Playing World of Warcraft RETAIL for the 1st Time!
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- Опубликовано: 25 авг 2024
- I played WoW Classic for the first time ever last week. Now, I'm going to play WoW Retail for the first time ever TODAY. RIGHT NOW.
I'll, of course, share my thoughts on the difference between the two experiences 😎
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Crazy how they based this whole game on Hearthstone huh
CLASSIC Blizzard, straight up STEALING from better games
"Sarcasm"
Nah man, this game is based on Warcraft Rumble.
@@guitaraffa But wasn't that just a fantasy ripoff of that game Starcraft from the developer... uh... Snowstorm I think?
This game is all based on The Jailer's vision.
its so annoying having to listen to everyone in his chat saying that he shouldn't have chosen the tutorial zone when you literally dont have a choice on your first character for a new account. It's like they want to seem smart and they just come off as moronic.
All back seaters are moronic, these people probably look up movie endings in the first 10 minutes of watching a movie.
When Game of thrones was popular, I can almost guarantee you they were also googling who died in the books to tell all their friends during the shows.
😂A classic, spouting stuff without as much as a factcheck
The worst part is they’re gonna force him to play BFA after, but chat will say he gets to choose the expansion 😭
That’s twitch chat for you
What happened to the snubby replies to this post. lel.
The sheer devestation in his voice when he heard about the level scaling sure was something.
destroy the ENTIRE reason to level up.
@@Dannerrrr You level up with ilvl.
@@AkiRa22084 but when you level up, the opponent levels up. It's zero sum. Might as well go after the level 1 dragon instead of the level 100 dragon, if the challenge and rewards are the same.
@@AkiRa22084 "I'm level 100, and I still can't smash villagers" what's the point in being powerful when everyone is equally powerful?
@@Dannerrrr So, villagers don't have Talent points, like players do. They only get some stats with levels, while players get stats, Skills and Talents with levels.
They are nowhere near as powerful as you even if you are the same level, since talents give you way more power than levels (also ilvl).
"I like games where I can look at the center of the screen, and don't have to look at the minimap" - Brood War player
🤣🤣🤣🤣
"This is the most exercise you get during the day if you're a World of Warcraft player." SHOTS FIRED!
thought the same 😅
Questing in retail is like hunting for easter eggs but you know where all the eggs are.
Shit analogy
yes, but there are also eggs that are hidden, but all the players know exactly where they are in every dungeon and you just gotta follow them in a single filed line 😆
2:18:02 - This is what I came here for, and I was not disappointed.
While hes pretty much on point, the new talent system does help. You FEEL more powerful due to the modifiers and new stuff/interactions added to your character constantly, so its not horiontal gameplay. You can pull more and kill faster as you go. In this way, I dont mind it, but wish it was a little slower than current still.
That was worth the whole video
@@itskhro Yeah but the game makes it so that pulling 5 or pulling 10 (or whatever meaningful amount) will always be manageable. You're trading one meaningful enemy for 1 group of enemies.
@@8thlvlMageto me, WoW is an endgame type of game. Minmaxing for raids, as I don't really care about PvP. So, while I despised levelling even during Wotlk, I still did it with almost every class, the only one I skipped was priest.
Here's the thing: I had my levelling route figured out. It may not have been perfect, but it was efficient. Cataclysm played well into that. MoP was another skip for me, not because "durr pandas stupid", I just lost interest in general. I came back for the WoD launch. And man, was I pissed that there was a mandatory questline for each and every character I played. Sure, you could levelboost any other character with XP options, treasures and world quests. But in order to get anywhere, there's the prologue. Rep farming in tbc was bad, probably worse in classic. But I didn't mind that as much, as playing the same questline again and again
I don't get his point, there are nine expansion worth of exploring. Classic only had two continents, today there are eleven. It need s some handholding or your just going to get absolutely lost and still do even with the hand holding.
Level scaling is a scourge on all RPGs. So glad Day 9 understands this.
The option to play tutorial island or original race starting zone only shows up if you've reached max level at some prior point (in the 20 year history of retail). Brand new accounts don't get a choice. Similarly once off tutorial island, you either get to go where you want or if it's a new account you have do BfA content. When next expansion comes out (later this year?) the new account default will be Dragonflight. Or you could do like D9 and just wander off and start doing Cataclysm content.
it's either "played before exile's reach" or "played exile's reach once"
I've never paid for wow so never got max level but still have the option when creating new characters now. I don't remember if it was like that the first time I created a character after exile's reach was added
It use to be that way. BFA is now optional, but they don't tell new players that. All player have access to Chromie for choosing an expansion to level in minus Cataclysm(which starts at level 30ish? They want you to do Vanilla up until then) and Dragon Flight. Now they are not going to tell new players about Chromie because they want a simple transition to BFA keep it simple. Tutorial island you only have to do once now, then you get the option of old starting zones.
So, long long ago I worked as a Blizzard Game Master, from Burning Crusade through Mists of Pandaria - one of the continuing goals of the dev team while I was there was that they wanted the playerbase to connect with the story.
