Start Over: Neverwinter's M21 Update

We certainly seem to be in the midst of a frenetic mmoprg news cycle right now. Every day seems to bring some new, surprising or unanticipated announcement but I don't think I've seen anything in the last few weeks quite as left-field as Cryptic's revelation than they plan on completely re-writing the entire concept of Neverwinter Online and taking the changes live next week!

I first read about it on MassivelyOP, where I had to go back and read it a second time to make sure I wasn't seeing things. Shintar at Neverwinter Thoughts, plays NWO a lot more often and at a much higher level than I ever have and is therefore far more likely than I am to know what's going on there, seemed just as blind-sided as I was, describing the upcoming changes as "completely out of the blue".

The headline change is a level squish that makes World of Warcraft's recent re-alignment look like a mere course correction. When the M21 update lands next week all existing characters will be equalized at Level 20, the new maximum level. That's a dizzyingly steep drop from the current cap of 80. 

As the FAQ at the Arc website explains

"If you are at endgame currently, you will see your level become 20 but everything will play as it did when you were 80. If you weren’t yet at level 80, you will become level 20." 

There's no stat squish to accompany the level squish. I don't remember enough about how NWO stats work to make any sense of that but the explanation of the reasoning behind the change does mention that "when reaching endgame, the focus turns to item level", something which supposedly confused players. 

The new baseline would appear to be Item Level 20. Current level 80s keep whatever Item Level above that they already have while every character that hadn't made cap before the squish gets a care package "to help get your item level to 20k which is where endgame starts now". Brand new characters made after the patch will still have to do their twenty levels the hard way before they can join in.

We'll have to see how this works in practice but on the face of it it doesn't sound obviously less confusing than doing eighty levels then shifting focus to your gear. That would seem to me to be the way most level-based mmorpgs work and I'd have thought most players would be familiar with it by now.

With a change this sweeping you might wonder what the point would be in keeping levels at all. The ostensible reason is "to connect better with D&D while also helping players understand what to focus on to improve their character", an argument I find less than convincing. Reading the details of how those twenty squished levels are going to work, it seems clear they'll be little more than an extended tutorial.

The unfortunate truth, at least as I see it, is that the underlying, organizing principles of the mmorpg genre are almost completely at odds with those of traditional Dungeons and Dragons. Mmorpgs are open-ended, exceptionally repetitive and need to be able to provide activity and entertainment for players 24/7/365, possibly for decades. 

 

D&D is all about scheduled, finite play sessions and stories and campaigns that follow a narrative to a conclusion. No-one grinds the same dungeon fifty times to get better gear in a table-top D&D game.

Whatever fudge developers attempt, that's a circle that's never going to be squared. And I wonder if that's the real motivation. 

My first thought as I read the original news story was inevitably of Star Wars Galaxies infamous NGE - the New Game Experience that fundamentally changed the nature of that game and left thousands of players bereft, angry and determined never to forgive or forget.  

Sony Online Entertainment and its CEO John Smedley took the hit for that but it eventually became an open secret that the change had been made at the direct instigation of the owners of the I.P. LucasArts. As Shintar speculates, it's not impossible that Wizards of the Coast had something to do with Neverwinter's sudden change of direction.

I like a corporate conspiracy theory as much as the next person but it seems a bit unlikely that WotC would care that much at this stage of Neverwinter's life. They seem quite content to let all kinds of peculiar things be done with the license and NWO seems well inside the parameters of what they'd consider appropriate.

Shintar also suggests the always-believable explanation of personal hubris. If true, this would hardly be the first time some high-up's vanity project or bonnet full of bees had led to a major change no-one else wanted or even understood.

I have a third theory I'd like to offer. It occured to me that what this change will do is establish a clear benchmark for a future "Neverwinter Online Classic" server. NWO is a game that's changed more than most and Cryptic is a developer that feels less likely than many to be able to reverse those changes. Except now they can.

The level squish doesn't just remove sixty levels by number, it removes some, possibly most, of the zones where players would previously have gone to gain the experience needed to level to eighty. As the FAQ explains

 "Certain former leveling adventure zones have been “vaulted”, meaning we’ve removed them from the leveling flow and access to players. Vaulted adventure zones may return at a later time in a different format."

That seems very... thoughtful. Someone's definitely looking ahead. But wait, there's more!

"A lot of the rewards were adjusted to make sure the player is geared out well while leveling. Some rewards that were no longer needed were turned off so new ones no longer drop. They still exist and can be repurposed in the future if that is ever wanted or needed."

