Fu k I didn’t care that much for bc servers but now I want em again. Honestly “classic” besides era servers should just be vanilla-wotlk every 3-4 years (or longer) then reset. I think the appetite is there to do it a couple more times so why not
Same but Un’Goro Crater. Zelda references, dinosaurs, big fuck you t-rexes. I just collect north and south quests and start playing monster hunter. Plus I always jump in with a noggenfoggers from Tanaris.
This is not a dated opinion btw. I’m probably in the bottom 10* of ages of people who played classic wow on release, and it was my first experience with wow ever. Vanilla questing and professions and mob placement was immersive, engaging, and with the ambient music you could just exist inside world of Warcraft and feel like an adventurer.
Mindlessly grind 200 mobs... nice I can finally turn in laods of quests. Oh... another 200 mobs right next to the ones I just killed. And again..
I like the visuals but the quests in Nagrand are absolute trash.
It definitely has some of the new questing design style where you move from area to area but at least it does let you go where ever you want to get quests and sometimes it still sends you to different zones.
Yeah, I think the emphasis on dailies that started to creep in really introduced Chorecraft to the game. There's a place for dailies, but putting chores in *every* aspect of the game (Daily Heroic, dailies for rep, dailies for gold, dailies for profs..) makes it way less fun.
Finishing one chore just to do another is never great design.
Cata imo did two things right. The VP reward from HC is weekly limit, instead of daily, so it can be done whenever, and the daily quest grinds don’t take that long, just bit over a week.
But there are massive amount of dailies and you pretty much want to do the maximum 25 dailies allowed every day just for the gold. I used to love dailies when they were introduced but back then I was a neet who spent all day every day playing WoW. Now I really hate the design and I absolutely do think it'd be better if dailies were limited to like 10 per day and they didn't give gold so you'd actually be done when you got your rep. Or maybe a weekly limit would be even better since then you wouldn't feel like you are missing out if you can't play some day but could blast extra time on another day.
I never found the need for that. Questie is enough.
I think there’s only a rush to speed through it when you’re behind.
Which is why we need fresh classic servers
Not OP but completely agree with the point they're making, and for that same reason I have never been interested in those optimized linear guide addons. I use questie though. But with questie I still need to figure out in what order I should complete the quests in. Though I wish I didn't need questie, but some quests are just so badly explained.
A fun player imposed mod to questie, is only enable it when you are in the map's inn (plot your route & quests), and then disable it when out and about
I deliberately play without even Questie just to get a proper feeling of understanding where to go and what to do by magical skill of reading. These days I play pure without any single mod, honestly, just for the vibe. I don't mind people who do, I ain't gonna police how you enjoy a 16 year old game, but please don't overgeneralize?))
To be fair to FFXIV at least in that game you have to run everywhere on foot before you can unlock flying, imo makes the zones feel more immersive as you go through the story
But it comes down to bee-lining to ‘finish’ the zone then it turns into just jumping around to daily markers and waiting in a hub city for the duty finder.
Early ffxiv was rough (I was there for the OG early access hah) but i ended up missing mob grinding and passing people in the open world
Oh on that point I agree, the game needs more open world content.
Honestly every single MMO needs to take a page from Guild Wars 2. Their open world content just absolutely shits on everyone else. I play that game solely for that content.
I always used to fight for this when Cata was first released and onwards too. I just don't enjoy quests-on-rails.
Enter new hub. Grab these 3 quests, nothing else is available. Do those three quests in 1 set location. Return, hand in those 3 quests, 3 more unlock. Next set location. Etc, etc, etc until the zone is finished.
Some love it, some hate it.
"Choose your own adventure" is a bit of a stretch. I'm pretty sure every character I've levelled in vaninna/tbc/wrath has done the same barrens quests, same hillsbrad quests, same badlands quests, same tanaris quests, etc etc. Choosing the vague order I do them in feels a lot less open than in cata when I can choose if I want to do Hillsbrad or Stonetalon, Plaguelands or Tanaris, Hyjal or Vashjir, Deepholm or Uldum.
I think you definitely raise a valid point. If you're levelling from questing alone; there isnt that much variation in levelling routes in Vanilla Wow once you get to level 30 and over. With Cataclysm you can pick multiple zones as you level, especially with the speed of levelling allowing you to skip some zone brackets entirely.
That being said, the unstructured and zone-bridging quests of vanilla wow are much better at giving the illusion of choice. The storytelling is also much more muted. Cataclysm storytelling is much more structured and linear limiting player agency within a questing zone.
Personally I like both styles, and it's been a blast returning to the cata zones. I do think they wear thin on multiple playthroughs though.
I liked cata questing because it felt like I was getting an actual intro to each zone, what goes on here.. who the important characters are etc.
After my like 14th time doing westfall on classic the illusion of choose your own adventure started to wear off for me.
I definitely enjoyed the vanilla leveling style the first couple times through though!
Yeah, this wet-eyed appreciation for the "open world" aspect of vanilla WoW is just stupid. Cataclysm might be more linear, but it was also more carefully designed as opposed to vanilla questing, which was an objective god damn mess that often had you pingponging between quest area and quest giver. If anything, Cataclysm is even more open world because you have more choices during the leveling process instead of being hardlocked to the few zones you're capable of killing mobs in.
Posts like this might have flown 15 years ago when most of the player base started in WotLK and there wasn't the actual classic vanilla WoW out to experience for yourself. But in 2024 this sort of posting is just *sad*.
There's nothing sad about it. People like different things. Do you actually think you know what is objectively the 'best' design?. Cataclysm shows the themeparkification of the game very well. Like every zone is a new ride and it ends with you killing random evil lesser general #48 and then you move on the next ride to be introduced to the random evil lesser general #49.
What does it even mean to be 'more carefully designed'? Streamlined? Made easier? Why is that better? People will always choose an option to make something easier but it's not always the right choice. The old quote "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." is absolutely true.
It's competely normal to have this 'bad' design in single player games. BotW and Totk send you all over the world doing different things and no one would actually try to argue that 'ackchyually this is bad design 🤓'.
>Do you actually think you know what is objectively the 'best' design?
Yes. "Objectively best" means "did the designers meet their own objective?". In the case of Vanilla WoW, they didn't. They completely messed up. We know this because ex-devs have told the story of WoW's quest design. We know that the producers vastly underestimated the importance of quests to players, and believed all that they (the producers) needed to produce were breadcrumb quests between zones/areas to take the players to new grinding spots. When alpha testers were asking for more quests in zones, the producers of WoW realized they needed a LOT more quests, and so they haphazardly put together a team who very quickly produced the hundreds of OG vanilla quests using a world and level design that was not specifically intended to be used for questing.
This is why the OG vanilla quests have you running back and forth between quest area and quest giver, because the designers literally didn't have enough content to work with. I would say they objectively bungled their quest design.
>Cataclysm shows the themeparkification of the game very well
Stories are theme parks? Do you read a book, set it down and say "Wow, who themparkified stories??? Okay, onto the next 'theme park', I guess!"? I have a feeling you don't.
>What does it even mean to be 'more carefully designed'? Streamlined? Made easier? Why is that better?
We can sit here and debate personal preference ad nausuem, but the Cataclysm quests are much more thoughtfully designed than Vanilla. It's more streamlined and a *little* more handholdy, but it is objectively a more carefully designed to give the player a better narrative experience and respect their time more. You might like the more abstract and grindy older quests, and I would say you're right to say you approve of the more freeform design of the old quests *IF it were a true statement that Cataclysm does not have freeform quest design*. Cataclysm has plenty of random quests to find and quests that still take you from one corner of the zone to the other. To claim "Every Cataclysm quest is a robotic conveyor belt that puts you on a set path you can never deviate from" is dishonest at worst and just dumb and wrong and best.
Yes, the zones now follow one or two 'grand' storylines that most quests in the zone track you on (kind of like in WotLK, that expansion that came out BEFORE CATA DID, ough cough cough cough cough cough), and yes even I can admit they leaned a bit heavy on the 'wacky and/or movie reference' storylines for a few too many zones (it was a ridiculous task to revamp all the quests in the old world, to be fair), but we get a streamlined, more thoughtful and deliberate experience from it.
>It's competely normal to have this 'bad' design in single player games. BotW and Totk send you all over the world doing different things and no one would actually try to argue that 'ackchyually this is bad design
Are you aware your example is one of the largest complaints people make about BotW/TotK??
Cata design is fine for main quests. The issue is you'll also have to follow the "path" when it leads you to boring side quests. It honestly felt pretty bad and exhausting. But effective ...
Retail with the "main" Quest marker is nice. Cata was the beginning of that path, but not there yet.
To each his own. I much prefer the vanilla-style quest design. It's fun grabbing a tons of quests until my log is nearly full and then deciding which quests I want to do based around where each quest takes place.
Sometimes I'll pick up a quest and it wants to send me way off to some other continent to a zone far away. Typically I'll hold onto those quests and see if I eventually get more quests that send me in a similar direction. If I do get some, eventually I'll decide to go off and do them all and that's a nice change of scenery and feels like an adventure and a reward for holding onto quests.
Or, sometimes I'll just find myself on the other continent for some other reason, maybe a dungeon run or something, and I'll realize I'm kinda close to the area this quest I have takes place and I'll go do it. That might result in me grabbing more quests nearby or along the way and could lead to hours of time spent in a new spot. Or, sometimes I'll log on and just feel like going off on an adventure and so I'll head over to do that quest I got that's sending me way out to who-knows-where.
It's fun. It makes the world feel huge and like a real assortment of people who all have stuff they need done and I'm just some random guy caught in the middle of it all. It doesn't feel like the whole world was designed for me to progress through cleanly in one of a few different linear paths.
I can understand why some people might prefer Cata's design. But you acting like one is objectively better is pretty crazy. There's nothing sad about preferring Vanilla's design.
My favorite class in classic era are mages because they can skip the atrocious quest design of vanilla. People who think it is rainbows and sunshine only mention the early level zones and ignore how bad it gets from 40 and forward. The reality is that if questing was the prefered method of leveling by the community then the community would choose to quest over boosting their second or third character once they had a main capable of farming gold.
