Can Modern WoW's Levelling Be Fixed?

One thing I did recently in an attempt to scratch the part of me that's itching to already play WoW Forever is create a regular new alt in retail WoW for the first time in a while. I made a Haranir since hey, I unlocked them, so I might as well make one.

I was quite delighted by the first couple of introductory quests, even if the story making your character extra super special and even more in touch with the goddess than Orweyna seemed unnecessary and a bit cringe. That said, since Haranir are only an allied race, the new intro quests barely took a few minutes and then it was off to wider Azeroth to do... whatever, and I could immediately feel my heart sink. None of the Chromie time options excited me because everything felt like it was either something I'd already done recently or something I wasn't that fond of. Why can't I just... go forth into the world and find my own path? 

The truth of course is that I still can do that if I really want to... and one pleasant discovery I made while doing so was that Blizzard changed the way the level scaling outside Chromie time works at some point. After the original level squish, some zones covered kind of weird levelling bands, like all the revamped old world zones from Cataclysm capping out at level 30, which meant you could barely blink in there before outlevelling everything. On my Haranir I noticed that all those old zones now scale up to 81, which means you have more freedom to choose your own path even outside Chromie time. I don't know when that happened, but I think it's a good thing.

I decided to randomly make my way to a low-level zone that I hadn't done since the Cataclysm and start there. This led me to the Northern Barrens, where I was reminded that for all the changes the devs made in Cata, there still isn't really anything noteworthy to do there for Alliance players. Fortunately the Southern Barrens were right next door and not much higher level. (The blog tells me that the last and probably only time I played through that zone was in April 2011).

As I started my questing there, things quickly started to feel off in several ways. For one thing, the world is devastatingly empty. During several hours of questing, I only saw a single other player around, and even that felt like quite the surprise. At some point I started queueing for dungeons in-between quests just because I wanted to see some other people. I usually got pops pretty quickly, so there are other levellers around - they are just all hiding away in instances. (By the way, the dungeon runs I had felt surprisingly chill by WoW dungeoneering standards - I got the feeling I wasn't the only one using retail levelling as a Forever waiting room.)

In this Gnomer run we even did all the optional bosses. 

Experience gains from questing also felt abysmal. Now, I'm not looking to be fast here, but the way sources of XP are balanced is just dramatically out of whack. That a random dungeon will get you multiple levels for a few minutes of effort is well known, but I made my druid a herbalist and the XP gains from that were also absolute crazy town: a single grey herb would give me more than three times the XP of killing a mob of my level. Handing in a quest was worth about as much as eight herbs. Just why? There is basically no correlation between effort and reward, and there's zero reason to do any quests unless you're a lore nerd and specifically want to see those stories.

There are other progression mechanics that just plainly make no sense. To stick with herbs for a second, at some point (I think it may have been Pandaria?) Blizzard made a change so that you could pick any herb at any level, and if your skill was too low you'd just get "petals" or bits instead of the real thing, and ten bits could be combined into one real herb. (They dropped this whole mechanic again in later expansions so it's weird to run into it in some expacs but not others, but that's a whole different problem.) The real issue is that since all the zones scale and herbs have no visible skill requirement anymore, you basically have no in-game way of telling at what skill level you'll be able to pick any herb "properly", nor in which zones you'd find herbs that actually match your skill. It's so messy and confusing that it's almost indistinguishable from randomness.

Another thing that really stood out to me were my druid's shapeshift forms. The Haranir forms all look pretty cool, but if you were to level a druid for the first time today... nothing about it makes sense. When you're first given travel form, it actually gives you no speed boost at all from what I can tell, which makes its purpose unclear. You'll also be given the skill to ride ground and later flying mounts before you can use your shapeshifting to do these things, which is a weird inversion of travel form originally being a neat speed boost before you could learn to ride. As it stands, it's just a random shapeshift that seemingly randomly does different things at different levels. I used mounts for several levels since that was my only way to fly and go faster, and then one day I hit travel form just to see the cute ferret thing again and was surprised to find that it now turned me into a bat and I could fly. No anticipation or reason to be excited, just "huh, I guess it does that now".

I could go on and on about more strange stuff like that, but the key takeaway from my point of view was that the progression mechanics of levelling are just utterly fucked up in retail. I'm not even talking about new players and story progression here, just about the gameplay side of wanting to go out into the world and getting a feeling of satisfaction from discovering things and growing in power - it just doesn't work at all.

Now, one reason I've been thinking about this subject is that I was surprised to see that one of the reactions to WoW Forever's announcement coming from the retail camp was: Why make a whole new game for levelling? Why not just fix retail's levelling? I'm guessing the answer to those questions was that starting over from a vanilla baseline was actually easier than fixing the mess that retail's levelling has become, and to be honest I was surprised that there are retail players left who care about levelling and haven't simply gone elsewhere to get their fix of that.

