I remember vividly in like 2008 doing the felhunter demon quest, wherein it tells you to go get a moldy tome as one of the quest items. I skim read through the quest text and read the words "Menethil Harbor", and spent days looking around there for the tome. Only when I re-read the text did I find out it said "The rest was lost off the coast west of Southshore, where it was to be transported to Menethil Harbor by boat. It never arrived." Went to the coast of Southshore and found it in like half an hour. I'll never get that experience back.
is that the one where you went underwater to find the sunken ship and had to deal with Murlocs? I loved my Warlock class quest back in the day. I remember getting my steed very well and the Fel puppy quest line was really satisfying.
@@kevinleewilliams5119the problem is that the quests now no longer contain enough information to find it on text alone, they already rely too much on quest helpers and symbolism
For me it's the reverse.. when I played Vanilla it was ALL about the destination (getting to 60 where the "REAL game begins", ie. raiding,) whereas now in retail I am way more casual and just grind stuff for fun.
in 2005, people just looked everything up on the equivalent of wowhead. You could always get around having to read your quest log. On a side note, the wow interface has always been garbage, and relied on addons to fix it. The weakaura packs for spells exist for a reason.
@@OWnIshiiTrolling What janky old Thottbot? it was missin a lotta shit, yeah you might use it if you got stuck but most of the time youd try and follow the quest or /1 Wheres Mankirks wife?
Sometimes I think Day9 is the father figure I never knew I needed, full of measured takes and wonderful advice and so lighthearted I'm always happy to hear it. Sometimes I worry if I'm going to inherit my internet dad's hairline.
To be fair, classic will give you a quesy where you have you talk to Blendar the recluse and you're basically going "where the heck is this guy?" For 2 hours until you accidentally find him. But by then the quest is gray
Most infamously, Mankrik's wife. Which I think still has its own special map on WoWhead with a drawing of an arrow that points to the pin with the location lmao.
Classic quests were acctualy hard to me in 2006 because I couldn't understand english as well as I do today. Most part of my english skills are due Diablo 2 and WoW, either I play the game or I just keep my english skills the way they was
Exactly. I saw the same thing with kids I was babysitting. One more reason to encourage people to read, especially given the current decline in literacy.
On the one hand you actually needed to put some effort in to find where to go, but felt good once you found it. On the other hand, where the heck is Mankrik's wife?
I think the problem with that particular quest was if i remember correctly it didnt tell you which direction she travelled.. it was just like "You need to find her..." but we're litterally at "Crossroads" she could have gone North/south/east/west.. Soo you'd spend hours looking and of course you went the wrong direction.. I seem to remember her placement was just off the road to the west.. but the quest text didnt say like "She was travelling west" or "Towards the thousand needles".. On the flip side in teldrassil theres a quest to gether "Fel cones" which was kinda the alliances version of mankrik's wife.. and the quest text was just like "They're in the forest near trees" and thats like oh gee thanks.. that really narrows it down.. So you'd spend hours looking for 1.. then suddenly realize that they are kinda everywhere they're just super small and green on green.. so super hard to see. which was the intial reason for creating the "Glows" cause even after the first patch where they added sparkles it still wasnt really enough.
This is one of those Classic love/hate things. Nowadays, everything is a Ubisoft game. Accept the quest and you'll have a marker on the map, a marker on the compass, and a floating marker in your HUD, maybe the path is even marked out. Back then you opened the map and started reading the names of places. But with fog of war, you might not have that particular name unlocked. what I loved was world chat going "hey, were is razorback point at?" because of this, and people actually helping each other. What I hated about it was when people would not help, but ridicule you for not already knowing that stuff. The advent of widgets and little helper programms and tie-in databases for this stuff was literally a game-changer.
well... BG3 has a lot of quests with open ended paragraphs where you need to explore or guess your way to what is next. so did Zelda Totk, they basically tell you "over here are *the dungeons*" but everything else you need to read the text either in your journal or when you get the quest... so there are games that are successful that don't follow the braindead "let's just put a huge marker on the map of where it is exactly so people don't get lost"....
It's a freaking mmorgp. The point of the game is to go explore not follow a glowing path to the chest. Another reason I quit this game when cata dropped. It got so dumbed down it's basically Mario bro. Removed talent trees and and handing out gear in 5 minute LFR groups...so sad and shameful what they did to a great game. RIP srfour, Latisha, fourplayed, cupodeez, Jchrist, and rodgthepodg forever 70s. I miss you guys 😢
What I find ironic is most people that comment about how wow doesn't feel like an RPG anymore like it did "back in the day" are the same people that ignore quest text in retail or download quest addons in classic. Or in other words, they are either in denial about the fact they don't care about the RPG/questing experience, they are negative engagement farmers that feel entitled to being a hypocrite, or just incredibly naïve and refuse to accept that not only is playing RPG's without caring about story or lore is a viable way to play the game, most people prefer it.
Exactly. Most people are going to play the easier way, and yet despite PREFERRING the easier way, some people complain they are not forced to play the harder way, because....reasons.
classic viewed questing through the leveling process as "the game"... retail views the end game content as "the game". So they do whatever they can to rush you through leveling to get there
Hopefully they give us a version of classic that doesn't allow addons, but even then they dont have a good way to stop people using wowhead and macros. Tbh i think that experience may simply be lost to time, as much as I want it back.
I remember as a kid printing out the region maps and drawing my own quest routes and doing educated guesses as to where I was going for the next part of various quests... ah the so called good ol' days of wow ... never knew where you were going and always just best guessing at your talent build (then promptly having to change it)
I started playing wow at 12 I went from RuneScape (osrs now lol) to WoW. I made an undead mage and had the time of my life questing and leveling solo. I died ALOT but I also learned how to survive as a frost mage. Questing though, maaaan it was work lol. No addons or help. Okay yeah I did look online for some quests but for the most part it took a lot of time to get stuff done but it was fucking amazing. Retail is much faster and I guess you could say easier. But I love retail as well.
