and a monthly payment to continue doing it
Leveling up with company was fun. Especially when you had an ass-puller like me in the party, running for your lives from all the boars in the area, because he got a new AoE spell.
I think a lot depends on why you play a game. I liked WoW and other open-world games for the vast lands I can explore. I don’t give a rats ass about combat or progression. I do just enough to stay alive and spend most of my time socializing and exploring.
My first PC game was WoW. I didn’t know how to use keyboards back then, and so, I was killed by boars 5 minutes into the game.
Fun times.
I’m old, so my first MMO was Everquest. I only did “hunt-and-peck” style typing using my index fingers prior to this. Within a month I was a skilled typist out of necessity.
Everquest also taught me that I have to keep very clear of WoW because I realize that if I ever started chasing that dragon, I’d wind up homeless.
I remember trying wow in their 10 hour demo being like “I’m just killing spiders when does this get fun?”
Then a friend told me “it takes 20 hours to get to the fun bit”. I then uninstalled and never looked back.
I remember leaving the dwarf starter zone for the first time. Passed some NPC dwarfs, got chased by a mob that was way too powerful for me and barely survived. When I was done running, and was safe, I looked around and saw the entrance to IronForge.
That’s when I knew the game was for me
It doesn’t take 20 hours to get to the fun but, it just wasn’t for you.
Yeah probably not.
Which is good for me as it saved me $15/month.
Yeah def not.
There is fun in changing zones sightseeing and getting really powerful abilities, running in raids. But if the hook for the core kill loop doesn’t catch, you’re going to have a bad time.
it’s less about the moment to moment gameplay and more about the vibes and ambiance tbh. Players love zones like Barrens and Nagrand even though a good chunk of both zones’ quests are just hunting animals because the vibes of those zones are immaculate.
You’re not wrong about Alliance zones feeling more fleshed out… but over the last two decades of playing vanilla WoW on and off, every single time that I’ve rolled an Alliance character and tried my best to commit, I would eventually see a primitive ass Horde outpost with hanging feathers and dreamcatchers, with some bulky spiked Orc and a noble Tauren standing there… and I would feel such an immense feeling of homesickness unlike anything I’ve ever felt in another game, and I would immediately delete that character and start over in Durotar.
Something about fighting for the honor of the Horde and the glory of the Warchief out there in an inhospitable land, with the inspirational swell of horns and indigenous drums just puts me in it. Like, really puts me in it.
Barrens compared to Goldshire was so garbage in vanilla at launch. Alliance aesthetics was so much more developed and implemented
I’d argue the Horde aesthetics is meant of be raw.
Although I am myself an Alliance connoisseur. Darnassus and Auberdine still being my favorite throughout the Classic, despite some immediate confusion over the location of some merchants.
The Burning Crusade only reinforces this notion, with Silvermoon being initially part of the Alliance and growing to be the majestic city I love wholeheartedly. Truly a gem of the Horde.
I think Duskwood was peak WoW for me. I spent years chasing that early high, and never really found it in that game or any others.
You may like the Alliance aesthetic more but there’s plenty of people who enjoy the Western feel of Barrens.
Hell, people are still making jokes about Barrens chat in this very post, do you see anyone talking about Westfall? If we wanna go off cultural relevancy, Horde is way more well known. Nobody cares about asking “Where’s the Defias Messenger,” but everyone knows Mankirk’s wife.
I agree that the size of Barrens meant that the chat was something else. I meant that while Alliance got three zones that felt unique and populated, horde had one giant open plain.
Might be because I started as Alliance and switched to Horde quite early
Now that’s just not true.
Repeatable quests weren’t added until much later. You had to collect all sorts of organs with shitty drop rates from a variety of animals in different zones.
It was actually barely worth doing quests in the original game, because most of the XP was on the kills rather than quest hand-ins, and the rewards were mostly crap.
Me, a refined person, playing Guild Wars instead.
Well, in Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, you also have reasons to collect lots of the same stuff to do stuff.