It did make me think though that there is some validity to the question. Modern WoW is a game focused on endgame, but that shouldn't mean that the levelling experience has to be this terrible for people actually looking for satisfying character progression from the levelling process. You can't just turn back time and try to go back to how things used to be - never mind all the happy retail players that wouldn't want that - but sometimes it's possible to come up with modern solutions that at least alleviate the problem a bit. A good example of this in my opinion are dungeons. I don't love the M+/rush-rush culture in modern WoW's dungeons and it's hard to imagine Blizzard ever trying to dial back what that has become, but they did add follower dungeons, which at least allow players who don't want to rush and who care about a dungeon's environment and narrative to engage with these things on their own terms.

So I'm wondering whether they could also add something to modern WoW's levelling to make it engaging and attractive but in its own way, something that isn't just trying to turn back the clock. I'm not a developer so these probably aren't the best ideas, but as an example I could think of something like an XP slider, so people have more options to tweak their XP gains to a level that feels good to them personally rather than always rushing along at either super speed OR turning it off completely in the capital. Or some different levelling challenges - e.g. "old school - do 50 quests in every expansion before you can advance to the next one, going in order". That wouldn't take anything away from those who just want to quickly rush to endgame, because they could still do it, but it would add a bit more meat to the bone for those who want to actually engage with levelling.

That and the devs would really need to do a pass over certain progression mechanics and think about whether they still make sense - e.g. travel form should be granted as something that actually offers a benefit not a random shapeshift with no purpose. Or regardless of what the actual XP numbers are, picking flowers shouldn't be this superior to doing quests - and I say this as someone who likes picking flowers.

I just think there is still something there in modern WoW's levelling - it has the greatest number of beautiful zones of all the versions of WoW - it's just been treated so badly for so many years that players are encouraged to just push past it and not pay attention. When I logged into the Forever beta just to look around, I commented on how impactful it felt to see Nordrassil looming in the distance all the way from southern Mulgore. As I was questing on my Haranir druid in that area of Kalimdor, I suddenly found myself wondering how the view distance in retail compared. I had to tweak my settings a bit from where they were, but what do you know, you can see Nordrassil from southern Mulgore in modern WoW as well. It's just that basically nobody will ever find themselves standing around to look.

My 3 Biggest Concerns for WoW Forever

I've said it many times now, but I'm very excited for WoW Forever's release. That said, I'm still going into it with eyes wide open. I don't necessarily expect it to live up to its name by being a "forever" game. Primarily, I'm just hoping to recapture a little of that "new adventure" magic that I felt on Turtle WoW and to some degree even in the first weeks of Classic back in 2019/2020. If I can get a few months of entertainment out of that, it'll have been worth checking out. If I manage to make any new social connections, even better. If it ends up being even more than that... great, but I'm not necessarily counting on that.

As mentioned before, I didn't really play the beta myself (not counting simply making a character and running around a bit) but I consumed a lot of content about people's experiences on it, and I've got to say, my overall impression is still that it looks very promising. Where people had complaints, they largely didn't really faze me that much. (Which is not to say that they were bad feedback or completely baseless, just that for me, something like mob dungeon XP for example really doesn't matter much as I rarely do a dungeon more than once while levelling anyway.)

All that said, there are three what I'll call "areas of risk" that I suspect are more likely to make me sour on Forever in the long run than anything else. I hope they won't, I'm just saying that these are the things I'm most concerned about.

#1 - Megaservers and sharding

I've said quite a few times on this blog that I'm not a fan of megaservers, for a number of reasons. I don't like it when the open world feels permanently crowded for example, and I get the impression that most people's (including Blizzard's) idea of what feels like a good population level for a zone does not align with mine. I don't want to compete with ten different people for mobs in every single area. I don't want basic gathering nodes to be a rare treasure because every square inch of the map is constantly being scoured by farmers. I'm way less bothered by a server being quiet than by it feeling overcrowded. This has been a problem for me in Classic more than once.

In Forever though, there's even more to it than that. In Classic, we had layering, which meant that there were multiple versions of each continent running in parallel, but within the layer you were in, wandering the world was a seamless experience that involved running into the same people repeatedly and so on. (It's funny now to remember how adamantly some people were opposed to having layers even just for population management at Classic's launch, while in the present many Classic players will break into a sweat if their addon shows them fewer than ten active layers on their server because surely that's a sign that it's dying. The way the goalposts have shifted on that one is crazy to me.)

It's been kind of lost over time, but there were whole dev talks about this in the run-up to Classic in which they explained why they had to come up with this new technology because of how simply spinning up multiple versions of individual zones would break things and just wouldn't work in a Classic context.

Forever's realmless structure instead has... exactly that thing that the Classic devs originally wanted to avoid at all costs. I'm not sure about the correct term for it - sharding? People keep calling it layering even though that's not what it is, but from a player's perspective it basically seems to behave similarly to cross-realm zones in modern WoW, with the only difference being that there are no named realms; it's just one big pool of players that gets split up or merged by zone, depending on how many characters are active there at any given moment.

