The problem with World of Warcraft

When set next to more recent MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), World of Warcraft can look aged. It did, in fact, debut over a decade ago. Because of this and other factors, some say that the game has run its course and should be put out to pasture. However, to many like me who have played and loved this game throughout our childhood, WoW is not beyond repair. If developed correctly, World of Warcraft can be made great again.

My first and most major qualm with the direction WoW has taken is laser focus on developing the end-game. This is the root cause of many of the problems that plague the gameplay. Low level content has been all but abandoned in while Blizzard, the multimillion-dollar company that develops the game, pours all of their resources into maximum-level content. This makes the game world feel disjointed and isolated for new players.

Why is the leveling experience in WoW so bad? Perhaps because the first sixty levels have not seen any updates since 2010. While the level 110s are worried about the Legion (again), quest givers for lower level characters are still frantic about the long-dead villain Deathwing. This is confusing at best. The worst thing is that the leveling experience could easily be made smoother if Blizzard wanted to do it. Leveling should be something to be enjoyed, not a hurdle in order to get into the real meat of the game.

Some years ago, Blizzard introduced items called heirlooms which speed up the leveling process. This was provided as a Band-Aid to attempt to remedy the fact that the questing in WoW has become a laborious task. This, of course, ties into the previously mentioned focus on end-game content. Instead of making the gameplay enjoyable for everyone, Blizzard allows existing players to skip content while new players have to grind it through the monotony– and the worst part is that neither way is fun.

Blizzard should fix this issue by revamping the quests in such a way that they can stand the test of time. Instead of basing these quests on current, ever-changing in-game events, they would based on the constant, never-ending war between the Horde and the Alliance, which is the entire foundation of the story.

A purposefully vague story like I described earlier would be much preferred to the discontinuous goop found in the questing right now. It is easy to see why newcomers would be disinterested and confused about the game in its current state. That, to me, is a problem. If new players are not confronted by intriguing story, how can they experience the same magic that helped make World of Warcraft so successful in the first place?