Thoughts on the Level Squish and Chromie Time, Three Years Later

I wasn't planning for this to be my first topic on the blog in the new year, but Wilhelm made an interesting post two days ago that I wanted to bounce off of. It's called "The Shadowlands era Level Squish was a Bad Idea" and well... it's right there in the title what it's about. There are a couple of misconceptions in there, seemingly caused by Wilhelm not having played retail in a while himself, but his general point, that he thinks the level squish ultimately wasn't all that, is completely fair. I already responded in a comment, but I wanted to spin my thoughts into a full post here as well.

Do I think that the Shadowlands level squish and the introduction of Chromie time were a success? Well, they made me log back into retail for the first time in many years back in 2020, and I've clearly had some fun with it since then. Mission success on that front! But of course, it's not that simple.

From my point of view there were two main reasons for the level squish and the introduction of parallel levelling paths by Blizzard:

1. The ever-increasing level cap was getting too daunting for new and returning players and they wanted to lower that number. Slashing the overall XP required to earn those levels only does so much after a while.
2. Narratively, the levelling experience was increasingly becoming a mess. With all those expansions stacked on top of each other, combined with the constantly decreasing XP requirements to out-level each expansion, players were getting whiplash from how quickly they were supposed to change tracks from one level to the next, and without ever getting a resolution to anything. The hope was that by just allowing people to level in a single expansion, that expansion would be able to present at least a somewhat coherent story.

I think as far as point one goes, it was definitely a success in the short term at least - though with each new expansion once again adding another ten levels on top, one has to wonder whether the devs have any kind of long-term plan to avoid running into the exact same issue again in another few years.

The second point is... iffier. As it turns out, they lowered XP requirements so much, that you'll still hit the end of Chromie time before completing even the one expansion of your choice, but at least you have more options in terms of where and how you want to spend your time there. Also, even if the tuning had worked out in such a way that you actually completed all of your chosen expansion's zones before being shunted into the newest content, you still wouldn't really know the resolution to the story as that's usually contained in a raid.

Oh, and it turns out that WoW's expansions really weren't designed to be parallel levelling paths in terms of narrative. Anything from WoD onward (if not earlier) tends to start with a bombastic intro featuring NPCs you're supposed to know and that hail you as a hero of many campaigns, which doesn't really make any sense if you're only just fresh off Exile's Reach. I wouldn't say it's any worse than the old mess, but I'm not sure it's really any better either.

Also, one of the most baffling things about Chromie time to me, at the beginning, was the way it just ejected you the minute you hit the required level for the next expansion, with no consideration for what you might have been doing at the time (I talked a bit about that experience in this post). I don't know how the devs ever thought that was a good way of handling things and I think they got a lot of complaints about it, so the experience has been somewhat smoothed out since then.

When I last encountered this situation myself, I actually got a quest from Chromie asking me to come back to the normal timeline a level before it would've kicked me out, to encourage you to voluntarily exit Chromie time beforehand. The husband has levelled an alt even more recently, and according to him you don't get kicked out at all anymore now, things just suddenly stop giving XP the moment you ding - which remains a little weird to me but still seems like an improvement.

Still, I wish they would just open the whole thing up even more. Specifically, I'd like Chromie time to be open to all levels, including max-level, and it should just be one unified layer where everything scales to your level, instead of having separate ones for each expansion. Fun fact: if you queue for a random dungeon in Chromie time and don't get a group within five minutes, you'll get a pop-up saying "This search is taking a while. Expand your search to dungeons from other expansions?", to which the answer is pretty much always yes. Why not allow people to queue up and play that way to begin with?

You could argue that this won't help with new players' narrative confusion, but the way I see it, it could hardly make things any worse right now. At least they could continue to explore along whichever path interests them without arbitrarily being shunted off elsewhere at certain levels. (Plus, players being confused/overwhelmed by everything the game throws at them isn't limited to new players and old content anyway. I think it says a lot that this meme was the most popular post in the wow subreddit last year according to the community's 2023 recap).

In general, I think the devs still need to work on granting their players more freedom and being less prescriptive. Obviously it's a game designer's job to impose rules, but they should aim to achieve this by organically leading the player down a path that is fun, not by boxing them in and threatening to smack their fingers every time they dare to stick their nose over the railing. I get that this must be challenging with the WoW community in particular, considering how min-max-focused it can be, meaning players will absolutely do stupid and un-fun things if they turn out to be unexpectedly efficient. But sometimes... people really just want to do something a bit different from the current prescribed path, and why not let them? If someone wanted to level to 70 purely by playing Legion content for example, instead of going through the Dragon Isles for the tenth time in a row, who would be harmed by letting them do that?

I suspect that internally there is a lot of baggage associated with WoW's old content. The devs currently do try to keep it functional at a minimum level but since it's considered deprecated and not really relevant, only the most egregious issues with it get addressed and even that without any kind of rush. I remember when the husband and I played through Legion for the first time, he got stuck on his class order hall campaign since it required him to get an item that had just been removed in a recent patch, but the quest hadn't been updated to take this into account yet. I think it took several months until he was able to continue that particular quest line. There are countless minor oddities like that which just get ignored.

If they started more openly supporting the "legacy" content as something for people to still do at max level, it would probably take away time and resources from actually working on new and fun things (not just for us, but also for them!) and likely open up ten new cans of worms in terms of balance. If everything scaled to max level in terms of gameplay and basic rewards (I'm talking gold rewards and greens, you can keep the best stuff for the current expansion), you might suddenly be dealing with issues like demon hunters being OP in Wintergrasp, Mists of Pandaria dailies being too rewarding compared to the ones in the latest expansion, or WoD's garrisons unbalancing the economy (again). And who wants to deal with any of that?

Still, I'll keep dreaming. The WoW team has shown a lot of growth in Dragonflight, including a willingness to step away from old paradigms. And I honestly think that the world in WoW is still great. There are so many fun things to do that new players will never even know about. I'm not expecting the game to completely change its stripes and suddenly care more about levelling than about endgame... but there are a lot of improvements that could be made even so.