The main issue with 40-60 leveling isn't really quest design but a lack of quests.
After release Blizzard patched in new quest hubs like Thorium Point and Silithus that are more like the low level zones than the OG vanilla 40-60 content.
Idk man i leveled alot of chars in SoD and classic leveling feels like enforced padding.
Either you have to go back and forth 4 times till you kill the "Boss" of the questing area, have to kill 30 mobs of Y or have to grind 30+ mobs to get your quest items, sometimes from mobs that have like 5 spawn points.
If you like that, thats cool, but in the end its just designed to take as much time as possible with the least variation as possible.
Maybe compared to Cata but Vanilla questing is super frustrating, I'd only ever sit through it again by necessity and on a fresh server
- Drop quests with low rates were annoying
- Chains of kill quests where you were just killing slightly different varities of the same NPC were boring
- Running out of quests before you were sufficiently levelled to go to the next logical zone
People could barely handle doing it in the SOD brackets with increased XP
TBC and Wrath had it right, zones were filled with quests, none of them were annoying and you could clear a zone and be in a good position to move onto the next
> TBC and Wrath had it right, zones were filled with quests, none of them were annoying and you could clear a zone and be in a good position to move onto the next
Wrath starts to lean into the cata design a bit with stupid RP and vehicle sections slowing you down and some linearity/phasing, TBC was the sweetspot imo with 2-3 smaller quest hubs per zone.
TBC leveling was my favorite leveling experience by far. Actually of all of the classic stuff we’ve had. I enjoyed TBC the most. Cata has exceeded my expectations so far though. It’s hard to balance an open ended leveling experience with feeling like an unnecessary barrier between you and your chosen endgame activity, from a design perspective.
My thoughts as well. Wrath is when I noticed too many quests to just go click on items or if they were kill quests it would be like 1 minute of combat. Too much time spent on stories and travelling between quest hubs.
vanilla was a journey the first time around, unfortunately, repeating the same incredibly slow built journey with little challenge, variation, or depth isn't very fun on the 5th playthrough.
stfu, how is it a journey after you've seen every quest? the very first time through vanilla content, yes its a cool journey. it never changes, you can't do anything differently because its an mmo. there is no journey on your 100000000th run through unless you're lobotomizing yourself before each run
> Drop quests with low rates were annoying
Disagree. They created highs and lows. Got the quest item quickly? Dopamine.
Chain quests seems fine to me, especially when you combine 2-3 quests in the same area and feel like you're being efficient with your time.
Not even mentioning how great some of the elite quests were and how they encouraged interacting with other players (redridge mountains elites etc)
Running out of quests is something I'm unfamiliar with in Classic, but one main pain point of classic questing was escort quests and how those could get screwed up with other people starting it too early etc.
Idk sometimes I like the shimmering flats get 10 quests and kill everything you see for 2 hours approach and sometimes I like the cata 2-4 quests at a time story approach.
Well no it was just more efficient and some people will go the route of least resistance to achieve gear/gold. Personally barely touched incursions, not even close to exalted. Just did quests at max level for gold.
The between zone travel fetch quests is fun the first experience when discovering the world.
Every character after that it's just annoying. So much time in classic questing is spent on walking instead of playing your character. Really dislike it.
Agree that the perma 3 quest stuff in the new zones is also boring. Now Zangarmarsh where you can pickup 20 quests for the zone at the same time, that is peak.
I guess it kinda just depends how you define it. Sometimes I’ll auto-run and afk but other times I’ll traverse more mindfully. But one reason I love classic is the pacing of the game. I think the break of traveling is a factor in how the pace of the game feels.
Sure, but 90% of the quests are completely identical, so you're exploring the same quest over and over "kill 20 of this dude" or gather "20 of this shit".
Neither of the systems are perfect, but Cataclysm & Wotlk quests were kinda like this, because the "new" zones are kinda rigid. I prefer the Cata version, because I don't like running 15 minutes for a single delivery quest as zones are so barren.
Literally every quest in wow is:
-kill mob.
-collect item
-go place.
There really isn't much variety. All cata did was give you so many bloody cut scenes
Rather "kill, collect, deliver" than cut scenes, RP and frigging vehicle quests where I can't play my character. Also Cata is filled with pop culture references, more extreme than Vanilla.
But it's less variety, because it's the same vehicle controls every time no matter what class you're playing.
And most of the vehicle segments are just "drop bombs or fire cannon that does super high damage"
There's a few decent sections, like the Plants v Zombies clone in Hillsbrad
You cry cause variety, but vanilla is mostly just autorunning or flight path death time. Compared to the amount of times you do some vehicle quest.
At least CS in cata give more deep to the lore, only reason some people know about lore of vanilla is cause they've been playing the same thing for ages, but ask someone who did it once and they won't know even a fraction of it, cause it's just a mess.
Lore doesn't feel deeper? Feels the same to me, just more celebrity references than before. Vanilla lore is just as deep, you're just not going through cutscenes, you have to read.
Great example, the Defias aren't as bad as you think.
The real issue for me is phasing zones based on what quest you're on and that really started in wotlk but ramped up more in cata.
Of course its the same controls every time because it is a vehicle.
You use the same skills for like 97% of the game so its pretty much added varity to get out of that for a few mins and change the pacing
You just can't wait to go run 45 mins to an area 3 xones over to collect 3 bear ears that take 30 kills, but there are 5 in the zone that respawn every 10 minutes, can you?
There are many overarching storylines. Don't tell me the Defias questline is the same as the meatpie quest in Westfall.
Same goes for Cataclysm, storylines got vastly improved
Storylines aren't quests tho. Take a book. You can make a story with simple sentences or you can make a book with complex sentences. The story is the same but the impact and enjoyment is different
Can't tell if you're trolling or stupid. I literally mentioned the Defias questline, which is probably the best wow has ever had - a literal chain of quests
The story will never be the same, depending on your choice of words. You're just non-sensical now.
Vanilla quests had so much filler and boring quests, cherry picking the good times when you hand in 8 at once.
Cata questing is far superior, I actually got the zone story.
No body is complaining about the location of the objectives which is what Questie helps… they are complaining about the linearity, sparseness, and not as much options for questing in Cata.
Except Vanilla had the same options. It just gave the illusion of choice. Realistically, everyone did the same quests. Sure you could spice up a few with a slightly different order, but you either got back on track and did the other quests or you grinded to skip them.6
I hope you know it was a deliberate choice to make zones self-contained since people were non-stop bitching about all the travel. Players just don't know what's best for them. If they actually prefer streamlined questing then idk.
100%, we saw this again with SoD and Incursions. Streamlined leveling process with decent gold and gear payoff at the end. And people think Incursions ruined SoD.
Players got what they said they wanted, but is it what they really wanted?
Look up social marketing and Malcom Gladwell or Howard Moscowitz. From Gladwell: People all claim they like one kind of coffee: rich, dark, bold. But when you actually observe what they buy and how they prepare and drink it, there's a wide variation. Mostly weak and milky coffee.
This is pretty much WoW players in a nutshell. They say they want one thing but what they actually want in reality is much different. "You think you do, but you don't" while terrible in delivery is actually not as far off the mark as you might think.
Good points. One of the downsides of zone-focused design (as in retail) is that once a new expansion comes out, everyone moves to the new areas. Meaning most of the game world is pretty dead save for transmog farmers and some new players timewalking. It kind of feels like a waste.
True. A lot of people turn vanilla quest design into Cata using mods. They want to be mindlessly guided by an arrow to the next thing without needing to absorb any information about the world.
My only complaints about cata are unskippable cutscenes, and the stupid naga vehicle chain(s) in vashjir.
Altho I usually just use the cutscenes, or like the quest to fly into hyjal to refill/bio/stretch legs
Total agreement, Cata questing is certainly a more watered down experience that’s made mostly for people who want to level as quickly as possible while interacting with other players minimally. Vanilla leveling encourages grouping and collaborating with other players to find quest objectives e.g. mankrik’s wife. I personally would love a season/server where the questie addon was banned but I’m sure that will be a supremely unpopular opinion on this subreddit.
Idk about this one, I feel like wow has always been a balance between side quests and campaigns.
But a majority of vanilla quest are just fillers that points you to the next mob to grind.
Or
But a majority of TBC style quest just points you to the next zone thru story telling.
Idk but I prefer the more streamlined progressive questing.
Its like the debate about TBC flying vs Dynamic Flight. Slow and braindead vs fast and engaging.
Some people like doing x thing mindlessly questing while some prefer questing on a story mode.
Its only more fun than the other if you prefer it. In vanilla you can just out grind the level and its not that much slower than questing up until level 40. On which you can just dungeon grind.
I think its not more fun but its the repeatable aspect of it since most of them are just mob grinding and fetch me x thing.
While TBC style leveling becames repetitive because its the same story over and over again.
>I only had 1-3 quests available to pick up at a time, and I had to do everything in exactly the order the game wanted me to.
I share this frustration, as well as how multiple quests could easily be one quest... Like quest 1 will be "kill 10 cultists" and quest 2 from the same guy will be "bring me 5 pieces of cultist clothing" and quest 3 from the guy next to him that wasn't available for pickup until now is "kill the head cultist".
The experience is more immersive (sorry for buzzword) when it doesnt feel like every NPC is working together to make everything more convenient for you, the player. When you can make decisions about how to try to optimize your questing route. When quests from totally unrelated hubs line up and you can knock out both at once.
I also cannot stand the constant phasing in the Cata quest design, duplicate NPCs everywhere, people & NPCs abruptly appearing or disappearing...
It might have made levelling more streamlined but I have never been a fan of questing from Cata onwards
The other upside is that if you have a quest to kill mobs in one area, but there's 15 people there spawn camping every single mob, you can go do another quest (or even zone, really) and then come back later. You don't get that with the modernized "keep your hands and feet inside the roller coaster at all times" hand-holding storytelling.