The problem is that this adds invisible "seams" all over what's meant to be a seamless world. I've seen people complain about chatting with someone on a boat, and then after the loading screen their friend is gone and they are surrounded by an entirely different crowd. I've seen a video of someone standing at the gates of Orgrimmar and watching character after character vanish into thin air right in front of their eyes as they exit. Another one showed a Horde raid on Ironforge, but the moment the Alliance defenders chased the attackers out the door, they vamoosed into the aether. Neat escape trick for the attackers, but immersion is something else.

This isn't as bad in retail because you'll rarely watch big crowds crossing zone borders there, but that aside, I'm also kind of used to "things suddenly phasing in and out of existence" just being part of retail's jank nowadays. Because you spend so much time travelling by flying mount at high speeds without paying close attention to your immediate surroundings, it doesn't bother me as much there. In a Classic world though, it feels really bad. And it worries me because I don't think it's something that will be fixed.

Sure, maybe the devs will be able to apply some band-aids, such as moving some shard borders to places where people are less likely to watch and notice their buddies vanishing. Maybe they'll manage to find a fix to keep travellers on boats and zeppelins together. But I don't think the overall problem is going to go away, because it seems to be a core part of their intended infrastructure for the game, and I don't see them making any changes to that at this point.

#2 - Community

I already think that the community aspect of Forever will suffer from the megaserver structure and being surrounded by too many people that you can't keep track of or remember. And yes, I know what they said at BlizzCon about the system being supposed to be smart and group you with players you've met before, but if you'll excuse me: I'll believe that when I see it. From reports I saw from the beta, the sharding system struggled enough just to keep people in the same group together sometimes. I know beta is beta, and hopefully what goes live will be better than that, but I'll still be very surprised if it's even remotely as good as Blizzard claimed it would be.

Aside from the general "too many people in one place" problem though, there's also the issue of toxicity and (lack of) moderation. There was some discourse about Asmongold and his followers being a real scourge on the beta and that they should've been banned. I can't tell you how justified that was, and I consider myself lucky that the US/EU split will keep him and many other streamers away from normal people over here, but let's simply put it like this: Blizzard's moderation and customer services haven't had the best reputation for a while, and this is going to be a huge stress test for them. I consider it a real risk that big streamers in particular will be allowed to run roughshod over everyone in their way because they provide publicity for the game, regardless of what kind of picture that paints of the community, and I hope I don't need to explain why I think that would be bad. The realmlessness of it all also means that there's no escape route for players wanting to get away from a certain crowd other than switching play style entirely.

#3 - Continued development direction/progression

Finally, for as much as people have been clamouring for Classic+ for years, I think part of the appeal of Classic for some at least has also been how predictable it is. You roll a warrior and already know at character creation that you've made the "right" choice to be top dps forever.

As the beta progressed, I started to see some videos along the lines of "I was going to make [class A] my main but they nerfed it so now I'll roll a [class B] instead" and all I could think was: Do you think whatever the final state of the beta is will be the state of Forever... forever? Because I think they will continue to make tweaks to things over time. How will it make you feel if the race or class you rolled and rushed to level is suddenly not the best anymore?

That particular example isn't going to be a problem for me, but I do worry whether we could end up in a situation similar to retail where my talent points are reset every other patch, along with new abilities being added and old favourites getting removed - just while adhering to a different design philosophy in terms of how those abilities should work. I'm honestly not even sure what the "correct" answer is here, because classes in Forever shouldn't be completely static if it receives continued development, but I also think that too much change too quickly would kind of go against the spirit of the thing.

Related to this, there is also the spectre of endgame progression. At BlizzCon, there were comments about horizontal progression and how you won't have to worry about falling behind because everything stays relevant, but the devs quickly backpedaled on that because of course they will be new raid tiers and of course they'll give stronger gear than the previous tier because why else would anyone do anything?

I think it was in a BlizzCon or adjacent interview where I heard Ian Hazzikostas once again reiterate that gear upgrades need to be thirty percent (or whatever the exact number was) stronger than the previous tier or else people don't bother with them, and that their internal metrics prove this. Sadly, I think this is just one of those holy cows that Blizzard still can't let go of, even after all the other bold changes they've made since Dragonflight. I'm not saying his metrics are wrong, but a) I thought a major point with Forever was to attract people who aren't already playing your game and b) you have no idea how many players take a look at those "needed" item level jumps and just nope right out of the whole thing before even passing go.

Games with horizontal progression are a thing, and I get that WoW has not traditionally been that kind of game, but I thought they were genuinely trying to dip their toes into new waters with Forever. Instead it now sounds more like they want to treat progression like in every other version of WoW, and if it becomes a problem further down the line, they'll figure it out. I saw Ion's talk about letting go of the idea that every system needs to be future-proof and that sometimes they just want to focus on what's fun now, but I don't think your new game's entire progression system is a good example of how it's OK to just wing it. I don't ever want to see Forever needing an item level squish that makes all low-level food and potions restore literally zero health like happened to retail this year, just because the devs can't stop themselves from constantly increasing the numbers at the top by huge amounts.

Anyone feel like taking any bets on how the above will shake out? Or do you have a completely different feature that you're worried could make or break WoW Forever for you? Feel free to share in the comments.

Why Are Players so Mad at WoW's Story?