So the zones are all safely tucked away in the vault and so are all the "rewards" players can no longer get from them. Give it a couple of years for nostalgia to do its work, let demand build up, then ride in on the white charger and bring back "Classic" Neverwinter.

Too subtle for Cryptic? Probably. But I'm starting to notice quite a few clues that suggest a number of developers have noticed just how well WoW Classic has been doing. Maybe EverQuest and Runescape didn't quite have the industry profile for their success to trigger dollar signs and certainly rushed opportunities like Rift or LotRO wouldn't have convinced anyone the past was the future but Classic and now Burning Crusade are a lot harder to miss.

I would guess that retro servers are probably part of the ten-year plan for would-be big-ticket mmorpgs these days. If you're spending millions of dollars and several years building a game you hope and expect is going to hold players attention and loyalty for five or ten years, at least, the kind of genre successes you'll be taking instruction from will already have some form of retro/nostalgia offer as part of the package. 

The developers of those older games had to make the genre up as they went along. They had no idea how long their games would last. They tended to think in terms of three to five years followed by a sequel. Reality for most of them turned out very differently. Mmorpgs tend to hang around a lot longer than ever seemed likely while sequels have tended not to do so well.

It would be almost irresponsible for an mmorpg debuting in the 2020s not to have at least some kind of plan for eventual Classic servers. At the very least you'd hope there'd be a nice, safe, secure copy of the original build tucked away in a safe, somewhere. 

If you're stuck with a game you've been fiddling about with for years, though, one where no-one bothered to keep the bits that fell off, well, you might just feel one, last really big revamp, with the previous version neatly stowed away for later, might just do the job.

It's just a conspiracy theory. For it to work, though, the new version has to be accepted by enough players for the game to remain viable but not so well-liked hardly anyone misses the old one.

Good luck with that, Cryptic.

Out-Foxed

 

When I read Dara's comment on yesterday's post, it occured to me that some of the assumptions I'd been making about unlocking the Vulpera race for my World of Warcraft probably didn't make a whole lot of sense. I've been following the story of the addition of the foxlike "allied race" to WoW since I first heard about it back in June of last year but only by way of sporadic mentions on Massively OP and the occasional blog.

I knew the Vulpera came as part of Battle for Azeroth, albeit as a late addition, arriving with Patch 8.3 at the start of this year. At the time, that meant you'd need to own BfA, which I didn't, and to have a near-max level character capable of killing stuff there, which I hadn't. You would also, of course, have to be subscribed, which I wasn't.

In addition, as I thought I understood it, there was a hefty reputation requirement and a quest chain to complete. That was about as much as I knew, and since I had no intention of buying the expansion at the time, that was where I left things, until more information began to filter out in the run-up to the launch of this year's expansion, Shadowlands.

Again I was picking up the pieces as I happened upon them in articles about the level squish and the upcoming pre-patch. By a few weeks ago I'd gathered that the reputation requirement was going to go away and access to all Battle for Azeroth content was going to be rolled into the regular subscription. Better yet, with the squish and the new leveling regime, a good portion of BfA would drop into the laps of players using the endless free trial.

Until this morning that was about as far as I'd taken it. In my mind I'd already decided I would subscribe, sooner rather than later, probably just for one month, so I could level up high enough to complete the questline and unlock the fox. I knew the Vulpera were a Horde-only race so I also assumed I'd need to level a Horde character, although if you'd asked me why an Alliance character wouldn't be able to do it I wouldn't have been able to give you much of an answer.

With Dara's comment the penny finally dropped. My idea that you needed to be the equivalent of a pre-squish 110 to start anything in Battle for Azeroth zones had to be pure tosh, didn't it? You can level in any expansion, including BfA, from ten to fifty now, can't you? 

The fearsome werewolf hunter with her narcoleptic pony and trained attack sheep.

I ought to know. I've been writing post after post about it for a week or more. You'd have thought it might have dawned on me sooner.  I even leveled my worgen hunter to the free cap of twenty last night in BfA zone Tirargarde Sound and still never made the connection.

Slapping myself for being so stupidly slow on the uptake I decided it was past time to go read up on the actual process of unlocking the allied races rather than working on hearsay and supposition. Dara mentioned that what I'd been thinking of as a questline was in fact an achievement (albeit one consisting of having completed a string of quests) so I started by reading up on "Secrets in the Sands".

