i had it for 1 Year … And was an such a epic feeling getting such an upgrade . that i didn’t replace even raiding t6 .
Right now you craft a 606 ilvl…then you need to upgrade to 619…and after an huge amount of time …636 that is not possible unless you do M/raid~m+8*
The main problem is that hard 636 ilvl if you gonna get is become useless once next Season arrive…
A single heroic dungeon would provide better ilvl-stats than a hard earning Mythic Quality item ~.
This game with the huge ilvl raises has dismissed the character growth and is pathetic as a MMORPG…
I think a lot of your points are valid although the way you’re framing it as Super Casuals might be ill-judged.
I agree that professions are no longer casual content. I used to do professions a little later in an expansion. Mats would be cheaper and I could make items for my alts. In MOP my alts all got pretty good gear when they leveled, until Timeless gear came along and replaced them. In WoD my alts all had a decent weapon for leveling made by my Pally Blacksmith.
But now they’re a convoluted mess and I ignore them.
And you’re also right with Pet Battles. I only started doing this content in BFA when I found the Falcosaur pets and mounts. I had to develop a roster good enough for that questline. Then I did the MOP celestial tournament. That took me some time to gather an even better roster.
The Pet Battle dungeons should be really easy content for them to make. They could link this to Timewalking.
I never bothered with Archaelogy but I do think that it could have been developed into a gameplay feature with just a little work.
The Vial of the Sands could have been a good intro to get folk interested. But when I read up on it I found that it was a massive grind with a massive gold sink on top of massive RNG. They really know how to drain the fun out of anything.
Old raid mounts could do with some bad luck protection too. I’ve been running Dragon Soul for years to get Blazing Drake. I should be off running Firelands for its mounts, or MSV to kill Elegon for his mount or loads of other raids. But I’m stuck on Dragon Soul.
The loosening of transmog collection was a big win for casual players. Collecting is a massive feature for them.
I don’t get it. OP says there’s not a lot of content for Super-Casuals but then goes on to list a huge amount of content that literally is suitable for Super-Casuals.
Sounds like the original question should be worded more like: "Why isn’t there more Super-Casual content that suits ‘ME’ "
When i log out i usually am frustrated because i didnt have time to do this or that
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