Vanilla and BC had a lot of story, that you had to go and find. And there were a lot of players who never knew who Illidan was in BC, because they never ran that specific raid. So each subsequent expansion, you see the story getting more in your face. Wrath had the Lich King showing up all over the place. Cataclysm literally had Deathwing nuking zones from time to time. Mists of Pandaria doubled down on a lot of the phased systems, and one central story. I haven't played since Battle for Azeroth, so I'm not super up to date on how things are now, but I suspect they've kept going in that direction.
That's good direction since MMO as a genre has split story telling unlike the previous RTS. AS LONG AS they don't replace gameplay with the story. This is a balance the devs have to look out for.
What was the best thing about being a GM in those days? What are some wild player behaviours that you witnessed?
Ick that explains it
1:59:41 nailed it. Blizzard intention was to provide a smorgasboard of experiences that would lay ahead of the player to compel them into pursuing the world further. But As you said, that's not at all what beginning (or even veteran) players want out of a starting experience. They want to be nobodies starting in a sleepy backwater of the game where nothing happens. That's tantalizing, that tickles the imagination.
The tutorial taking the absolute piss out of what a "quest" entails is as hilarious as it is absurd. Shoot a training dummy. Quest complete. Walk back to camp, quest complete, have some pants. Truly a thing of beauty.
not any more than "i need 10 pieces of boar meat but it only has a 30% drop chance so go kill 50 boars"
@@roborob4296 Sure, from a gameplay standpoint every quest is just receive objective complete objective. It's kind of meaningless to point that out when the actual criticism is of the quality of the quest. It's much more engaging to talk to a butcher who asks you you fetch some extra meat in exchange for better food and the recipe than to be told to cast a spell at a training dummy. At least for a new player; the only real problem with classic questing is that its not engaging to do that butchers quest again for the 1367th time or even the 2nd or 3rd time tbh.
@@demaratus8946 lmao that you think anyone is reading any of that
they are functionally the same quest, it's just killing one training dummy instead of 500 boars.
Its a tutorial you turd to introduce people to the concept of a quest. Longer quests literally happen within 10min
As someone who played WoW back in classic and then for the first two expansions, I also didn't appreciate the boar scene. I think what happened is that, over the many years of trying to keep the game fresh Blizzard constructed more and more elaborate forms of quests. And then they try to make this new tutorial and because they don't know how to do it normal anymore they end up putting in all these strange types of quests that they've created. But weirdly, those quests only made sense to be introduced to a player after many kill ten boars quests had gotten so stale that Blizzard had to invent new types of quest. It seems super weird because its like you're playing "future quests" from the future of the game.
My favourite Day9 statement of this video "I just like games that are very punishing to be honest" (Starcraft) xD
I totally feel the same, love the challenge!
showing a problem before showing the solution is such a great way of putting it
I'm an ex-teacher, now in software dev. It amazes me how onboarding and tutorials don't just use pedagogy as a basis for onboarding tutorial frameworks. Want to make a good tutorial that *ahem* teaches a player how to play the game, just hire teachers to do it. God knows they could use a decent salary as well. I use so much of my psych degree and teaching degree in my current role as UX designer. Some games (and software) brutally miss the mark for new user/player onboarding and tutorials.
@@beardedjb2273Cool insight. I love that you’re taking UX seriously as a teaching vehicle.
Whoever said WoW 1 vs WoW 2 at the end nailed it. WoW isn't a forever game. It's a living thing and a lot of what made classic great was the novelty of everyone experiencing it for the first time. Some of that is still retained in classic, but WoW as a game exists as a period in time, and the movement toward an "endgame focused dumbed down fighting big bosses with your friends adventure" is the natural progression of the thing. It can't be the first time every time.
I agree with you except dumbed down. The challenging content in Wow is not dumbed down.
I thought Sean hated the diamond tracker so much, he preferred death over it hahaha
Sean, you didn't ask why, but here's why.
Over the years there have been a couple of level and stat squishes.
Classic started with 60,
then it was +10 for expansion 1 and 2 (TBC and WotLK),
then +5 for expansion 3 and 4 (Cataclysm and Pandaria).
Then again +10 for 5th, 6th and 7th expansion (WoD, Legion and BfA).
At lvl 120, expansion no.8 (SL) squished all of that to lvl 50, with max being 60. (because values for items and damage were getting ridiculous)
Since then, we had expansion 9 (DF), with +10 levels, and expansion 10 is around the corner.
We are going to be at max lvl 80 this summer with new expansion.
As someone on reddit wisely said,
"They 1. Never balanced it 2, Will never Balance it. 3.Most likely Don't know wtf to do with it". Hence the scaling.
Also it's not uniform across the world. *(citation needed)*
* Starting Experience:
- Levels 1-10: Starting zones specific to each race or Exile's Reach, a universal starting experience for all new and returning players.
* Default Leveling Experience:
- Levels 10-60: Currently, the default leveling experience for new players is through Battle for Azeroth content using Chromie Time. This will transition to Dragonflight content later this year as the new expansion releases.
* Chromie Time Alternatives to Default Leveling Experience:
- Levels 10-60: Players can choose to level through the content of previous expansions via Chromie Time, including:
* The Burning Crusade
* Wrath of the Lich King
* Cataclysm
* Mists of Pandaria
* Warlords of Draenor
* Legion
* Battle for Azeroth
* Shadowlands
* Scaling Outside of Chromie Time:
- Levels 10-30: Classic Zones in Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor.
- Levels 10-30: Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King zones.