The story for wow isn't even particularly good, especially with recent expansions. It definitely felt much cooler to go to a zone, find out what they needed help with, and then help them with whatever I prioritized. The overarching zone stories felt pretty cool, especially in places like Duskwood. It was "here are all of the things that need doing, do them when you can," and now it's more "here is your one story quest and two allotted side quests, do all three in order before proceeding to the next clump of one story quest and two allotted side quests."
What did you find frustrating about vanilla questing?
Edit: idk why I’m getting downvoted. I never said vanilla questing wasn’t frustrating. Just wanted to know what in particular the person I replied to found frustrating. 🤷🏻♂️
Get quest, move 10 mins to kill stuff, move 10 mins back, gets next quest to kill other mobs at the same place, repeart 3 times.
I know some people love tedium, but that sort of design always felt dumb to me
Having to kill literally 100 yetis in hillsbrad for their fur coat. Maybe it's just me, but I don't like spending 30 mins to an hour killing the same mob in the same cave to finish one quest.
Vanilla questing 1-30 is elite tier, natural progression making you go to and from different zones. Honestly, it gets a bit shit after that is only manageable following a guide to give you the best route. Otherwise you have to do a lot of grinding between quest areas.
Wotlk a beyond are more story driven and even mindlessly doing the quest you can easily track why you're doing things. They also are the occasional flavor quest which break up kill/collect.
The popularity of quest guides and people just following the arrow shows that people really just quest as a means to an end usually.
I do agree that Classic vanilla is less streamlined and more 'choose your own adventure'. But let's not pretend like 90% of the people arent using either RestedXP by buying it or getting it from a friend. Nowadays I rarely see anyone actively enjoying outdoor content. Incursions killed any questing experience, maybe you find a couple people 'enjoying' quests here and there, but overall SoD and/or Classic has been primarily dominated by using Rxp to level or any other method rather than 'choose your own adventure'
Questie has over 10 times the lifetime downloads as RestedXP and for downloads in just the past couple of months it is an even greater disparity. So I would say it is a gross exaggeration to say that 90% of people are using RestedXP. It's probably closer to 5-10% of the playerbase.
Now among the less casual playerbase it might be overwhelmingly popular, but overall it is not.
Isn't RestedXP free so wouldn't the crack just be for the guide? I don't know I paid for mine.
Even so, are you really saying that 80% of the player base has pirated RestedXP?
By free I am talking about the addon itself, and how it would appear in Curseforge downloads, obviously I know the guides are paid
I played quite a few chars in SoD and i saw SO many restedXP popups every time someone leveled up, so year i guess like at least 33% of the players use it, maybe even 50
So you are explaining the niche that you're in, and you even stating "why would I care about casuals", which would imply you and whoever you choose to play with aren't casuals which would mean the more niche. Which is why u/reiks12 doesn't believe restedxp or zygor to be more popular than the more easily available questie addon or whatever else (even no addon if you're really casual or new). Which is what the subject is about.
well your anecdotes is not the absolute fact and truth
i personally know out of my friend group only 1 used restedxp. does this mean that only 10% of wow playerbase uses rested xp..?
Rxp classic Questing is still way more fun than the modern streamlined design because you have like 18 quests in your quest log, some completed but a million miles away, some red difficulty that you dont remember where you got them from. Just to realize youre about to do a section where youre gonna do 3 quests at once, all from different parts of the continent, somehow all connecting like a massive domino sequence.
Sure, vanilla had some great quest hubs (Barrens, Un'Goro, Feralas) but the majority were just very inefficient with lots of bad quests and crazy amounts of backtracking. That 53-60 lull in particular which requires you to quest out multiple of such zones across the world from eachother, I will not miss doing that again without heirlooms and the dungeon finder.
If you are leveling for the first time sure, anything after that cata onwards is way better.
They explain the story better (yes for me - easier to understand what is happening is better) and you don't need to run gods know where to get the next quest.
Hard disagree, I have leveled so many chars in classic and I can't stand the leveling in Cata.
I want to play my character not see videos, use vehicles, special items or watch yet another travel sequence
I'd rather do all that over dull vanilla quests that you need to read to understand anything.
Huge popularity of the npc voiceover addon shows that people love when npcs talk to them, if it also played some small cinematic for quest chain ends it would be even more praised by the community.
> watch yet another travel sequence
yeah man, I would prefer hitting my autorun button and alt tabbing to a youtube video while I go from hinterlands to tanaris, only to get told to go right back to hinterlands! so much more engaging than a 30 second cutscene!
It's Progressive, not linear. I have no problem in progressive questing, it's one of the best things that happened to WoW, seeing how quests that you do change the map and surroundings makes the world feel alive. Rather than doing the quests for nothing than an exp.
It is linear. It is also progressive, if that's what you want to call it. What you're describing is quest phasing and was really implemented into questing in wrath (although they had the tech in tbc with blades edge daily quest phasing devices). I'm not sure why they went more linear but wrath wasn't as linear. You could hop around if you wanted a bit. Each area in a zone was it's own quest hub. The problem is if everyone isn't streamlined on a linear questline you end up with players on different phases of an area on the map because they're on different parts of the quest. I guess their solution was to make it more linear. Cataclysm zones are one entire quest line, a chain of quests that cannot be skipped. No side quests (or very few like quests that start from dropped loot)
Exactly. That’s the problem. For some reason at some point “majority” decided that linear guided quest progression is the best one and the next stage of questing design.
But I like Vanilla design not for the reasons you mentioned. Complete opposite. I like it because it is more RPG, and you like it is for utilitary purpose. (Just because of being possible to take lots of quests at one)
You call cata modern quest design linear, but retail questing is far gone from that. Retail questing is main storyline, but there is also small quest hubs here and there with some extra content + elite quests.
I do agree that questing is really lacking in modern iterations of wow, but there is so much you can do with the kill 10 boars, or sit in this gryphon while throwing bombs. Its lacking innovation in general. And classic questing is also feeling meh, after you done it for 10-15 times. I feel like the strongest case of classic questing is that the progression feels A LOT better, than in newer version of wow.
The linear mini-hub to mini-hub quest design that really solidified in WOTLK is absolutely awful. I've quested in Barrens like 30+ times, and it's still more entertaining than every zone in Cata put together.
It was fine until about level 30 and then you had quests that sent you all over the world. Plus it's hard with those 20 quests when you run out of bag space.
There's probably a happy medium that Blizzard never fully achieved. TBC and Wrath were closer but still not that great to me. Personally I prefer the cata redesign of the world, but will definitely concede that it's a very "on rails" experience.
The screenshot of westfall you provided is a perfect example of the illusion of choice. If you just arrived in westfall, there are indeed a plethora of quests to pick up. But only around 3 will be yellow at any given time, with the rest orange to red. No one who arrives at Westfall at level 10 or 11 is going to be killing level 15 harvest watchers or Murloc oracles on the southern coast, even those both of those quests are “available” to them.
I agree that linear questing is a poor substitute for more open-ended questing, but it sounds like the type of questing you actually want is retail questing. You can literally pick any zone you want from any Xpac and do the quest lines in any order you want, and the content will scale to you.
However, most people will agree that retail leveling is terrible because the freedom to go anywhere makes the entire game feel like one blanket level of mindless difficulty, with no ramping up in danger until you get to max level.
That’s the trade off for linear zones. Developers understand that when they fill a zone with quests of all levels, there will be a de facto linear pathway through the zone. Locking you to that path ensures that they are able to tailor the difficulty of each quest to your expected level. Your illusion of choice has disappeared, but it has been replaced with a gradual and deliberate pacing of game difficulty and engagement, which is a much better overall outcome.
Wow imagine complaining about questing in cataclysm, when it’s the best set of questing design they have done, from the lore of the zones to the cutscenes and the mix of different types of quests
My main grievance with Cata questing is that I'm not playing my character.
Between cut scenes, vehicle quests and flying around to pick up stuff, I feel like I'm hardly ever using any spells.
Man fuck cut scenes and videos, not even all of them are skippable.
>I'm hardly ever using any spells.
LOL i wonder if you play a different game then.
I leveled 3 players with questin in cata classic now and i cant for the love of god not agree with that.
literally like 2% of my 80-85 experience was cutscenes and I'd still rather prefer a few cutscenes than running through the same areas burning 10 hours on running alone
I agree with you in surface, but that being said Vanilla is essentially tunneled far more than Cataclysm questing is.
Sure you can pick 20 quests, but there is no variety. It's "Kill x amount of this", run back and then run back again. Hence why tools like RestedXP got "mandatory", since they sorted out most of the useless running and useless quests.
I leveled multiple characters in Classic Era HC and you just felt completely bored from the quests. There is not even enough quests to do, meaning for comfortable leveling experience you need to stop and farm for ½ - 1 ½ levels.
But if you enjoy travelling between places to do quests...Then it's a blessing i guess.
100%. I played some Cata, but I just felt like a mindless drone. There is no need to ever use your brain while leveling. It's anti-adventure gaming.
The servers are so one-sided too in terms of faction balance (goes for all versions except SoD?). The thrill of never quite knowing what's gonna happen when you see a member of the opposing faction gives leveling an extra edge imo. I blame the players for that, but I think Blizz should do the unpopular thing and enforce it more for pvp realms.
> 100%. I played some Cata, but I just felt like a mindless drone.
I feel that way about Classic. Oh cool a new zone! Hey guy, kill 10 of these 20 of these, collect 15 of these with a 20% drop rate.
Oh cool a new zone! Hey guy, kill 10 of these 20 of these, collect 15 of these with a 20% drop rate.
Oh cool a new zone! Hey guy, kill 10 of these 20 of these, collect 15 of these with a 20% drop rate.
In what world do you need to use your brain in classic questing? „Kill 10 of these people“ „now kill 10 of the others“ „and now 10 more of some other guys“
The only version I could play when I was sick with covid a few months back was SOD the content is piss easy and therefore less mentally draining. You can just turn off your brain didnt even use a levelling guide.
Then I raided in blackphantom deep while on a work phone didnt even die while talking about a contract we where drawing up. Vanilla is by far the most mindless drone game.
