And I think it's because Azeroth back then was a perfect size, with regions that I grew to understand deeply, to the point where I could map a mental route through its areas with relative ease. Still, WoW has lost the sense of adventure it used to capture so brilliantly. This approach doesn't come without one major caveat, though: FF14's early portions are slowwww, to a point where it can be actively offputting for folks who want to reach the more modern, more engaging stuff. You're forced to engage with its beginnings and work your way methodically through its expansions one by one, so by the time you've reached the endgame, you know exactly how you've ended up there. I say this because Final Fantasy XIV doesn't - without spending money - let you bypass its history as a new player. Maybe, just maybe, it needs to shape its world and its systems by forcing players down one steady track, rather than building a motorway through many of its forgotten areas.
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But with expansions and regions up the wazoo, I'm unsure whether Blizzard know how to collate it all into a package that's all-encompassing yet doesn't take you hundreds of hours to complete.ĭon't look at me! I have no idea how Blizzard can fix a fractured Azeroth. Even still, I think that normal, retail WoW has become a disjointed experience that's concerned more with shuttling me towards max-level daily quests, than embedding me in its storied history. I could play WoW Classic for that delicious vanilla flavour, or choose Elwynn Forest as my starting area instead of Exile's Reach. Not once has someone offered you a chance to tackle a dungeon maybe it's buried in the menu? "No matter where I was, I understood my place in Azeroth" Head into town and there are portals that whisk you to many of the game's major cities.
Gold will positively fall out of your Pandaren pockets, as you purchase a mount and then learn to fly your very own gryphon. Time ticks by and you're dinging level 15, 20, 30 at lightning speed. You bounce off Stormwind having spent all of 20-minutes there, before you're ferried across the ocean over to the gloomy isles of Kul Tiras. In all honesty, it's an excellent advert for WoW's advances over the years.īut if you follow the flow of Exile's Reach, you quickly lose track of your place in Azeroth. All of it is tied together by a bespoke storyline that culminates in an NPC-guided instance where you fell a dragon! Yes, there are basic fetch quests, but even these are punctuated by voice lines (I know!) and the odd cutscene (huge!). It's a showroom filled with WoW's hippest quests, like ones where you slam a giant boar through armies of ogres, or mutate animals with a gnome-engineered zapper. Now you're encouraged to choose Exile's Reach, a new starting island that's quick and snappy and streamlined. Watch on YouTube Check out the inaugural episode of Inventory Space by clicking on the video above. And as your confidence grew, and you took down an enemy that sported an intimidating golden border for the first time, you'd graduate to the dusty fields of Westfall. Here you'd get a grounding in professions, perhaps fish in the rivers nearby or seek out some iron ore veins for that relaxing clink. As you started slowly levelling up, quest givers would nudge you towards the little town of Goldshire. Back in my day you'd pick a race, like Human for instance, and you'd begin your journey in Elwynn Forest tackling Kobolds for their candles. The new player experience in WoW is very different to how I remember it. As Blizzard carves out new space for new regions and races with each and every expansion, I wonder: has the game become too big? Or put another way: am I unable to grasp just how vast its become? Blizzard have streamlined the early game, sure, but in doing so they've made it almost impossible to pin down my sense of place in the world.
Having returned to World Of Warcraft after many, many years away from Azeroth in our new Inventory Space video series, I'm taken aback by how disjointed the new player experience has become.
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