A bit over a week ago, patch 12.1.5 brought us a short update to the current storyline and a new instanced raid boss, the old god servant Kith'ix. Killing him is part of the story, and for once, Blizzard made the story mode version of the fight accessible from day one! Thumbs up for that.

Still, I didn't play on release day, but I immediately saw people complaining about the new story, before I'd even gotten to it myself. Now, this has actually been the case with almost every Midnight patch and I never found the complaints very convincing, but this was on another level in terms of sheer volume. I eventually ended up running across an accidental spoiler for the major plot point that triggered all of this, which just left me feeling confused, because it didn't sound so bad in principle. What exactly was wrong with it? I urged my husband to play through the story with me as soon as possible, so I could find out for myself.

The below will contain spoilers for the 12.1.5 story, so don't read on if you want to avoid those. There is more content to this post that is spoiler-free, so you can scroll down to the "Why does everyone seem to be so mad about WoW's story right now?" header and read on from there if you want.

To summarise the 12.1.5 story in a nutshell: With the defeat of Ula'tek, Kith'ix is free and the Aqir are swarming in Eversong and Zul'Aman. Lor'themar leads an army to deal with the problem and clashes with the Amani. Liadrin manages to keep everyone focused on the Aqir threat and an agreement is reached to send a small mixed strike force to the Coiled Isle. During the confrontation with Kith'ix, the darkness is overwhelming but Liadrin calls upon the light like she did in the Midnight expansion cinematic and manages to save the day, though it comes at the expense of her own life. Everyone is sad and Lor'themar and Zul'jarra agree to part peacefully to honour Liadrin's memory (though they still aren't friends or anything).

So far, so good. Maybe you don't like the idea of Liadrin dying in general, and I wouldn't fault you for that. WoW has a long history of killing off important characters in unsatisfying ways, and I do suspect this one will be added to the list by many, but it shouldn't be a problem on paper, right? Going out with a heroic sacrifice for the greater good is not a bad way to die, right?

The problem lies in the execution. Self-sacrifice used to be part of the paladin class's toolkit a long time ago, with Blessing of Sacrifice draining your health and Divine Intervention literally killing the player to save another one, but it's not something that's generally been reflected in the storytelling. When Tirion Fordring called upon the light on top of Icecrown Citadel to lay the smack down on Arthas, he seemed empowered by it, not drained. And when Liadrin empowers us during the Kith'ix fight, she grows bigger and bigger golden wings, which honestly just looks badass. You go, girl! I'm not saying being drained to death by the light doesn't make sense, just that based on more than twenty years of in-game lore, it's not exactly the natural thing to expect when you see someone pumping holy power like there's no tomorrow.

It took me watching this T&E video to learn that she apparently has some shouts during the fight that indicate that things may not be going so well for her, such as "Let my life sustain them!" but I'd argue that these are easy to miss in the mayhem of the melee and also don't sound like she's on the verge of dying. More importantly, the characters in-universe don't seem to get the idea either! You'd think that if Liadrain was giving off vibes of being on the verge of death, someone would immediately turn around after Kith'ix's defeat and ask whether she's OK.

Instead, the post-raid cinematic shows us everyone whooping and cheering obliviously while Liadrain quietly expires in the background. Honestly, I thought that was unintentionally comical, which is really unfortunate. Only afterwards do Lor'themar and Zul'jarra turn around and act all shocked. Heck, Lor'themar starts saying "Liadrin, you were a(mazing)" like he expects to be high-fiving her any moment. So yeah, I 100% get why people are memeing about that.

In addition, there's also the meta context of all of this happening in a minor patch, during a raid (where players will be wiping and getting back up again all the time, and there should be plenty of healers around to aid the injured). My understanding is that Kith'ix is quite the bad mofo in theory, but in game he's made to play second fiddle to Ula'tek and everything about him is wrapped up within less than an hour of questing, so that only adds to the feeling of underwhelm.

All that said, it's one moment in a story that's otherwise solidly constructed (Liadrin gets quite the send-off in Silvermoon), so I don't feel like this is a sign of WoW's story being terrible or whatever other hyperbolic headlines are being thrown around right now. (Bellular made a video calling for Blizzard's writers to be fired in the title... I mean, come the fuck on.) Which brings us to the bigger question:

Why does everyone seem to be so mad about WoW's story right now?

Like I mentioned earlier, even before this patch I'd been seeing complaints about whatever the latest story update was for a while now. You'd think that Midnight had the worst story ever, which it really hasn't.

To take a step back for a moment, people have been complaining about WoW's story and lore for as long as I've been playing it. People will claim that the story was good back in Wrath of the Lich King for example, but you can go back through the archives of this very blog and find yours truly complaining in 2009 about how ridiculous Arthas was as a villain if you weren't predisposed to love him due to nostalgia for the RTS games. I just didn't think that made everything about the expansion terrible.