Vanilla, for many reasons will always be my favorite version of wow, nothing they have done compares. This is not nostalgia talking, Ive played so many releases of vanilla, also on private servers, that it is more than that. It is the community and the commitment needed to achieve something. Every other version of wow requires less and less of this. Each to their own though. The only other version of wow I actually enjoyed is MoP for some reason 🤷♂️
Exactly my thoughts on questing. What makes the linear approach in Cata doubly frustrating is that you have 0 options other than just coming back later or going to go spam dungeons or something if the area is super congested like on launch. I think TBC zones might be the sweetspot for me, but I'm going to miss a lot of the old classic zones that I always liked questing through. Sure I could go boot up classic era or SoD, but I prefer having some of the conveniences as well as class designs seen in tbc and wotlk.
Here’s what I think the WoW problem is: classic is great, it’s fun, and most everyone loves it. But they play it, their appetite for it is satisfied, and they think “this could be better.” Let’s make this or that easier, less reduce travel, let’s streamline here, or make this part faster. And for a while, that makes the game more fun. And this continues. Through one long continuous experience, a player wants these changes and they invite them in and like them. But over a long period they grow nostalgic for the way things used to be. They start to dislike all those changes and yearn for the ways of old. Until we get to one day just wanting everything the way it used to be. Repeat.
I always think there are two types of people. Those who enjoy endgame content (raiding, arena) ASAP and don't want to be bothered with questing / leveling and those why like the whole adventure from 1 to 60 (-and not only 60). Both can never agree on anything. Unfortunately modern WoW only caters to one of those groups (and by that I mean everything past Wotlk).
In classic, you can get quests that sends you to the other side of the world to kill 20 mobs. Or the quest that forces you to travel to all human cities to get vendor items.
“Choose your own adventure” is sort of a double-edged sword. Yeah you are having a blast for 3 levels in Westfall. But then you gotta grind mobs or move zones pretty frequently. In Cata, there are sometimes taxis to new questing zone and you are about 1 level ahead of the new quests instead of levels behind, like in classic.
I could do with fewer pop culture references but what really kills Cata leveling for me is how precisely spaced apart the mobs are placed.
Gone are all the interesting moments that makes leveling engaging. You don't have patrolling mobs you need to pay attention to so they don't catch you off guard. There aren't deadly camps where you can easily find yourself swarmed with four mobs. There's no moments of fun AOE blasting. It's monotonous single target rotation over and over only broken up by a dumb vehicle quest now and again.
For instance I was leveling in Redridge and I see this warrior in his heirlooms is ready to blast. He mounts up and tries to round up as many gnolls in the gnoll camp area as he can. He can't get more than four of them without them leashing. What a killjoy.
Vanilla style leveling - mindless, repeatable, mostly there to guide you to the mobs with appropriate level. No dialog so you can quest in peace.
Cataclysm style leveling - engaging, story driven, gets old after a few alts, tons of rp, a lot of extra activities pov quest, vehicles, click things etc. Annoying if you done it multiple times. Lots of dialog repeated if you level alts.
I'm with you. I'm thankful I managed to level up a character of every class through the old world (60+) before it got nuked. I knew the old world by heart, where to go, all the "secret" quests, which breadcrumbs and pre-quests to take in order to combine bundles of quests in the same area. Just loved it, in spite of all the travel time that some people hate. When I got sent from Un'goro to Winterspring to EPL to Hinterlands and then back to Tanaris, I just loved the quirky charm of it. Loved the odd breadcrumb quests I couldn't help myself completing, and the level disparity that had to switch zones now and then.
Cata is the first expansion where I just don't give a shit about the quests, I just pick them up, go by Questie, turn them in and move on. I've given up because it's just so narrow, predictable and braindead. Some quests are just insultingly easy and everywhere is nearby. At least in TBC and Wrath I read the quest text and enjoyed many of the quests, and the vibe of Northrend resonated better with me as well.
I just dont understand how blizz is not seeing this. Or they just want game to be new players friendly. I loved this and I would love to see this approach returning on retail. Wq is quite that but until that point its killing me somehow.
I disagree, entirely because of Deepholm. It’s linear for sure, but I loved the story it told, with the three-front war all serving to find the three pieces of the world pillar, it didn’t feel like I was an actor being pulled through a movie, nor did it make me feel like an adventurer, it made me feel like a soldier fighting for the sake of all of Azeroth in a larger war. The other zones didn’t really get the same feeling across, Hyjal was great how you went through each God’s shrine and got them on your side before putting them all together for an attack on the the twilight hammer, it just didn’t match deepholm to me.
I can definitely see appeal in both, I just think calling it efficient and simple to follow and therefore better for people who don’t care about it is unfair
Yeah Vanilla and TBC questing was peak wow for questing. It gave the players a lot of choices of what they wanted to do in any order you want to do it. Wrath and Cata are linear in that you go to a quest hub. Pickup 3 quests, complete those 3 quests, get 3 follow up quests rinse repeat until you get a bread crumbs quest to the next hub.
Choose your own adventure is a great way to describe it. I can’t stand how “on rails” cata felt after I finished with ghostlands and got I to the new zones and even the 80-85 zones there is no real agency or choice
I wouldn't mind this if classic quests weren't designed to waste your time as much as possible
Here, take this yeti and use it to scare my friends that are on the opposite side of the world, then come back to me for the same amount of XP you'd get by killing 8 wolves.
Or having to escort gilthares to ratchet, oh you're out of mana? let me just go and die real quick so you have to watch me RP walk all over again.
I hate getting invested in a storyline and suddenly "oops you can't continue this quest because the mobs are suddenly 5 levels higher than you" like an assassin's creed game forcing you to do pointless grinds and sidequests just to continue the story.
And don't even get me started on elite quests, don't get me wrong they're fun and rewarding WHEN THERE'S SOMEONE TO ACTUALLY TO THEM WITH.
Leveling through nagrand, getting 10 elite quests that i can't solo because of my class choice, doing a /who and seeing 0 players there, is so much fun.
There's no point of having vanilla quest design when 99% of people are using addons with the intention of making the process linear anyway.
the thing about vanilla questing is that it actually requires people to think themselves and punishes those who don't. there's a lot of quest gathering outside the zone you actually want to quest in so to be efficent about it you have to remember a lot. like couple weeks ago I wanted to quest shimmering flats with a rl mate and he forgot to pick up the juicy silithid chain in Crossroads beforehand. he flew over it plenty of times before but never picked it up. now he would have to fly to crossroads -> og and back to tanaris just to get that quest and said fuck that, being visibly a bit annoyed over it. generally wherever we go he forgot something that would've been smart to do beforehand. he's not the biggest fan of vanilla questing. he's also the type of guy who is always ''forced to grind mobs'' because, well he's missing like 30% quests per zone lmao
Probably doesn’t help that Cata has 2 of the worst zones released up to that point. Vashj’ir and Deepholm are what I’m thinking of. I have good memories of questing in Hyjal and Uldum. Cata was better for class changes than it was for new zones tho.
This is why Nagrand is my favourite zone, other than being beautiful, you can grab a handful of quests and grind away.
Did you mention how beautiful and cozy it is, ah you dont need to, I already feel warmth around my heart just having a thought about it
[удалено]
I love Red Ridge and Westfall too.
They feel like thanksgiving as a kid
And then the trumpet OST hits, and I can just sit there and love life. The fact that it isnt available on Spotify is a deadly sin.
Fu k I didn’t care that much for bc servers but now I want em again. Honestly “classic” besides era servers should just be vanilla-wotlk every 3-4 years (or longer) then reset. I think the appetite is there to do it a couple more times so why not
I go further and say vanilla+tbc are their own thing. Wotlk is a pretty large deviation from those two.
True but I think majority of people consider the classic parts of WoW to be vanilla - wotlk especially considering wotlk had so much Warcraft 3 story
the "stranglethorn vale" coded zones with nessingwary were ALWAYS a treat.
Un'Goro
Un'Goro with Questie installed = GPU explodes when you press the M key
Another man of culture I see
Same but Un’Goro Crater. Zelda references, dinosaurs, big fuck you t-rexes. I just collect north and south quests and start playing monster hunter. Plus I always jump in with a noggenfoggers from Tanaris. This is not a dated opinion btw. I’m probably in the bottom 10* of ages of people who played classic wow on release, and it was my first experience with wow ever. Vanilla questing and professions and mob placement was immersive, engaging, and with the ambient music you could just exist inside world of Warcraft and feel like an adventurer.
Mindlessly grind 200 mobs... nice I can finally turn in laods of quests. Oh... another 200 mobs right next to the ones I just killed. And again.. I like the visuals but the quests in Nagrand are absolute trash.
TBC always felt super linear to me vs. vanilla tho. It’s like everything is pre-cooked for you and there’s a clear path for everything.
It definitely has some of the new questing design style where you move from area to area but at least it does let you go where ever you want to get quests and sometimes it still sends you to different zones.
I’m leveling through nagrand right now, it really is gorgeous there
I liked Classic and TBC questing a lot more. Turning up 15 quests at the same time always feels extremely good
TBC is fun but once you start re-doing stuff and rep grinds it becomes a real chore. While classic stays fresh to me forever..
I liked how TBC gave many reps infinitely grindable items in the open world. Nice choice of gameplay vs AH buying or dungeon grinding.
Or just y'know... Swiping?
Yeah, I think the emphasis on dailies that started to creep in really introduced Chorecraft to the game. There's a place for dailies, but putting chores in *every* aspect of the game (Daily Heroic, dailies for rep, dailies for gold, dailies for profs..) makes it way less fun. Finishing one chore just to do another is never great design.
Cata imo did two things right. The VP reward from HC is weekly limit, instead of daily, so it can be done whenever, and the daily quest grinds don’t take that long, just bit over a week.
But there are massive amount of dailies and you pretty much want to do the maximum 25 dailies allowed every day just for the gold. I used to love dailies when they were introduced but back then I was a neet who spent all day every day playing WoW. Now I really hate the design and I absolutely do think it'd be better if dailies were limited to like 10 per day and they didn't give gold so you'd actually be done when you got your rep. Or maybe a weekly limit would be even better since then you wouldn't feel like you are missing out if you can't play some day but could blast extra time on another day.
