The Shadowlands expansion makes World Of Warcraft interesting again

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The Shadowlands expansion makes World Of Warcraft interesting again

The Shadowlands expansion makes World Of Warcraft interesting again

The content battlecruiser that is World Of Warcraft has been sailing for the best part of two decades. I’m almost thirty-two. I started playing this game when I was seventeen. It’s surreal to type that out - and it’s also one of the reasons why the people I try to introduce to this behemoth of an experience often tap out.To get more news about buying gold classic wow, you can visit lootwowgold official website.

Thankfully, this may change. With the advent of the Shadowlands expansion, Blizzard has introduced a series of huge changes to how the game functions not only for existing players, but for people who have never touched the game, or even any MMORPG, ever before. Firstly, there’s the “level squish” - 120 becomes 60, and the original 1-60 becomes an accelerated 1-10 - with a brand new levelling region intended for players new to the series and even the genre. “Trying to get to level 120 is a bit much,” comments Production Director Patrick Dawson. He’s not wrong.

WoW’s new player experience takes place on the island of Exile’s Reach. For the WoW lore nerds, it’s just north of Kul’Tiras, but for all intents and purposes, it’s a small island upon which a group of Horde or Alliance veterans and your plucky, inexperienced self find themselves marooned.

The amount of tutorial upgrades is immediately obvious - clear, concise tooltips guide players through everything from movement and user interface basics, to buying and selling items, combat, and group/dungeon roles. It’s all tailored to your class, too - my goblin mage was taught how to use frost magic to slow the advance of my opponent, fire for burst damage, and utility spells to manipulate the battlefield. All in real time, too - your NPC pals will call out instructions to you and explain the why of your actions. You’re not just cautiously hitting buttons and hoping, any more - you’re being taught to understand your character as a dynamic toolkit.
Dawson notes that this is all extremely deliberate. “We’ve been doing a lot of studies internally too, to make sure it helps people connect with the game as quickly as possible, which is something we maybe haven’t been so good at before now.”

The story of Exile’s Reach is fun and simple. Shipwrecked, you soon discover your missing crewmates are being used to summon a fallen dragon back to the land of the living, and go on a journey of fighting smaller enemies, exploring the region and even finishing up with a two-boss dungeon - where your NPC party members will yell things like “I’ll keep the ogres focused on me while you strike them down!” to help you understand what a tank does, and why.

I’m a cynic when it comes to WoW’s quest design approaches, especially when you’ve hyped the game up to your mates only for the starting quests to be “do X thing Y times.” But there’s a lot of subtle, smart choices in enemy pacing and map design in Exile’s Reach. Combat flows from big single-target enemies to groups of smaller, weaker ones, purely to give players that “aha” moment as they find their area-of-effect abilities. The goal is that players feel encouraged to experiment as they tackle a range of classic enemy types with unique behavior, from Murlocs, to Quillboar, to Harpies.

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