I do think there are other things that have changed over the years though:

1. The story's weaknesses lie in different areas

One thing I found interesting while reading some of the reddit threads in which people were complaining about the latest story and wistfully talking about the "good old days" of... usually Legion or earlier, was that they would say things like "I miss when cinematics were just cool". I can't quote a source for it, but Blizzard famously went on record back in the day saying that their storytelling was largely driven by the "rule of cool": someone would picture a character doing something epic, and then they'd write the story around making that thing happen.

The result were some admittedly pretty memorable cinematics, but often tied to story beats that made zero sense. To use Legion in specific as an example, Illidan yelling "I am my scars!" in The Rejection of the Gift is badass and definitely memorable, but the whole narrative around him suddenly being a chosen one was considered quite cringe even back then, and the way the Army of the Light are only mad at Illidan for killing a semi-divine being for all of ten seconds before moving on and seemingly forgetting about it is ridiculous. However, I can understand that for some people having these cool moments was more important than characters behaving in a believable way, and that fond memories of a neat cinematic are enough to paper over a lot of plot nonsense.

Since circa Dragonflight, there has been a shift towards more character-focused plots, with cinematics often used to show us NPCs talking about what they think and feel. I personally feel that this has made them more interesting and relatable... but I won't deny that it has resulted in fewer "exciting" cinematics.

I also wonder whether Blizzard has moved away from showing us specific characters kicking butt because they want the focus to be more on us as players doing heroic things. I do know I hated Tirion killstealing Arthas back in Wrath, and that wasn't even a cut scene yet, just a bit of in-game RP. But that's just me speculating. 

2. Blizzard has actively been drawing attention to the story

Blizzard's story may have had its issues in the past too, but they always promoted themselves as "gameplay first" and there was a widespread sense that people generally didn't play WoW for the story above all else. With the Worldsoul Saga promoting itself as... well, an epic saga, it makes sense that players are paying more attention to the story the devs are trying to tell and putting it under heavier scrutiny. So I'll say that this at least is something they kind of brought upon themselves by promising to be so much better about story.

3. Social media rewards outrage and clickbait

Like I said, people complaining about lore and story is almost as old as the game itself, but twenty years ago, that kind of stuff used to be confined to forums or niche blogs like this one. With social media, random complaints can gain much further reach, and algorithms and paid incentives actively reward anyone expressing outrage, which I think makes these complaints look much more widespread than they actually are.

With reddit in specific, I think WoW Forever has also caused a lot of cross-pollination between different WoW subreddits recently, and I think some Classic players are enjoying the opportunity to dunk on retail by upvoting complaints. I honestly don't think that we'd be seeing quite so many highly rated threads complaining about 12.1.5 otherwise, as /r/wow usually leans more positive towards the game as a whole. Again, I'm not saying there aren't valid issues for people to talk about, but for them to gain this much traction and to be blown up to be this massive sign of how retail WoW is over is definitely... abnormal.

As for me, I don't think that the current story is any worse than most of what came before. I don't think the Worldsoul Saga is entirely delivering on its promise of being much better at storytelling so far, but we're only about halfway through, so we'll see how things go in the second half. The one thing I do think the writers have gotten better at is general plot consistency and logic - I'm not claiming it's perfect, mind you, but you can usually tell where things are coming from instead of the random nonsense they used to inject in the past on occasion (hey, here's Jaina on a flying boat). However, I also agree that this has made for fewer "cool" and surprising moments for people to get excited about, so if that's something that's an issue for you, I do think that's fair. Let's just not pretend that WoW's storytelling having problems in general is a new thing.

Midnight on Foot

Two years ago I recommended FaroraSF's excellent YouTube video on exploring the Dragon Isles without flying, to which she made sequels for War Within and Midnight as well. While the latter two videos didn't get many views, I think her idea of going against the grain and sticking to ground travel in an environment where Blizzard had finally given up on forcefully grounding players was very inspiring, and at the start of Midnight it was interesting to see a lot more people talking about the concept of levelling without flying. I don't know how many players actually tried it - probably not that many - but the idea at least gained enough traction to be discussed on more mainstream channels. Somebody also made an addon that allows you to disable flying for yourself until you've hit certain milestones.

I was never tempted to forsake flying at the very beginning of the expansion, but I did decide to devote an alt to it as a side project. I eventually landed on my human paladin, since paladin seemed like a class that would really benefit from the increased immersion this expansion. More importantly though, if I was going to ground myself, I needed a character that was fun to watch on a ground mount and I still adore the paladin charger, so the paladin was a natural match in that regard too.

The idea was to stick to my ground mount and flight paths while levelling from 80 to 90, though due to a mix of restedness, gathering XP and a maxed-out warband mentoring bonus, I ended up hitting 90 early on in Harandar, so I still continued all the way to the end of the levelling campaign on the ground after that.

My biggest "worries" going in were a) that I was going to randomly forget what I was doing and take off on a flying mount while on autopilot and b) that levelling my mining skill was going to be a pain. I ended up being completely wrong about the first point - while I enjoy skyriding, being ground-bound is also still completely natural to me, and my brain had no problems switching to "ground-bound" mode and staying there. In fact, I even started running around Silvermoon like that while I wasn't questing and would've technically been "allowed" to fly, e.g. to get to crafting stations more quickly, but I was just happy to remain on my horse.

