"Who is Day9" Day9 is the original twitch streamer. He was on twitch before it was called twitch. He is an OG pioneer in streaming video games. Wrote his master's thesis on it. His streaming ID was 2.
to say that Day[9] is as old as TwitchTV is an understatement. Twitch was launched in 2011. Day[9] had been covering Starcraft: Brood War pro scene pretty much as early as 2004 (I think he was 18 back then) He is THE founding father of gaming content creating
As a lore nerd I think how new players feel is what alot of players feel playing this game. Who is that? What do they do? Where is this? Where am I? Why am I doing this? What most people get after the first long dialogue is "You know what? I don't actually care just let me hit something."
Part of the problem with this, and it got stressed by other people, is literally EVERY bit of lore he is being forced through right now will never matter. None of these people matter. This city doesn't matter. The proudmoores don't matter. So even if they want to care about it, their first interaction is going to be learning almost none of it matters.
@@Endoken The problem I have with the above, is that no lore anywhere will ever matter. Doesn't matter the game or the quality of story telling. unless you're playing a story game, just go hit things and win loot.
In terms of lore it's the same thing even in Vanilla. The difference Classic actually lets you hit something and you figure out the lore later..... if you want at all.
When I played WoW, I spun up new alts regularly, had my max slots filled almost all the time, but once every 2 years or so would feel like playing solo for a while, no raiding, no dungeoning, just playing the story and it was mostly when BfA hit that the experience of starting from scratch and following through all quests, zone by zone, turned into a complete mess. There are far to many skip mechanics in the game now that lead you to current content that aren't clearly marked as paths to catching up to current content. And lets not even get started about all the OG content that was straight up removed, that make the modern solo lore play through straight up no fun anymore. Simply going from Stormwind to Westfall and Duskwood used to be a magical and immersive experience that you could spend days in completing everything. These days, they feel soulless and empty.
When I play a game for the first time I try to use google as little as possible because i want to figure things out for myself and i dont want to be spoiled. I think most casuals will just turn the game off and most hardcore gamers will try to avoid google.
And I completely disagree with you on that. Whenever I get stuck on something, I google it and when I say stuck is literally 5 minutes while checking if I'm actually clueless. These days I've been playing planet crafter and the moment I get an item that lets me get more items I immediately went to google where to use it for what I wanted. The average player will google shit if they are enjoying their experience. If they are NOT, then I'd say the average player will just quit.
If I need to google anything about the story or gameplay within a couple hours I do just turn off an MMO. Unironically making everyone do the MSQ for FFXIV is a good thing. I don't care if people find it dull, it doesn't leave anyone feeling utterly confused.
You know Asmongold had a conversation with a chatter while watching this video, where the guy tried to argue that he is a new player and this isn't their experience. Despite having played since Legion. The only reason they consider themself a new player, is because the game is so convoluted that they still feel lost half the time even after having hundreds of hours played in the game.
And Zack was also clear to point out that if you have 200 hours in almost any other game, that's an OBSCENE amount of play time! You can do two pretty thorough playthroughs of BG3 in that amount of time! The level of cognitive dissonance that veteran WoW players have is absolutely insane. I'm saying this as someone who has played WoW since 2006 and has probably 5k+ hours in the game.
"How has Day9 never played WoW?" He mentioned during the stream that back in the WoW launch era his attitude was "Why waste my time on anything that isn't competitive?" so he ignored it completely to play StarCraft
@@1un4cy classic wow, compared to brood war, is child's play, its a saturday morning cartoon to opera, cereal to a gourmet meal, a baby's first puzzle to theoretical physics. Not better or worse, just much, much, much, much easier
@@7PlayingWithFire7 Lol what? One had an esport and the other didn't. That's what he was referring to. No one knew that guilds like Nihilum will end up driving a competitive raiding scene
@@chameleonedm I believe wow arena was once part of MLG and was removed after they decided that comps were what decided wins/losses at the highest level.
So glad you checked this out. When I got to this point in Day9's vod I knew you'd appreciate his perspective. It really is a baffling experience how the introduction works. Kicking you to BFA first thing after exile's reach is absolutely insane.
BFA is not a good starting expansion for anything following up. You need Patch 8.1 & 8.2 endgame quests to really get any follow-up knowledge for further expansions. Add to that: The alliance BFA start seems to be 30 minutes of cinematics while on horde side you land at the harbour, go up into the main capital, take a round for the Quality of Life features and then you are off doing quests/playing the game. He literally got the worst starting experience he could get.
@@Sobepome @Hype_Incarnate Jaina's Kul Tiras storyline continues straight from War3 to BfA. Are you people daft? Passage of time does not matter, the storyline is there. Did you not watch "Daughter of the Sea"?
Preach. the problem isnt the story cause "everyone is saying there isnt enouhg story". it is HOW blizz treats the story. adn no one knows when is what and what is what.
We see the reason that nobody knows what is what is because they're not paying attention to the cutscenes or dialogue where characters explain who they are. This guy doesn't care about any of it, by his own admission, and just wants to hit stuff with spells. The BFA story is actually really good until you get the the faction war and n'zoth stuff, where it kinda falls apart. The opening for the zones is good, you just have to like, not be a grognard about it. If Blizz pays attention to the story, people complain it's too much RP. If they don't pay attention at all, people complain they don't know why they're doing what they're doing. WoW has problems with its story, huge problems. But where this guy is at isn't one of those problems.