- Levels 30-35: Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria zones.
- Levels 35-40: Warlords of Draenor zones.
- Levels 40-45: Legion zones.
- Levels 45-50: Battle for Azeroth zones.
- Levels 50-60: Shadowlands zones.
* Current Expansion Content:
- Levels 60-70: Dragonflight - latest expansion and its new zones, quests, and endgame activities tailored to the newest expansion storyline and mechanics.
dude, im late to find you. you are one of a kind, ur one of those CC that people follow/sub to you and follows you not the game u play. keep it up, hope to find you on a stream soon.
Glad my assumption that you would be blown away by the glowing was right LOL
I just noticed the music during the tutorial kicks into one of the Warcraft 2 Alliance songs. Incredible.
That Captain Garrick sounds like Ashley Williams from Mass Effect.
They're both Kimberly Brooks, so good catch
"creative confidence" remains one of the funniest things I saw in 2023.
So enjoyable to watch him play. I love his humour.
55:39 "I'm old school, I wanna play myself." 🤣
Retail wow revealing that Sean doesnt have 2FA on his Blizzard account.
I'm the last one to defend what retail has become, but regarding the giant boar sequence, I think it was intended to introduce you, a brand new user, to the possibility of quirky and specialized vehicle quests.
But primarily, I think they wanted to show you a bunch of damage numbers flashing on the screen, because that's the dopamine rush some people need to be interested.
Classic is a game based on exploration. Instanced group content is kind of an afterthought. But weirdly the end game of classic is all instanced group content. And so as players hit max level and did the end game content, there was a gradual shift in expectations that WoW isn't the exploring things game, it's the instanced group content game. And gradually as the game moved from expansion to expansion, the balance tipped more towards providing what's in the end game and hurrying people to the end game point. Spend thousands of hours gradually grinding up to level 120 and exploring each nook and cranny along the way? Absurd! That will put thousands of hours between players and the REAL GAME (instanced group content). So it's interesting to see Sean react to that disjunction. He got kind of acclimated to the classic experience and retail is, in so many ways, a COMPLETELY different game. I think both the exploratory classic experience and the instanced group content of retail are fine, good things. They're just SUPER different.
This! Exactly this! This is probably the best explanation of the evolution of WoW over time that I've heard. I've also discovered over time that I prefer the classic gameplay experience because it has the nostalgia factor for me. I enjoy the exploration. I enjoy the slow pace. I find retail to be too hectic and too epic. One of my favorite parts of playing vanilla originally was accidentally wandering into a zone that was above my level and getting instantly killed, then having something exciting to work towards as I leveled. With the "choose your adventure" model of retail, I felt like the sense of wonder and accomplishment was gone. I think Sean's rant about level scaling reflects that same sentiment.
Then dont play, people really want new wow every 4 years and delete everything
@Bugsbysix exploration based, aka the WORLD of warcraft lol.
@@ThomasCMurphyIII that's why wow was good, because of the exploration and slow stuff. I even like slow quest text. the present day wow is entirely about getting your mind to enjoy instant gratification because that is the mindset of gambling. Item levels, loot boxes, daily quests, level skips, many different currencies, in game purchases, retail wow is a glorified mobile game.
Perception of classic is warped any by classic I mean vanilla. In classic everyone levels and does end game stuff. Vanilla no, most people didnt get to end game start raiding and doing all this shit. Most people didnt do any of that. Vanilla was about exploration classic is not everyone used questie. You know the addon that told everyone everything. Secondly most players in retail are not dungeon or raid spammers most people are casual or mid level players. The perception that everyone is some high level dungeon spammer is warped beyond belief.
Sean is remarkably charitable about provisionally holding off on what his instincts (which are strong) are telling him -- about scaling, the absence of exploration in what is ostensibly an open-world game, of complicated abundance in the face of few meaningfully strong obstacles. What he's actually missing is only the scale of cynicism in front of him: the story aspects are shallow so as to allow a person to not care about it in the least. The scaling exists to deliberately remove incorrect decisions: when the correct decisions are already known by people who have played the game for years, this kind of shift would feel liberating, allow playing in a way that is different to how they had rotely executed before. And, of course, the fact that the 'real' game is actually the endgame: when every player character has the same base stats prior to customising talents and equipment, the obstacles can be calibrated into puzzles with specifically correct approaches and insurmountable punishes. Even more so when classes are homogenised into the three archetypes of dps, healer or tank. All this is obfuscated by an amusement park of minigames and micro-customisations, and all of this is in the service of maintaining a paradigm that hasn't really changed at its heart since WoW initially copied EQ: to create something that is most often a low-effort time sink, that is psychologically addictive and pacifying; an immense and impressive distraction that never fully ends. It is a hideously exploitative thing that is artistically bereft on purpose.
A dangerous and powerful wolf called. Sir grey wolf, the most generic of all the subordinates
I feel like there must be some way to make a game that combines the best of both worlds - the slow exploration-based no-handholding experience of classic combined with the much more improved quality of life features and combat of retail. I feel like we could have a truly Elden Ring experience if this was done right - a massive world chock full of danger and the unknown with excellent moment-to-moment combat encounters that never feels boring and yet you can take it at your own pace.
A total refresh, WoW 2, unironically. Or another MMORPG that can bring something revolutionary and complete. Sadly it keeps feeling like we'll never get any of that.