When I started wow back in the day, early 2000’s, I barely knew any English. (Am European) This was a time when barely anyone I knew spoke fluent English. So deciphering these quests was like solving the da Vinci code 😂 I had to write down some of these quests and bring them to my schools only English teacher. Also one of my friends mom knew decent English so she would be like our holy priest deciphering these ancient scrolls for us. If things got really tough, we turned to his scary older brother, the only guy who knew internet slang and understood American English properly. If you got real lucky, he’d help you out. Vanilla wow basically taught me English out of necessity 😂
I'm playing on a classic server rn where quests and enemies scale to level until a certain point. It's really nice being able to mince up areas and come back later when you want to care about them
The things added to the game by Blizzard to make it easier are things that people were already adding to the game to make it easier. And with everything that has been added people are still using weakauras and a bunch of other stuff to streamline the game. People seem to want the game to be easier.
Mankriks wife. Those who know, know. And I might be a lil off with the name but I know it’s close, and I’m going off 20 year old memories here. That quest was the epitome of WoW quests.
I once spent over one real-life hour looking for a furbolg in Azshara, and that's what I miss in modern gaming. One furbolg in what is arguably the most empty, boring zone in the entire game, but it was a whole evening's adventure for me.
From classic to retail. This was a good change. You’d miss items, or have to mess around waiting for a gear to pop up because quest items would blend into an area. Not every quest was built equally in detail. In the end most people would just google it, and now people just use addons. Quest text can be a good read for lore in the area, and I’ll give old wow having better immersive quest text.
I was there in Vanilla. I started using Thottbot before level 10 because there was 0 in game guidance. Retail experience is 1000% better from a gameplay perspective
This was why Quest Helper was the most downloaded add-on. You lost out on the experience of immersion and connecting with what was going on in the quest, but you saved hours of frustration and wandering about trying to figure out wtf they meant by that.
Anytime i see stuff about quality of life changes about any game there is always, bunch of angry people in comments mad about it. Like the game is more accessible and enjoyable for people who wouldn’t play before. It’s strange seeing using the “In good old days” about video games.
the thing about it is - with an rpg players mind , I want to read and THINK things out... but because it displays these things readily and automatically - I am actually demoralised from using my brain, because it won't EVER matter. so by doing what I want, I'm putting myself at a time disadvantage against every other player who could easily just ... not...
Classic WoW really used to be like Elden Ring. It didnt have way points. It was hard, death was common. And it felt like there was a massive world of challenging content. Not a world that wastes your time so you can do a tiny bit of challenging content at the end.
Let's not pretend like we all didn't go to thottbot or allalhazam, or download mods, to give ourselves directions instead of analyzing a thesis to figure out what to do That said, having to read the text did add to immersion
I started playing in TBC and personally it's just really daunting trying to figure it all out on your own. While leveling fighting more than 2 mobs the same level as you was almost a death sentence; if you were a warrior, good luck. Then you go do a quest where the drop rate of an item is 10% off of one type of mob in an area that has four different types. A single quest could easily take half an hour. Plus you had to walk 10-15 minutes just to get to some of them. The leveling process could take a month or two for a casual player. To each their own, but my first time going through The Barrons just made me say to hell with it tell me where to go and what to do.
the irony in the comments is outstanding. No classic layer actually reads quests. zero. They just install the one addon that literally tells you what to do where to go thats even more streamlined than dragonflights UI and quest tracking. just laughable
So, and while I totally get that the question is a joke, I also have to be that guy; a lot of loot the item quests used models which were identical to the clutter around it, and so you'd spend a good amount of time searching for, say, a small greenish-yellow bush amongst a field of yellowish-green bushes. Not all were terrible and needed a glow... But some were. Hey, click the green vial of liquid on the table full of green vials of liquid. Few and far between, really, but your virgin experience of the quest is such that you will never forget how much time you wasted growing more and more frustrated.
Retail WoW took all the QoL mods and just put them in the game by default. I remember discovering them and thinking the game was WAY more playable cuz I didn’t have to constantly read and reread nonsense to figure out what I was doing with my 20 chicken heads or whoever tf Bolvar the Chameleon was and where he went
Game really went from an MMORPG to an MMO on rails. There are no roleplaying aspects left, since the path is laid out in front of you with glowing arrows and you're punished by not following that path.
The game has to rely on Lore being served to you through cutscenes and characters more important than you, since you don't have the luxury of creating your own story and place in the world. It's not an RPG anymore. You're just watching a movie while playing mini-games on the side.
Nobody can name 5 important players on their realm. The 2 players controlling the devilsaur leather market? The first player to get Thunderfury? The helpful lvl 60 who always fishes in SW? We lost all the storylines of real people in the world.
Bro I literally started playing a vanilla private server recently and it is the most painful experience I have ever had. There's no roleplaying, all the quests are written like shit. Half of them have misspelled words or bad grammar, 90% of them involve you killing 15-20 mobs which you can only pull 1 at a time otherwise you just die, about a third of them literally don't tell you where to go at all, you have to sit and heal for 30 seconds after every 4 or 5 mobs, the mob density is insanely high, no way to tell what should be picked up/kept as there's no values attached to items, etc etc.
@@ShadowmancerLord if you want the game to tell you exactly what to do and when to do, then playing an oldschool open-world RPG might just not be for you. You learn what to keep and what to sell through experience. You might learn that at level 40 you should have kept all your Light Feathers, when you need them for slow fall or levitate. Or you might learn that Mining is not optimal on a mage. The game is about exploration and overcoming challenges with friends. Some people enjoy how you just have to figure things out. The game have lots of DnD elements and you should look at it through that lense. Combat I agree is outdated, but it's not why you play oldschool WoW. I will say entering WoW in 2024 is way different than back in 2004 and people play games differently now. The objective of WoW back then was to just play around and have fun. No big villain was presented when you bought the game, so you just logged on to explore and have fun figuring things out with friends. I am happy to hear new players are trying Classic WoW thoug
@@Hvemlol Please don't act like WoW's lack of info was by design. People had to figure out how to do everything back then because Blizzard wouldn't, or couldn't, do it themselves. WoW, at release, was an incomplete game.
