Given how Retail WoW has developed over the years, why is leveling still a part of the game?
That has been one of the items I've been pondering over the past several days. It's not a new opinion by any stretch of the imagination, but the leveling experience ceased to be a focus of Retail WoW players for as long as I can remember.
If the Old World zones back in 2009 were as populated now as they are on the 20th Anniversary Classic Servers, I'd have likely found leveling incredibly difficult. Remember, I began playing WoW on a PvP server, and if every zone had a crowd like Hillsbrad Foothills had, I'd have spent most of my game time running for my life.
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| Or dead. Yeah, I'd be dead. I pulled this out of my archives just because. |
Since those zones weren't that populated --because most people were at max level in 2009-- that made my original leveling experience easier.
Yes, I do love the leveling experience in Vanilla Classic. While I dislike the XP boosts that the Classic team regularly puts out, at least they do pay lip service to the time honored tradition of actually leveling a character.
But that's the pre-Cataclysm WoW environment. Since that time, as WoW's game world has become bigger and the level cap has grown larger, the actual process of leveling itself has become more and more streamlined. Paradoxically, the emphasis placed on the current expansion --and getting players as quickly as possible to the level cap-- has skyrocketed as well.
So that begs the question: why have people level in the traditional way at all when a new expansion drops?
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It's not as if what I'm suggesting hasn't been thought of before. After all, Blizzard loves to roll out level boosts late in an expansion --frequently with gear upgrades to help you once you reach the level cap-- for at least several years now. What I'm asking, however, is why are they even bothering with the leveling journey in the first place if the entire focus of the game is at the level cap.
If people are zipping through the leveling zones to get to max level as quickly as possible --or the actual leveling process is so streamlined as to be little more than a visual novel with a few "kill ten rats" quests-- then why not eliminate the leveling process itself and start everyone at max level when they purchase the expansion?
I'm not saying to eliminate the leveling zones themselves, but to essentially make them optional. If people are zipping through quests, not bothering to even read quest text, then why not leave the quests for people who actually want to read them and let everybody else just rocket on ahead and do what they really want to do?
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Am I playing Devil's Advocate here?
A bit, I'll admit.
There are days when I feel like I'm the only person in the world who enjoys the leveling process itself, and during the last Retail expansion I played --Mists of Pandaria circa 2013/2014-- it actually took an effort to slow down my leveling so I could enjoy the game. It also took a bit of an effort to handle the Mists intro areas when the gear I was wearing were Cataclysm quest rewards and random drops from the mid-Cataclysm zones such as Uldum; I could tell that the development staff expected the average Mists player to have at least a full Heroic dungeon set when they crossed to Pandaria*, and there was at least one mini-boss quest that was effectively a gear check in the Pandaria intro zone that you had to pass before you progressed further in the story.
Nostalgia aside, however, I think the time has come for Blizzard to seriously consider eliminating the leveling process from Retail. If enough people are blitzing through the zones (or really don't care about the story except for the "get gear/renown/etc." part), why not give the players what they want and just let them skip the leveling process entirely? Or, knowing how Microsoft and Blizzard thinks, offer players the opportunity to skip the leveling for a price. Instead of Early Access, allow those players the opportunity to start the next expansion at max level for an extra $30. All the try-hards can go straight into their gearing process while those that actually care about the story and the questing zones can go do those. Blizzard can even institute layering to separate the paid boosts from the levelers, so you can prevent the boosters from farming all of the World Bosses and gathering nodes.
Before anybody brings up the elephant in the room --PvPers and gankers-- institute a simple change to the PvP rules: for the first month of an expansion's release, max level toons can only engage in PvP with other max-level toons. Not with NPCs. Not with lower level toons of the opposite faction. That keeps those who paid for the privilege of skipping the leveling process from interfering with the fun of those who did not.
Anyway, that's my thoughts on the matter. As for me, I'll be back on the Anniversary servers, leveling at my own pace.
*It's not an accident that the level boosts provided to players have included a set of basic gear so that the boosted players aren't too underpowered in the current expansion.
Leaving aside the question of whether levels ought to be there at all, I'd like to make my usual objection to the received wisdom that leveling in Retai WoW is so easy it no longer provides any obstacle. I think this is something regular WoW players or returning veterans who used to be regular players assume all too quickly without necessarily having experienced it from the perspective of someone coming to the game without their numerous advantages of experience and social ties.
ReplyDeleteI don't play WoW regularly but in total I've been subbed for more than a year across a decade and a half. The first time was six months at the tail end of WotLK, at which point I was playing something like 30+ hours a week. Pretty much all I did was level and still didn't get a single character to the level cap. My highest had only just reached the first WotLK zone when I quit.
Even having been back for several more short runs, I still don't have even one character at whatever the level cap was the last time I played. Far from finding leveling too fast, I found it too slow to be fun, which is one of the reasons I never carry on with it for long. I don't deny it's fast compared to how it once was or compared to other games of its original era but compared to almost any MMORPG I've played that was made after about 2012 it still feels really sluggish, especially in the mid-levels.