The difference is that you don’t have to collect 10 boar asses in boar ass forest for a specific boar ass quest, but instead you may want to craft a legendary bone weapon, so you need to gather bones, and you can go anywhere in the world that drops the bones, or that gives gold you can use to buy the bones from other players, or that grants a special map currency that you can use tyo buy boxes of bones from a map currency vendor, all while doing whatever you feel like doing, progressing your bone gathering in a wide variety of ways.
Guild wars 1 and 2 are good games. The second one is still very active.
GW1 my beloved, how I miss you.
I got GWAMM like 3 years ago before I started playing ff14.
Now, games have aggressive monetization through battle passes and gotcha mechanics! Truly we have improved.
This was the state of many RPGs to level up at that time, MMO or not. The more interesting quests or difficult ones came along when you had more kit to use. Though that said, most of WoW’s initial quests available for a while were like that. In BC you started to get bombing runs, more point A to B path finding quests, etc.
Wow was fantastic when it came out. I never had the money to pay for a subscription so I played on pirate servers. I never got to the endless grind stages, but I adored exploring the early zones with all the original classes. The world looked great, the magic felt real and the fantasy was engrossing. I don’t think I ever made it passed lvl 35 on any characters, but thoroughly enjoyed getting there, sometimes with friends and sometimes alone.
It was more because it was a virtual chatroom and community in an age where such things were not widespread
Also, I think this undersells how good the game looked.
Yes, you were hunting boar livers but you were doing it in this beautiful tropical jungle beside a giant waterfall. And then you’d peak behind the waterfall, discover a mermaid who was at the gate of a giant dungeon themed like a water park. And you completely forgot about the quest to go play in the water park for a couple of hours.
I’d say the bigger problem with WoW was the gradient of zones. You’d be hunting zebra-taurs on the high planes. And then you’d walk through a mountain pass, see a dinosaur, get all excited, and aggro a creature +30 your level.
AHHH! RUN! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! I’M TOO LOW LEVEL TO DIE!! sorry ptsd kicked in there
I picked it up recently with a group of friends on turtle wow (RIP, fuck blizzard), and while I really enjoyed the social aspect, the actual gameplay felt like a chore the whole way through. Plus, it felt like an obligation to keep up with my friends who somehow had much more time to throw at the game.
I’d heard about Turtle wow for a while. I decided to try it a few months ago. Loved it. But you know what happened.
To be fair, it was Turtle wow’s fault. Blizzard has a legal obligation to defend their IP. Private servers are an uneasy truce. Blizzard ignores them because they get people into the WoW space. Turt Wow, however, started charging money and advertising Turtle WoW on Blizzard’s pages on social media. Turtle WoW pulled their dick out in front of Blizzard, started helicoptering it while taunting Blizz, “The fuck you gonna do, pussy boooiiii??”
Blizzard quite literally had no choice. I really loved Turtle WoW, but they completely fucked themselves on this one.
This is a friendly reminder that Warcraft stole from Warhammer’s IP
None of what you said was a new thing or what actually pushed Blizz/Msoft to action. It was the unreal engine port that did it.
why do real chores when virtual chores
“Honey, can you go out and powerwash the side of the house this weekend?”
“Awww, c’mon… I was planning on playing Powerwash Simulator this weekend! 😩”
A real power washer can run out of water or power unless you tether it to outlets. Meanwhile in the simulator, you can parkour onto the roof with an infinite water tank.
Now I kind of feel guilty for enjoying Crime Scene Cleaner. At least in my defense, my house is not covered in blood.
Real chores give us no sense of pride and accomplishment
Neither did WOW ones, every time I’d complete an impossible task and get my reward they’d nerf it and start giving it away the next week
TBH they kinda do. It’s just that there’s all sorts of real-world issues attached to them, while a game is at worst boring.
For a lot of people. they don’t. Chores are just painful and annoying and unrewarding and they hate them objectively.
I’m sure lots of people don’t feel a sense of accomplishment from gaming, either.
but gaming is fine-tuned to be fun, real life isn’t
but real life achievements are much more real and often more lasting than in-game achievements
Pride And Accomplishment™ 🤤
So only every 25. boar has a liver there?
Nah, you just keep instinctively stabbing them in the liver to kill them.
No idea if this was an official explanation, but I always heard drop rates like this were simulating the item/body part/etc. being too damaged during combat to retrieve.
