Murf Versus

It is extremely telling for me that an expansion dominated by trolls is not drawing me back in to play World of Warcraft every night. Battle for Azeroth’s initial grip on me has slackened greatly and now I regret committing to a three month run.

Here’s the rub: Battle for Azeroth, and current World of Warcraft in general, is a solid iteration of a game that has no right to be this good this many years later. That said, I feel like its a pretty boring single player RPG, a lackluster multiplayer game, and an awful MMORPG. I had hoped to get a solid month plus out of it but I don’t know if I can anymore.

Let’s rundown some of my biggest problems with the game “as is” in Battle for Azeroth:

Progression Regression

Leveling, as in playing the game, is still a lot of fun in World of Warcraft. Leveling, as in playing a roleplaying game where you expect your character to advance and evolve, has never been worse.

When you level up in Battle for Azeroth, you get nothing. No talents, abilities, or anything of any kind of merit whatsoever. Everything scales now too so there isn’t even a sense of “being able to go places I previously couldn’t”. Outside of padding, I don’t understand why they added more levels in the first place.

Now, I don’t mind quicker leveling, but leveling in general should always mean something in a RPG. I doubt I could go back to the days of EverQuest leveling where getting past a level (and staying there) was an achievement unto itself but World of Warcraft had a happy medium once and I miss it.

My Character Plays the Same

Toward the end of Legion, I exclusively played my Warrior as Fury for the quick PvE kills while I finished up some lingering quest chains. I enjoy Fury and I decided to keep leveling that way. It plays exactly the same as it did though, so yay?

I think we are all a bit spoiled by Blizzard’s willingness to rewrite the rules every expansion. Maybe it was time to get away from that. Still, the new expansion chaos of “relearning” key aspects of the game has always been something I have looked forward to. I am not sure I will be as excited for a future expansion if Blizzard has found its permanent status quo.

A MMORPG With Chat Turned Off

My schedule for playing is chaotic. For the first time, I am a true casual player who only gets an hour(ish) every few nights (maybe). At first I enjoyed the lazy pacing, but it is harder and harder to login when I have no guild, few in-game friends I don’t talk to elsewhere, and zero reason to find a guild/make friends/casually chat in dungeons.

The other day, a stranger whispered me to ask about Warriors. I was shocked. He was the first non-friend to send me a message without intending to recruit me into some horrible spam invite guild.

It was a brief conversation. I could’ve gone for more, but I didn’t have the energy. I miss the days even in early World of Warcraft where chatting with strangers was part of the allure. I made a lot of friends in-game that way, but there’s no real point to trying anymore. Everything is laid out in-game or on the internet on my second monitor.

What do I need other players for? Absolutely nothing.

Ending On A Positive

There are a lot of trolls and I love all of the Zandalari zone design. Plus, troll-based armor everywhere! Battle for Azeroth is a dream come true in the sense that you dream about winning a million dollars, enjoy it for a bit, and then wake up to being broke again.

But trolls …

This post is part of a series of everyday posts for Blaugust. If you’d like to know more, click here.