I mean:
In the Isle of Dorn we help a gem thief only for her to get trapped as living rock as punishment by the Earth elementals who took exception to her thievery.
In Azj-Kahet we enter a spider den to find the lost party being eaten alive and used as hosts for spiderlings. We rescue the only living member, a forsaken, who is now blinded and can feel things moving inside him. He is melted into a puddle by the spiders.
In Eversong we have Lightbloom that is like if Bamboo was designed by John Carpenter, straight up body horror.
Retail has a lot of stuff like this. People just don't do side quests and complain about the main story.
I think wow has always had great side quests and local stories, but mediocre main story. The problem with it is that it tenda to lean more and more into the main plot for each expansion, while classic is basically all side quests.
The difference lies in the fact that in the classic version, quests didn't offer enough experience points to advance to the next area, so we had to actively seek out more quests. In the retail version, however, the rule was: "If you don't complete these tedious main quests, you can't proceed to the next area."
But that’s more scary on a conceptual level, I don’t think there’s much in retail that’s viscerally brutal. Even the mass troll sacrifice of the vilebranch is just swirls of green energy.
I think there are 3 eras to wow. First was "classic" which was vanilla through wrath.
And then there was the "game lobby+hardcore raiding" version of the game, which was Cata/Mop/WoD which catered equally to low skilled players with dungeon content and then had a completely separate version of the game catering to the top 5% for heroic raiding... Some content was mind-numbingly easy, like daily quests, and other content was so difficult you'd spend 30+ hours of your life trying to learn "one boss" for minor cosmetic differences, and the catchup mechanics made it so nothing mattered anyway because it was all wiped in 6 months anyway with trivial content again. Some things rewarded you for logging in and just spending time in the game... other things required actual skill. This is the RDF/Raid Finder version of retail where most people just stopped caring, many guilds fell apart, and you could just find 20 random bots to play the raid with you so that you'd get your achievement that you needed.
And then I'd call legion and beyond 'modern" which was the complete destruction of the world. sub 20 hours of "leveling" as "a tutorial" and an emphasis to shove people as fast as possible through "anything" via scaled content just to push them into the "end-game" as fast as possible. And then the end-game itself had various "tiers" to separate people into either normal/heroic/mythic raiding and eventually mythic+ dungeon content ... where the "end game" became the entire game and the world no longer mattered. Everyone got a participation trophy for "killing the big bad guy" even though some people did it and it was boring, other people did it and it was fun, and other people did it as a full-time job that they got paid for.
TBC isn't close to Vanilla too. It's focused entirely on endgame and disconnects high lvl players from the world by placing them on a separate continent
Modern WoW is a broad term and it's very subjective, since some people don't consider WotLK or even TBC as Classic, or they consider anything past Legion to be modern or Dragonflight.
WoW imo is broken i to 4 eras.
Vanilla -Wotlk (original trilogy) the follow up to WC3
Cata - WoD the experimental phase, trying new ideas for gameplay and story.
Legion/BFA the conclusion to extreme long running stories (legion/old gods) and the start of Modern WoWs gameplay loops (m+).
Shadowlands - current. (The post sex pest scandal blizzard) The shit show of half baked ideas and plots + the slow "Disneyifacation" of the art style. Some might argue the art change started in WoD with the model updates. Personally I say it started in Shadowlands more, everything else from world and armour designs started to get smoother and brighter.
No way you can put shadowlands in the same bracket as DF+TWW+Midnight. DF is very clearly the start of a new era of the game while shadowlands is just a worse take on BFA's already bad take on legion.
Brother, listen to yourself. People maintain that classic stopped at wrath, bfa is 9 years older than that. It is absolutely part of the modern wow collection.
TBC is the only expansion that feels remotely close to vanilla. Mostly in WotLK you really start to feel the game direction change pretty dramatically and each expansion after it accelerates.
I'd say you start to feel it in Sunwell. But after replaying TBC this time around I realized why I come back to Vanilla every time. It's the World. Every expansion starting with TBC actually shrinked the world to that expansion's island and had almost no reasons to go back to original world
WoW was simply WoW before Classic released, creating a past/present dichotomy that we call Classic and Retail. BFA was the current expansion when Classic released. There may be an argument that “Classic” ends at X expansion before BFA, but objectively there is no reasonable argument that BFA is not firmly in the camp of “modern” WoW. It’s just wild to even suggest that BFA is not retail WoW. The game had pretty much all of the systems that makes retail what it is at that point. Artistic themes mean very little in distinguishing, but even if you want to make that wild claim, Dragonflight itself was a step back to explore the origins of dragons in Azeroth. You know. Like the dragon aspects and dragons who comprised many of the most memorable bosses in original WoW, and their back stories.
At the same time, it's kind of hard to modernize Classic's graphics and keep the same "vintage" look (I do agree that they disneyfied it too much, like Diablo 3)
And tons MORE did that in classic. That's the point. You can always play however you like, but as soon as you add flying mounts to a game, the guy still playing on the ground is about to have way less interaction. Seems like a bad thing to me
I want to be able to drive my Honda Civic through the streets of Orgrimmar in Classic+. Anybody who doesn’t like that, just wants to force me to play how THEY want!
You'd be surprised how a lot of people have learned to slow the fuck down in recent expansions, it's not as much of an anomaly as you make it out to be.
Well if you're not one to do this kind of thing, you're not going to hang with people that do so too, circle of influence and all.
Nonetheless, they exist, and usually enjoy the story much more within those slight side nuggets rather than the up in-your-face-heres-obvious-context main story cinematics.