The worry about mining wasn't completely unfounded, as my mining skill is still only 75 or so at this point, when I would've maxed out long ago on a flying character. The two main problems I'd anticipated were running into nodes that were inaccessible without flying and being too slow on my ground mount compared to flying players, so that ores would despawn before I could reach them. Now, on a general level this wasn't as bad as I had feared: being ground-bound limits your field of view, and once you're actually close enough to an ore node to see it, you can usually make it there in time as well. Accessibility did become more and more of an issue with each zone though, and I'll definitely want to do some mining on my flying mount now to catch up a bit.

Silvermoon and the Isle of Quel'Danas

The expansion storyline starts you on the Isle of Quel'Danas, and for a brief period, all characters there are unable to fly. Once you can take off, the distance to Silvermoon seems quite long even while flying... and boy, is it a ride when you stay on the ground. The bridge connecting the island to the city is sooo long! Passing over it on the ground certainly gives you time to rethink your life choices, but the city slowly looming ever closer along the way is a pretty impressive sight.

I was kind of curious how Silvermoon itself would feel to navigate on foot and it was mostly fine... though I was disappointed to find that there are a few instances where you're supposed to talk to an NPC on a terrace on top of a building and there literally isn't any way to get there without flying. It's not a big deal considering we're expected to fly nowadays, but from an immersion point of view it really bugged me that there wasn't an actual stairwell or ramp to get to these places.

There are a couple of points in the campaign where you have to return to Quel'Danas, and on those occasions I found the island kind of annoying to navigate because the road just takes you to the entrance to the March on Quel'Danas raid, and to get to anywhere behind that you need to loop around the island on the outside because there are no walkable paths to cross those first few plazas outside the instance. 

Eversong Forest

Unsurprisingly, Eversong Forest was the easiest and most pleasant zone to navigate on foot, because as I noted in my review of Midnight's zones, you can still tell that it's based on a zone that was originally designed without flying in mind. That means the environments are pretty flat with only minor elevations for the most part, which made getting around easy and straightforward and ore nodes very accessible. There were a few nice vistas to enjoy as well, such as the silhouette of Windrunner Spire appearing on the horizon as you ride towards it.

Zul'Aman

I loved Zul'Aman while flying, but my perception of its elevation levels had kind of been limited to "west high, east lower". Exploring it on the ground really fleshed out the details of my mental map as it actually gave me a reason to become fully aware of minor cliffs and plateaus as well as the roads between the troll settlements.

I knew from Farora's video that the Temple of Akil'zon wasn't accessible on foot via normal means, so I did get out my flying mount just to get up there when the story required it. When it came to getting back down, I was delighted at the opportunity to bubble-jump, something I hadn't really had any reason to do for a long time (but continued to do many more times throughout my journey).

The loa temples were the thing that looked the most different to me on foot. I'd never realised how impressive the Temple of Jan'alai looms when you approach it from the ground, or the cool outer appearance of the Den of Nalorakk (while flying, I just point myself towards the dungeon entrance and zoom straight in like an arrow, with no pausing to look at the exterior). 

Harandar

I expected Harandar to be a bit of a pain to navigate on the ground as my impression while flying had been that it was all steep cliffs and deep ravines, but I was surprised by how much gentle sloping ground there actually was in the areas where the main campaign quests take place.

The Den of course has that big opening in the face of a cliff, which is great for taking off on a flying mount but does not have a corresponding footpath, which did make me wonder at the start how I was even going to get in or out of the place. I was surprised to find that the "ovaries" of the cave (if you know, you know) actually contained walkable ramps up to the top - I'd genuinely never had reason to go in there before. I just wish they were a bit more visible from the surface, as I had difficulties finding the entrances again from the outside more than once.

The only area I really struggled to navigate was the Rutaani village in the Lightbloom area in the south-west, which has all these looping ramps connecting to different platforms, and if you're on the wrong one you basically have to go down and find the right (different) ramp to climb back up. I felt like a spent a ridiculous amount of time on what was a fairly simple quest there.

The views were not as impressive(ly different) from the ground as they were in other zones in my opinion, maybe because the zone is designed to draw your eyes up to the Cradle, which works at any height. The giant mushrooms definitely have a different vibe though when you're riding underneath them instead of soaring above their caps all the time.

Voidstorm

I would say that in general, the annoyance levels of navigation increased with each zone, which made this one the biggest pain in the rear. Voidstorm really is all cliffs and ravines, and I don't think I've had to do this much running up and down narrow mountain paths since the first time I quested my way through Blade's Edge mountains in the original Burning Crusade. Every step in the story was another exercise in "where exactly is the path to lead me up/down to the next quest marker", which made this zone the first one to actually make me yearn for my flying mount at times.

Conclusion

All in all, I really enjoyed this experiment. The game is obviously no longer designed for this kind of questing, but nonetheless I felt that it really improved the pacing of the experience. I'm someone who does read all the quests (at least the first time around), but with how quickly you tend to hop from one location to the next, it's still easy to start skimming sometimes. The prolonged travel between quest objectives gives your brain time to breathe and digest both what just happened and what you're trying to do next, leaving you more ready to take in the next set of quest instructions - or at least that was my experience.

