Hello Everyone.
I got this article, recommend on my Google news.
Main points:
“NEW PLAYERS WILL ONLY KNOW SYLVANAS AS A ONE-DIMENSIONAL VILLAIN INSTEAD OF A COMPLICATED, CONFLICTED LEADER - IF THEY GET TO KNOW HER AT ALL”
“BLIZZARD IS PRESSING RESET ON WORLD OF WARCRAFT, WHICH REMOVES ONE ANSWER TO AN URGENT QUESTION: WHY START A WOW ACCOUNT TODAY?”
What’s your opinion ?
Thanks for your attention.
Cheers.
Well, they don’t need to know her really, she’ll be dead soon.
WoW has been slowly and steadily moving towards this rush to end-game model for many years. First with Cataclysm’s changes and then helping experienced players level alts quicker and now introducing this which will give even new players a shorter experience. The lore and backstory was always there though if you wanted to experience it, and even with this change you still can - if you want to.
Many would start a WoW account today for pretty much the same reason they’d have done so before, to play with friends, and really the only place to do that for many is at level cap. But playing and buying the latest expansion has allowed you to do that anyway for a few expansions anyway… through a level boost, so really this isn’t much of a change, though this time you buy the level boost and get a free expansion. I’d think unless they’re so casual a new player that they only level one toon, they’ll pick another expansion if they level more.
I don’t entirely like the changes, but it is what it is, nothing significant has been erased though, it’s been partially hidden for an entirely new player sure and it’s been given the timey-wimey-dragony-wagony stuff that Blizz seem to think we like, but it’s still there in all its low res texture glory.
Yeah, but that’s what she’s always been. I don’t see the problem.
New players interested in the story will still be able to explore it, but there’s no point having them go through a quarter of each expansion like today - that doesn’t tell the story well, either. Currently, the leveling experience is a mess, you don’t get to know the story of any expansion, it just ends up being a huge mess of half-information. In contrast, Shadowlands will tell a single coherent story. That’s a great improvement in my book.
If someone wants to join WoW right now, it is because they want to play Shadowlands, because this is the currently marketed game, the one that will attract new eyes. There’s no marketing for Cataclysm’s Durotar going on. Imagine buying a game, only to have it tell you that you’d need to spend over a month playing before you get to the part that actually attracted you to buy it in the first place.
It’s like buying a game, let’s say Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. But it asked you to play every single AC game before it in order to play this one. And you just can’t play this game before you beat the other ones.
Also, with the leveling during Legion, I can say the game is simply nonsensical. New players being plunged right into BFA is good. Each new expansion is basically a new game and with this change, Blizzard is asking players to only play the previous entry in the series for about 2 weeks, maybe, and then to get into the new and fresh stuff.
WoW is a giant game. I’m playing a toon whose goal right now is to clear every expansion at an appropriate level. I’ll be level-locking myself to make sure this happens… but this is a humongous task. Not something to ask of new players. You’ve had 16 years to play all this content, and they just want to play Shadowlands, because that’s the game that they bought. Blizzard is doing well with the new leveling changes.
Players following this leveling path will never confront Illidan perched atop Black Temple, holding Guldan’s skull, telling them “You are not prepared!” They will never hear one of the best speeches ever made in a videogame, at the Battle of Angrathar the Wrathgate, where an undead character takes revenge against the Scourge invasion and for the rejection of his race by all living creatures in Azeroth: “Did you think we had forgotten? Did you think we had forgiven? … Death to the Scourge! And death to the living!”
I don’t really feel the person who wrote the article has ever levelled through the current state of WoW. It is utterly disjointed and does not match their descriptions. Levellers rarely go and see the raids as they are working their way through expansions.
Previously we jumped from zone to zone for the maximum benefit, then they introduced scaling and we could complete entire zones but we can jump around all over the place and there is no flow, no history, no storytelling beyond the individual zones we go to. It is a big disjoined mess.
Which is why, based on new player feedback, they have changed this experience.
They can if they want to. I got Outland, Draenor and Broken Isles Loremaster on my Draenei Paladin while leveling. Because I wanted to experienced the story, never felt the need to rush for max level.
This is why I always say people are free to play the game however they want. I know someone who started playing a few months ago and he rushed to max level. And he’s like “why should I care about all these stories?”
