What you need to know
- World of Warcraft is an industry-leading MMORPG, developed by Blizzard and now owned by Microsoft as part of its gaming division.
- The game is a legend, with 20-years of ceaseless operation and non-stop content updates.
- However, finding new players has been tough for the game generally, which hasn’t had a refreshed levelling experience since Cataclysm back in 2010.
- New players now start off in the recent “Dragonflight” expansion, and players discovered that while levelling there, you, in fact, cannot die.
- I wondered if this was intended to try and make the game as easy as possible for new players even if it took all of the risk out of the game. World of Warcraft Game Director Ion Hazzikostas confirmed to me today that it is unintended, however, that players should be permanently immortal.
World of Warcraft is a personal favorite and a beloved MMORPG comprised of millions of players, and it recently got a huge update.
The War Within expansion added some of the best story delivery the game has ever seen, complete with high-quality in-engine and pre-rendered cinematics and new gameplay features. In my World of Warcraft: The War Within review, I noted how the game has hit a high point not seen in years, and has an incredibly bright future ahead of it. That is, if you’re an existing player.
One of my biggest criticisms of World of Warcraft in recent years has been the new player experience. It lacks the breadth and immersion that the game had back in the vanilla and Cataclysm days, which featured nostalgic zones from Warcraft 3 in low-stakes localized “evergreen” experiences that connected players to their chosen race and faction. WoW has lacked this level of new-player immersion since Cataclysm’s 2010 revamp, even if it’s mechanically more polished than ever.
With the launch of The War Within, Blizzard moved the new player experience to the most recent expansion, Dragonflight, which begins with a bit of a time skip going in. The story there is a little less disorienting than starting at previous expansions, which were effectively in a mid-saga state. In terms of immersion and wonderment, it’s a far cry from the new player experience of the original base game and the Cataclysm revamp, but it’s better than the previous efforts there to some degree. But trying this experience for myself recently on an alt, I noticed something odd. New World of Warcraft players couldn’t actually die. However, World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas confirmed to us today that this, is in fact, a bug.
I speculated in my original piece that the “immortality” buff you get as a new player in World of Warcraft could be a bug, given that there’s no real explanation or tooltip for it. And indeed, it seems that the cooldown on this feature was not implemented correctly.
“The seemingly immortal gameplay for players in current Dragonflight leveling is a bug,” Ion Hazzikostas, Game Director, explained. “When we converted Dragonflight to become the new default leveling experience, we received feedback from playtesting and user focus groups that some of the zones and content that were originally built for veteran level 70+ players could feel overwhelming to true new players who were still trying to learn the basics of combat.”
“In The War Within, we added a “training-wheels” set of zone buffs themed around the different dragonflights, intended to only apply if you are a new player on your first playthrough (i.e. haven’t unlocked Chromie Time, never had a max-level character, etc.). One of these buffs is a “cheat death” that should save you from one death every so often. Unfortunately, there is a bug with that buff, and the cooldown isn’t working. We’re fixing this as we speak, and it should be resolved in the coming days.”
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Will future WoW expansions revamp the new player experience?
World of Warcraft’s latest expansion represents an on-going upswing for the franchise, after years of near and total misses. Franchise co-creator Chris Metzen has returned to lead the game’s story direction, and the big Microsoft acquisition has reduced corporate-level meddling in the game reportedly seen under the Activision Bobby Kotick regime. The War Within started off a new story saga focusing on the Void herald Xal’atath, and Blizzard has, for the first time, offered a glimpse at what other future expansions hold as well.
RELATED: World of Warcraft: The War Within story overview
We know that the next expansion, Midnight, takes place in the region of Quel’thalas. This area of the northern Eastern Kingdoms comprises starting zones for Blood Elf, Forsaken, and Worgen players — at least historically. Part of me wonders if Blizzard might gradually “remake” the old school zones as part of expansion content, and then repurpose them as new player zones in the future. Night elves got a new city in the form of Bel’ameth during Dragonflight, which I also felt could serve pretty well as a starting area for new night elf players as well.
As World of Warcraft heads towards its 20th anniversary, I can’t help but wonder why there’s not a bigger sense of urgency in improving the immersion for new players. Cataclysm back in 2010 was a truly great effort to achieve this, adding new features to classic zones, while sprinkling in updated lore for various races. I can’t imagine the scale of the undertaking it would require to get the entire Azerothian landscape up to par with the game’s modern tech and standards, though. It’s easy for me to sit here and reminisce, but games like this are more expensive to make than ever before.
At the very least, removing the “immortality” buff from Dragonflight should help keep World of Warcraft feeling “engaging” and challenging to some degree, at least in terms of gameplay. I’m still unsure how appealing it is for new players to drop randomly in the middle of a big new saga on a random island, rather than experience the lore of their chosen race as was designed back in the day. But keeping the current player base satisfied is clearly an intense amount of work. Perhaps Microsoft should throw some more investment at the game to upgrade the new player experience? Again, easy for me to say, perhaps not so easy to do.