@@KnownAsKenji And after 5 years of wow 2 the same people start crying. Season of discovery is perfect for you
That rant about death as a learning tool is one I agree with, but I also have many friends who hated classic because they died too often and didn't seem to learn anything from it
Day9 himself didn't seem to learn much from dying in classic.
Josh stryfe hays Has had some good discussions on the slowness and "boringness" of old MMO design, and how it actually wasn't such a bad thing. These days, dying in a game like classic, most people will just find boring (it is btw) and that's something that game devs and players are trying desperately to avoid. As a result, devs don't design games that slow anymore, and we're left with these dopamine treadmills of instant gratification in game design.
Your friends likely would have learned had they kept trying, but they probably just found it too boring to continue learning. It's not their fault, when you didn't grow up playing slower games, later in life, they are hard to understand the appeal of.
It really is a dying design philosophy, and that's a tragedy in this age of every kid being diagnosed with OCD or ADHD, games are practically teaching people to have zero patience, no long term goals, and any gap between dopamine rushes is a waste of time when there are 15 other games on their desktop that are free to play that offer instant gratification.
"died too often and didn't seem to learn anything from it"
That's just being stupid 101. Many of us did die lot of of times, but it forces you to rearrange strategy, because dying is annoying. It makes you learn the game, not telling you how to play the game.
Thats because despite what classic andys tell you WOW is casual. When wow first came out it was shat on by the current MMO community of the time at how casual it was. No death penalty no dropped loot or anything.
One small benefit of the level scaling, with the fast leveling wow has, is that if you’re into the lore and the quests you won’t out level the quests in a zone where you want to experience the whole story going on there. Most people probably don’t care, but some people do.
You don't need scailing for that. Also, if they are a lore>levels guy, then why would they care about outlevelling?
@@HellecticMojo level scaling makes questing more fun. It’s not “quest > leveling” it’s “quest + leveling”.
@@just_eirik whole benefit of quests is that it's better than leveling.
@@HellecticMojo What do you mean “benefit”? I like leveling and I like quests. What’s hard to understand about this?
@@just_eirik quests give more XP and loot than grinds. That's WoW's basic design since day 1
38:12 that whole commentary is so true. Like he said while playing classic, a game is a set of (easy or hard) problems that you (the player) have to overcome. That's where the fun is of playing a game. Take that away and you might as well just watch a movie or read a book..
All your points are exactly why I'm playing classic
Yeah I've played retail for a total of like 30 minutes, most of which was checking out my old time capsule lvl 70 Paladin from BC
Nearly all these points are exclusive to the tutorial and introduction though. A few things that he mentioned can also be easily disabled if you don't like them.
@@pred4507 nah I've tried multiple expansions and my experience is spot on
@@pred4507"torture can be turned off" is not an excuse for the torture to exist in the first place
@@HellecticMojo Its only torture is you are slow
I love the moment when he realizes arcane explosion is incredibly overpowered at low levels 🤣
2:14{35 really loving the ironic placement of the line "whoops, I drooled" XD
Some of the sounds effects legitimately were used in Hearthstone before World of Warcraft,
In particular, Frostbolt
Retail WoW is what happens when a developer is asked to imagine what it's like to be a new player or what players would enjoy doing, as opposed to actually being allowed to develop it based on their own passion as a gamer. It's very obviously "design by committee".
I guess a game developer develops games but a game designer designs games.
The process of developing means to implement a thought into existence. But not coming up with a thought. Strictly speaking.
The bigger a company the less are developers involved into game (or software) design.
Except that the committee was the fanbase. Everything wrong with WOW was made at the request of the fanbase.
"We want to fly everywhere"
Fine, we'll redo the whole world so that it isn't an untextured flat plain.
"wtf, why is the world messed up"
"Raiding is too hard and tedious"
Fine, we'll add difficulty levels
"wtf, raiding used to mean something"
"There's not enough side activities"
Fine, we'll add garrisons, pet battles, and other stuff each expansions to occupy your time.
"wtf, why is there so much clutter"
Awful state of WoW is ironically not something I blame Blizzard for.
@@bufferc6362 I don't think it's necessarily that black and white (even strictly speaking). Not to me at least. People can have good ideas for the design of the game regardless of whether or not they can do the actual implementation. I agree that there is more overlap for the term "game developer" for someone who can reason about game design AND implement game elements or generate art/assets vs someone who only does game design (not that game designers contribute less). However, someone who just wants to do programming (as an example) but doesn't have any opinion of whether a game feature works or not, is simply a programmer in my eyes (or software engineer or whatever the case may be).
Regardless, when I say design by committee I don't necessarily mean that it was thought up by game designers and passed on to "game developers". I just mean that it reeks of the sort of over engineering that comes from designing a game based on thought up problems/experiences.
Someone in a design meeting could mention that the player dying could be a negative experience. Then a group discussion led by people who are in charge, but don't play games, decide that the game should have a very managed and safe new player experience and counter arguments are ignored. All based on a thought up problem that may or may not have existed in the first place. It's the sort of process that reduces passionate people into people who have given up and just sit silently in disbelief.