From there I went via Reddit and the offical WoW Forums bfore ending up on Icy Veins. As usual, none of them was wholly to be trusted. Most sources still claim you need to be Exalted with the Voldunai, for example, and I didn't see any mention of the actual new level requirement for adventuring in the zone, Vol'dun. 

As Dara explains in a follow-up comment,  during most of the BfA era it was possible to address the zones in the expansion in any order because the content was designed to scale apropriately. It still does, to a degree, but as Wilhem makes clear in his post about leveling in the squished Wrath of the Lich King, "while the expansion now scales from 10 to 50, the individual zones are not all equally accessible.  There are different ranges for the zones."

As you can see from his list, though, some of those ranges are pretty generous. Two-thirds of them stretch from twenty to fifty. I was still hopeful that Vol'Dun might fall within the range of my new goblin shaman, at least by the time she caught the worgen hunter up and dinged twenty.

Can't help feeling there's a bit of "give with one hand, take with the other" going on here.

 

Not really trusting much that I read about WoW right now, I figured the best way to find out would be to log in and see for myself. Fortunately Blizzard have seen fit to include the new level ranges on the in-game map, so I was quickly able to confirm that Vol'dun is intended for characters between thirty-five and fifty.

Clearly my goblin wasn't going to be helping any foxfolk without doing a good deal more busy work for the trolls. Since I had her there anyway I knocked out a couple more levels, taking her to fifteen, but it didn't seem nearly as much fun as what the worgen had been doing. 

That was when I began to wonder whether, with the faction requirement gone, it might be possible for an Alliance character to swoop in, grab the necessary quests and knock out the achievement, which would presumably be account-wide, thereby unlocking the option to create a Vulpera character on the other side of the barricades.

I did a bit of checking on that. I found someone who said they'd done it. There's always one, isn't there?

You can't, in fact. As Dara clarifies in the second comment, the Secrets in the Sands achievement is Horde-only. Each of the two factions get separate zone storylines in BfA (probably in all expansions, I imagine) and this one is exclusively the property of the Horde.

Didn't stop me checking for myself, even so. The way things are in Azeroth at the moment it would be a brave player who took anything for granted without checking for themselves. I re-subbed my account and dusted off my highest character, a now-thirty-seven dwarf hunter. Perfect for the zone's required level range.

I think you mean "stay out of the way and don't touch anything" don't you?

 

After re-taking all his talents and sorting out his bags I watched a You Tube video to show me how to get him to Vol'dun. First he needed to get to Kul Tiras so I ran him through the meeting with the King in Stormwind. When he met Jaina on the docks he got the option to skip the Kul Tiras opening quests altogether but I figured he could use the xp so I took them anyway.

With that done, the trip to Vol'dun was simple enough. Just a boat trip from Kul Tiras. I was interested to see that the Admiral still offered him the choice of all four zones. At thirty-seven my hunter would be above the lower limit for all of them so it makes sense but I wonder if the game filters the options for lower-level characters? I ought to test that with my level twenty-five warlock, sometime.

In Vol'dun there was some business with a landing craft and a flare gun and then we were free to explore. I tried to google the exact location of the questgiver I wanted but I couldn't find anything much more specific than that it was in the North East of the zone near somewhere called the Abandoned Burrows.

As it happens, the Alliance foothold is also in the North East. I set out to look for fox prints. It wasn't long before I found a clutch of Vulperas being held captive by the indigenous snake people. They wouldn't speak to me even after I killed their captors. Neither would some freed foxes I ran into, nor the Vulpera flight master. At least they didn't attack me on sight like the snakes.

Don't give me the silent treatment. I know you can hear me!

 

A short while later I came across a couple of named Vulpera with a caravan. I thought I recognized their names as the ones who began the questline although now I think back on it I'm not sure. They were clearly supposed to be there to offer some kind of quest to someone. Just not to me.

Satisfied that there'd be no Alliance shortcut I decided to return to a modified version of the original plan. I'll need a Horde character of around level thirty-five, which is considerably better than having to get one to fifty or even forty-five. I don't think I can face another twenty levels with the trolls so I'll probably shift to another expansion then come back.

Given that the worgen hunter did five levels in an evening yesterday and the dwarf hunter went from thirty-seven to thirty-nine in a couple of hours, it shouldn't take too long. Shintar timed her journey from nought to fifty at around twenty-six hours and I imagine it slows up at least a little towards the end.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to it. It's strange how, after lionizing Classic this time last year for being in almost every respect the antithesis, I find myself having a fine time leveling in Retail. I guess I just like levelling, period.

