World of Warcrafts latest expansionLegiondrops this Tuesday.
The game set the standard for MMORPGs in 2004 and set the stage for the modern MMO.
But areWoWs best days behind it, or here, right now?
Well approach this broad time period as classic WoW.
Well touch on why thats important, as well as how the game compares to the classicWoW.
Part of the beauty of this game is that everyone can have a different experience in the same world.
Be sure to share your own experiences at the end.
you’re free to also check outKotakus in-depth tour through all the old expansions here.
When you first start to explore the game, it feelsmassive.
Each race has its own starting zone with a cluster of quests that exist in your own little neighborhood.
You have to runpainfully slowlyfrom one village to another.
By the time you reach the nearest capital city, you think that it couldnt possibly be any bigger.
This is the big end goal of the entire game.
Except it doesnt end there.
Pick any direction not over an ocean and you’ve got the option to just keep wandering forever.
When you take your firstflight from one city to another, it starts to sink in.
This really is aworld.
You could walk from one end of a continent to another if you wanted.
Best of all, each area is riddled with quests, characters, and things to do.
The first couple of times you level a character like this, its exhilarating.
When youre on your tenth character, its not nearly as fun.
So over time Blizzard has added things that make traveling across the world easier.
you’re able to use your hearthstone to teleport back to a single home location.
InBurning Crusade,Blizzard added flying in the new continents.
In a way,Catawas a turning point where the feature creep started to boil over.
Nowadays, you’re able to hop on your flying mount to bypass any inconvenient mountain.
The Group Finder tools made itprogressively easier to find other players to play with.
When you want to join a dungeon or raid, the Group Finder will just teleport you there.
It only takes a few minutes to get acrossWoWsgiant continents.
The new Broken Isles area inLegionis beautiful, but it never quite captures that same sense of grandeur.
This change isnt necessarily a bad thing.
Walking everywhere is tedious and it can take away from actuallyplayingthe game.
Blizzard wasnt building massive virtual continents for nothing.
If you wanted to reach the top level, you had to work for it.
Dungeons and raids offered new and bigger challenges featuring grandiose characters from theWarcraft RTS series.
This trend continued through the games early expansions.
It was a hard battle.
Depending on your group, it couldve taken weeks or months to get there.
It was worth it.
Blizzard rewarded that kind of dedication.
The early expansions were packed withlegendary weapons that were incredibly rare.
These were incredible moments of teamwork.
Those rare few who won their hard-earned trophies carried them with pride.
InLegion, literally everyone is given a legendary weapon right at the beginning.
Its…pretty underwhelming.
One example where this gets really weird is for shamans.
This weapon has been used by Orgrim and Thrall, two of the most important figures inWarcrafthistory.
Iteven appears in the Warcraft moviebeing carried by Orgrim, who is gigantic and covered in muscles.
This is a bit like givingsome teenager Captain Americas shield.
When you receive the Doomhammer, Thrall tells you that youre already more powerful than he is with it.
Even though heliterally killed Deathwing.
You get a lot of cool stuff, but its not as hard to earn it.
That hard work leads to a sense of satisfaction.
Without the grind, the rewards can feel cheap or meaningless.When everyones super, no one is.
You get a free boost to level 100 by purchasingLegion.
The classes have also been simplified a lot since the early days.
Of course, this doesnt necessarily make the gamesimple.
Youll still grind for hours collecting pelts and herbs, killing mobs, anddigging through poop.
You should still study the mechanics on raid bosses, which isnt easy.
New players wont be able to justwalk in to fight Xavius in the Emerald Nightmareand expect to do well.
Theres a lot of learning new players need to do and raid boss mechanics are stillridiculously complicated.
The only difference is that now players have a more clearly laid out path to get there.
I ran into this problem when I startedCataclysm.
The giant black dragonDeathwingwas destroying the world.
I wanted to know how this story ends.
This was also the time I was working 80+ hours a week and raiding was not a possibility.
To this day I still havent gone back to finally kill Deathwing.
Old raids were even harder.
These guys were their expansions primary antagonists and if you werent raiding, you never saw them.
In Legion, that entire dynamic is turned upside down.
Youll meet the big baddieGuldanat the start of the Demon Hunter quest line.
Itll be tough and some jerks might complain, but its easy mode.
Your character is also more important to the story.
InLegion, you are thegrandmaster in charge of your entire class.
Yes, every player is roleplaying the guy in charge of all the other players in their class.
This approach draws you into the story, though.
For example, my mage in Legion will be rebuilding theHall of the Guardian.
For most of myWoWexperience, I didnt really know what the Guardianwas.
In fact, I only learned about itfrom the Warcraft movie.
While I was busy missing out on all the high-level content in earlierWoWexpansions, I missed those mythical elements.
So far, this has done more good than harm.
Warcraft has incredibly rich lore andLegionis using its new features as a way to connect players with it directly.
What we have now, however, isnt bad.
Blizzard has stumbled some in recent years.
We get new weapons, new challenges, and much better ways of experiencing this massive story.
Despite the updates and tweaks, the game we have now looks pretty good.