I haven't played in several years so maybe it really has gotten a lot faster but the last two times I went back, expecting that to have happened based on things I'd read, it felt as slow as ever.
I believe that a lot of it centers around expectations. Vanilla WoW was designed around the leveling experience being a significant part of the game, and while the leveling is fast and relatively painless compared to it's contemporaries, by today's standards it is slow.
DeleteThe WoW clones that followed in the wake of Vanilla's release iterated the leveling experience to be smoother and quicker as the MMO community bought into the "game begins at Endgame" mentality. Even those that are not WoW clones, such as GW2, leaned more into leveling and exploring by emphasizing the engagement (and FOMO). There were days when I'd play GW2 and I'd look up and realize it was 4 hours later. Even knowing that, I felt like I simply had to keep going and had to force myself away from the PC to get other things done during the day. With Vanilla WoW, the relaxed nature of leveling meant I can disengage whenever I want and I don't have that FOMO.
The perception of leveling as a chore to get through to get to the "good stuff" does WoW no favors, so I have to ask why bother at this point. When you consider the amount of effort it takes to create new areas, new quests, and a new story for each zone when a large enough chunk of your player base simply doesn't care, if you eliminate the leveling requirement you can focus resources elsewhere.
For me personally the levelling game tends to be the game. It's rare that I hit the cap in a MMO I try, and rarer still that there is anything I consider remotely fun to do when I get there.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of WoW in particular, I think the tension comes from the developers wanting to both consume their cake and possess it. The developers are pretty well focused on endgame, and at least in retail the rest of the game is a complete afterthought. A lot of players feel that way too, and consider the levelling game a slight speedbump on the way to getting back to the "actual game."
However, MMOs and RPGs in general also tend to attract a large proportion of players for whom the journey is the entire point. If you eliminate the journey altogether, you set that part of the player base on fire. I honestly get the sense that the team working on retail begrudgingly supports the levelling game in an attempt to do the bare minimum they need to in order to not completely lose that audience.
Also, take all this with a grain of salt because the last time I set foot in retail WoW was also around the last time I wrote about it, which is at least three years ago at this point.
My love of the journey and not the destination manifests itself in other RPGs, such as Baldur's Gate 1. I'm at my happiest when I'm roaming around out in the wilderness, examining areas and getting into every nook and cranny. Once the game gets to Baldur's Gate proper my interest tends to wane.
DeleteI do wonder how much of a stink the player base would make if they eliminated leveling but allowed players to experience the zone as an option. The story and journey crowd would get their story without having to deal with the RUSH RUSH RUSH crowd, and that crowd can basically skip to the end like they've always dreamed.
Admittedly, the last time I actually played Retail WoW was in 2014, so 11 years ago, and I realize that the loud voices in social media tend to get the lion's share of views, but I'm surprised that Blizz hasn't experimented with this at least.
I think to encourage people to have an expansion goal. When you get on that alt you never played, it's painful to level.
ReplyDeletePersonally I enjoyed the levelling experience once the rush was over, I certainly picked up expansion after expansion achievement of every quest done. I even read quests...
I now know from experience that leveling alts can be a bit of a pain, especially when you regularly switch between them. However, I think that in some cases it's easier to swap between alts in Retail --despite more abilities than Classic-- because almost all toons have similar abilities. The homogenization of Classes makes it a lot easier to handle a gigantic stable of alts, ironically enough. In Classic, it can take me upwards of an hour or two after switching between toons before I remember and use all of the abilities available to me.
DeleteI think the key here about enjoying leveling is the "once the rush is over" part. When you're expected to rush through to get to the end, that turns leveling from a key part of the game to an obstacle to overcome.
I would turn your question around: Why shouldn't levelling still be part of the game? Plenty of people enjoy it, and for those who don't it's easy enough to "get it over with" quickly.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I had to smile at you bringing up PvPers and gankers as "the elephant in the room". Retail WoW hasn't had PvP servers in almost seven years. If you want to take part in world PvP, you can turn on "war mode", which is similar to the PvP instances that SWTOR has had for even longer. Nobody gets exposed to unwanted PvP these days.
The easiest answer to why leveling shouldn't be part of the game is the cost/benefit factor. The amount of effort to design leveling sucks up a lot of time and money, especially when designing the abilities throughout the leveling process ends up getting thrown out once you reach max level. You're effectively doubling your effort for a minority of players.
DeleteNow, just how many players there are who enjoy it I have no idea, but I suspect that it's a loss leader for Blizzard because "it has always been done before."
While I was unaware that official PvP servers are gone, I still consider it the elephant in the room because if you want to PvP while leveling you'd better pay up for Early Access or the max level boost so you can quickly outlevel your potential opponents, or they'll just gank you mercilessly. IIRC, there were Reddit threads about Early Access people doing just that on the latest expansion, clearing out gathering nodes and ganking people with regular access. The easiest solution is to separate out the people with early access by putting them in different layers for a week or two until the "poors" (as some people derogatively called them) can catch up in leveling.