@@HellecticMojo Yes, much of the state of the game is down to players complaining but I don't see a world where the terrible tutorial or the excessive use of cut scenes and "quick time events" as quest objectives are the result of player complaints. Existing players complain about current content. I doubt the majority cares much about the early game experience as long as they have the option to boost most of the way. Their complaints wouldn't have affected what Day9 experienced that much though, apart from quests being shown on the map.
Day9's first hour of BFA is an excellent example of "wtf were they thinking". 3 or 4 NPCs having a conversation, with the player needing to click a thing or character to move the conversation forward, is more an interactive movie than gameplay. You don't even see this level of mock interaction in full on story driven RPGs.
So while I agree with you overall; many of the things you mention have also been discussed for a long time and Blizzard has had plenty of opportunity to make improvements.
Also, I'm sure many people like retail, especially the end-game. The people who wanted dungeon finder, gold tokens and level boosts aren't necessarily the same people who later complained about these things being added to the game. Retail players probably wouldn't want to have flying mounts removed in most areas or have one dungeon difficulty that they have to travel to before starting. I doubt many find the tutorial or old leveling content that inspiring though.
@@Novacification players wanted onboarding for new characters quick as possible. So tutorial and leveling rushes you through much as possible.
Things got railroady since WOTLC because flying meant that people would invalidate content.
At the end of the day, nearly every problem in modern WoW is directly or indirectly the result of Blizzard listening to fans and fans are notoriously bad at comprehending the consequences of their requests.
Hey Day9 haven't watched you for about 2 years now, but shouting shoot her feels like coming home 😊
2:14:00 Genuinely did not know that. What's the point of exploring if there's no danger anywhere?
@onlyrealnumber the point is to get you to the wow store via psychological tricks. that's all retail wow is.
You saved my life, mount me!
Day 9 started a side job as a bouncer. I can see him out there with a cap on and some chains keeping the riff raff out of LA's finest clubs.
Damn indeed, I'm pretty much having the exact same feeling about the tutorial, showing all available quests and objectives and scaling. Retail is pretty fun if you play very hardcore but that's about it.
1:16:44
I have to wonder if he would have just gone down into the hole/cave thing if the game had not put dots on the mini map, because it feels like the most yellow paint moment.
You were given quests by people standing in front of the mouth of a giant hole in the ground and twice he heads off in different directions. Now the first time he did have another quest to do so it does make sense, and he is also reading chat, but him missing that running off to the side like that seems like it would not have happened in classic.
I'm diggin the shaven look Day9
3:59 Block invites, etc. 😂👍 I was looking for such options. Thanks!! 😄
55:40 I came back to WoW after 8-10 years and decided to actually read quests and.. if you read quests there is a gameplay you’re taking about. I’m being PvP oriented for whole life, but personally liked wow quests so much and stories, campaign. I’m playing slowly, enjoying. Try it :) Try to play it slower :)
And also - you will die often during leveling up, don’t worry :) Everything you’ve mentioned - will happened at level 30+-
And dungeons (raids for low levels heh) got harder actually since pandaria. Love now pick heal role, it’s a challenge! Nice
Campaign is very interesting, just read quests please! I hate reading too :) but it’s your native language at least, you will get used to it and game should be more enjoyable
recently got into wow, but I never really enjoyed the questing aspect. I primarily enjoy the endgame content of Raiding / Mythic+ dungeons. I treat leveling a character on retail to max level to be the actual tutorial for how to play the class, as you are slowly introduced to each new ability/ talent tree. It's a flow state of doing enough individually taxing things that accumulate to an overall enjoyable experience.
unless i already knew people who played at the endgame, I don't think i would have stuck around long enough to see it to then enjoy it.
Small follow-up - that Leveling doesn't matter in retail like it does in classic. I agree it doesn't really have any meaning, besides you getting used to the character during that climb. I can't say it enough that retail is designed for the max level content. obviously this doesn't play will to the new player experience, and is generally the most agreed upon criticism of retail
I played WoW for a number of years and god all of the Lore Master achievements. I could likely count on my hand the number of quests actually read. There is something to be said for classic actually forcing you to engage with the content.
Or going to wowhead haha
@@casaroli Why do people keep acting like Classic WoW has some aura of mystery when sites like wowhead exists?
edit: By "classic" I'm referring to the official version Blizzard released, not the actual vanilla experience of original WoW when that content was current when WoW was first released.
Original classic like 2004 had you engage with the content, do you seriously think 99% of people are going to "engage" with it? They're still boring ass quests lmao
@@LuckySmurfbecause using wowhead is not the default experience
@@Linguistie I should have specified, but when I say "classic" I'm referring to the version Blizzard officially released, not the original vanilla WoW experience (where people actually had to figure stuff out for themselves).
i love how in 2 hours of play, Day9 sums up all (or most of) my problems with retail WoW and illuminates why many of us still flock to Classic, SoD, and private servers.
Sadly, after blizz has treated SoD, my hopes for a true Classic+ have gone down the pooptube.
I want to enjoy leveling, i want to feel weak and overcome that gradually, i want to be immersed in the environment and engage with the game. I don't want to teleport to max level. I want rewards to be earned. It's tragic that this has somehow become a minority opinion and all MMO's have resorted to spoonfeeding and handholding.
I was hopeful for SoD until I saw it was just... super-charged Classic, with most additions being skills from retail. There wasn't any care to retain classic's difficulty.
plays retail for 25 minutes "You know what I would prefer? Death."