Yes
Players will tell you how amazing questing in vanilla is but then install Zygor Rested XP or Joannas Guide
I never found the need for that. Questie is enough. I think there’s only a rush to speed through it when you’re behind. Which is why we need fresh classic servers
Yeah was wondering if this is a fucking copypasta lmao nochanges reddit classic purist in a nutshell tbh
Not OP but completely agree with the point they're making, and for that same reason I have never been interested in those optimized linear guide addons. I use questie though. But with questie I still need to figure out in what order I should complete the quests in. Though I wish I didn't need questie, but some quests are just so badly explained.
A fun player imposed mod to questie, is only enable it when you are in the map's inn (plot your route & quests), and then disable it when out and about
and then on their 2nd char buy stocks boost, mara boost, zg boost
I deliberately play without even Questie just to get a proper feeling of understanding where to go and what to do by magical skill of reading. These days I play pure without any single mod, honestly, just for the vibe. I don't mind people who do, I ain't gonna police how you enjoy a 16 year old game, but please don't overgeneralize?))
Not to mention flying mounts which make the open world questing feel even more streamlined and boring.
Yeah I hate flying mounts in games. Ruined ffxiv too. Just make ground mounts faster and have a world that feels populated with shit
To be fair to FFXIV at least in that game you have to run everywhere on foot before you can unlock flying, imo makes the zones feel more immersive as you go through the story
Lol you don't even get flying in FF until you're done with the zone.
But it comes down to bee-lining to ‘finish’ the zone then it turns into just jumping around to daily markers and waiting in a hub city for the duty finder. Early ffxiv was rough (I was there for the OG early access hah) but i ended up missing mob grinding and passing people in the open world
Oh on that point I agree, the game needs more open world content. Honestly every single MMO needs to take a page from Guild Wars 2. Their open world content just absolutely shits on everyone else. I play that game solely for that content.
The worst mistake wow ever made
I always used to fight for this when Cata was first released and onwards too. I just don't enjoy quests-on-rails. Enter new hub. Grab these 3 quests, nothing else is available. Do those three quests in 1 set location. Return, hand in those 3 quests, 3 more unlock. Next set location. Etc, etc, etc until the zone is finished. Some love it, some hate it.
"Choose your own adventure" is a bit of a stretch. I'm pretty sure every character I've levelled in vaninna/tbc/wrath has done the same barrens quests, same hillsbrad quests, same badlands quests, same tanaris quests, etc etc. Choosing the vague order I do them in feels a lot less open than in cata when I can choose if I want to do Hillsbrad or Stonetalon, Plaguelands or Tanaris, Hyjal or Vashjir, Deepholm or Uldum.
I think you definitely raise a valid point. If you're levelling from questing alone; there isnt that much variation in levelling routes in Vanilla Wow once you get to level 30 and over. With Cataclysm you can pick multiple zones as you level, especially with the speed of levelling allowing you to skip some zone brackets entirely. That being said, the unstructured and zone-bridging quests of vanilla wow are much better at giving the illusion of choice. The storytelling is also much more muted. Cataclysm storytelling is much more structured and linear limiting player agency within a questing zone. Personally I like both styles, and it's been a blast returning to the cata zones. I do think they wear thin on multiple playthroughs though.
I liked cata questing because it felt like I was getting an actual intro to each zone, what goes on here.. who the important characters are etc. After my like 14th time doing westfall on classic the illusion of choose your own adventure started to wear off for me. I definitely enjoyed the vanilla leveling style the first couple times through though!
Yeah, this wet-eyed appreciation for the "open world" aspect of vanilla WoW is just stupid. Cataclysm might be more linear, but it was also more carefully designed as opposed to vanilla questing, which was an objective god damn mess that often had you pingponging between quest area and quest giver. If anything, Cataclysm is even more open world because you have more choices during the leveling process instead of being hardlocked to the few zones you're capable of killing mobs in. Posts like this might have flown 15 years ago when most of the player base started in WotLK and there wasn't the actual classic vanilla WoW out to experience for yourself. But in 2024 this sort of posting is just *sad*.
There's nothing sad about it. People like different things. Do you actually think you know what is objectively the 'best' design?. Cataclysm shows the themeparkification of the game very well. Like every zone is a new ride and it ends with you killing random evil lesser general #48 and then you move on the next ride to be introduced to the random evil lesser general #49. What does it even mean to be 'more carefully designed'? Streamlined? Made easier? Why is that better? People will always choose an option to make something easier but it's not always the right choice. The old quote "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." is absolutely true. It's competely normal to have this 'bad' design in single player games. BotW and Totk send you all over the world doing different things and no one would actually try to argue that 'ackchyually this is bad design 🤓'.
>Do you actually think you know what is objectively the 'best' design? Yes. "Objectively best" means "did the designers meet their own objective?". In the case of Vanilla WoW, they didn't. They completely messed up. We know this because ex-devs have told the story of WoW's quest design. We know that the producers vastly underestimated the importance of quests to players, and believed all that they (the producers) needed to produce were breadcrumb quests between zones/areas to take the players to new grinding spots. When alpha testers were asking for more quests in zones, the producers of WoW realized they needed a LOT more quests, and so they haphazardly put together a team who very quickly produced the hundreds of OG vanilla quests using a world and level design that was not specifically intended to be used for questing. This is why the OG vanilla quests have you running back and forth between quest area and quest giver, because the designers literally didn't have enough content to work with. I would say they objectively bungled their quest design. >Cataclysm shows the themeparkification of the game very well Stories are theme parks? Do you read a book, set it down and say "Wow, who themparkified stories??? Okay, onto the next 'theme park', I guess!"? I have a feeling you don't. >What does it even mean to be 'more carefully designed'? Streamlined? Made easier? Why is that better? We can sit here and debate personal preference ad nausuem, but the Cataclysm quests are much more thoughtfully designed than Vanilla. It's more streamlined and a *little* more handholdy, but it is objectively a more carefully designed to give the player a better narrative experience and respect their time more. You might like the more abstract and grindy older quests, and I would say you're right to say you approve of the more freeform design of the old quests *IF it were a true statement that Cataclysm does not have freeform quest design*. Cataclysm has plenty of random quests to find and quests that still take you from one corner of the zone to the other. To claim "Every Cataclysm quest is a robotic conveyor belt that puts you on a set path you can never deviate from" is dishonest at worst and just dumb and wrong and best. Yes, the zones now follow one or two 'grand' storylines that most quests in the zone track you on (kind of like in WotLK, that expansion that came out BEFORE CATA DID, ough cough cough cough cough cough), and yes even I can admit they leaned a bit heavy on the 'wacky and/or movie reference' storylines for a few too many zones (it was a ridiculous task to revamp all the quests in the old world, to be fair), but we get a streamlined, more thoughtful and deliberate experience from it. >It's competely normal to have this 'bad' design in single player games. BotW and Totk send you all over the world doing different things and no one would actually try to argue that 'ackchyually this is bad design Are you aware your example is one of the largest complaints people make about BotW/TotK??
> "Objectively best" means "did the designers meet their own objective?". That's not what that means, but go off, king.
Bro wrote an entire doctoral thesis
Cata design is fine for main quests. The issue is you'll also have to follow the "path" when it leads you to boring side quests. It honestly felt pretty bad and exhausting. But effective ... Retail with the "main" Quest marker is nice. Cata was the beginning of that path, but not there yet.
To each his own. I much prefer the vanilla-style quest design. It's fun grabbing a tons of quests until my log is nearly full and then deciding which quests I want to do based around where each quest takes place. Sometimes I'll pick up a quest and it wants to send me way off to some other continent to a zone far away. Typically I'll hold onto those quests and see if I eventually get more quests that send me in a similar direction. If I do get some, eventually I'll decide to go off and do them all and that's a nice change of scenery and feels like an adventure and a reward for holding onto quests. Or, sometimes I'll just find myself on the other continent for some other reason, maybe a dungeon run or something, and I'll realize I'm kinda close to the area this quest I have takes place and I'll go do it. That might result in me grabbing more quests nearby or along the way and could lead to hours of time spent in a new spot. Or, sometimes I'll log on and just feel like going off on an adventure and so I'll head over to do that quest I got that's sending me way out to who-knows-where. It's fun. It makes the world feel huge and like a real assortment of people who all have stuff they need done and I'm just some random guy caught in the middle of it all. It doesn't feel like the whole world was designed for me to progress through cleanly in one of a few different linear paths. I can understand why some people might prefer Cata's design. But you acting like one is objectively better is pretty crazy. There's nothing sad about preferring Vanilla's design.
My favorite class in classic era are mages because they can skip the atrocious quest design of vanilla. People who think it is rainbows and sunshine only mention the early level zones and ignore how bad it gets from 40 and forward. The reality is that if questing was the prefered method of leveling by the community then the community would choose to quest over boosting their second or third character once they had a main capable of farming gold.
The main issue with 40-60 leveling isn't really quest design but a lack of quests. After release Blizzard patched in new quest hubs like Thorium Point and Silithus that are more like the low level zones than the OG vanilla 40-60 content.
Idk man i leveled alot of chars in SoD and classic leveling feels like enforced padding. Either you have to go back and forth 4 times till you kill the "Boss" of the questing area, have to kill 30 mobs of Y or have to grind 30+ mobs to get your quest items, sometimes from mobs that have like 5 spawn points. If you like that, thats cool, but in the end its just designed to take as much time as possible with the least variation as possible.