Tbf if someone joins for wow now and never played any wc or read book/article, watched lore vids etc and expect to understand like 20years if games lore in one expansion, i dont have much to say.
Its like someone saying that SW film number 12 was bad because if u havent seen those 11 movies before u will miss maib plot… Well u dont say.
And yes and i know there aint that much SW films, and tbh last ones were realy bad regardless of previsious plot, imo.
In other words, journos don’t know what they’re talking about. Next in, water is wet.
There are a lot of things wrong with WoW…but compressing the “new player experience” (much more likely the returning player experience or alt-rolling-experience, really) is not one of them.
As others have said, almost no “new player” would have actually played through a lot of story content the way leveling has been until now. Those very few that did do still have the option to do so - just like they do now. But for the VAST majority, the new system will be an improvement.
I would not call the new system “good” - for a LOT of reasons. The most visible of which is that the core intention of the new system - to make you play the story of ONE expansion in its entirety to get up to speed instead of jumping around constantly without seeing the end of any single story unless you go out of your way to do so - is NOT achieved at all. You won’t actually see the end of ANY expansion you chose to play through because that story is gated behind raid encounters which you will not see.
But the new system is still an improvement over the horrible state leveling has been in from a story PoV for many years in WoW.
Players following this leveling path will never confront Illidan perched atop Black Temple, holding Guldan’s skull, telling them “You are not prepared!” […]
I mean they won’t either way so… Who does raids while leveling? As for the rest, actual quests and stuff, at least this way you can experience one expansion story. It’s a good change.
That article purpusefully misleads the reader. The aren’t removing 14 years of content. They are streamlining leveling and making leveling more replayable by giving you different choices.
That article isn’t only bad, it is actually wrong. The autor didn’t even try to think about how a new player gets to experience wow right now:
You start in the time of your race. In the case of my latest character, a pandaren: MOP
Then after a few level I went back in time, to experience kalimdor in the cataclysm time.
At 60, I got to do another backward timejump to TBC (could have chosen wotlk).
I’ll then have to go forward to cata/mop/wod/legion/bfa, only experience a few quests each time without having any idea what the whole story actually is because I level up too fast for the main quests.
Raids can’t be experience at the end of the zone. You have to gain 10-20 levels and then come back in time to solo your way to the end of the story of each expansion.
WoW right now is a disjointed mess, that makes absolutely no sense. You often run around with 4-5 quests given by different leaders of the horde from different timelines.
The leveling revamp is imo the best feature of shadowlands, and completely make sense: as a new player: you get into Azeroth on the current timeline (well, 1-2 year behind), get to experience bfa storyline, leading into SL storyline.
If you want to experience past expansions, you can do them through timetraveling (chromie time), which make sense since those events took place in the past.
The article seems like it’s trying to make stuff controversial to get more views.
At least since Cataclysm the story has been disjointed sending you to the past and future between expansions. And as XP gain was buffed with the years new players started outleveling their current content pretty fast, either making quests almost trivial or having to jump around zones before completing the quests.
In truth is people who don’t want to listen to the story will still do quests without reading the text and people who want to experience the story will go out of their way to do so. That has always been the case and new leveling system won’t change that.
I agree with the idea that players should have at least some sense of what their character is part of, specifically the background of their race as it at least provides some way of starting point for other lore. But the alternative of having a new player level through all the expansions is, as others already pointed out, not viable.
But other than that, it’s not really a better alternative either if you want someone to become familiar with the lore. WoW lore, as pretty much everyone who is familiar with it knows, doesn’t take place in WoW that much but in the Warcraft games, the books and the other sources. There is no way you can effectively learn everything about, say, the Night Elf empire in-game, becase the War of the Ancients trilogy does that much better. Tauren lore? Forget it, you can get an idea of who they are in Mulgore and elsewhere but that’s it, it’s up to you to find the rest.
And that’s the charm of WoW. It doesn’t hold your hand, and it certainly doesn’t give you the entire narrative. If you want to learn more then you need to look it up. It’s even more fun that way, because the next time you set foot in Azeroth and beyond, you’re going to recognise things you weren’t familiar with at first. And that is exploration at its core. I’d rather explore WoW by slowly discovering it myself than by being led through it.
a complicated, conflicted leader
the guy who wrote the article clearly plays an other game
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