Nah sorry, you are excused as you are new but people just looked up wowheads for every quest. Its the same with people who claims nostalgia how "it was so much better back when we didnt have guides for bosses" except they always did, they were just not as good.
Nah sorry, some people actually enjoyed the discovery :) I only went to Thottbot (proto-wowhead) if a quest text was so vague that I would spend 30 minutes running around aimlessly. Playing SoD today on the opposite faction, I absolutely refuse to use Questie like what it seems 90% of my guildies, because I actually like to read the quests and figure it out. The discovery is what made this game so good!
After seeing his take on the first players wow experience I kinda want to see how much he would trash on ff14's first player's experience. Since his opinions just feel so honest and I feel like a lot of streamers hold their opinions for clicks when it comes to that mmo.
I heard they fixed it from how it used to be, I played a bit after A Realm Reborn came out and it felt a lot like his retail WoW experience, endless fetch quests in the first town with people saying things I had no context of.
I don't blame blizzard here. I blame the players. I blame them because they all downloaded all those horrible addons that put you on rails and optimized the roleplaying out of the game. And then they made you feel like crap for not running 20 of them. Blegh. Blizzard just decided "ok, if this is what you want, I'll do them myself"
Eh there was never really any roleplaying in the game at all, unless maybe you played on an RP server, which I didn't, so I can't speak of. But on pvp and pve realms, WoW was basically a chat client with gameplay for most people.
blizzard is the one who kept it open for addons to exist , yea sure blame the players for what blizzard gave us man , its up to them whether we use addons or not
@@earth2saka yes because blizzard isnt the one who let players make the addons in the first place , lets not blame the lazy devs who love addons because they fix problems in the game for free
I remember getting to lvl 90 in Final Fantasy and had no idea what I was doing or where I was going or what the main quest, I was just going where the glowing thingy told me to and clicked things and killed things. That was like 3 or 4 years ago, I agree, it's literally brain dead content. (I blame myself for allowing it to be that way)
What?! Did you skip all the cutscenes and dialogue? Leveling your first job is literally playing out the main story line. Compared to WOW it couldn't be more spoon fed to you.
Until you hit a quest that not even using your brain con divulge the necessary information you would need to reach your objective. some quests in classic just straight up suck. They've admitted this and corrected them in future expansions. but people in their delusions believe that classic wow is infallible. perfection.
Wow you can think!!! So proud of you. So you are miles ahead of 90% of the people that played Vanilla why do you think things sparkle now? Besides to placate all the kids?
This is just Blizz adding QoL features that WoW players standardly added themselves via 3rd party addons. Almost nobody plays without Questie and even the speed leveling addons. Blizz cant win. If they do what players want, they dumb down the game. If they stick to deliberate game design to engage with world lore, players modify that out of the game and then complain that Blizz standard UI and questing is “unusable”. Every design choice in retail is a direct result of giving players what they want. “You think you do, but you dont” was memed on, but it was succinctly the truth about the state of the game in 7 words. But regular players think of themselves as customers first, and feel entitled to logging in and having the game play itself at the cost of min/maxing fun and discovery out of the game. Thats not to say Blizz’s design was perfect. But 3rd party addons definitely painted them into a corner for leveling, questing, dungeons and raiding, pvp, trading, joining guilds and even engaging with other players as potential future friends. There is a lot to talk about for the complex evolution and conundrums of WoWs game design when you let players have the final say in everything. The game is effectively made for everyone and no one at the same time, and its constantly at odds with itself.
Man, as someone that sometimes reads the quests' text, they don't really tell you much, even if you read them, cause the game expects you to do certain inputs and not role play the quest. I don't get why some people complain about this simplification; it was always this simple, now you just know what simple thing to do right out the bat.
After playing classic from retail (i played vanilla back in the day) I can only ask one question. If you have to think for every quest. Why are so many WoW classic players so fucking bad?
Both classic and wow retail are extremely easy to execute games with very little actual skill involved in properly running a character. So for someone who played Tera, a game that requires actual skill, it's hard to tell the difference between retail and classic players. They are both insanely bad and use 10 mods to being their skill level to what most people would consider laughably bad in Tera.
@@jakelink1482 ill tell you where the line is. Character movement and speed of actions. After running several dungeons with classic players. Ive never seen so many keyboard turning, slow reaction speed, having players in any game. Retail players conquer very hard content such as green fire and mage tower and high lvl m+ dungeons are common activities in the general player base. Retail players are just better. No bias at all. They just are.
@@joshm.2954 Sure, but retail wow is extremely easy, especially when you pay it modded. So lording over people who can't play it well is just sad. Play a game that actually requires a modicum of skill.
@@jakelink1482 retail wow it one of the hardest mmos out. It requires more skill than time. You telling me a game is easy that has less than 40% full normal clear on raids, 25% full heroic and .1% mythic full raid clear. Im not saying no mmo is harder but no mmo is as hard and doesnt require you to play for hours for gear to attempt to play at the highest levels. When it comes to classic players they can not play the games without addons. I know cause i just played pre cata patch with several ppl who cant watch their debuffs without weak auras. They just died constantly.
They didnt remove the quest text so you can, if you so desire, still do quests by reading and figuring out if you so desire, they just put in options for the people that dont care as much about the RPG aspect , aka most people that have ever played WoW. Also the community did this A DECADE before Blizzard made it a part of the game, i dont know any old player that didnt use thotbot (wowhead of yesteryear) There are plenty of things to critize blizzard about but giving people options of how to play is not one of them.
it would be interesting to see some settings, where you have some options to disable some of the help features. I believe it could create a better balance between handholding and exploration
Such an old and tired complaint. The “paragraphs of text” in Classic only ever contained one or two sentences of valuable information. Quests in WoW have always been incredibly simple: go to X, kill Y. Expansions since Classic just made it so you can skip the one or two sentences and get straight to the point, the thing we care about, which is playing the game. Funnily enough, the single most popular addon in Classic WoW is “Questie,” which turns the questing process into that of modern WoW, eliminating the need to read quest text at all. You can whine that people don’t want to read paragraphs every time they’re asked to kill 10 boars, something they’ll do hundreds of times between lvl 1 and max, but those paragraphs are still there for you to read if you love them so much, and they’re not hidden behind menus. Every time you accept a quest the first thing that happens is the quest text appears and you click “accept.” Paragraph Andies get the option to read their precious text every single time they right click a dude. The rest of us have shit to do.
if designed well using text is way better. Like in divinity original sin 2 and probably baldurs gate. Here the text often gives hints to solve the quest in an unique way, being sort of a puzzle.