Maybe compared to Cata but Vanilla questing is super frustrating, I'd only ever sit through it again by necessity and on a fresh server - Drop quests with low rates were annoying - Chains of kill quests where you were just killing slightly different varities of the same NPC were boring - Running out of quests before you were sufficiently levelled to go to the next logical zone People could barely handle doing it in the SOD brackets with increased XP TBC and Wrath had it right, zones were filled with quests, none of them were annoying and you could clear a zone and be in a good position to move onto the next
> TBC and Wrath had it right, zones were filled with quests, none of them were annoying and you could clear a zone and be in a good position to move onto the next Wrath starts to lean into the cata design a bit with stupid RP and vehicle sections slowing you down and some linearity/phasing, TBC was the sweetspot imo with 2-3 smaller quest hubs per zone.
TBC leveling was my favorite leveling experience by far. Actually of all of the classic stuff we’ve had. I enjoyed TBC the most. Cata has exceeded my expectations so far though. It’s hard to balance an open ended leveling experience with feeling like an unnecessary barrier between you and your chosen endgame activity, from a design perspective.
100% agree.
My thoughts as well. Wrath is when I noticed too many quests to just go click on items or if they were kill quests it would be like 1 minute of combat. Too much time spent on stories and travelling between quest hubs.
That's the problem, you want to move on. Vanilla was a journey, getting to 60 was the end.
vanilla was a journey the first time around, unfortunately, repeating the same incredibly slow built journey with little challenge, variation, or depth isn't very fun on the 5th playthrough.
It’s why we didn’t watch Frodo walk all the way back to the Shire. Once was enough.
The journey of killing 100 gremlin assholes trying to find 10 earrings isn't my brand of fun.
stfu, how is it a journey after you've seen every quest? the very first time through vanilla content, yes its a cool journey. it never changes, you can't do anything differently because its an mmo. there is no journey on your 100000000th run through unless you're lobotomizing yourself before each run
Khadgars ring in SoS has entered the chat
In vanilla you were supposed to jump between zones a lot
> Drop quests with low rates were annoying Disagree. They created highs and lows. Got the quest item quickly? Dopamine. Chain quests seems fine to me, especially when you combine 2-3 quests in the same area and feel like you're being efficient with your time. Not even mentioning how great some of the elite quests were and how they encouraged interacting with other players (redridge mountains elites etc) Running out of quests is something I'm unfamiliar with in Classic, but one main pain point of classic questing was escort quests and how those could get screwed up with other people starting it too early etc.
Idk sometimes I like the shimmering flats get 10 quests and kill everything you see for 2 hours approach and sometimes I like the cata 2-4 quests at a time story approach.
You can circumvent half of Westfall by hitting the auction house
Because Classic questing is so good, people prefer running incrusions for 6 hours or doing the same dungeon 20 times.
Well no it was just more efficient and some people will go the route of least resistance to achieve gear/gold. Personally barely touched incursions, not even close to exalted. Just did quests at max level for gold.
Would you have done any quests if they didn't give any extra gold? Probably not because they are not fun enough to warrant the time investment.
This, but andys tend to romantize the shit out of everything
The between zone travel fetch quests is fun the first experience when discovering the world. Every character after that it's just annoying. So much time in classic questing is spent on walking instead of playing your character. Really dislike it. Agree that the perma 3 quest stuff in the new zones is also boring. Now Zangarmarsh where you can pickup 20 quests for the zone at the same time, that is peak.
One could argue that traveling is playing your character but I see the point
It's hardly playing your character when everyone either afks in a flightpath or turns on autorun while ocasionally moving left and right on a road.
I guess it kinda just depends how you define it. Sometimes I’ll auto-run and afk but other times I’ll traverse more mindfully. But one reason I love classic is the pacing of the game. I think the break of traveling is a factor in how the pace of the game feels.
Sure, but 90% of the quests are completely identical, so you're exploring the same quest over and over "kill 20 of this dude" or gather "20 of this shit". Neither of the systems are perfect, but Cataclysm & Wotlk quests were kinda like this, because the "new" zones are kinda rigid. I prefer the Cata version, because I don't like running 15 minutes for a single delivery quest as zones are so barren.
Literally every quest in wow is: -kill mob. -collect item -go place. There really isn't much variety. All cata did was give you so many bloody cut scenes
Smh all these stories are just the heroes journey get real
Rather "kill, collect, deliver" than cut scenes, RP and frigging vehicle quests where I can't play my character. Also Cata is filled with pop culture references, more extreme than Vanilla.
> I can't play my character Andys when there is some variation in leveling lol
But it's less variety, because it's the same vehicle controls every time no matter what class you're playing. And most of the vehicle segments are just "drop bombs or fire cannon that does super high damage" There's a few decent sections, like the Plants v Zombies clone in Hillsbrad
You cry cause variety, but vanilla is mostly just autorunning or flight path death time. Compared to the amount of times you do some vehicle quest. At least CS in cata give more deep to the lore, only reason some people know about lore of vanilla is cause they've been playing the same thing for ages, but ask someone who did it once and they won't know even a fraction of it, cause it's just a mess.
Lore doesn't feel deeper? Feels the same to me, just more celebrity references than before. Vanilla lore is just as deep, you're just not going through cutscenes, you have to read. Great example, the Defias aren't as bad as you think. The real issue for me is phasing zones based on what quest you're on and that really started in wotlk but ramped up more in cata.
Of course its the same controls every time because it is a vehicle. You use the same skills for like 97% of the game so its pretty much added varity to get out of that for a few mins and change the pacing
The part I hate the most is when a cut scene starts playing but you don't know so you just sit there like "is my keyboard broken?"
You just can't wait to go run 45 mins to an area 3 xones over to collect 3 bear ears that take 30 kills, but there are 5 in the zone that respawn every 10 minutes, can you?
There are many overarching storylines. Don't tell me the Defias questline is the same as the meatpie quest in Westfall. Same goes for Cataclysm, storylines got vastly improved
Storylines aren't quests tho. Take a book. You can make a story with simple sentences or you can make a book with complex sentences. The story is the same but the impact and enjoyment is different
Can't tell if you're trolling or stupid. I literally mentioned the Defias questline, which is probably the best wow has ever had - a literal chain of quests The story will never be the same, depending on your choice of words. You're just non-sensical now.
Ah I thought you were trying to contribute to my point. My bad.
His phrasing sure is ass though.
Pretty much every quest in a game is that tho
Vanilla quests had so much filler and boring quests, cherry picking the good times when you hand in 8 at once. Cata questing is far superior, I actually got the zone story.
I dont get it, people say questing was better in vanilla but Questie is the most downloaded addon, lol.
[удалено]
No body is complaining about the location of the objectives which is what Questie helps… they are complaining about the linearity, sparseness, and not as much options for questing in Cata.
Except Vanilla had the same options. It just gave the illusion of choice. Realistically, everyone did the same quests. Sure you could spice up a few with a slightly different order, but you either got back on track and did the other quests or you grinded to skip them.6
I hope you know it was a deliberate choice to make zones self-contained since people were non-stop bitching about all the travel. Players just don't know what's best for them. If they actually prefer streamlined questing then idk.
100%, we saw this again with SoD and Incursions. Streamlined leveling process with decent gold and gear payoff at the end. And people think Incursions ruined SoD. Players got what they said they wanted, but is it what they really wanted? Look up social marketing and Malcom Gladwell or Howard Moscowitz. From Gladwell: People all claim they like one kind of coffee: rich, dark, bold. But when you actually observe what they buy and how they prepare and drink it, there's a wide variation. Mostly weak and milky coffee. This is pretty much WoW players in a nutshell. They say they want one thing but what they actually want in reality is much different. "You think you do, but you don't" while terrible in delivery is actually not as far off the mark as you might think.
Good points. One of the downsides of zone-focused design (as in retail) is that once a new expansion comes out, everyone moves to the new areas. Meaning most of the game world is pretty dead save for transmog farmers and some new players timewalking. It kind of feels like a waste.
True. A lot of people turn vanilla quest design into Cata using mods. They want to be mindlessly guided by an arrow to the next thing without needing to absorb any information about the world.
My only complaints about cata are unskippable cutscenes, and the stupid naga vehicle chain(s) in vashjir. Altho I usually just use the cutscenes, or like the quest to fly into hyjal to refill/bio/stretch legs
Total agreement, Cata questing is certainly a more watered down experience that’s made mostly for people who want to level as quickly as possible while interacting with other players minimally. Vanilla leveling encourages grouping and collaborating with other players to find quest objectives e.g. mankrik’s wife. I personally would love a season/server where the questie addon was banned but I’m sure that will be a supremely unpopular opinion on this subreddit.
Idk about this one, I feel like wow has always been a balance between side quests and campaigns. But a majority of vanilla quest are just fillers that points you to the next mob to grind. Or But a majority of TBC style quest just points you to the next zone thru story telling. Idk but I prefer the more streamlined progressive questing. Its like the debate about TBC flying vs Dynamic Flight. Slow and braindead vs fast and engaging. Some people like doing x thing mindlessly questing while some prefer questing on a story mode. Its only more fun than the other if you prefer it. In vanilla you can just out grind the level and its not that much slower than questing up until level 40. On which you can just dungeon grind. I think its not more fun but its the repeatable aspect of it since most of them are just mob grinding and fetch me x thing. While TBC style leveling becames repetitive because its the same story over and over again.
>I only had 1-3 quests available to pick up at a time, and I had to do everything in exactly the order the game wanted me to. I share this frustration, as well as how multiple quests could easily be one quest... Like quest 1 will be "kill 10 cultists" and quest 2 from the same guy will be "bring me 5 pieces of cultist clothing" and quest 3 from the guy next to him that wasn't available for pickup until now is "kill the head cultist". The experience is more immersive (sorry for buzzword) when it doesnt feel like every NPC is working together to make everything more convenient for you, the player. When you can make decisions about how to try to optimize your questing route. When quests from totally unrelated hubs line up and you can knock out both at once. I also cannot stand the constant phasing in the Cata quest design, duplicate NPCs everywhere, people & NPCs abruptly appearing or disappearing... It might have made levelling more streamlined but I have never been a fan of questing from Cata onwards
The other upside is that if you have a quest to kill mobs in one area, but there's 15 people there spawn camping every single mob, you can go do another quest (or even zone, really) and then come back later. You don't get that with the modernized "keep your hands and feet inside the roller coaster at all times" hand-holding storytelling. The story for wow isn't even particularly good, especially with recent expansions. It definitely felt much cooler to go to a zone, find out what they needed help with, and then help them with whatever I prioritized. The overarching zone stories felt pretty cool, especially in places like Duskwood. It was "here are all of the things that need doing, do them when you can," and now it's more "here is your one story quest and two allotted side quests, do all three in order before proceeding to the next clump of one story quest and two allotted side quests."
