One of the things I love about the vanilla World is how utterly explorable it is. You've got these huge land masses full of interesting things to discover everywhere, and even after years of playing that version of the game, I have no doubt that there are still some quests and hidden surprises that I've never come across. The sense of wonder this created was amazing.
Sadly, this is also something that kind of fell by the wayside in the expansions that followed. The artists still created beautiful environments, but you weren't really meant to spend much time in them; they were increasingly just a backdrop for the quests you rushed through on your way to the level cap. Just today I did a few low-level Cata quests on an alt, and while mining an ore node, I accidentally got into combat with an elite. It was surprisingly powerful and took me a while to whittle down... just to then drop nothing, and not even give XP, presumably because it only exists to be blown up with a quest item in one specific quest.
Fortunately Blizzard has backtracked on this in recent years, and both Dragonflight and War Within are full of all kinds of neat things to find if you only allow yourself to look. Sure, you can never be that same wide-eyed newbie again, but there are still new vistas to marvel at and fun secrets to discover.
On that subject, I just wanted to share a couple of YouTube videos I saw recently and that really resonated with me. First we have small YouTuber ButchX3's series about playing World of Warcraft for the first time.
The first part with the title "I played World of Warcraft for the first time EVER" showed up on my YouTube feed when it came out, but I've got to admit I ignored it at first. The thumbnail hinted at him having difficulties, and I figured I'd seen enough videos of people struggling to figure out basic mechanics or not understanding the story recently.
But then part two showed up, with the title "FIRST TIME Player Discovers the SECRET of World of Warcraft", with a thumbnail of him gaping in awe at a purple flower in his hand, at which point I was like "fine, I'll click, let's see what a new player considers the secret of WoW". And I was not only surprised, but positively enchanted. The purple flower in the thumbnail even turned out to be relevant! I immediately went back to watch part one afterwards, and found that there was a third part as well.
In a nutshell, he started by playing through Exile's Reach and had a fun time, but once Azeroth fully opened up to him, he forgot all about questing and got completely distracted by other players and the sheer size of the map, embarking on an epic adventure to immediately travel as far as the game would let him, which he conveys with appropriate excitement and sense of grandeur.
He got a lot of help from newcomer chat as well, which really impressed me, as until now this was a feature that I was vaguely aware of but hadn't really given much thought. I felt inspired to sign up as a guide myself after that. I wonder if there'll be any more installments in this series, now that he's explored the world in all three dimensions.
The other video that showed up in my feed one day and really surprised me was "DragonNoFlight: A love letter to ground travel" by tiny YouTuber FaroraSF, which caught my eye with both its title and the lovingly hand-drawn thumbnail.
Unlike Butch, Farora is an old hand at the game, but clearly loves to explore. In this nearly two-hour long video, she decided to randomly quest through Dragonflight without flying, documenting along the way the kinds of challenges she'd come across. Spoiler: For an expansion all about flying, the Dragon Isles turned out to be surprisingly accessible on foot!
At various intervals, she takes a break from her current adventures to look back on older versions of the game, going over fond memories and analysing different expansions' zone designs. I found this really eye-opening, as she points out a lot of things that I'd kind of noticed sub-consciously but had never really thought about myself.
Finally, she also made a shorter sequel about exploring War Within without flying. Seriously, the way she did that quest with the pipes!
Anyway, I just really wanted to give these two creators a shout-out as examples to show that modern WoW still has room for exploration and a sense of wonder as well, and because I found all their videos thoroughly enjoyable.
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When I started playing WoW it was during Wrath, so to me flying at L60 was simply how things were done in Outland. It was only when TBC Classic came along and flying was relegated to L70 and somewhat cost prohibitive if you were leveling an Ally Shaman or BE Pally from scratch, so I had to learn how to deal with Outland as it was intended. And I found I preferred it that way, especially when I discovered just how hard it was to fight your way through the mobs surrounding Black Temple when you couldn't rely upon surgical strikes from flying. Rather than saying "this is slowing me down, I need flying" I took the difficulty as a challenge and I reveled in it.
ReplyDeleteI did disagree with one thing that Farora said about Storm Peaks in Northrend, however: the Alliance experience requires you to have flying after a certain point because you can't get to their main base without it, but the Horde has no such restriction. IIRC, you can get to the crashed zeppelin by going into Storm Peaks via Icecrown Glacier --I went that way when I was exploring in Wrath Classic-- and the Taunka base in Storm Peaks doesn't require flying to get to either. The only questline that eventually requires flying is the Sons of Hodir questline because you need flying to get to Thorim and the other temples in the area. (And really, that questline isn't a gatekeeper to prevent you from getting into the Ulduar instances/raid; it's there just for the story. You can completely skip it and get to the group content, like I did on my Wrath Classic toons with both that and the Wrathgate quests.)
Still, the exploration potential that Azeroth has is unmatched. The only difficulty with that is that so much phasing goes on from Wrath onwards that there are vast swaths of expansion areas that are either empty or have nothing going on in them until you "unlock" them via said phasing.
I think the phasing thing isn't actually that bad nowadays. It was a big thing in Wrath and Cata, but I think they realised that it actually didn't make for a good experience and toned it down a lot in subsequent expansions.
DeleteThat sounds like content I would enjoy a great deal - bookmarked for later tonite. Although am not sure I should really be venturing down the nostalgia rabbit hole... :)
ReplyDeleteI remember recording little secrets, nooks & crannies and special NPCs between vanilla and Wrath. There were far too few....WoW was not great at it back then but whenever I did find something, it was so gratifying. I never understood why they didn't invest more time in making exploration more rewarding in and of itself. It seems like they're finally catching up a little.