@@ravivandersalm4586 it can’t really be designed well unless it’s a niche game. Modern gamers determine how big games are designed and any game that wants mass appeal needs to listen to them. Modern gamers at large do not want to read. They have gotten used to VA and cutscenes and find reading much too unstimulating in games. Your text no matter the force will be skipped in most cases unless it’s a niche game for that audience that enjoys that style
Questie is the most downloaded add on in Classic because Classic is for OLD players. They have already played through all those zones. When they're on their 7th Alt, do you think they need to read the quest lore again?... No. They already have. Multiple times. They need to get that toon to 60 so they can raid on it.
@@Dandii_Hondanah you're never gonna get rid of add ons and hacked clients and rhe like, there'll always be people who want to modify their game in whatever way. Especially if it automates the game for them or gives them an advantage. Even ffxiv had people get caught hacking during the last ultimate race
I mean who woulda thought that using your brain actually could be somewhat fun 😅. Totally missing from todays game where its not about the journey but just about hitting the destination/max lvl.
We the people chose to stop thinking. We created quest helper which gave the arrow and glowing. It's unfair to blame blizzard for following the will of the people. You read the text if you care about the story. 95% of players do not care about the story
I loved classic so much because it was very easy to determine who was actually good at the game and put in some hours to be good at the game vs some scrubs who thought they had it all figured out. Yes it's anoying when you get older to have to put in so many hours in a game but that's also exactly why it was so popular in the beginning. This is how you start an addiction. The rest of WoW was just manipulation to keep playing the game. It wasn't as good anymore. They diverted into giving you small pieces of a puzzle to keep you hooked like raids for 10/20 people or PVP arena. People honestly dont understand good games anymore. Good games are where you spend most of your time not just because you are addicted but because you want to explore and find out more stuff and learn more
I remember vividly in like 2008 doing the felhunter demon quest, wherein it tells you to go get a moldy tome as one of the quest items. I skim read through the quest text and read the words "Menethil Harbor", and spent days looking around there for the tome. Only when I re-read the text did I find out it said "The rest was lost off the coast west of Southshore, where it was to be transported to Menethil Harbor by boat. It never arrived." Went to the coast of Southshore and found it in like half an hour. I'll never get that experience back.
is that the one where you went underwater to find the sunken ship and had to deal with Murlocs? I loved my Warlock class quest back in the day. I remember getting my steed very well and the Fel puppy quest line was really satisfying.
But it built the foundation for experience in reading more thoroughly moving forward d:
@@paeden5431 no underwater ship, it just ended up being in a box on the shore. Plenty of murlocs though
If you play wow ever, remove all questions helpers, the game is so much better when you have to find things yourself.
@@kevinleewilliams5119the problem is that the quests now no longer contain enough information to find it on text alone, they already rely too much on quest helpers and symbolism
Classic/Vanilla WoW was about the journey. Retail WoW is about the destination.
Well, as they say: the true journey are the friends we made at the destination.
its how most game are now adays all about "end game" and not the journey to it.
Even now people use questie. People are just different these days
@@RM_3Dbecause that's how people play games now
For me it's the reverse.. when I played Vanilla it was ALL about the destination (getting to 60 where the "REAL game begins", ie. raiding,) whereas now in retail I am way more casual and just grind stuff for fun.
People be complaining about everything flashy in retail and then get their classic UI brought up to date with adding like questie
Lol ikr
Classic fan base are clowns. They complain about retail now they playing cata classic soon shadowlands classic. Donkey ass people.
in 2005, people just looked everything up on the equivalent of wowhead. You could always get around having to read your quest log.
On a side note, the wow interface has always been garbage, and relied on addons to fix it. The weakaura packs for spells exist for a reason.
@@OWnIshiiTrolling What janky old Thottbot? it was missin a lotta shit, yeah you might use it if you got stuck but most of the time youd try and follow the quest or /1 Wheres Mankirks wife?
@@BobOfBarons I used a german site, that had pretty much every quest covered
Remember the days of Ventrilo and Thottbot?
Yesssss
everyone in our age range that played wow does.. so yes, millions remember the days of Vent and thottbot
"You're on thottbot, you're cheating anyway!"
ooh i membaaaa
I said thotbott the other day and someone who only started playing in legion said "unfortunate name"
I said back then thot wasn't even a slang lol
I lowkey wish there was no questing tools. Thinking about quests and figuring them out was at the core of social interactions in wow.
Yeah we might aswell all play a singleplayer rpg
sadly i think these days that would just cause people to find the answers on youtube before asking someone in game
@@mcdonnu These days? You remember Thotbot, right?
@@Arrzarrina haha yea i do but even then i think people were a little more chatty in game..
@@mcdonnuyeah, now when you need help, people just tell you to Google it lol
Sometimes I think Day9 is the father figure I never knew I needed, full of measured takes and wonderful advice and so lighthearted I'm always happy to hear it. Sometimes I worry if I'm going to inherit my internet dad's hairline.
well you get your balding genetics from the mom's side so you should be fine unless her dad is bald
To be fair, classic will give you a quesy where you have you talk to Blendar the recluse and you're basically going "where the heck is this guy?" For 2 hours until you accidentally find him. But by then the quest is gray
Most infamously, Mankrik's wife. Which I think still has its own special map on WoWhead with a drawing of an arrow that points to the pin with the location lmao.
To be fair, even through retail WoW stinks, Sean's attention span is somehow even worse so there's that.