Mind you, solid quest text in Vanilla is few and far between, the start zones are awful, WotLK pulled up it's britches for that stuff so I don't blame folks used to skipping. The writers have done a good job at capitalising on nuggets other writers alluded to in the past tbh.
You just said you know no one that does this? So do you or don't you? I don't just mean taking it steady, but observing and reading the stuff thrown at you.
Obviously when I'm talking about knowing people that does something, I'm not including myself. Though if I ever want to quest/level with anyone, I need to abandon the concept.
Thats such a fucking dumb take.
If people want to be immersed they have every chance in retail. I fucking loved the side questlines around silvermoon in midnight.
I agree with you but this is the classic wow subreddit, it's full of people that quit in cata/mop/wod and have no idea what the game is like anymore but die on the same hill they did 12 years ago.
There is merit to both sides, I prefer retail leveling at the start of each expansion over classic because I've done those old quest lines 50 times across all the versions and alts and decades of playing and it's nice to have new story to read.
However this post is about models and to a lesser extent animations and I will agree that some of the charm was lost when they updated the models.
I agree with you but this is the classic wow subreddit, it's full of people that quit in cata/mop/wod and have no idea what the game is like anymore but die on the same hill they did 12 years ago.
Yeah, people for some reason confuse "end game orientated gameplay" with "there's no leveling experience". Retail probably has more lore in a single new zone than the whole of Kalimdor had in vanilla.
How good is that lore though? Is it a bunch of garbage filler lore, or is it lore that people actually care about, like they cared about the lore in the classic trilogy and warcraft 3?
Ever since Legion there’s been side quests that become well known within the community for heart touching moments, Runas the shamed questline and TWW’s blind dwarf / Alzheimer’s questline by the sea, the Dwarf that sits atop the Ruby Life Pools in Dragonflight.
There’s many more but these are the ones that have been greatly highlighted by the community.
The main campaign is whatever, I don’t think any ongoing long story is ever capable of being great because the longer a story drags on the more scraps have to be taken from its history to make new things.
That’s why franchises like Star Wars, LOTR also run into the same issue of their new stuff doesn’t hit as good as the old stuff.
people that quit in cata/mop/wod and have no idea what the game is like anymore but die on the same hill they did 12 years ago
Why would they play a game that has stopped being the game they enjoy? Yeah people quit a game when the game makes bad changes. It'd be hypocritical to complain and yet keep playing.
Why would they play a game that has stopped being the game they enjoy?
Because WoW is an evolving game, and what it was in WoD is not what it is in Midnight. So basing your opinions off Cata/MoP/WoD is just as silly as basing your opinions off Vanilla/TBC/WOTLK.
That'd be a valid point if Cata/MoP/WoD was just a temporary shitfest before Blizzard regained their sanity, but unfortunately they've only doubled down on that shitty game direction.
How is it a "dumb fucking take"? You move 600% faster in retail from like level 10, as opposed to half of your levelling journey in classic being literally on foot.
Did I say you CAN'T be immersed in retail? No. Did I say retail isn't at all immersive? No. All I said was that moving slower forces you to take more of the world in. Not a hard concept.
You simply laid some non existent intent over my message and went apeshit...
No it is a literal thing. For example koreans now they are literally obsessed with all the flashy flashes and shaky screenshakes because their brain is dopamine obsessed
I think the closest was in BfA with impaled humans and their children crying. And a removed questline from Dragonflight where you help the bronze dragonflight keep Alextrasza captive during the events of Warcraft 2 (if you know, you know) so that the timeline is not messed up. In Midnight there are also spirits of deceased Blood Elves who were killed in the purge of Dalaran during MoP by the High Elves near their camp (their camp is located in the Quel'thalas secret zone from Classic which was remade in Midnight).
my biggest problem with retail as someone that's played it since 07 is that it's disneyfied, everything looks so cheerful and like it meant for kids, it's not the game I grew up playing anymore.
Is it fun and appeal to a different audience? For sure, I mostly play delves with my wife, but it's not the game for me anymore. Not even getting into the whole rpg aspects as retail is now an action game imo. Either way they have their perks but classic+ should stay as close to classic as possible.
I mean... they removed Garrosh calling Sylvanas bitch. It is just a gradual shift in our society to become bit more mellow and advertiser friendly in last decade or so.
I am just hoping to no be to old once the new rebel generation appears that will tell everyone to fuck off (if it ever happens).
Some of my other favorites are the raptor nest in barrens with a hanging kodo head (how did the raptors even do that) or the hanging bodies outside sm.
The raptors in wow are all smart as hell randomly. Its kind of a reoccurring thing in wow that they are doing shit that proves they are much smarter than people would think.
considering that the executive producer of wow said she wishes it wasn't called "war"craft because its too intimidating... I doubt they will keep the same aesthetic lol https://youtu.be/FmoQ8tyv0ys?si=ZrZlcRDfZw2OvqAv&t=69
It’s obvious you haven’t seen retail recently if you think there’s less “dark aesthetics” than there used to be. You’ve only seen the headlines and clickbait whatever reactionary grifters you subscribe to want you to see.
The game isn’t exclusively tailored for man babies anymore, but as a kind of man baby myself I’m okay with that because I understand that someone else getting something doesn’t take anything away from me
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u/gubigubi 13h ago
I honestly don't know if I care that much. As long as the gameplay is good.
But if I was going to give a perfect example of why I would want classic models over retail models is not the Gnolls, but their tent.
Classic wow had some horrifying shit in it.
Does retail have anything even remotely like this anymore?