Still a lot of hoops to jump through just to be able to play a cute fox, though, isn't it?

Figuring It Out

 My experiments with World of Warcraft's new leveling options continue. Largely unsuccessfully.

Well, not unsuccessfully in terms of the levelling itself, I guess. That's going fine. I played my goblin shaman for a couple of hours last night and she went from ten to thirteen, which is level thirty in old money.

As I commented this morning over at Ulalu's blog, I'm finding the new system unexpectedly confusing. I thought the whole point of the revamp was to make everything simpler and clearer. It seems to have had the opposite effect, at least on me.

So far I've made two new characters, one Alliance and one Horde, both on the same unsubscribed account with no max-level characters. I've used the endless free trial, which allows you to make characters and play them to the new level twenty, which would be the mid-forties under the old method of counting.

Both characters were offered the option of starting in either their original, racial starting zones or in the new, universal starting zone, Exile's Reach. Supposedly only "veteran" accounts get that option. Having completed the new tutorial zone, however, neither received the dialog option I was reliably informed they should have had that would have allowed them to opt out of the introductory tour of their respective capital cities in favor of moving straight to the expansion of their choice.

As things stand I have a level ten worgen hunter in Stormwind who has visited Chromie, the expansion-of-choice facilitator, only to be told to finish the tour and come back later, and a level thirteen goblin shaman, now committed to helping the trolls of Zandalar with their seemingly endless series of trivial chores.

Anyone else getting those Roger Dean flashbacks again?.

 

I was planning on taking the shaman to see Orgrimmar's version of Chromie once her introductory tour ended but the whole thing moved so seamlessly into the beginning of Battle for Azeroth I didn't even spot the join. I was enjoying the pretty good BfA opening movie before I knew what was happening and by then it was too late.

Which is fine. I'm determined to get my Vulpera fox-person started at some point and to do that I'll need a Horde character capable of getting the quests, for which they'll need to be, I'm guessing, at least level forty-five, which would have been one hundred and ten, entry level for the expansion when BfA launched. I'll have to subscribe to get that high, of course, and for all I know I might need to do the last five levels as well. I'll find out when I get there.

There seems to be a lot of that going on right now. The only way to find out how things work is to try them for myself. Just looking stuff up on the internet isn't cutting it. I'm not finding my experience in game to be an exact match with what I'm reading. 

It's maybe not all that surprising. There are a lot of moving parts. Does it make a difference whether the account is subbed or not? Does it matter whether you have a maximum level character? Does that mean the maximum possible at the time the account was last subbed or the maximum during Battle for Azeroth? Is the game checking flags for things you've done, maybe by way of achievements? Does it know whether you really have already made yourself familiar with the capital cities or is it just going to take your word for it? 

I'd hate to be a street-cleaner in this town.

 

Once you've gotten started on Battle for Azeroth content, can you just drop out, talk to Chromie and start over somewhere else? Can you do that over and over again? And what if you don't take the tour or talk to Chromie? How about if you just arrive in Stormwind, fresh from Exile's Reach, then turn around, walk out the gate and go start leveling in Westfall and Redridge?

Honestly, this feels to me exactly like a beta. I'm really hyped to go out and experiment with all this stuff. I feel like making a slew of new characters and trying out all the options and seeing what I can break. I'd like to try doing the same things on an established free account, an established, subscribed account and a brand-new, free account to see what the differences are.

One thing I'm pretty sure about is that doing all that unpaid testing would be a lot more intellectually stimulating than playing the game itself. As Ula points out, leveling in Retail WoW is almost entirely challenge-free. So far I've found it next to impossible to get into any kind of trouble. Most mobs die in two casts. Healing seems a distant memory. I've yet to need to eat or drink anything, make anything, buy anything or do anything at all other than click on NPCs and equip quest rewards.

Hey! None of this was my idea!

 

As far as I've gotten, the game pretty much plays itself. How am I staying focused? Or even awake?

Well, the scenery in Zandalar is spectacular. WoW's graphics may be stylized but they very definitely don't look outdated. Exploring would probably be fun, just for the screenshots, if I ever managed to step off the questline conveyor belt.

Speaking of quests, they literally never stop. Every one leads inexorably to another. There is no respite. At all. The writing is... okay, I guess. It's better than functional but not by a lot. I'm a dedicated reader of quest dialog in all games I play but here I do find myself skipping lines, paragraphs even, almost involuntarily. 