You mean you find him in 2 days
Classic quests were acctualy hard to me in 2006 because I couldn't understand english as well as I do today. Most part of my english skills are due Diablo 2 and WoW, either I play the game or I just keep my english skills the way they was
Exactly. I saw the same thing with kids I was babysitting. One more reason to encourage people to read, especially given the current decline in literacy.
@@vanyadolly I actually learn english at 7, thanks to the need of reading in videogames
On the one hand you actually needed to put some effort in to find where to go, but felt good once you found it. On the other hand, where the heck is Mankrik's wife?
I think the problem with that particular quest was if i remember correctly it didnt tell you which direction she travelled.. it was just like "You need to find her..." but we're litterally at "Crossroads" she could have gone North/south/east/west.. Soo you'd spend hours looking and of course you went the wrong direction.. I seem to remember her placement was just off the road to the west.. but the quest text didnt say like "She was travelling west" or "Towards the thousand needles"..
On the flip side in teldrassil theres a quest to gether "Fel cones" which was kinda the alliances version of mankrik's wife.. and the quest text was just like "They're in the forest near trees" and thats like oh gee thanks.. that really narrows it down.. So you'd spend hours looking for 1.. then suddenly realize that they are kinda everywhere they're just super small and green on green.. so super hard to see. which was the intial reason for creating the "Glows" cause even after the first patch where they added sparkles it still wasnt really enough.
Everyone looked up a guide. This way is 1000 percent better.
This is one of those Classic love/hate things.
Nowadays, everything is a Ubisoft game. Accept the quest and you'll have a marker on the map, a marker on the compass, and a floating marker in your HUD, maybe the path is even marked out.
Back then you opened the map and started reading the names of places. But with fog of war, you might not have that particular name unlocked.
what I loved was world chat going "hey, were is razorback point at?" because of this, and people actually helping each other.
What I hated about it was when people would not help, but ridicule you for not already knowing that stuff.
The advent of widgets and little helper programms and tie-in databases for this stuff was literally a game-changer.
well... BG3 has a lot of quests with open ended paragraphs where you need to explore or guess your way to what is next.
so did Zelda Totk, they basically tell you "over here are *the dungeons*" but everything else you need to read the text either in your journal or when you get the quest...
so there are games that are successful that don't follow the braindead "let's just put a huge marker on the map of where it is exactly so people don't get lost"....
It's a freaking mmorgp. The point of the game is to go explore not follow a glowing path to the chest. Another reason I quit this game when cata dropped. It got so dumbed down it's basically Mario bro. Removed talent trees and and handing out gear in 5 minute LFR groups...so sad and shameful what they did to a great game. RIP srfour, Latisha, fourplayed, cupodeez, Jchrist, and rodgthepodg forever 70s. I miss you guys 😢
This conversation always makes me think of Morrowind vs Skyrim
On the one hand using your brain is good, on the other hand do the shaman totems quest.
What I find ironic is most people that comment about how wow doesn't feel like an RPG anymore like it did "back in the day" are the same people that ignore quest text in retail or download quest addons in classic. Or in other words, they are either in denial about the fact they don't care about the RPG/questing experience, they are negative engagement farmers that feel entitled to being a hypocrite, or just incredibly naïve and refuse to accept that not only is playing RPG's without caring about story or lore is a viable way to play the game, most people prefer it.
Exactly. Most people are going to play the easier way, and yet despite PREFERRING the easier way, some people complain they are not forced to play the harder way, because....reasons.
Yep. I stopped playing classic largely because the player base just isn't the same. The game is still fantastic, but they're not playing it.
@vanyadolly yea they just rush to end game and spam raids like it's WOTLK. Even the SoD developers are catering towards this boring playstyle.
classic viewed questing through the leveling process as "the game"... retail views the end game content as "the game". So they do whatever they can to rush you through leveling to get there
People forget that quest helper was originally an addon that was so popular blizzard put it in the default UI
Hopefully they give us a version of classic that doesn't allow addons, but even then they dont have a good way to stop people using wowhead and macros. Tbh i think that experience may simply be lost to time, as much as I want it back.
Also, you can turn off outline mode in the settings which helps turn all the things that are outlined in the world off.
This man has endlessly been a complete gem to these various communities.
As someone who played wow back then and is dyslexic I learned where to go by the compass directions
pro tip, usually the quests on wow classic will give you the direction of where you need to go in the last paragraph of the quest
Holy 💩 perfect edit on that 😂
I remember as a kid printing out the region maps and drawing my own quest routes and doing educated guesses as to where I was going for the next part of various quests... ah the so called good ol' days of wow ... never knew where you were going and always just best guessing at your talent build (then promptly having to change it)
Let’s be real though 99% of people just downloaded questions. That’s why blizzard baked it into the game
You get really good at skimming the important information. There are addons these days as well though.
I started playing wow at 12 I went from RuneScape (osrs now lol) to WoW. I made an undead mage and had the time of my life questing and leveling solo. I died ALOT but I also learned how to survive as a frost mage. Questing though, maaaan it was work lol. No addons or help. Okay yeah I did look online for some quests but for the most part it took a lot of time to get stuff done but it was fucking amazing. Retail is much faster and I guess you could say easier. But I love retail as well.
When I played classic, I used questie, and so did nearly everyone I grouped up with
98% of people that play classic use questie which does the same thing as retail lol
Right but that’s because people have been used to that kind of questing for years now in retail.
When you're on your 30th alt, it doesn't really matter
@@omegaxtrigun its not just because theyre used to it its because classics quest log design sucked dick
Then they're doing it wrong.
still better than retail
I love how much sean looked exactly like that groudhog
Wow literally taught me English.
When I started wow back in the day, early 2000’s, I barely knew any English. (Am European)
This was a time when barely anyone I knew spoke fluent English.
So deciphering these quests was like solving the da Vinci code 😂
I had to write down some of these quests and bring them to my schools only English teacher. Also one of my friends mom knew decent English so she would be like our holy priest deciphering these ancient scrolls for us.
