We're on the cusp of Warlords of Draenor - the new expansion will be going live on 12:00 Thursday morning (PST.) It's strange to think how much has happened in WoW over the last ten years.
I started playing in the fall of '06 - about two years after WoW itself had launched, and a few months before the release of The Burning Crusade. I leveled up, slowly, and eventually got a few characters to 70 before the release of Wrath of the Lich King.
Anyway, without any meaningful gear progression to be done, and most of my transmog-hunts either finished or delayed by raid lockouts, I've been venting my patch 6.0 and expansion-anticipating energy by leveling up some new alts - not sure if these guys will ever get into my "canon" roster, even though they are on a connected realm to my main one, so they could easily be integrated into my guild and such, but sometimes you have to say "you know what, I really only have the energy to focus on one of any given class at a time."
So among these new alts is Armaad - a Draenei Paladin (had I waited a few months before I started playing, and had I the foresight to know how awesome Draenei were, and that there would be Death Knights and Worgen in the future, I might have made one of these my main instead of the human, though I've gotten quite attached to the human, so oh well.) Having already run the revamped Cataclysm zones, I decided to stick to the Draenei starting areas - Azuremyst and Bloodmyst Isles. I literally had not quested through Bloodmyst since 2007, and so I decided to see what it was like.
Here's what I'll say about Burning Crusade - the world/zone design was amazing. Every zone they created for BC has a really cool feel and look to it (oddly, the only one I don't really care for is Nagrand, which everyone else seems to think is the bee's knees.) The Blood Elf and Draenei starting zones are no exception. Azuremyst has a cool serenity to it (something you'll see in the new/old Shadowmoon Valley) and Bloodmyst has an ominous aura to it that feels very different from the Felwood or Plaguelands types of "wrong." The zones are really cool, if a little light on interesting geographical features.
But oh, oh, oh dear god, the questing. The questing is... so bad. Mind you, for its time, the questing in these zones were great. They did a good job of introducing the Draenei and showing how they would fit in with the Alliance. But the quests and the quest flow was just...
Arriving in Blood Watch, you get a handful of quests. You then kind of ricochet between different areas on the island - and it's not even that big of a zone, but damn does it feel huge when you don't have a mount. Just about every quest sends you off to some far-flung location and then has you trek all the way back. Often they'll then send you back to the same place, or if that quest chain sends you elsewhere, some other quest chain will send you back there instead. There's no sense of which chain one should start on, and even if you round up all the quests you can and then complete them before heading back to town, they'll just send you out to do it again.
There's also very little variety in quests. You basically have your "interact with a specific object over there," or "kill x of these guys" or its "gather x of these things off these guys" variant. There are multiple quests where you just need one thing to drop, but you'll have to kill over twenty monsters to get it. And I can't stress this enough, there's a huge amount of travel and backtracking.
It's absurd, and I stuck to it for as long as I possibly could, but then gave up. I headed to Stormwind to get as far away from there as possible. But I realized something - this is what it used to be like to quest everywhere. Every zone in vanilla had this haphazard quest design. It occurs to me now that part of the reason it took so much time to level up back then is that you'd just spend so much time running back and forth from quest givers to quest objectives over and over and over (and on foot, as you didn't get a mount until level 40.)
Cataclysm gets a lot of flak - and much of it is deserved - but I don't think you can easily dismiss how much improved the game is thanks to the revamp of the old world. While there are some exceptions - relics of an older WoW that didn't get updated - questing through the world is just so much smoother and enjoyable. Yes, Cataclysm didn't get everything right - they went a little too linear, particularly in some of the high-level zones - but I'll take linear over whatever the hell is going on in Bloodmyst any day.
I don't know if it's possible to ever hit the "perfect" quest design; different people will have different opinions on what that is. But the Cataclysm revamp did a huge service to the game, and I really think that, accounting for nostalgia, you can't say it was anything but an enormous improvement.
Cataclysm is now four years old (give or take a month,) which actually means that it's been around half the time I've been playing the game. When WoW turns 12 (and we'll definitely have expansion 6 by then) it will have been the state of the game for half its lifespan. Will we look back at the Old World again and think "time for another revamp?" So far, I don't think so. I certainly think that Warlords of Draenor has reached the next level in quest design, but Cataclysm's old world revamp will, I think, mostly hold up. Sure, there will be zones here and there that aren't all that great, and of course the changes that had been made to adjust for the passage of time are already obsolete given the events at the end of Mists of Pandaria (there's a lot of Garrosh.) But honestly I think they'd revamp Outland before they do anything else with the Old World, and I'm don't think it's likely they'll do that either.
Anyway, my advice for those who want to start a Draenei (or Blood Elf, probably) character: get them the hell out of their starting zones as quickly as possible. If you want to experience the story there, come back at a high level with an epic mount and some patience.
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