and a monthly payment to continue doing it
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.
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.
Kinda ironic that alliance zones are more fleshed out, but horde lore and characters tended to get much better treatment.
Barrens compared to Goldshire was so garbage in vanilla at launch. Alliance aesthetics was so much more developed and implemented
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.
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.
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
Horde also had Silverpine if you weren’t hot for the plains, and it’s not like you were actually meant to level nonstop in Barrens from 10-20, though I won’t pretend Stonetalon is that much of a change of scenery.
But again, you’re comparing two very different vibes. The Alliance was meant to feel civilized because they’d existed in the Eastern Kingdoms a thousand years. The Horde had only been on Kalimdor for like a decade, and their start reflected that.
I appreciate you saying that. I did not want to sit still for the Silverpine erasure. Leveling my little undead priest at launch is the most fun I’ve ever had in a computer game. Me at level 10 going a bit to far up the path to Scarlet Monastery in Tirisfal was a truly confusing moment. The whole undead area is amazing and Undercity filled my little Tim Burton adjacent heart with joy.
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.
It doesn’t take 20 hours to get to the fun but, it just wasn’t for you.
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.
Yeah probably not.
Which is good for me as it saved me $15/month.
So what? The grind is the fun bit to you?
I never actually said one way or the other if I like it or not.
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
Compares to gatcha
Hmmm
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.
Yeah but while killing the boars another guy comes round and helps you kill some quicker and then you team up and go around helping anyone else you come across
It was never about quests. It was always about player interactions.
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.
Now, games have aggressive monetization through battle passes and gotcha mechanics! Truly we have improved.
My first WoW experience was Horde. I created an orc hunter, did the training area and got to the Crossroads in the Barrens. As I was figuring out what traders and so on were available, a bunch of high level alliance characters turned up and started laying into the guards. Word went out and high level Horde characters began arriving from Orgrimmar by wyvern. Ended up with about 20 or more characters on each side. It was epic!
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’m so old my first MMO was ICQ
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.
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.
I played during the trial period once. I usually love games with fun gameplay loops that have a bit of grind, but I couldn’t get into WoW. It just didn’t feel fun. It felt like a job. I’m still not sure how it became the largest MMO ever made.
It might help to think of it less like a video game and more like a million person bowling league.
People would log in to hang out. To chat. To bullshit.
Sometimes, to level up or to raid or to pvp. Sometimes, people would log in and play for a few hours just…going around helping other people with stuff. Some people take their characters to the starter zones, handing out bags and some nice gear upgrades and advice to new players.
And that doesn’t even take into account the RP servers, where people would have like guild meetings in game, or legit life events like a wedding in game. Funerals when a guild mate dies? Of course!
That is how it became the biggest MMO ever.
And the game has largely strayed from those roots, which is why so many WoW players go for the Classic version, rather than play the new expansions.
Adding to that: this was back when a lot of people were getting high speed internet for the first time, which allowed them to play for much longer periods. While messaging programs already existed, the social aspect was super important and the artificial difficulty of certain enemies was an attempt to force people to socialize, before dungeon/raid finder killed a significant part of that.
“You don’t miss spamming LFG with need tank, need tank, need tank, nowadays you just press a button and wait!” - from the “you think you do, but you don’t” guy
Many things killed it off. I’d add external databases and addons.
It is not that I hate external databases and addons. They are great and help a ton. But they also did remove the “exploration” part of the game. If you know exactly where to go and addon also plans out the optimal route +if you do not know what to do, external database will tell you in details - this kills exploration and player interactions on top of dungeon-finder and auction damage.
When you compare it with its competition back in 2004, it was the most casual game. Everquest, Asheron’s Call, Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, those were full time jobs, while WoW was “only” a part time job next to them.
Blizzard was at its peak, coming off the huge successes of Starcraft (1998), Diablo 2 (2000) and Warcraft 3 (2002), the latter of which also brought DotA thanks to the community. Hype and hopes were high.
It’s like Hearthstone is a pretty decent card battling game, but because of dark pattern monetisation they made it so you’re only playing to fulfill your daily quests, which means it’s not actually fun anymore and you grow to resent feeling like you have to play or you’re losing something.