The trolls seem like they ought to be amusing but somehow they rarely are. There's clearly a discussion to be had about their ethnicity. I'm guessing that's a converation that's been had elsewhere, already. It would pretty much have to have been. I can just about deal with the voice-acting but the phonetic rendering of the accent in the quest text is... difficult.

I feel like I want to say something but maybe I shouldn't?

 

As for the action, the quest designers clearly try to keep themselves amused by trying every variation in the playbook, even when the result mitigates against reason, sanity or enjoyment. I'm all for a bit of variety but I find myself wishing I could just go somewhere and kill stuff for a level without having to deal with the minutiae of troll politics for a while. Or doing their tedious chores.

Even so, the time passed fairly painlessly last night as I burned through all my rested experience and added three levels to my tally. I'm reasonably keen to carry on. Can't say I feel very involved, though. It's a weirdly passive experience, somehow.

My mind keeps drifting back to the externals. I really would like to get to the bottom of how this new leveling process works. Only I suspect that would take a lot more effort and time than I'm going to feel comfortable giving it. 

It's one thing to explore the structural limits of a game in beta but it seems kind of strange doing the same thing in the latest live release of one of the biggest, oldest, most successful games of its kind in the entire world. You'd figure there were people being paid to do that, wouldn't you?

I Remembered You Older And Taller

Where I live, World of Warcraft's big level squish patch landed around two o' clock in the afternoon. I'd been reading about it without paying quite as much attention as i should have been so I was expecting it last night. 

I logged in after work yesterday, went through Blizzard's security routine, which apparently kicks in if you haven't played since this time last year, downloaded a three gigabyte update and logged in to see my characters as I'd left them, unsquished.

Reading the patch notes more carefully I realized we in the U.K. weren't getting the update until October 14th. The servers went down around dawn and came back up just after lunchtime. That suited me well enough. I didn't have to go to work today and I had nothing else planned.

Just after two I went to log in only to find Blizzard was "unable to authenticate" my account "at this time". They politely suggested I try again later, which I did. About thirty seconds later, in fact, and then again a few more times for good measure. No luck.

It seemed like a sound approach. I mean, doing the same thing over and over in the hope of a different outcome is always a solid choice, right? Still, I thought maybe I ought to check. 

Googling to see what was up I found several sources suggesting if I just kept trying I might get in. See? I knew it!

Meanwhile, Blizzard's Twitter account was busy apologizing

As I write, four and a half hours later, the apologies have stopped but the investigation continues

I might be taking a different tone if I was still waiting to get in but in fact the internet was correct.

After a couple of tries I closed the launcher and re-started it. That got me past the "cannot authenticate" issue and into the real patch, all thirty-four gigabytes, the previous evening's three having been merely an amuse-bouche.

Blizzard might have been having problems with the log-in servers but there was no holding the patcher. The whole thing was done in a matter of minutes and I logged in to see... the Shadowlands trailer. 

I've seen it before. It's quite good. I happily watched it again. And then the game kicked me back to login.

At this point I might have started to get annoyed only there wasn't time. I entered my details yet again and there I was, at character select, looking at the damage the squish had wrought. Or, more accurately, at a massive warning preparing me for the emotional impact of what I was about to see.

Which, at first glance, didn't seem to be all that much, possibly because I don't have any max-level characters and I can't remember exactly what levels the characters I do have have might have been before the squish, even though I was looking right at them only last night. 

It took me a couple of minutes to work out what had happened to whom. My Hunter, who was around about level 100, I think, had squished down to thirty-seven. My Warlock, who I seem to recall being in the sixties, was now twenty-five, along with my Death Knight, who hasn't been played in a decade, so what does he care?

Those three were all flagged "Inactive" because as yet the account remains unsubscribed. All of the rest were now well below the threshold for WoW's version of free-to-play, which remains at level twenty despite the squish.

This presents me with a rather pleasant quandry. I had fully intended to resubscribe for at least a month so as to enjoy the manifold changes, along with the pre-expansion events. As it turns out, however, it seems the squish has effectively doubled the leveling opportunities available under the endless free trial or whatever they call it.

Since I had been thoroughly enjoying leveling several of these characters (plus my goblin on a different account) until they ran into the buffers at twenty, I don't feel any great need to give Blizzard any money just yet. I ought to be able to get quite a bit more out of the unpaid version before I free-cap my panda monk, my gnome hunter, my goblin (whatever class she is - I forget), my worgen druid...