Not directly related to the ground-bound travel, but redoing the base campaign with the benefit of hindsight was also interesting. Since reinstalling retail WoW at the end of BfA I've never played through the main story of an expansion more than once during that expansion - until now that is - and there were definitely a few things that made me go "huh" on replaying. For example, there is one quest where Lothraxion talks about burning mana forges on a foggy swamp world - was he on Naigtal? Or the way Xal'atath talks about the dark Naaru trapped inside Alleria - on first playthrough that just seemed like more of her idle needling, but obviously after the events of the Voidspire you know that it was not!

My takeaway from all this is that I'll definitely want to do more of this kind of thing - maybe even go back to some previous expansions some time and do them on foot as well.

Waiting (For) Forever

I'm not sure it's really apparent from me making a post on here once or twice a week, but I'm still very excited about WoW Forever and have been consuming content about it ravenously. I'm trying to avoid direct spoilers/too much detail about things like quests and dungeons, but otherwise I've been game for almost anything: dev talks, first impression videos, reddit discussions, you name it.

Personally I've continued to not play the beta other than to log in once or twice to play around with the character creator. Hot tip for fellow SD model enjoyers: make sure to also check your character's look in HD. While it's unfortunate if the cute or heroic face you chose in SD looks derpy in HD, HD does sometimes have extra options like eye colour or eyebrow shape that aren't tied to any of the SD drop-downs and which are simply randomised if you don't make a selection. So you can adjust those to make your HD appearance look a bit more palatable without affecting the way your character looks in SD.

I did think about playing properly a couple of times when the yearning got a bit too much, but I always remembered quickly that the beta is only temporary and that was always enough to stop me. I want to save my energy for the real thing.

Also, my physical collector's edition arrived yesterday. I wasn't home but my husband was, and when it arrived he texted me that the box was massive. As I'd never bought a physical collector's edition for an MMO before, I wasn't sure what to expect.

When I got home he urged me to open it immediately as he'd gotten quite curious after hours of waiting and wanted to see the contents. It was quite a Russian doll affair of boxes within boxes, but eventually we had everything unwrapped. My husband immediately got annoyed with the dwarf statue, thinking I'd been ripped off because the dwarf wasn't holding his rifle properly, but fortunately it only took a small push to pop it back into its proper place. I think it looks pretty cool actually.

Otherwise my favourite physical item was probably the mouse pad, mostly because I've actually been in desperate need of a new one for a while and just couldn't be bothered to replace it. This gave me an excuse to finally bin the remains of the old pad and clean up the rubbery residue for a fresh start.

I'm also happy that I'll now be able to log in for the early name reservation. I was always doubtful of that as for Midnight I'd heard some horror stories on social media about physical collector's editions being delayed in the mail and people missing out on early access perks. 

The digital bundle also includes a copy of Warcraft 3 Reforged and the new Forsaken Kingdom campaign - I've never played any of the RTS games, but maybe I'll give this one a go while waiting since I've heard people rave so much about the new campaign...

Otherwise, I'll keep enjoying myself in retail for now. It's weird but in some way the announcement of Forever has also made me look at the modern game a bit differently and I've been enjoying it more recently. Funny how that works.

Three Worlds of Warcraft

I continue to be fascinated by the community dynamics around WoW Forever.

Were players of modern WoW worried about the future of their game when Classic first came out? I don't really know because I was paying little attention to it at the time, but whenever I did hear people talk about what was going on in retail during those years, Final Fantasy XIV seemed to be considered the more dangerous competition.

If there ever was any worry about Classic taking away interest and development resources from modern WoW, it seemed to dissipate fast. For several years, my experience moving through different WoW spaces was that players of modern WoW usually cared so little about Classic that they tended to forget it even exists, while Classic players didn't really care about what was going on in the modern game either. (Though if prompted to have an opinion, the latter were much more likely to be hostile towards the other game than the former.) Modern and Classic WoW were very obviously two very different MMOs with different audiences.

With WoW Forever appearing as a third pillar in the middle, things look very different though.

At least the fact that Blizzard has been updating the WoW website and the Battle.net launcher to split WoW into Midnight, Forever and Classic indicates that Classic is meant to stick around, even if players are understandably frustrated about the complete lack of communication about the future of the MoP Classic and anniversary servers. Classic will persist in some form, but the details are fuzzy.

The reason that there isn't more outrage about the lack of news right now is that the vast majority of Classic players are currently too busy being excited about Forever. They have a lot of criticisms about how this or that isn't "classic enough" (some reasonable, some less so), and I suspect that a certain percentage of them will be happy to turn their attention back to regular Classic in a few months time, but for the time being, Classic+ is here and the new hotness. This was to be expected.

What surprised me more was the level of interest from retail players. I mean, I never thought that Classic+ would be completely uninteresting to all retail players - not everyone playing modern WoW raids or runs Mythic+; there's still also a casual player base that just likes to putter about, quest and explore the world, and why would those players not also want to explore WoW Forever? Makes perfect sense.

