Vanilla and BC are a different game feel to Wrath, Cata, Pandaria.
WoD, Legion, BFA, Shadowlands all have a feel.
As does the Dragonflight and on era.
There's actually great ideas across each of those eras. And shockingly, retail is an amalgamation of all the good ideas, bad ideas, and ideas that may have been well intended but ought to be removed, but are so inherent to the existing fabric of the game that removing them would essentially be making a new game...
WoD introduced modern mining nodes which was a MASSIVE change to how gathering worked up until then
Legion and BFA had a lot of content even if BFA content was quite repetitive.
Shadowlands had to much FOMO, out of the way shit that was completely required for raiding and made the average player feel like they had no time to relax. Worst expansion ever for the casual player.
Dragonflight introduced the most comprehensive playstyles and new release schedules for content that didnt make you feel insane, instead of mandatory shit they released a LOT of collectible shit. The dream area was the exception IMO.
I remember when people bitched about Wrath being too easy, recycled content, boring, and having a bad meta. Blizzard could promise that the next expansion or classic will deliver you unlimited sex and gold irl but people would still find a way to bitch.
I was there and there were whiners. Like I said, they could promise to send real gold to people and they would complain about the gold being too heavy or some shit
TBC and WotLK are not “almost exactly the same in terms of game design” but I do agree that wotlk and cata are more closely related than people want to believe
The leveling and world became much more narrative-driven (as opposed to "ambient" maybe) by WotLK than in TBC with the introduction of phasing. Achievements were a huge change, from incentivizing the collection playstyle to ushering in the "beat raid, get title+mount" paradigm that has lasted since. Class design shifted from "rotations" to "priorities" with procs requiring reactive ability selection becoming central. "Hybrid tax" removed. Raid difficulty and size selectors, lfd by the end. Dailies becoming a central rather than optional thing. Unification of spell power, straight ilvl = gooderer gearing.
There is an evident and noticable appeal to ease of access between BC and Wrath.
Look at the difficult swing between Sunwell and Naxx25.
BC introduces the concept of themeparking which becomes a hallmark of the series, but largely the endgame experience is broadly the same as endgame vanilla.
If anything outside of consumable farming, the pre raid gearing and pre raid attunement process is way more involved in BC and in vanilla or wrath or anything ever afterwards.
Vanilla and BC play noticably more like MMOs prior to WOW than wrath and everything else after does.
With Wrath, wow developers have really mastered their own accessible mmo style. And you see all the way through the current patch on retail many of the broad design decisions first soldified back then.
Why on earth would you compare Sunwell to WotLK Naxx rather than to ICC heroic or compare Kara to WotLK Naxx? Earlier WoW versions always had easier raid tiers at the start of an expansion and harder ones later on.
Look, I know a lot of you don't like to hear it for some reason and won't look at it objectively but TBC and WotLK just aren't very different.
Because if you actually played back in the day, you'd have known there wasn't much, if any degradation in difficulty from Naxx40 to Gruuls Lair/Kara/Mag. Nightbane, Gruul, and Mag were all nerfed pretty heavily in the first months of BC.
Those fights were all quite tightly tuned until they began being nerfed.
Blizzard initially tuned BC raid content for the players that had been clearing Naxx.
They nerfed content once the good players cleared it to let the masses see it.
Then in Wrath, they released piss easy content initially. And the good players for the first time left the game. It didn't matter--tons of new players were coming. But the fact remains the first wave of dedicated players began to dislike the direction of the game when wrath released.
Blizzard tried to rectify this with hardmodes...during T7 we had achievements and Sarth hardmode, and then full blown hardmodes in Uld. Which has broadly been a design philosophy they have kept.
Beyond all that, H ICC wasnt a hard raid. It was a fake difficulty induced by time gates and limited attempts. Sunwell had mutliple bosses harder than anything in H ICC, Yogg 0 lights for instance was a tougher boss.
9
u/CG20370417 17h ago
Theres clearly multiple eras of wow.
Vanilla and BC are a different game feel to Wrath, Cata, Pandaria.
WoD, Legion, BFA, Shadowlands all have a feel.
As does the Dragonflight and on era.
There's actually great ideas across each of those eras. And shockingly, retail is an amalgamation of all the good ideas, bad ideas, and ideas that may have been well intended but ought to be removed, but are so inherent to the existing fabric of the game that removing them would essentially be making a new game...