Yeah... not really feeling it.

 

As for the pre-expansion events, as far as I can tell, they won't start until two weeks before the expansion itself and as yet we don't have a date for that. I'm only really interested in seeing the zombie invasions of the home cities, anyway, and I doubt you'll need to be subbed for those.

I will eventually have to subscribe just so I can level a Horde character into Battle for Azeroth if I want to do the quests to open the Vulpera race. Once that's done, though, I think I can make and play my fox for free.

All of which seems a bit of a shot in the foot for Blizzard. I mean, I was all set to subscribe but now they've made it so I barely need to think about it and certainly not yet. I'm quite surprised they didn't squish the free to play offer down to Level 10, which would have allowed the exact same content access for what is effectively supposed to be a free trial. Glad they didn't.

When I was able, I logged in several characters to see what was what. I started with my now-level six night-elf druid, followed by my now-level ten gnome hunter and finally my now-level nine worgen druid. 

All of them were just where I'd left them. All of them had just a single hot bar up and that nearly empty. I spent a while re-opening hot bars and re-installing spells and abilities. Everything looked very tidy but I couldn't remember what I used to be able to do clearly enough to know if much had changed.  

Thinking about how much leveling fun I might have ahead of me and also wondering about the supposed new by-expansion leveling paths I was curious to see how fast squished xp might flow. The worgen druid had a host of quests up on the tracker so I started working through some of those and in about half an hour she was level twelve. 

Hold on, let me get my breath...

Granted she had full rested xp but that did seem fast. With a cap of twenty that looks like no more than a couple of good sessions per character. According to the handy conversion chart included in TAGN's post on the patch, the new level twenty should get me to somewhere in the old mid-forties. I'd have thought that would take longer but maybe my estimations are being tainted by my time in Classic last year. Still, hardly seems like enough time to get through an entire expansion.

However it pans out, it's a whole lot of free content I didn't have access to yesterday. As I was saying a while ago, what with FFXIV raising the free trial bar to sixty, Lord of the Rings giving away most of the quests and now this I can't see why I'd pay for anything. And that was before I'd even heard of Genshen Impact. Not to mention all the other MMORPGs I can play for free - EverQuest, EverQuest II, Guild Wars 2, Elder Scrolls Online... remind me why anyone ever pays for games again?

I'm back at work tomorrow but after that I have five straight days to do whatever I feel like and I think I might feel like making a new character and playing through WoW's fresh-paint one-to-ten zone, Exile's Reach. It sounds uncannily like half a dozen other intro/tutorial zones I've played through in other games. 

Not that I'm saying Blizzard like to iterate on other developers' ideas. Or that that would be a bad thing. Then again, I'm not sure anyone else has tried taking away more than half the hard-earned levels of players who spent a decade and half working on them, along with 96% of their power. I guess we'll see how that works out and who, if anyone, decides to follow suit.

When You Close The Door... : World of Warcraft

As the alert reader will have noticed, I haven't posted about World of Warcraft Classic for quite a while. The last time it got a post all to itself was back in mid-November, when I explained why I'd stopped playing.

I ended that post by saying "I am still going to get to 60. And I will certainly be back when Battlegrounds appear." Well, I haven't and I wasn't. And it doesn't look like I will be.

It took me a couple more months before I decided to pull the plug. I have a habit of letting subscriptions run on even though i'm not using whatever it is that I'm paying for. Then one day I found myself looking at a £5.00 sub for an Amazon Prime channel and wondering whether it was worth it...

So last week I cancelled my WoW sub. It seems a little ironic, after all the angst over Blitzchung and the boycott. Actually, in light of the lukewarm reaction to Patch 8.3 and the savaging of the Warcraft III reforge, it seems Blizzard need no outside help in dragging their stock price down.

In the end it was a fairly easy decision to make. There really hasn't been a moment since I stopped playing when I thought to myself "I miss Classic" or "I really should get back to leveling my Hunter". On the odd occasion when the game crossed my mind it was with something of a mental shudder.

The reasons for that are... strange. While it's certainly true to say the thought of grinding out those last half dozen levels in the fifties held very little appeal, what put me off the most was thinking about what the game looked like.

Which makes very little sense. I always thought WoW was a pretty good-looking game, even on the "Classic" settings I was using. I've taken a phenomenal number of screenshots as I roamed around Azeroth, most of them because I very much liked what I was seeing.

