We miss the good parts of WoW

| Friday, September 10, 2010
Remember the epic Onyxia attunement chain and how fun that was? Oh you didn't like looking for Rexxar? Let me show you something.

*opens door*

This is my Nostalgia Room. In here I only put Good Things.

*opens other door*

This is my Stupid Design Room. In here I only put Bad Things.

As you can see the idea of an epic chain to attune to Onyxia is in the room with Good Things, but wandering for an hour to find a patrolling NPC is in the room with Bad Things.

You see, not everything has to exist as the total package exactly as it is. For another example, I liked the idea of needing special water to douse runes in MC. But that doesn't mean that needing 8 or so people with water, or 8 trips to an inconvenient place, was a Good Thing. The ideal often does not exist, so we have to pick those pieces we like.

Another example is Drak'theron Keep. I like the Drakuru finale. I like how it has a different scene in each area. I like that it looks out into the world, making it seem as if it were not isolated. That doesn't mean I like that it is so short and has only a single path.

Or let's look at Lower Blackrock Spire. I think the layout is almost genius. The visual appearance is one of a place which has been constructed with many paths and nooks and possibilities. And in fact there are many ways to run through LBRS. But the true genius of it is that a single path does emerge to clear the entire instance in one sweep, with only a short backtrack in a couple spots. This doesn't mean I liked the terrible drop rate for the UBRS key gems or the frequent long strings of trash.

So when I say I miss something from vanilla, I don't mean to imply (though I often do anyway) that I miss every single aspect of vanilla.

I know I don't miss the way hybrids were mishandled. I don't miss single-class drops which were frequently wasted. I don't miss people not looting core hounds.

I liked the multi-class tokens we saw in AQ which were part of quests. The BC tier token system was less 'fun' and clearly had problems with trending in drops, but it felt more interesting than the badge+token system we now use for tier gear in ToC and ICC. If I had to create a system, it would use a generic "rare item of awesome" combined with quests and some sort of tradeable token (like the AQ scarabs), so that classes could have that bit of differentness without the problem of useless drops.

Yes, I am cherry-picking and picking and choosing and only taking the pieces I want. That's the point. That's a much better idea than picking every single aspect of each expansion as an indivisible whole.

*opens yet another door*

And over here are the things that I like and you don't and aren't objectively good or bad but instead are fun for one person or another.

P.S. Bring back sentry totem.

6 comments:

Shintar said...

Haha, your comments about LBRS crack me up. It's the one normal instance I never ran even once back in Vanilla, and coming back to it later on, I found it to be a nightmare to navigate. Only tonight I went in there to complete some quests and was cursing the entire time about how stupid it was, most often when I fell down a "surprise hole" in the floor and found myself on a level I definitely didn't want to be on. Once I even fell out of the instance. It was infuriating.

On the other hand I never built my seal of ascension until they had already adjusted the gem drop rate to 100%. Such different impressions.

Leah said...

I miss attunement chains. I don't miss them requiring groups, or better yet, raids. I mean, Kara chain was actually pretty cool, since the group parts were in instances, so you stood a good chance of getting it done, but netherwing chain...good luck finding people to help you kill that orc dude that are on the same part of the chain. Or BT attunement... Oh and remember that quest where you had to have special goggles to even see the mob you had to kill and those goggles weren't at the start of the chain so it was pretty darn annoying to find a group to do it with you. wasn't as bad if you were in a guild/had a group of friends questing along the same chains at the same time, but if you were a mostly solo player? forget it.

it sucked something fierce to have to kill specific raid bosses over and over, just to attune new raid members...

but I still miss attunement chains. they really did add to immersion for me. make them soloable and bring them back and I'd be a super happy gamer :P

Anonymous said...

Yeah, the reason I often comment about missing vanilla or TBC in every post that could possibly be related to them is that they were both better (in my opinion) then WotLK overall.
Like over 9000x better.

Syl said...

I can easily provide a list of 50 things I miss about vanilla wow. I can easily provide a list of 50 things I do not miss about vanilla wow.

that's exactly the point. naturally we'd like the good things back, while we're happy to let the bad ones rot. who doesn't strive for perfection?

If I could combine some of vanilla's more epic and immersive features with today's wow...that would be almost heaven. ;)

Nils said...

Thanks for this sophisticated post!

Some people out there seem to think that todays games are in every single aspect better than older games. This is, quite obviously, absurd. Even the probability of such a thing happening would be almost 0.

But if you start to argue, they take what you say and make a strawman, like: "There are many thing in Vanilla Wow that were worse!!11!"
Yeah, thanks. I knew that.

We need people who are willing to differentiate and are able to understand that player attitude towards a game makes a difference.

I wrote about it myself some days ago.

Klepsacovic said...

@Shintar: No one really expected to make their seal. Only a fool would expect such glory and wealth as was fitting one of the few people who could be summoned directly to UBRS to be paid to open the door and then ported to anywhere. Those people were VIPs.

@Leah: Either soloable or as part of content that we do anyway are better ways to do attunements. I guess I'm saying I agree.

@Anonymous: I'd go with a smaller better ratio, maybe 15/10 for BC and 175/100 for vanilla.

@Syl: I wonder if they can be combined. can we have convenient instance teleports and immersion?

@Nils: You have a blog? And it isn't Tobold's comment space? ;)
But yes, that strawman bugs me too. I can just imagine everyday life with them: "sun's great today!" It gives you cancer! "it's a bit cloudy" Rain increases traffic accidents!

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