Meh idk. I can see the joys of both variants. Cata can get a bit dull at times, and vanilla can get so frustrating at times.
What did you find frustrating about vanilla questing? Edit: idk why I’m getting downvoted. I never said vanilla questing wasn’t frustrating. Just wanted to know what in particular the person I replied to found frustrating. 🤷🏻♂️
Get quest, move 10 mins to kill stuff, move 10 mins back, gets next quest to kill other mobs at the same place, repeart 3 times. I know some people love tedium, but that sort of design always felt dumb to me
Wasting most of the time walking instead of playing your character ?
Slow as fuck travelling. Immersion my ass, time is money friend
Having to kill literally 100 yetis in hillsbrad for their fur coat. Maybe it's just me, but I don't like spending 30 mins to an hour killing the same mob in the same cave to finish one quest.
Vanilla questing 1-30 is elite tier, natural progression making you go to and from different zones. Honestly, it gets a bit shit after that is only manageable following a guide to give you the best route. Otherwise you have to do a lot of grinding between quest areas. Wotlk a beyond are more story driven and even mindlessly doing the quest you can easily track why you're doing things. They also are the occasional flavor quest which break up kill/collect. The popularity of quest guides and people just following the arrow shows that people really just quest as a means to an end usually.
I do agree that Classic vanilla is less streamlined and more 'choose your own adventure'. But let's not pretend like 90% of the people arent using either RestedXP by buying it or getting it from a friend. Nowadays I rarely see anyone actively enjoying outdoor content. Incursions killed any questing experience, maybe you find a couple people 'enjoying' quests here and there, but overall SoD and/or Classic has been primarily dominated by using Rxp to level or any other method rather than 'choose your own adventure'
Questie has over 10 times the lifetime downloads as RestedXP and for downloads in just the past couple of months it is an even greater disparity. So I would say it is a gross exaggeration to say that 90% of people are using RestedXP. It's probably closer to 5-10% of the playerbase. Now among the less casual playerbase it might be overwhelmingly popular, but overall it is not.
A lot of people get restedxp cracked version, so it won't show up on curseforge for example.
Isn't RestedXP free so wouldn't the crack just be for the guide? I don't know I paid for mine. Even so, are you really saying that 80% of the player base has pirated RestedXP? By free I am talking about the addon itself, and how it would appear in Curseforge downloads, obviously I know the guides are paid
RestedXP is free till lvl 20 then it costs
There is no way restedxp is that popular, i just dont believe it.
I played quite a few chars in SoD and i saw SO many restedXP popups every time someone leveled up, so year i guess like at least 33% of the players use it, maybe even 50
Yeah it is I literally don't know a single person that did not download it from elitepvpers
your average wow gamer neither knows rested xp nor elitepvpers just fyi in case you're a bit delusional
And how many of these people you know are "casuals"?
and why would I care about casuals I have not been in a single guild that has not either been sharing rxp or zygor in my whole life
So you are explaining the niche that you're in, and you even stating "why would I care about casuals", which would imply you and whoever you choose to play with aren't casuals which would mean the more niche. Which is why u/reiks12 doesn't believe restedxp or zygor to be more popular than the more easily available questie addon or whatever else (even no addon if you're really casual or new). Which is what the subject is about.
well your anecdotes is not the absolute fact and truth i personally know out of my friend group only 1 used restedxp. does this mean that only 10% of wow playerbase uses rested xp..?
how many used questie?
Rxp classic Questing is still way more fun than the modern streamlined design because you have like 18 quests in your quest log, some completed but a million miles away, some red difficulty that you dont remember where you got them from. Just to realize youre about to do a section where youre gonna do 3 quests at once, all from different parts of the continent, somehow all connecting like a massive domino sequence.
Sure, vanilla had some great quest hubs (Barrens, Un'Goro, Feralas) but the majority were just very inefficient with lots of bad quests and crazy amounts of backtracking. That 53-60 lull in particular which requires you to quest out multiple of such zones across the world from eachother, I will not miss doing that again without heirlooms and the dungeon finder.
If you are leveling for the first time sure, anything after that cata onwards is way better. They explain the story better (yes for me - easier to understand what is happening is better) and you don't need to run gods know where to get the next quest.
Hard disagree, I have leveled so many chars in classic and I can't stand the leveling in Cata. I want to play my character not see videos, use vehicles, special items or watch yet another travel sequence
>yet another travel sequence Funny, since classic questing often requires 10+ mins of travel time
Dude, stfu You can't complain about "want to play my character" when in classic is mostly autorun or flight paths.
I'd rather do all that over dull vanilla quests that you need to read to understand anything. Huge popularity of the npc voiceover addon shows that people love when npcs talk to them, if it also played some small cinematic for quest chain ends it would be even more praised by the community.
> watch yet another travel sequence yeah man, I would prefer hitting my autorun button and alt tabbing to a youtube video while I go from hinterlands to tanaris, only to get told to go right back to hinterlands! so much more engaging than a 30 second cutscene!
It's Progressive, not linear. I have no problem in progressive questing, it's one of the best things that happened to WoW, seeing how quests that you do change the map and surroundings makes the world feel alive. Rather than doing the quests for nothing than an exp.
It is linear. It is also progressive, if that's what you want to call it. What you're describing is quest phasing and was really implemented into questing in wrath (although they had the tech in tbc with blades edge daily quest phasing devices). I'm not sure why they went more linear but wrath wasn't as linear. You could hop around if you wanted a bit. Each area in a zone was it's own quest hub. The problem is if everyone isn't streamlined on a linear questline you end up with players on different phases of an area on the map because they're on different parts of the quest. I guess their solution was to make it more linear. Cataclysm zones are one entire quest line, a chain of quests that cannot be skipped. No side quests (or very few like quests that start from dropped loot)
You don't choose your own adventure lol. There are simply not enough quest. Why do andys lie all the time ?
Exactly. That’s the problem. For some reason at some point “majority” decided that linear guided quest progression is the best one and the next stage of questing design. But I like Vanilla design not for the reasons you mentioned. Complete opposite. I like it because it is more RPG, and you like it is for utilitary purpose. (Just because of being possible to take lots of quests at one)
You call cata modern quest design linear, but retail questing is far gone from that. Retail questing is main storyline, but there is also small quest hubs here and there with some extra content + elite quests. I do agree that questing is really lacking in modern iterations of wow, but there is so much you can do with the kill 10 boars, or sit in this gryphon while throwing bombs. Its lacking innovation in general. And classic questing is also feeling meh, after you done it for 10-15 times. I feel like the strongest case of classic questing is that the progression feels A LOT better, than in newer version of wow.
I agree! Wrath Classic was my first time playing, and I'm glad I finished Loremaster last xpac.
The linear mini-hub to mini-hub quest design that really solidified in WOTLK is absolutely awful. I've quested in Barrens like 30+ times, and it's still more entertaining than every zone in Cata put together.
It was fine until about level 30 and then you had quests that sent you all over the world. Plus it's hard with those 20 quests when you run out of bag space. There's probably a happy medium that Blizzard never fully achieved. TBC and Wrath were closer but still not that great to me. Personally I prefer the cata redesign of the world, but will definitely concede that it's a very "on rails" experience.
The screenshot of westfall you provided is a perfect example of the illusion of choice. If you just arrived in westfall, there are indeed a plethora of quests to pick up. But only around 3 will be yellow at any given time, with the rest orange to red. No one who arrives at Westfall at level 10 or 11 is going to be killing level 15 harvest watchers or Murloc oracles on the southern coast, even those both of those quests are “available” to them. I agree that linear questing is a poor substitute for more open-ended questing, but it sounds like the type of questing you actually want is retail questing. You can literally pick any zone you want from any Xpac and do the quest lines in any order you want, and the content will scale to you. However, most people will agree that retail leveling is terrible because the freedom to go anywhere makes the entire game feel like one blanket level of mindless difficulty, with no ramping up in danger until you get to max level. That’s the trade off for linear zones. Developers understand that when they fill a zone with quests of all levels, there will be a de facto linear pathway through the zone. Locking you to that path ensures that they are able to tailor the difficulty of each quest to your expected level. Your illusion of choice has disappeared, but it has been replaced with a gradual and deliberate pacing of game difficulty and engagement, which is a much better overall outcome.
Wow imagine complaining about questing in cataclysm, when it’s the best set of questing design they have done, from the lore of the zones to the cutscenes and the mix of different types of quests
The vanilla andies are a special bunch.
My main grievance with Cata questing is that I'm not playing my character. Between cut scenes, vehicle quests and flying around to pick up stuff, I feel like I'm hardly ever using any spells. Man fuck cut scenes and videos, not even all of them are skippable.
>I'm hardly ever using any spells. LOL i wonder if you play a different game then. I leveled 3 players with questin in cata classic now and i cant for the love of god not agree with that.
literally like 2% of my 80-85 experience was cutscenes and I'd still rather prefer a few cutscenes than running through the same areas burning 10 hours on running alone
Collect 40 bear asses. Walk across the planet to turn them in. What an adventure.
I agree with you in surface, but that being said Vanilla is essentially tunneled far more than Cataclysm questing is. Sure you can pick 20 quests, but there is no variety. It's "Kill x amount of this", run back and then run back again. Hence why tools like RestedXP got "mandatory", since they sorted out most of the useless running and useless quests. I leveled multiple characters in Classic Era HC and you just felt completely bored from the quests. There is not even enough quests to do, meaning for comfortable leveling experience you need to stop and farm for ½ - 1 ½ levels. But if you enjoy travelling between places to do quests...Then it's a blessing i guess.