And yet, after a couple of months of EverQuest II, my eyes seem to have adjusted. It's not the greatest-looking game in the world; lots of people think it's downright ugly and in places it can be. But I'm attuned to its beauty. The very thought of staring at the different textures and surfaces of Classic for any prolonged period of time oddly set my teeth on edge.

That's just stupid and I know it is. I also know that if I logged in the feeling would dissipate and vanish in nano-seconds. But when you already don't especially want to do something, even an irrational reason adds considerable weight to your determination not to do it. Well, it does to mine...

I was more tempted to log in some of my characters in the Live game (are we still calling it "Retail"?). The graphics there are different. They wouldn't be a hindrance.

No, the bouncer on the door of Retail is the gameplay. Last time I tried to level my Hunter in the 90s it wasn't the graphics that stopped me. It was the boredom. He was trying to make some progress in the Legion expansion, which I hear is reckoned to be one of the good ones, but the quests were beyond tedious. I couldn't make myself care about any of it so I stopped.

I had a bit more luck with my Warlock in his forties or fifties (I forget which) but if I'm going to level a Warlock in that bracket I might as well go back and work on the one I left in Classic.

And then there's that superginormous elephant taking up the entire room: the Level Squish. What on earth is the point of leveling any character in Retail right now, when you know that in a few months you can do it on fast-forward, and in an expansion of your choosing? I have a vague idea I might re-sub then and level my Panda monk up in Mists of Pandaria, which everyone seems to agree is one of the best of all the expansions.

There's very little chance of me buying the Shadowlands expansion, of course. Just look at how much play I got out of Legion. It took me two years after I was given it to even log in and then I didn't like it.

I did very much like the Legion pre-events, though. They were  great. I re-subbed just to do them. If Shadowlands can come up with something as good I might do the same - and then carry on long enough to do the Pandaria thing.

I'm assuming the Level Squish will be available for everyone, whether they buy Shadowlands or not. It would be a bit weird if it wasn't, although I think I remember someone confirming that you would still be able to level the old way if you wanted to. Although presumably not at the old speed...

Anyway, I'm still subbed into early March so I could pop in for a run around before the doors swing shut. And after that I can play my under-twenties on Retail if the mood takes me. Maybe just writing this post will put me in a WoW mood. It's happened before.

For now, though, it's goodbye to Azeroth. It was fun until it wasn't, which is about as much as I expect from any game.

It'll Squish: World of Warcraft

Perhaps the most interesting news to come out of BlizzCon this year, for me at least, was the full reveal of what's been called the "Level Squish" for World of Warcraft.  Rumor and speculation have been rife for some time concerning Blizzard's desire to cut the amount of levelling needed to reach the cap in WoW but now we have some actual facts about how it's going to work.

The official press release sums it up like this:

"Every Level Is Meaningful: Shadowlands will introduce a new leveling system, meant to provide a meaningful sense of advancement with every level achieved. Current max-level characters will begin Shadowlands at level 50 and work toward the new level cap of 60."

There's a lot more to it than just slashing the number next to your character's name by more than fifty percent. PCGamer explains some more of the detail:

"...when you start a new character they will start at level one in an entirely new zone designed to better showcase what makes World of Warcraft special and fun. Once you're level 10, you can choose an expansion to level through that will take you the entire way from level 10 to level 50. From there you can go onto Shadowlands. Each and every level will also unlock a new ability, talent, or some other upgrade so that each level is meaningful."

That's still only scratching the surface. Massively:OP posted a much more nuanced explanation of what's being proposed, drawn directly from the Shadowlands panel at BlizzCon, complete with screenshots of the PowerPoint presentation. The gist here is that, to quote Justin "Syp" Olivetti, "World of Warcraft’s leveling process will be more like a choose-your-own-adventure than ever before… at least for veteran players and their alts. For brand-new players, however, it’s more of a strict path".

The idea is that players coming fresh to WoW will begin in a brand new zone called "Exile's Reach". They'll stay there until Level 10, whereupon they'll "tackle a mini-dungeon with two bosses, visit their respective capital cities, and then be off to a one-two punch of Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands for their 10-60 run."

Veteran players rolling alts will have a choice of Exile's Reach or any of the current starting zones. From there, after a trip to their faction's capital, they'll be able to speak to an NPC called "Chromie" to pick an expansion from any of those released before Shadowlands. That character will then be locked into the chosen expansion, which will provide sufficient xp to take them all the way to Level 50, after which it's into the latest content to finish the final ten levels alongside everyone else.