I know he was talking about dying in game to reinforce consequences etc but it was a really good one liner lol
not gonna lie..... spent the whole time thinking how lame it is that backseatboss was just waiting for day9 to get to the dungeon portion to que up at the same time so he could be in there with him.
Game suggestion: Chants of Sennaar.
I mean the real suggestion is Outer Wilds, but....😢
SHOCKING how different, and bad, the retail experience here is than classic.
Maybe not all caps shocking, but no wonder new players aren't getting into retail.
@@EpeenKing "but no wonder new players aren't getting into retail" new players get into retail every day
@@mikko3 ... No they don't.
"if every decision can be made.... none of them can" -syndrome incredibles, 2004
Anyone else stopped playing wow for good quite some time ago, watched Sean play and now feels the urge to play again?
damn having played wow back when it released, ending up raiding nax before burning crusade, this is so painfull to watch...
Day9 your videos recently have been a blast!
I was watching the steam live when the Creative Confidence BG3 moment happened. Had to pause this video to go watch that again because I was absolutely crying laughing.
Level scaling was a necessary evil because many people outleveled the zones they were in, quickly. A lot of the zones are also narrative driven so the fact that you couldn't level up any more in that zone means you'd have to abandon that zone to be "efficient". Classic is paced where you can likely experience a zone in its entirety before moving on.
Nope. It wasn't necessary. Because why were people outlevelling zones quickly? Because power gamers demanded faster levelling so they could mass-produce their mirror mains. The people who actually enjoyed the questing experience never asked for faster levelling, nor level scaling. It was the people who wanted to skip to endgame who asked for that, and the people who didn't want to skip that paid the penalty for their request.
Today's Blizzard probably wouldn't do things this way; But Blizzard back then valued the power gamer feedback above all else. But don't be confused and think it was necessary; They KNOW they screwed up the open world and have spent a lot of DF trying to breathe life back into it again.
@@DarkScreamGamesThe leveling being way slower does not breathe life into it
The level scaling in WoW is objectively a net positive. And chat never clarified that the whole world doesnt scale DOWN to you, it can only scale UP to you. Every zone still has a MINIMUM level required to go in, but now you can stay in it for longer. Elwynn Forest was a 1-10 zone, now it is a 1-20 zone. Westfall was 10-~20, now it is a 10-60.
The point of "oh I leveled, but so did the mob, so I dont feel much stronger" is only half right. The only thing that the mob got was slight increase in damage and health, but you got a talent point AND stat increase.
They implemented this because it was very disjointed to level in Elwynn, go to Westfall for maybe 2 or 3 hours, then have to go to Duskwood, be there maybe an hour, then go to Dustwallow, then travel continents to get to a level 40 zone, then travel expansion continents to get to 50, then travel another continent to get to 60.
It streamlined it to let people play one expansions worth of content.
Scaling allowed Sean to leave the Tutorial area, go back to the human starting zone, and get xp for killing the Blackrock Spies and the Wolves and the corresponding quests. Had there been no scaling, there would have been no kill xp and the quests would have barely given 1% xp. And he was still 2 shotting the mobs
I hadn't played retail in like 10 years and tried it again a few months ago, and I have this same feel that I was on rails in this foreign area, and I got to the mid 20s in it and never felt like I had control over what to do or had time to like, go to town and just explore things.
It was feeling like the new user experience in Retail now is more focused on simply accelerating you to the high level so you could play what other people are playing.
This is why I level my alts in Outland, Northrend or in Cataclysm Azeroth. You pick up a dozen of quests in a single hub and the game let's you sort out your own pathing.
That's true, but it's also by demand. Even as early as BC players wanted ways to level up faster. Also WoW has like 10 expansions worth of stuff that doesn't matter anymore. There has to be some level of guidance at this point.
That is just untrue, you can literally do anything you want when ever you want
It's so stupid it never leaves you alone to immerse yourself in the world....
'its a geomancer and it forgets its skills and headbutts me'
well it is a quilboar.........................................
In film they say "show, don't tell". Maybe the analog for games is "challenge, don't show or tell".
Your commentary at the end there about level scaling is one of the reasons I stopped playing retail WoW after Legion. When they introduced level scaling throughout the entirety of the game, it killed any incentive I had to play. It was incredibly stupid to me that I could kill a kobold in 2-3 hits at level 10, but that same kobold at level 50, 60, whatever, now took 20 seconds and 12 attacks to kill. Level scaling didn't just render leveling up ineffective; it actually did the reverse. It made you get weaker the more you leveled up. It's one reason why twinks will cap their level at around 10, because then they are the most powerful and OP they will ever be, and doing dungeon runs with, say, a level 10 or 11 twink Monk tank when they're one-shotting everything, and you simply cannot match them as you're leveling up at level 35, 40, 50, whatever, is just so incredibly stupid.
I can't eat a sandwich without mayo. But, I can eat one without mustard. So I'd have to pick mayo.
We ever gonna revisit BG3?
This is like my dad learning about video games
As a long time WoW player (and day9 fan) I find it fascinating how he is completely not drawn in by the games core systems. Talents, gear, to some extent leveling, etc. are all built to make you want to progress and get to the next objective - leveling is just a way to introduce it to you slowly. It is really interesting that despite being a super analytical SC player he isn't drawn into WoW's (imo very engaging) systems.
