The upcoming World of Warcraft: Shadowlands doesn’t just create new experiences at the top end for players. The revised leveling is bringing with it a revised starting experience, and the latest preview on the official site is all about that new starting experience and how it will play for both new and veteran players. From now on, levels 1-10 will take place not in individual racial starting zones but a new shared zone in which players are part of an expedition for their respective factions searching out an earlier missing expedition.
Once you find yourself in Exile’s Reach, you’ll be facing off against immediate threats on the island, culminating in a special “mini-dungeon” with two bosses designed for up to five players (but playable solo). Veteran players, however, can opt to still play through the individual racial starter experiences, with allied races and the game’s two Hero Classes starting at level 10 and the latter retaining their special starting areas. Check out the whole rundown if you’ve got some alts you’re eager to level in the new expansion.
wow that sucks bad.. the starting storyline for the undead is AMAZING… and now that’s going to be gone?
I will never play the game again after the china crap they pulled or give blizz a penny ever again.. but that change is kind of horrible.
“Veteran players, however, can opt to still play through the individual racial starter experiences”
No, it’ll be present. It’s just that newer players will be yoinked towards the new exile zone and then will follow the “golden” road throgh level 10-50 by the A M A Z I N G experience that is the BfA storyline.
You can still do Glades, just not initially as a new player, and they’re not (yet?) updating the zone for the current story timeline – still stuck in basically-Cata. So pick the zone, and you’ll only see fewer players there than ever, with developers focusing the new experience on the new starter + BFA zones + Shadowlands zones.
Lore-wise, a ‘new’ Forsaken character is coming out of a Legion invasion world into a Battle for Azeroth faction conflict story.
So new players still have to go through BFA ? Poor buggers.
BfA leveling/questing experience wasn’t bad imo. The zone stories and quests were fun, and if we ignore the ovearching war campaign, i thought they closed off rather well. Luckily, the new players won’t have to partake in the slog that is BfA endgame.
Yeah there wasn’t anything glaringly wrong with the zone/level progression with BfA. The worst I can really say is that it is “more of the same”, but well established games like this don’t want to alienate fans by reinventing the wheel (the gameplay loop) every two years.
I agree with you, but man, someone needs to tell Blizzard this, because relearning the classes all over again is the exactly that.
The main storyline was complete garbage. The sidequesting and zone story were incredible.
As is per Blizzard tradition.
Why can’t we just have a One Azeroth patch like they did in ESO?
The vocal minority will complain that they cant go back and faceroll old content. I think they mentioned it before.
Scaling mobs are the devil, and an instant nope for me and many others.
ah yes, the surreal realities the shadows-
“Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.”
― Stephen King
Important point in the announcement you seemed to gloss over:
So a) level gets pruned to 60 is now confirmed b) you can pick any expansion up to BfA to level your character from 20-50.
I absolutely love this. Let’s hope the pacing is right so you can enjoy the expansion in it’s entirety before moving on. I have some alts ready to test this right away after release.
The wording on that “pick expansion” sounds off, and i think it’s a “they” issue.
I’m quite sure it’s just: You can go anywhere from 20-50 in the world that’s not Shadowlands. If you wanna go from Ashenvale to Uldum, to the Jade Forest to Argus, you can.
Have to wait and see how it’s implemented, it wasn’t specified but I think they intended initially that one expansion is enough to get you to 50. If it’s possible to switch the expansion in between and/or if you need to do all expansion zones to get to 50 is to be seen.
Probably. I think it’ll be simply equal to how it is already: You choose the zones at will, and completing an relatively small number of them will feed you enough XP.
While this is great news for veteran players, it can be extremely daunting and disconnected for somebody who is new to the game. I have a friend who just recently started playing ESO – and while he loves the game mechanics, he is completely lost lore-wise in the vanilla world.
I am also not a big fan of mob level scaling mechanics in general. More often than not, you simply don’t feel your power growing, so the gear/level rewards become meaningless.
It’ll be daunting because new players will be forced to play through the dumpster fire that is BfA.
You did mention that there is a difference for veteran accounts, but this sentence makes it sound like there isn’t an option to get the “old” intros. I know you’re just writing up a quickie for this info that is barely news anyway, but I feel like clarifying because I am avoiding doing my work-from-home work.
Nobody is losing access to the old intros that most veterans wish they could skip anyway. A more modern starting experience makes sense with the massive progression overhaul we have coming in the new expansion.
Also, I’m not sure anything in that Blizzard post is new from what they said at Blizzcon :P Maybe the screenshots are more new.
…. a couple weeks after completing the starter experience…
Dungeon group, “This next pull has 2 groups, we need to make sure just to pull the closest one”
Warrior tank, “I know how to charge good, the game taught me!”
party wipe.
I love giving Blizzard flak, but…really, the game never, ever, teached you to play it well.
I suppose I’ll play through it once, just to see what it’s like, but I suspect after that I’ll be sticking to the traditional starting zones. I can’t imagine rolling up a new night elf & not playing through Teldrassil, for example, and I feel the same way about a lot of the other starting zones. I can’t think of any that I would actively try to avoid.
Man, what a cheap cop-out. Instead of making the starting areas fresh and meaningful, they create some bastardized mini-zone copy of EQ2 Isle of Refuge.
Who in the name of all that is good and true is piloting that ship over there?
Why don’t they just freeze the whole game prior to the current expansion and just start all new players (for FREE!) at the latest expansion starting level? You know, like you can do ANYWAY for $60!?!?!
And all previous expansion content should be unlocked (including Flight and Allied Races) for FREE and zero quest/grind needed!
That would make a hell of a lot more sense to me, if they wanted me to buy the latest expansion and re-sub the game!
That’s the area I was trying to remember !
I hardly think this little addition is really worth all the emotion you put into that post.
The world is more accepting than ever for people uninterested in modern WoW with the success of Classic. I’m happy for you all, so go be happy instead tearing down someone else’s game.
What do you mean “someone else”? I paid for this garbage the same as you. It’s as much “my game” as it is “yours”.
My brain read his post as something that is isn’t. The part of my post you responded to is basically a brain fart, sorry.
No prob.
Actually, I may have misunderstood some of your post there. While I do feel you are overreacting to this specific pieces of news, I somehow totally read that as a Classic fan rant against modern WoW. That was completely fabricated by my dumb brain somehow, sorry.
Taken in isolation, I can certainly see why you would see it as an overreaction. However, it is just one more misstep by the suits and developers of Retail WoW. If this one was the only one, for sure would not care. But the bad decisions just keep piling up.
…oh, so that’s where TERA and Blade & Soul got the idea from! o.O
Ye Gods! It’s EQII’s Isle of Refuge all over again!