If you really balk at being railroaded this way then fine, Blizz is cool with that. You do you. As Syp puts it, "If you don’t really care about doing a specific expansion, you will have the choice to roam the world and do whatever you like".

Good luck with that, though. XP gain will also be increased (for everyone, whichever leveling path they take) by an estimated sixty or seventy percent. Since current Live rates already make it impossible to see more than a fraction of the content before outlevelling it, after Shadowlands releases Azeroth is going to zip past the windows of your speeding level-train in a blur.

I've been thinking about all of this quite a bit since I first heard about it. My initial reaction was something of a splutter. Really? How is this a good idea? Fix the problem of people not finding leveling engaging or meaningful by making it even less engaging and meaningful?

It seemed that the lesson Blizzard had learned from the enthusiastic take-up of Classic was "people like getting stuff for levelling so let's give them stuff every time they ding and make it so they ding faster so they feel like they're getting even more stuff!". They seemed to have missed the point that the reason people found that process so satisfying was a) because it felt like a pay-off for significant investment of time and effort and b) the new abilities received with each Ding made the characters feel more powerful, more flexible, more capable and more able to handle what came next.

By fast-forwarding the rewards so they come so thick and fast there's no time either to look forward to getting them or appreciate the difference they make to gameplay seems likely to defeat the entire object. It's hardly thrilling to gain the ability to breathe underwater if you never need to go swimming in the first place because none of your main sequence quests require it, for example.

Once the initial shock and outrage had faded, though, I began to come round to the proposed changes, at least somewhat. Playing Classic right now, I am already running into a bit of a wall through the combination of repeated content, lengthy travel and slow xp gain. What feels compulsively entertaining on a first run-through starts to seem less so on a second and third, especially when playing several characters of the same faction, concurrently.

This is largely a function of the retro nature of the Classic experience. Playing an unfamiliar MMORPG, it might take many months, even years, before the content begins to go stale, something that was even more true back in the Golden Age, when the genre itself was less well-understood. But Classic isn't new any more and neither are MMORPGs; that process doesn't take as long.

Retail WoW is already a very different beast from either Classic or the WoW of various periods in the past. And we have Classic, for those who want something approximating the original experience. In the future we might even have Classic servers for all the various Expansions, if the demand exists. Who knows where Blizzard will take the concept over the next decade?

Meanwhile there's the main game. And it is a game now, not a virtual world. The people in charge of WoW's future clearly see it as belonging to a very particular audience: people who want to Raid. Retail WoW has become a conveyor belt to some very specific content and the Level Squish is designed to make that belt move faster and deliver its passengers more smoothly to the endpoint.

Curiously, the specific way they've chosen to do it could have positive implications for players with no interest in raiding. What the new approach to levelling does is split the whole fifteen-year package into separate games, all of which end in raiding. At which point, if you don't like raiding, you might decide you've "won".

I've often suggested that one way to avoid the problems of power creep and content decay that plague every long-lasting MMORPG would be to maintain all the expansions as discrete entities. I imagine a system where characters have to graduate (or, as I'd lay odds it would be called, "Ascend") from one expansion to the next, maintaining continuity and integrity for the individual characters but, for the player, effectively starting over afresh each time.

WoW's new levelling game isn't quite that but it's a stepping stone towards it. Of course, it still points inexorably towards an end-game which, I believe, is of interest to far fewer potential customers than the original open world approach that once saw WoW reach twelve million paying subscribers. I don't believe the Level Squish will return the game to its former commercial success, let alone revive its lost cultural significance.

It might, however, make for an amusing series of vignettes. By focusing entirely on the storyline of each expansion and re-tooling the game so it can be played as a series of narrative-driven video games, each with its own, clear ending, Blizzard can lay WoW to rest as an MMORPG once and for all.

The extended virtual world motif never really suited a company that places far more importance on narrative than the form is able to support. By reverting to a focus on directed gameplay in service of a pre-written story, perhaps Blizzard will be able to take back control of a vehicle that long ago outpaced their ability to steer it in the direction they intended.

Looking back at posts on this blog it's clear I rather enjoyed the tight, disciplined storytelling in starter zones like Kezan and Gilneas. That's the direction WoW has been taking ever since the Vanilla era ended and perhaps it's where they need to go. WoW won't really be an MMORPG any more but maybe it will be a better game because of it.