Its just not his thing. Perhaps had he played wow for years he would understand that retail wow is past that "new player" stuff he is wanting to experience.
He outlines the issue around 42 minutes or so. It relates to the problems with him getting engaged.
Talents and skill improvements and such mean nothing if you don't have a context for usefulness.
Vanilla WoW had the benefit of being one of the first reasonably immersive worlds you could engage with. Your motivation was to stay alive, engage with the world, and explore. Getting a 10% damage boost to melee or whatever was innately interesting because it allowed you, in all ways, to stay alive in the world, and get to explore more. But the motivator is never the 10% damage boost. The motivator is the world.
Retail works differently in that most of the worldside stuff has been sidelined for the most part. It's more to get people into the mechanical part of it, which can run somewhat well, but it's meaningless at game start.
Retail has a lot of problems actually getting new players into the game.
Like, try and frame your idea this way. Say you try to get a new player into the game. To do so, you could say "Oh, the game is so good - you get a +10% damage boost at level 10!"
That will not pull in any people. That's what's identified as a problem of context.
Like, there's a real reason to get people into games by talking about mechanics. Take Path of Exile. It's a very mechanics-side game. But then the onboarding that gets you into that isn't like "there's a belt that improves your summoning duration", but the very compelling selling point that all skills can be modified in a tremendous number of ways. When I tell them what makes the game exciting, I make the example of Fireball (which most gamers have some context for) and note that you can modify the number of balls fired, the duration of the burning, you can have it deal frost damage, ricochet, you can make it a spell that fires from a turret, all that... Some players don't care, but those that do want to try it out jump at the chance. That's why the game is succesful.
Now, Retail has a lot of that. But the tutorial is so afraid of putting the player in danger that you get served piles of enhancements against monsters that die in two hits anyways. It's an abject nonsensical experience and I'm right alongside day9 being baffled by it.
@@youngchristopher14 Yeah. I think he has said before that for a long while, all he played was Starcraft and absolutely nothing else.
Because he enjoys RPGs, and the modern wow player does not, they take every action to try and argue the RPG out of the MMO. Level scaling is just one example he articulated perfectly; The motivation to get stronger and to fight the big strong thing is gone, because everything is the same level as you (and never a challenge). The levelling process was optimized for powergamers rushing mirror mains to endgame, which is why it doesn't draw in literally fucking anybody anymore, in retail.
@@youngchristopher14 It depends on your preferences, really. But I suspect that the people who didn't like where WoW's design has gone have probably mostly stopped playing so that it becomes more and more self-reinforcing.
I've played WoW for years and for me end game was never 'the place to be'. I guess maybe that's because I'm more of a story / exploration-type player. I also liked the space older zones (pre-Cata) gave, especially the Barrens and Ashenvale Forest.
That's not to say later content is worse categorically but with Cataclysm especially (because that's the one time we could see a before-and-after) it feels like the devs wanted to fill up space and not give players a chance to get bored. Which is a fine motivation, I guess but and I'm not entirely sure how to phrase this, but to me it seems like a choice that removed something from the game.
The last time I've played was during Legion so I can't speak to later content, but while I've certainly enjoyed the game especially in the later years newer zones felt less like part of a world to explore and more like set dressing for people to pass the time until they get to the real stuff.
I dunno.
57:51 This part killed me 😂😂
Captain Garrick sounds like ashley williams from mass effect!
1:27:22 you had magic missiles and 2 fire spells and other usable items =) wow is also generally a multiplayer game, increasing the types of attacks you have by working together.
35:28 (ish) That Gnome is definitely voiced by the same guy who did Mayuri Kurotsuchi in Bleach. Some voices you just recognize instantly.
This version of the game is basically what Sean and his mods would've kept banning entire playthrough of Classic Era. The handhelding and "backseating" starts before you even touch the keyboard and it quite literally never stops. This time it's just not the chat backseating, but it's the game itself.
And that's something that killed the whole community and made the whole game into a pipe run with 95% of it being dead content until you reach max level of current expansion.
It does look shiny and new tho, with smoother animations. (Compared to Classic)
As far as level scaling, the game that made me hate it was actually Diablo 4. I went from disliking it to hating it. I remember when I got to fight The Butcher and went "Man, if I'd been a few levels lower I would have won" because I'd been using the same gear for a while.
This isn't world of warcraft, this is Fornite, this is Raid Shadow Legends, this is Bejeweled. they've massacred our boy.
Man that guy looks oddly familar to the dream character in bg3 haha 😉
What a boss move, going all-in on the bald while playing WoW retail to support Asmongold.
Egg Man Sean has returned
You can be critical of something without disliking it 😊
And more importantly, you can dislike something without it being a mortal stain on your character
i was going to agree until ☺, now i am spitefully against you
"Backseatboss" lol
24:45
Sean really relating to Gen Z lol
I am so glad that you tried playing WoW Classic without any addons so that you don't recognize the question marks on the map. That was added to the retail game since every player used an addon (and people playing classic are still using it and 90 % of the people don't even want to bother to do any quests without it) that gave you guidance on where to go to do the quests just how it was in your tutorial playthrough. I am not sure if there is an option in the settings to remove that but they should put that as if you never played before that really ruins the exploration part of the game.