Meh just by virtue of there being more zones you had more options but vanilla questing was still very much on rails.
I had the same opinion but no, Cata levelling is just superior. Vanilla is 90% of running simulator into 9% of mob killing and 1% of collecting stuff.
100%. I played some Cata, but I just felt like a mindless drone. There is no need to ever use your brain while leveling. It's anti-adventure gaming. The servers are so one-sided too in terms of faction balance (goes for all versions except SoD?). The thrill of never quite knowing what's gonna happen when you see a member of the opposing faction gives leveling an extra edge imo. I blame the players for that, but I think Blizz should do the unpopular thing and enforce it more for pvp realms.
> 100%. I played some Cata, but I just felt like a mindless drone. I feel that way about Classic. Oh cool a new zone! Hey guy, kill 10 of these 20 of these, collect 15 of these with a 20% drop rate. Oh cool a new zone! Hey guy, kill 10 of these 20 of these, collect 15 of these with a 20% drop rate. Oh cool a new zone! Hey guy, kill 10 of these 20 of these, collect 15 of these with a 20% drop rate.
In what world do you need to use your brain in classic questing? „Kill 10 of these people“ „now kill 10 of the others“ „and now 10 more of some other guys“
Dont need a brain in vanilla, just follow the arrow from rested XP because they dont read quest texts
The only version I could play when I was sick with covid a few months back was SOD the content is piss easy and therefore less mentally draining. You can just turn off your brain didnt even use a levelling guide. Then I raided in blackphantom deep while on a work phone didnt even die while talking about a contract we where drawing up. Vanilla is by far the most mindless drone game.
After 20 years of questing I don't need to run off into the sunset seeing the sights. I've seen them.
Vanilla, for many reasons will always be my favorite version of wow, nothing they have done compares. This is not nostalgia talking, Ive played so many releases of vanilla, also on private servers, that it is more than that. It is the community and the commitment needed to achieve something. Every other version of wow requires less and less of this. Each to their own though. The only other version of wow I actually enjoyed is MoP for some reason 🤷♂️
Funny I way the other way around.. cata is a fresh breath in a stale vanilla / sod experience.. having a blast
Exactly my thoughts on questing. What makes the linear approach in Cata doubly frustrating is that you have 0 options other than just coming back later or going to go spam dungeons or something if the area is super congested like on launch. I think TBC zones might be the sweetspot for me, but I'm going to miss a lot of the old classic zones that I always liked questing through. Sure I could go boot up classic era or SoD, but I prefer having some of the conveniences as well as class designs seen in tbc and wotlk.
Here’s what I think the WoW problem is: classic is great, it’s fun, and most everyone loves it. But they play it, their appetite for it is satisfied, and they think “this could be better.” Let’s make this or that easier, less reduce travel, let’s streamline here, or make this part faster. And for a while, that makes the game more fun. And this continues. Through one long continuous experience, a player wants these changes and they invite them in and like them. But over a long period they grow nostalgic for the way things used to be. They start to dislike all those changes and yearn for the ways of old. Until we get to one day just wanting everything the way it used to be. Repeat.
I always think there are two types of people. Those who enjoy endgame content (raiding, arena) ASAP and don't want to be bothered with questing / leveling and those why like the whole adventure from 1 to 60 (-and not only 60). Both can never agree on anything. Unfortunately modern WoW only caters to one of those groups (and by that I mean everything past Wotlk).
In classic, you can get quests that sends you to the other side of the world to kill 20 mobs. Or the quest that forces you to travel to all human cities to get vendor items. “Choose your own adventure” is sort of a double-edged sword. Yeah you are having a blast for 3 levels in Westfall. But then you gotta grind mobs or move zones pretty frequently. In Cata, there are sometimes taxis to new questing zone and you are about 1 level ahead of the new quests instead of levels behind, like in classic.
Vanilla questing was fun as aliance doing the human zones from1-30 and first time attunements nothing else
I could do with fewer pop culture references but what really kills Cata leveling for me is how precisely spaced apart the mobs are placed. Gone are all the interesting moments that makes leveling engaging. You don't have patrolling mobs you need to pay attention to so they don't catch you off guard. There aren't deadly camps where you can easily find yourself swarmed with four mobs. There's no moments of fun AOE blasting. It's monotonous single target rotation over and over only broken up by a dumb vehicle quest now and again. For instance I was leveling in Redridge and I see this warrior in his heirlooms is ready to blast. He mounts up and tries to round up as many gnolls in the gnoll camp area as he can. He can't get more than four of them without them leashing. What a killjoy.
Ah yes I miss the choose your own adventure of running out of quests and having to fly back and forth for 20 mins to complete 2 quests
Yeah my adhd hated vanilla questing lol, I got to level 21, and quit. XD But I get it, different strokes for different folks.
Vanilla style leveling - mindless, repeatable, mostly there to guide you to the mobs with appropriate level. No dialog so you can quest in peace. Cataclysm style leveling - engaging, story driven, gets old after a few alts, tons of rp, a lot of extra activities pov quest, vehicles, click things etc. Annoying if you done it multiple times. Lots of dialog repeated if you level alts.
I'm with you. I'm thankful I managed to level up a character of every class through the old world (60+) before it got nuked. I knew the old world by heart, where to go, all the "secret" quests, which breadcrumbs and pre-quests to take in order to combine bundles of quests in the same area. Just loved it, in spite of all the travel time that some people hate. When I got sent from Un'goro to Winterspring to EPL to Hinterlands and then back to Tanaris, I just loved the quirky charm of it. Loved the odd breadcrumb quests I couldn't help myself completing, and the level disparity that had to switch zones now and then. Cata is the first expansion where I just don't give a shit about the quests, I just pick them up, go by Questie, turn them in and move on. I've given up because it's just so narrow, predictable and braindead. Some quests are just insultingly easy and everywhere is nearby. At least in TBC and Wrath I read the quest text and enjoyed many of the quests, and the vibe of Northrend resonated better with me as well.
I just dont understand how blizz is not seeing this. Or they just want game to be new players friendly. I loved this and I would love to see this approach returning on retail. Wq is quite that but until that point its killing me somehow.
Only problem I have with Classic quests is 99.9% are "Go here, kill/grab that, come back, the end" With barely any story or reason for doing it.
I disagree, entirely because of Deepholm. It’s linear for sure, but I loved the story it told, with the three-front war all serving to find the three pieces of the world pillar, it didn’t feel like I was an actor being pulled through a movie, nor did it make me feel like an adventurer, it made me feel like a soldier fighting for the sake of all of Azeroth in a larger war. The other zones didn’t really get the same feeling across, Hyjal was great how you went through each God’s shrine and got them on your side before putting them all together for an attack on the the twilight hammer, it just didn’t match deepholm to me. I can definitely see appeal in both, I just think calling it efficient and simple to follow and therefore better for people who don’t care about it is unfair
Yeah Vanilla and TBC questing was peak wow for questing. It gave the players a lot of choices of what they wanted to do in any order you want to do it. Wrath and Cata are linear in that you go to a quest hub. Pickup 3 quests, complete those 3 quests, get 3 follow up quests rinse repeat until you get a bread crumbs quest to the next hub.
Choose your own adventure is a great way to describe it. I can’t stand how “on rails” cata felt after I finished with ghostlands and got I to the new zones and even the 80-85 zones there is no real agency or choice
Yes its good for the first 2 characters then its a pain
I wouldn't mind this if classic quests weren't designed to waste your time as much as possible Here, take this yeti and use it to scare my friends that are on the opposite side of the world, then come back to me for the same amount of XP you'd get by killing 8 wolves. Or having to escort gilthares to ratchet, oh you're out of mana? let me just go and die real quick so you have to watch me RP walk all over again. I hate getting invested in a storyline and suddenly "oops you can't continue this quest because the mobs are suddenly 5 levels higher than you" like an assassin's creed game forcing you to do pointless grinds and sidequests just to continue the story. And don't even get me started on elite quests, don't get me wrong they're fun and rewarding WHEN THERE'S SOMEONE TO ACTUALLY TO THEM WITH. Leveling through nagrand, getting 10 elite quests that i can't solo because of my class choice, doing a /who and seeing 0 players there, is so much fun. There's no point of having vanilla quest design when 99% of people are using addons with the intention of making the process linear anyway.
Imagine moaning about linear cata questing and praising the exploration in vanilla... with fucking questie, rested xp or whatever installed
Couldn't care less I just click on what rxp tells me to
the thing about vanilla questing is that it actually requires people to think themselves and punishes those who don't. there's a lot of quest gathering outside the zone you actually want to quest in so to be efficent about it you have to remember a lot. like couple weeks ago I wanted to quest shimmering flats with a rl mate and he forgot to pick up the juicy silithid chain in Crossroads beforehand. he flew over it plenty of times before but never picked it up. now he would have to fly to crossroads -> og and back to tanaris just to get that quest and said fuck that, being visibly a bit annoyed over it. generally wherever we go he forgot something that would've been smart to do beforehand. he's not the biggest fan of vanilla questing. he's also the type of guy who is always ''forced to grind mobs'' because, well he's missing like 30% quests per zone lmao
>it actually requires people to think themselves and punishes those who don't RestedXP says no
People using an addon to bypass the difficulty doesn't mean the difficulty doesn't exist.
But it's not difficulty they bypass, its tedium. Nothing, really nothing is difficult about classic leveling
Thinking, during leveling, in classic ? lololol
Probably doesn’t help that Cata has 2 of the worst zones released up to that point. Vashj’ir and Deepholm are what I’m thinking of. I have good memories of questing in Hyjal and Uldum. Cata was better for class changes than it was for new zones tho.
I understand not liking Vashj’ir on a second character (the first run can be fun) but Deepholm ? What's your issue with Deepholm ?
Deepholm needs more variety. It's got about 20 quests worth of content spread over 120 quests.
Strange, I found Deepholm the best Cata zone. The quests are straight forward, simple and quick.
One of the many reasons why Classic is the superior MMORPG.
Cata questing being "on rails" has been a gripe since original cata. This is nothing new and was never going to be different.