Shadowlands is going to shake up the way leveling works more than any previous expansion.
Not only is the level cap being cut in half (and resetting current 120 players even farther, to 50) but it's also going to seriously redefine the paths that one takes while leveling.
I've gone over this before, but I think I've got more details this time.
For one thing, they are going to make the leveling experience different for new players than for veterans. While I'm sure at this point the vast majority of WoW players have been playing for years, anyone who starts the game for the first time is going to have the following path:
They start with Exile's Reach, a new 1-10 starting zone that every race and class (with the exception of hero classes - which we'll get to) goes to. This will apparently be a relatively simple story in which players are sent to rescue a lost expedition and then stop an ogre necromancer from raising a dragon. It's intended to showcase modern quest design and ends with a mini-dungeon, using their new group scaling tech that will allow players to do it with 1-5 players, and is class-agnostic.
These new players - again, not new characters, but new players, as in a new WoW account - will then be sent to Battle for Azeroth to level from 10-50 before starting Shadowlands.
The intention is both to create an enjoyable starting experience that isn't bogged down in old ideas and then to get players up-to-date on the latest story - preventing the Cataclysm problem where you were dealing with all the Deathwing stuff and then getting shunted back in time to BC and Wrath.
Veteran players (as in, most) will be able to choose whether they want to go with Exile's Reach or just start in their standard starting zones as normal. Likewise, they'll also encounter Chromie shortly into their adventures, who will send them off to any expansion's content to do their leveling from 10-50, which includes the revamped "old world" of Cataclysm as well as its higher-level zones.
Now, what about characters who inherently start at a higher level?
For hero classes, you'll now actually start at level 1. However, rather than doing Exile's Reach or other low-level zones, you'll instead do your standard starting experience. Demon Hunters will begin on Mardum as normal, but by the time they escape the Vault of the Wardens, they'll be level 10. Death Knights, however, will have two different starting experiences based on race. The races that can currently be DKs will have the old one, fighting for Arthas in the Eastern Plaguelands. By the end of this, they should be level 10. Pandaren and Allied Race DKs will have a new starting experience in which they are raised by Bolvar (this takes place before the Shadowlands cinematic, so Bolvar will still be Lich King.) This should, likewise, get the character to level 10 by the time you're done.
Allied races, however, will still get a head-start, and it will be roughly proportionate (arguably actually better) as they will just start at level 10 and do what content they feel like doing.
So: thoughts and questions:
One thing I find interesting is that this will, in fact, undo part of the philosophy about "hero classes" that was established way back when Wrath was announced in 2007. Part of the reason they had them start at 55 (which, remember, still meant they had to get through Outland, the previous expansion's content, before joining veteran players in Wrath) was that they thought it would be beneath a Death Knight to be fighting kobolds in Elwynn Forest's mines. Now, however, you will be able to play a DK in places like Westfall or the Barrens.
On the other hand, because you'll be able to skip over a decade of WoW content, you can just take your Death Knight or Demon Hunter into stuff that certainly doesn't seem beneath an empowered character like that, going straight to Pandaria or the Broken Isles.
The big question, then, that I have, is how this will work in the future.
On one hand, I think they've given themselves a ton of room. It wasn't until we got to maybe level 110 that the notion that levels were too high really started to feel like an issue. Level scaling helped a bit with the pacing, but you can actually trace the biggest issues back to Cataclysm. In Cataclysm, they changed talents a little - not the radical redesign that came with Mists, but still a change.
Cataclysm got rid of ability ranks, which cut down on a lot of the trips you made to your Class Trainer. They also changed it so that talent points only came every other level - previously, you'd get a talent point at every level starting with 10. While you'd get a new ability and a couple of passives (like crit protection for tanks other than Feral, because it was still just one spec then) what it meant was that there were some "empty levels."
These days, that's a much bigger deal, with some spans of five levels not really giving you anything new, and with level scaling meaning that you're actually really just falling behind as the gear you previously had is no longer as good proportionately to what you're fighting.
Now, the gear treadmill is always going to be part of the game to an extent, but I agree that there should be a sense of getting stronger - and if you want the world to scale up to keep things worth doing even if you're leveling up faster, you need to give that sense of power to players by giving them more to do.
By resetting the cap all the way back down to 60, their goal is to make every level feel big. And I think that should work. The question, though, is where things go moving forward.
Two years from now, we're going to (presumably) be talking about expansion nine. Is the level cap going to go up to 70? That seems reasonable. I don't know how long WoW is going to last - surely, all good things must come to an end. Do they think that WoW is going to live long enough for ten-level expansions to get us up to level 120 yet again?
That is, admittedly, a problem for fifteen years from now (maybe slightly less, if they don't repeat the 5-level expansion ideas from Cataclysm and Mists.) But I am very curious to see how things will work.
In 9.0, new players are going to be sent from Exile's Reach directly into Battle for Azeroth, and then they'll go into Shadowlands once they hit level 50. The idea is that, because BFA is the most recent expansion, it'll get them the most caught-up story-wise.
When 10.0 comes out, will new players instead level from 10-50 in the Shadowlands? Or will they go from 10-60, and then level up to 70 in whatever region the next expansion takes place within? Or will they spend 10-50 in BFA, 50-60 in Shadowlands, and 60-70 in the new area?
The latter scenario essentially turns BFA into the new Vanilla, and Shadowlands into the new Burning Crusade, effectively retroactively making BFA into WoW 2.
I suspect that instead, they're going to figure out some way to always have players playing the most recent expansion before going into the new one. But will they keep squishing levels to keep things from getting too stretched out and keep leveling a relatively quick process? How is that going to work?
Also, I still haven't used any of my character boosts that they started giving out in Warlords of Draenor. What will happen to them? Will I just be able to boost three characters to 50? (I'm probably going to make a Void Elf DK in order to see the new Death Knight starting experience, and since I already have the heritage armor for VEs, I could just use the boost on them.)
One last note: I'm curious to see how current non-maxed characters are converted to the new level range. I'm assuming it will be pretty proportional - if you're level 60, for example, you'll be level 25. I'm sure it won't be perfectly clean, with some characters potentially losing abilities they'll need to re-earn. But if all this means that I can get a character all the way to the new expansion's content just by playing through a single expansion's worth of content, I'm pretty happy with this. My Kul Tiran Druid (who I actually intend to make my main druid if I ever get back to having a max-level character of every class) is in the mid-60s, and it would actually be pretty cool for him to be able to head straight to Drustvar, which is totally where he's from.
It'll also make it a lot easier to catch up on all the characters I hit max level with back in Legion and earlier. My Goblin Hunter is still level 100, meaning a bit of a climb to get the Goblin heritage armor. But if that's reduced to roughly level 42, getting up to 50, that's a far less daunting climb. Hell, that should just require less than a Legion zone's worth of leveling assuming that you really can make it all the way from 10-50 in a single expansion's content. (And if the requirement is the equivalent of 110, it'll actually only mean getting from 42-46.)
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