About the zone scaling I really hate it too, as the only difficulty while leveling is trying to kill mobs that are higher level than you (the higher level the mob the less chance you can hit them and they can do double damage to you if they are +4 levels than you),but I understand why it is there - if it wasn't there you would never step to 90 % of the places on the map like ever because the old zones are old quest hubs and their whole purpose is leveling. To level to max level you can complete like 4-5 zones and you are done so all the other zones are completely unused (except the end zones of the current expansion)and if you start a new character(alt) you can choose 4-5 different zones and that way your leveling experience will be completely unique and enjoyable somewhat.
At a point in time in the expansions the max level for a character was 120! Imagine leveling 120 levels from 1 to 120 like in classic on average you spend like an hour to get a level - thats 120 hours until you get to the endgame. When you spend 120 hours on a modern game you are probably almost done with it like the whole playthrough and WoW retail says - oh you have just started now that you are max level the endgame content begins. I think because of that philosophy they redid leveling, squished the levels and numbers down (characters were doing millions of damage and they still do just not in one hit anymore) and made it so you can get to max level faster.
Anyways I am ending this wall of text with a message to say - I really like how you are noticing the good and the bad things of the game and realize that they may be good to some and bad to some. I think that's the whole problem of WoW retail - it tries to cater to such a wide audience and it is destined to fail because there are so many different WoW players that want to do different things in the game. Hope you enjoy the rest of your playthrough.
to be fair, they moved away from the exploration focus a while ago. modern wow doesnt really care if you explore. and its not jsut the addition of quest markers. The Ease of access to portals between major areas, the unlockign of most/all the flight points and changes to how they design quests (and areas) all point ot the devs minimnising the need to explore.
Its a shame for me, in vanilla i spent days walking around in wolf form on my Shammy exploring places in Kalimdor and the Easter Kingdoms i never should have gotten to.
My brother wrote a whole essay
@@RobotnikPlngas better to write an essay about something you care about than 1 sentence to take a shot at someone.
Man i wished you would do a 1-60 classic!
see i wish you played Classic a little bit longer, long enough to get Blink, Frost Nova, and Cone of Cold, then you feel like a real mage
I wanted to see him do the Deadmines
Damn Day9, looking fresh man. Nice cut!
I personally prefer retail over classic but c'est la vie. Something for everyone!
It took him 29 minutes to read a Spell description...
He doesn't understand what he wants is in the end game for retail rather than in the start like classic, but the problem then is the reliance on addons to do everything for the player. Hot button topic.
Honestly Watching this help me realize how much Retail actually sucks for beginners and makes me rather convinced my friends to play classic sod than Retail
Did he ever discover TAB targeting?
i believe if you are a brand new player, you are more or less forced to go to exile reach, only folks with alts get the option of starting zone or not
Damn that really sucks
@@AMVmushroom Not really, the found people were bouncing off the old quest zones because they don't teach you anything. The younger generation for various reasons needs structure and clear direction to be comfortable, Ambiguity and potential for failure are terrifying to them- Not knowing what to do makes them feel anxiety and shame. Exiles Reach retains players, they drop off in BFA content usually (I watch a lot of "first timer" videos)
Wild seeing someone play through the first time modern wow.
I can see why we dont get new players :D
that is a myth
@@lIIest It absolutely is not. Cope harder.
no chat no watch
Is Sean... Allergic to reading? Like, honestly? I know he hates backseating, but has he ever looked at the actual items in his bag? Or abilities? Or anything?
no he has not. he has also not done that in his vanilla "play through" because he had 0 interesst in the game in the first place. but thank god he made a "review"
2:04:52 you said it, brother
Watching your repeated heartbreak and sadness over the loss of the old-school friction in the game is very real to me, it's the very visceral impact of 20 years of streamlining of a game, for good and for bad. I also despise level scaling and the modern handholding of quest design, even as someone who still very much enjoys the questing experience of modern WoW. Season of Discovery has been a fun experience because it's classic design thrown at new content (in classic WoW, of course, so minus all that streamlining and dulling of edges)
I'm still someone who loves *both* versions of WoW, but I wish modern WoW would now take some lessons from the success of the return of Classic, and that friction that people still love, and apply them to the levelling experience, because it IS still a part of the game and should be treated with the care it deserves.
Personally I wish they removed the paywall on the level boost so that my friends can experience M+ without going through all other bullshit.
It’s tough to make the tutorial simple enough for people. People who haven’t played games and even people who haven’t used a keyboard are in the pool of new players. This tutorial is not for gamers.
I don't buy the "wow classic is about exploration, and wow retail is about killing bosses with your friends" excuse. The two are not mutually exclusive, and classic has both.
It's a bit of a shame that Sean is avoiding the multiplayer parts of these games because I do think that's where the differences are most tragic. In addition to classic giving more opportunities for self-driven goals, it also almost requires you to make other players part of the solution to those goals. In retail, not only does the game set all the goals for you, other players are *never* part of the solution to those goals. And by that I mean, other players' choices and behaviors. Classic is a social game where you and others work in concert toward your own goals. Retail is a silo'ed game where no other player's decisions or behaviors can possibly impact your experience, because that would be inconvenient.