But I've also seen a fair amount of outright jealousy and seeming fear that WoW Forever is meant to replace original WoW as the "main" game. I do kind of get the gut reaction behind that, not least because WoW has never had to take a backseat to another game the way it did at this BlizzCon. While I haven't watched most of them myself, I also heard that the panels about modern WoW were kind of underwhelming this time around. (I did see a clip where people were booing the dungeon selection announced for Midnight Season 3 - yikes.) So from that angle, a certain degree of sour grapes is understandable.

Some of the more extreme takes have been kind of funny though, like when people think Forever is going to mean certain doom for retail WoW. I say this as a SWTOR player, someone who's seen an MMO suffer actual public failure, as well as having people predict its death at least once a year for the past one and a half decades. Meanwhile WoW is printing so much money that they are actively branching out, but somehow that's supposed to be a bad sign? Come on.

Still, it's going to be interesting to see how the dynamics between the different modes will play out in the long run. For now, all eyes are on Forever, and its launch in a little over a month is bound to be huge. While I think its main target audience is lapsed players, both Classic and retail audiences will want to dip their toes in as well. After a few weeks to months, I expect things to fall off as players return to their usual haunts or just get bored. I suspect that this will be when Blizzard suddenly announces Wrath of the Lich King Classic for the anniversary servers and shines a spotlight on what's coming next for Midnight again. As long as some version of WoW keeps enough people's attention to bolster the overall sub count, it's probably all good.

But it'll certainly be interesting to see whether WoW Forever turns into an unexpected juggernaut or just an uncomfortable middle ground between different game modes that doesn't quite appeal to mass audiences. There are certainly risks there, but I'm extremely curious to find out.

First and Last Names in WoW Forever

One of the things that's going to differentiate WoW Forever from other versions of World of Warcraft is that every character in it will be required to have both a first and a last name. I don't think the devs did this to appeal to roleplayers - I don't think it was even meant to be a major feature, really. I suspect it was more or less a necessary side effect of their new "realmless" structure, because asking millions of people to come up with one-word character names that must be unique across the entire region was always going to be a nightmare.

I initially had two different reactions to this piece of news that are actually slightly at odds with each other. The first one was major relief. No longer do I have to be the first one to type "Shintar" (or any other name) into the character creation screen; I just need to have a different last name than whoever else chose the same first name, which should be extremely easy to achieve if you're going for an actual made-up name. This is particularly welcome as I don't know whether I'll get access to the early name reservations while waiting for my physical collector's edition. The only ones for which I expect there to be any real competition would be real world references, names stolen from fictional works, or names based on memes. 

However, that initial relief was almost immediately followed by a different thought: I've got to come up with last names for all my characters now? Dang! Pretty much since the dawn of time, all my characters only ever had first names, with the exception of the first character I ever created on a WoW roleplaying server. I was rolling there for a friend's sake and had no real intent to RP myself, but I had no idea what the experience was going to be like and was worried that some stranger might quiz me on my character's background and reveal me as a fraud. Once I realised how ridiculous that whole notion was, I quickly forgot about my hunter's last name again.

But now all my characters will need last names... and while it's nice that I have no set expectations to fulfil on that front, since I'm someone who also cares quite a lot about her characters' names, it's also going to be a bit of work.

I basically identified four different approaches to the matter that I could potentially take:

The first one is what you could call an attempt to cheat the system a bit - if your name of choice has multiple syllables, you can simply split it in two. So I could be Shin Tar for example. That feels very clever to me, and might work particularly well for something like a troll, who canonically don't have last names anyway, but it's obviously not going to be suitable for every situation.

Then there's the option of treating the last name field like a legacy name in Star Wars: The Old Republic, which is to say giving all my characters the same last name and using it as an easy way for people encountering me in the world to recognise the same person behind several alts. I do like that as a concept, and I do display my legacy name in SWTOR most of the time, but I don't think many people actually pay attention to it. As far as I can tell, most other players tend to hide theirs. And of course, it just wouldn't really work very well from an immersion point of view. Elves and dwarves wouldn't have the same kind of last name for example.

Thirdly, one could turn the above on its head, and simply use the same first name for all characters, and just give them different last names. That also works for recognition, and as long as your first name is something relatively neutral, it could be somewhat more immersive than option two. I have a couple of guildies in SWTOR who like to give all their characters the same name with just one letter changed - there's never any confusion about whose alt that is. However, I can't quite picture this approach working for me. I can see myself reusing a name once or twice, sure, but the same thing every time? No, I imagine my characters as different people, not just as masks I put on, so they should have their own names too.

Which leaves me with the last and hardest option.. to come up with actually lore appropriate surnames for every character I create, and I think I'll just have to bite the bullet on that one. At least it's an excuse to spend a bit of extra time thinking about each race's lore. Also, based on the beta, Blizzard actually put a bit of effort into the random name generator so that it actually spits out last names that fit each race, so if I get completely stuck, I can always use that randomiser for inspiration.