If things got really tough, we turned to his scary older brother, the only guy who knew internet slang and understood American English properly. If you got real lucky, he’d help you out.
Vanilla wow basically taught me English out of necessity 😂
Back in my day.. Joanna's guide was a book without plugins/addons that you had to read!
Holy shit, that’s Day9? Haven’t seen him since StarCraft cheese strat days.
I'm playing on a classic server rn where quests and enemies scale to level until a certain point. It's really nice being able to mince up areas and come back later when you want to care about them
i dont miss reading tons of texts which boils down to: go to X, kill Y, collect Z. i dont mind the new UI
they add all the glow. since it was a addon that used to tell you where to go and alot of ppl used it so blizzard added it
Excuse me, I require a warning before you do a surprise nostalgia raid of 2007 on me
The things added to the game by Blizzard to make it easier are things that people were already adding to the game to make it easier.
And with everything that has been added people are still using weakauras and a bunch of other stuff to streamline the game. People seem to want the game to be easier.
Mankriks wife. Those who know, know. And I might be a lil off with the name but I know it’s close, and I’m going off 20 year old memories here. That quest was the epitome of WoW quests.
I once spent over one real-life hour looking for a furbolg in Azshara, and that's what I miss in modern gaming.
One furbolg in what is arguably the most empty, boring zone in the entire game, but it was a whole evening's adventure for me.
Critcal thinking.. a wild concept
From classic to retail. This was a good change. You’d miss items, or have to mess around waiting for a gear to pop up because quest items would blend into an area. Not every quest was built equally in detail. In the end most people would just google it, and now people just use addons. Quest text can be a good read for lore in the area, and I’ll give old wow having better immersive quest text.
I was there in Vanilla. I started using Thottbot before level 10 because there was 0 in game guidance. Retail experience is 1000% better from a gameplay perspective
This was why Quest Helper was the most downloaded add-on. You lost out on the experience of immersion and connecting with what was going on in the quest, but you saved hours of frustration and wandering about trying to figure out wtf they meant by that.
the reality was that people would constantly have to Alt-Tab to wowhead to figure out where to go
No the reality is that wowhead didn’t exist back then and the equivalent (thottbot) didn’t have nearly as much info as wowhead does.
Anytime i see stuff about quality of life changes about any game there is always, bunch of angry people in comments mad about it. Like the game is more accessible and enjoyable for people who wouldn’t play before. It’s strange seeing using the “In good old days” about video games.
the thing about it is - with an rpg players mind , I want to read and THINK things out... but because it displays these things readily and automatically - I am actually demoralised from using my brain, because it won't EVER matter. so by doing what I want, I'm putting myself at a time disadvantage against every other player who could easily just ... not...
You say that like Questie isn't basically the most downloaded addon in Classic
Some people just want to chill without reading, some just are not proficient enough in English and here you get i guess majority of players.
i want a server of classic with no mod allowed
That would be awesome
That would be interesting but not many would play it
I cleared bt in retail bc before attunement nerfs. I haven't played this game since Cata dropped
Classic WoW really used to be like Elden Ring. It didnt have way points. It was hard, death was common. And it felt like there was a massive world of challenging content. Not a world that wastes your time so you can do a tiny bit of challenging content at the end.
Well yeah the wow of 2004 and 2024 are two different beasts.
Let's not pretend like we all didn't go to thottbot or allalhazam, or download mods, to give ourselves directions instead of analyzing a thesis to figure out what to do
That said, having to read the text did add to immersion
some programmer loved his new glow algoritm too much.
I started playing in TBC and personally it's just really daunting trying to figure it all out on your own. While leveling fighting more than 2 mobs the same level as you was almost a death sentence; if you were a warrior, good luck. Then you go do a quest where the drop rate of an item is 10% off of one type of mob in an area that has four different types. A single quest could easily take half an hour. Plus you had to walk 10-15 minutes just to get to some of them. The leveling process could take a month or two for a casual player. To each their own, but my first time going through The Barrons just made me say to hell with it tell me where to go and what to do.
I remember doing that gorilla sinew quest in Stranglethorn Vale and gaining over 2 levels of XP before it dropped. This was before heirlooms.
I love day9 😂😂😎😍☺️
the irony in the comments is outstanding. No classic layer actually reads quests. zero. They just install the one addon that literally tells you what to do where to go thats even more streamlined than dragonflights UI and quest tracking. just laughable
"No classic layer actually reads quests. zero" well, i am reading them.
"Everyone else is just as braindead as me 🤓👆"
He thinks that was bad. Everquest would blow his mind.
Surprised hamster. Now that I have not seen in a long time 👴
Haha why did someone tell him to play retail that's mean as fuck
Because almost every quest is an escort or just go find some weeds lol
Your brain would explode if you played EverQuest
Holy shit day9 has gray hair. I'm fucking old, man...
Mondern humans are LLMs witch 280 input tokens
he stole my mug
"where's rexxar"
Hey hey hey you're making many people mad 😂😂😂😂
Its very telling when a pro RTS gamer/variety streamer plays WoW for the first time and is able to notice how cookie cutter retail became. ;3
So, and while I totally get that the question is a joke, I also have to be that guy; a lot of loot the item quests used models which were identical to the clutter around it, and so you'd spend a good amount of time searching for, say, a small greenish-yellow bush amongst a field of yellowish-green bushes. Not all were terrible and needed a glow... But some were. Hey, click the green vial of liquid on the table full of green vials of liquid. Few and far between, really, but your virgin experience of the quest is such that you will never forget how much time you wasted growing more and more frustrated.
Oh my god, its yellow paint!
If a quest doesn't tell me where to go, I just skip that quest.. It's annoying AF.
Retail WoW took all the QoL mods and just put them in the game by default. I remember discovering them and thinking the game was WAY more playable cuz I didn’t have to constantly read and reread nonsense to figure out what I was doing with my 20 chicken heads or whoever tf Bolvar the Chameleon was and where he went
yh now everythings just a glowing disco ball instead and the levelling journey is a soulless mess in a barren world / a world of dungeon Qs.
@@MartialArtzz
I think it’s a fundamental flaw with conventional MMORPGs. There’s nothing inherently interesting about “number go bigger.”
Game really went from an MMORPG to an MMO on rails. There are no roleplaying aspects left, since the path is laid out in front of you with glowing arrows and you're punished by not following that path.
The game has to rely on Lore being served to you through cutscenes and characters more important than you, since you don't have the luxury of creating your own story and place in the world. It's not an RPG anymore. You're just watching a movie while playing mini-games on the side.
Nobody can name 5 important players on their realm. The 2 players controlling the devilsaur leather market? The first player to get Thunderfury? The helpful lvl 60 who always fishes in SW? We lost all the storylines of real people in the world.
Bro I literally started playing a vanilla private server recently and it is the most painful experience I have ever had.
There's no roleplaying, all the quests are written like shit. Half of them have misspelled words or bad grammar, 90% of them involve you killing 15-20 mobs which you can only pull 1 at a time otherwise you just die, about a third of them literally don't tell you where to go at all, you have to sit and heal for 30 seconds after every 4 or 5 mobs, the mob density is insanely high, no way to tell what should be picked up/kept as there's no values attached to items, etc etc.
@@ShadowmancerLord if you want the game to tell you exactly what to do and when to do, then playing an oldschool open-world RPG might just not be for you. You learn what to keep and what to sell through experience. You might learn that at level 40 you should have kept all your Light Feathers, when you need them for slow fall or levitate. Or you might learn that Mining is not optimal on a mage. The game is about exploration and overcoming challenges with friends. Some people enjoy how you just have to figure things out. The game have lots of DnD elements and you should look at it through that lense. Combat I agree is outdated, but it's not why you play oldschool WoW. I will say entering WoW in 2024 is way different than back in 2004 and people play games differently now. The objective of WoW back then was to just play around and have fun. No big villain was presented when you bought the game, so you just logged on to explore and have fun figuring things out with friends.
I am happy to hear new players are trying Classic WoW thoug
@@Hvemlol Please don't act like WoW's lack of info was by design. People had to figure out how to do everything back then because Blizzard wouldn't, or couldn't, do it themselves.
WoW, at release, was an incomplete game.
Nah sorry, you are excused as you are new but people just looked up wowheads for every quest.
Its the same with people who claims nostalgia how "it was so much better back when we didnt have guides for bosses" except they always did, they were just not as good.
Nah sorry, some people actually enjoyed the discovery :) I only went to Thottbot (proto-wowhead) if a quest text was so vague that I would spend 30 minutes running around aimlessly.
Playing SoD today on the opposite faction, I absolutely refuse to use Questie like what it seems 90% of my guildies, because I actually like to read the quests and figure it out. The discovery is what made this game so good!
stop eith the nostalgia, old man
After seeing his take on the first players wow experience I kinda want to see how much he would trash on ff14's first player's experience. Since his opinions just feel so honest and I feel like a lot of streamers hold their opinions for clicks when it comes to that mmo.
I heard they fixed it from how it used to be, I played a bit after A Realm Reborn came out and it felt a lot like his retail WoW experience, endless fetch quests in the first town with people saying things I had no context of.
I don't blame blizzard here. I blame the players.
I blame them because they all downloaded all those horrible addons that put you on rails and optimized the roleplaying out of the game.
And then they made you feel like crap for not running 20 of them. Blegh.
Blizzard just decided "ok, if this is what you want, I'll do them myself"
I had to scroll way too far down to find a sensible, intelligent comment. Kudos to you sir.
Eh there was never really any roleplaying in the game at all, unless maybe you played on an RP server, which I didn't, so I can't speak of. But on pvp and pve realms, WoW was basically a chat client with gameplay for most people.
@@Pinfeldorfyou are wrong.
blizzard is the one who kept it open for addons to exist , yea sure blame the players for what blizzard gave us man , its up to them whether we use addons or not
@@earth2saka yes because blizzard isnt the one who let players make the addons in the first place , lets not blame the lazy devs who love addons because they fix problems in the game for free
VoiceOver add on adds voices to Classic
but it's terrible
@@firstLast-jw7bm debatable
People who hate reading will take it over reading.
I remember getting to lvl 90 in Final Fantasy and had no idea what I was doing or where I was going or what the main quest, I was just going where the glowing thingy told me to and clicked things and killed things.
That was like 3 or 4 years ago, I agree, it's literally brain dead content. (I blame myself for allowing it to be that way)
What?! Did you skip all the cutscenes and dialogue? Leveling your first job is literally playing out the main story line. Compared to WOW it couldn't be more spoon fed to you.
Which final fantasy?
@@tesladrew2608 the online one, ff13 was it? I don't even know what number they are on right now lmao.
Until you hit a quest that not even using your brain con divulge the necessary information you would need to reach your objective. some quests in classic just straight up suck. They've admitted this and corrected them in future expansions. but people in their delusions believe that classic wow is infallible. perfection.
Thoughthammer do be pounding eh??
Wow you can think!!! So proud of you. So you are miles ahead of 90% of the people that played Vanilla why do you think things sparkle now? Besides to placate all the kids?
This is just Blizz adding QoL features that WoW players standardly added themselves via 3rd party addons. Almost nobody plays without Questie and even the speed leveling addons.
Blizz cant win. If they do what players want, they dumb down the game. If they stick to deliberate game design to engage with world lore, players modify that out of the game and then complain that Blizz standard UI and questing is “unusable”.
Every design choice in retail is a direct result of giving players what they want. “You think you do, but you dont” was memed on, but it was succinctly the truth about the state of the game in 7 words. But regular players think of themselves as customers first, and feel entitled to logging in and having the game play itself at the cost of min/maxing fun and discovery out of the game.
Thats not to say Blizz’s design was perfect. But 3rd party addons definitely painted them into a corner for leveling, questing, dungeons and raiding, pvp, trading, joining guilds and even engaging with other players as potential future friends.
There is a lot to talk about for the complex evolution and conundrums of WoWs game design when you let players have the final say in everything. The game is effectively made for everyone and no one at the same time, and its constantly at odds with itself.
Man, as someone that sometimes reads the quests' text, they don't really tell you much, even if you read them, cause the game expects you to do certain inputs and not role play the quest. I don't get why some people complain about this simplification; it was always this simple, now you just know what simple thing to do right out the bat.
Yeah back then it was fuxking awful. You could miss one word and be left scratching your head where tf to go
Yeah literally all classic players use questie. Just doesn’t glow
After playing classic from retail (i played vanilla back in the day) I can only ask one question. If you have to think for every quest. Why are so many WoW classic players so fucking bad?
Both classic and wow retail are extremely easy to execute games with very little actual skill involved in properly running a character. So for someone who played Tera, a game that requires actual skill, it's hard to tell the difference between retail and classic players. They are both insanely bad and use 10 mods to being their skill level to what most people would consider laughably bad in Tera.
@@jakelink1482 ill tell you where the line is. Character movement and speed of actions. After running several dungeons with classic players. Ive never seen so many keyboard turning, slow reaction speed, having players in any game.
Retail players conquer very hard content such as green fire and mage tower and high lvl m+ dungeons are common activities in the general player base. Retail players are just better. No bias at all. They just are.
@@joshm.2954 Sure, but retail wow is extremely easy, especially when you pay it modded. So lording over people who can't play it well is just sad. Play a game that actually requires a modicum of skill.
@@jakelink1482 retail wow it one of the hardest mmos out. It requires more skill than time. You telling me a game is easy that has less than 40% full normal clear on raids, 25% full heroic and .1% mythic full raid clear.
Im not saying no mmo is harder but no mmo is as hard and doesnt require you to play for hours for gear to attempt to play at the highest levels.
When it comes to classic players they can not play the games without addons. I know cause i just played pre cata patch with several ppl who cant watch their debuffs without weak auras. They just died constantly.
@@jakelink1482 retail is easy if all you do is level and do world quests lmfao
Well when someone in vanilla/bc made an addon that everyone used that did this blizzard eventually just put it into the game.
They didnt remove the quest text so you can, if you so desire, still do quests by reading and figuring out if you so desire, they just put in options for the people that dont care as much about the RPG aspect , aka most people that have ever played WoW.
Also the community did this A DECADE before Blizzard made it a part of the game, i dont know any old player that didnt use thotbot (wowhead of yesteryear)
There are plenty of things to critize blizzard about but giving people options of how to play is not one of them.
it would be interesting to see some settings, where you have some options to disable some of the help features.
I believe it could create a better balance between handholding and exploration
Those settings exist
Such an old and tired complaint. The “paragraphs of text” in Classic only ever contained one or two sentences of valuable information. Quests in WoW have always been incredibly simple: go to X, kill Y. Expansions since Classic just made it so you can skip the one or two sentences and get straight to the point, the thing we care about, which is playing the game. Funnily enough, the single most popular addon in Classic WoW is “Questie,” which turns the questing process into that of modern WoW, eliminating the need to read quest text at all. You can whine that people don’t want to read paragraphs every time they’re asked to kill 10 boars, something they’ll do hundreds of times between lvl 1 and max, but those paragraphs are still there for you to read if you love them so much, and they’re not hidden behind menus. Every time you accept a quest the first thing that happens is the quest text appears and you click “accept.” Paragraph Andies get the option to read their precious text every single time they right click a dude. The rest of us have shit to do.
Oh wow, another paragraph! I'll surely read it /this/ time!
if designed well using text is way better. Like in divinity original sin 2 and probably baldurs gate. Here the text often gives hints to solve the quest in an unique way, being sort of a puzzle.
@@ravivandersalm4586 it can’t really be designed well unless it’s a niche game. Modern gamers determine how big games are designed and any game that wants mass appeal needs to listen to them. Modern gamers at large do not want to read. They have gotten used to VA and cutscenes and find reading much too unstimulating in games. Your text no matter the force will be skipped in most cases unless it’s a niche game for that audience that enjoys that style
Questie is the most downloaded add on in Classic because Classic is for OLD players. They have already played through all those zones. When they're on their 7th Alt, do you think they need to read the quest lore again?... No. They already have. Multiple times. They need to get that toon to 60 so they can raid on it.
@@Dandii_Hondanah you're never gonna get rid of add ons and hacked clients and rhe like, there'll always be people who want to modify their game in whatever way. Especially if it automates the game for them or gives them an advantage.
Even ffxiv had people get caught hacking during the last ultimate race
Maybe get off the literal tuorial island forst lmao.
I mean who woulda thought that using your brain actually could be somewhat fun 😅. Totally missing from todays game where its not about the journey but just about hitting the destination/max lvl.
Meanwhile at FFXIV...
Day9 really let himself go, didn't he? I tune in to his videos from time to time and it's shocking how quickly he aged.
We the people chose to stop thinking. We created quest helper which gave the arrow and glowing. It's unfair to blame blizzard for following the will of the people.
You read the text if you care about the story. 95% of players do not care about the story
it's called quality of life bud
everyone uses quest marker addons in vanilla except the absolute noobs who probably mouse click on their abilities, ew
When you had to use wow carto on your second computer you've found in trashes xd
A take from someone who doesn’t play the game. Irrelevant.
Elder of Scrolls Morrowind is the worst game I've played with quest tab and quest progression
Great game. This is my only complaint about thw game
I loved classic so much because it was very easy to determine who was actually good at the game and put in some hours to be good at the game vs some scrubs who thought they had it all figured out. Yes it's anoying when you get older to have to put in so many hours in a game but that's also exactly why it was so popular in the beginning. This is how you start an addiction. The rest of WoW was just manipulation to keep playing the game. It wasn't as good anymore. They diverted into giving you small pieces of a puzzle to keep you hooked like raids for 10/20 people or PVP arena. People honestly dont understand good games anymore. Good games are where you spend most of your time not just because you are addicted but because you want to explore and find out more stuff and learn more
Day9 looks 20 years older than when I watched him 10 years ago