@@cabellocorto5586 It's fine for someone who has already been playing wow this whole time, which is kinda the point preach is making with it. It's the same problem Xenosaga had, where you'd play the game for about 10 minutes and then watch an actual hour and a half of cutscenes to be exposited at, and then it dumps you back into gameplay and expects you to even remember what it was you just did. Even FF doesn't lay its story on as thick, everyone you talk to in the beginning is about getting you going as an adventurer, and you can just walk out and go fight stuff for a bit to play the game. Wow's opening was better before exile's reach, and it's wild they force players into BFA because of the "who's the warchief" problem when that isn't really a problem. Putting a mile of shit between new people and playing the game is a real problem.
Modern media has fried your brain if that's the case. The characters literally stand in a field and shout "They're making weapons out of the planet's blood?! That's not good! Hero, you have to stop them!" if you can't figure out what's going on after that, nobody can help you.
@@cabellocorto5586 As someone who has never played, and watching the Day9 vods, there is a lot of lore dumping. What happened to show don't tell? Why does the story feel so crammed in there? It's like watching a movie where everybody just tells you what's going on, vs showing you. Games actually can be more immersive than a movie. They don't have to tell you what's going on, you can actually experience it in real time. Wouldn't that be more evocative. It's literally a lore dump.
1.BFA should never have been picked for new players. It is way worse on alliance side than on horde regarding the starting pace (too many cinematics, too much exposition). 2.During leveling you get next to no information that will be relevant for (back then) Shadowlands (which needs a ton of prior information) and Dragonflight (which requires way less). 3.DF might do a better job and I hope they send people through the 10.2.7 and pre-patch story before sending them to the first TWW zone. The "you are max lvl, now go to the next expansion"-interruptions are just bad.
This. I don’t understand why they don’t set a difficulty rating on the Chromie start areas. They could even make a 1-20 starting area and people would be happy.
@@Frozenkex people aren't saying BFA is bad, at least not in the context of a new player. They are saying BFA is bad "STARTING" experience for onboarding a new player. As it was specifically stated by Day9 in the video is that you are bombarded which a bunch of contextless information that means nothing to you as a person because you have zero prior knowledge of anything. Exiles reach does nothing to bridge the gap between its self isolated tutorial that is arguably too short and what is actually going on in the over arching story of WoW.
On Horde BFA starting experience is Zuldazar city, horrible to navigate without flying. It's literally a giant pyramid that forces you to take elevators and stairs, along with huge walk paths to get around. I couldn't wait to get out of that city I got lost so many times and I'm an experienced WoW player.
Before all the twitch and Starcraft 2 videos and casting etc. Day9 is a Starcraft:BroodWar pro gamer, that had some international success. That is where he started and how he got a following for streaming and got famous in Starcraft scene. So before judging his skill, know that this guy was a succesfull pro gamers for the OG esport and one of the hardest ones.
As someone that came from FFXIV to try a bit of WoW at some point last year, I gotta say the whole experience was just frustrating and I haven't touched it since. I wasn't expecting a grand narrative like 14 but even then, the story experience was awful. Just an endless list of characters talking at me that the game seems to assume i already know and also act like they already know me. Who am I? Where am i? What am i doing here? Who are you? Wtf is going on? Don't think about it, now go get me 20 crab shells for no reason other than XP. What really killed it for me though was the dungeon experience. Very first dungeon, load in and people immediately mount up and start speed running, jumping over buildings and shit, moaning at me for accidently aggroing stuff i'm apparently not meant to aggro and then they kill a single boss and left. I remember being stood there alone and completely dumbfounded for 2mins before just logging off and uninstalling. If that's what blizzard uses as their introduction to the dungeon experience in WoW then haaard pass.
I totally get it. The problem with WoW atm is that its a schizo wet dream. If you are a new player they instantly start you at the most current expansion and a newbie has to basically go in and play what the rest of the player base did with 15+years of knowledge. Forget having introduction tutorials. There is no amount of catching up they can do to understand the plot. And get this, unlike XIV, a lot of the GOOD juicy plot points are not even in the freaking game. You have to go read a novel to get certain character's motivations and why you start doing certain things. Legit unhinged story telling.
My first dungeon experience was my running through some mine I think and at some point we jump down a hole which you are probably supposed to walk down on the sides, if you are not in a rush, and I take a lot of falling damage and die to some trash mob. I respawn, seeing a portal (thinking it will port me close to my group like in ffxiv) and I leave the dungeon. I am asking the group how I get back in, noone answers, they finish the dungeon without me and I quit the game for like 2 years. Second time I did a dungeon was the exact same dungeon you went through with the exact same experience you had, except someone shit on me for not using my curse on warlock (at least here I learned that those are important). Third attempt was classic wow and that just went better cause first thing I did was type in chat "I am new, if theres something important in here let me know please" and people were actually helpful. The dungeons were also very simple so not much you can fuck up except stand far a away from the group and pull extra mobs, but it was a lot more enjoyable.
@@sr7olsniper Not to mention that Cata completely removed the old world, stories and quests. Retail literally makes no sense if you don't play Classic first or watch a story synopsis.
@@cattysplat yeah.. I lowkey wish they would just do a Zidormi on every zone like they did in Silithus and Lorderon. So basically any zone that got cataclysm you can use the time warp and go to a pre cata zone. That why you can still do quests and what not and its up to the player. This has to be left to the player tho. Like for me I came back to play some DF and the game kept trying to rush me to the emerald dream. Instead i just did every quests in order step by step and was able to follow the plot of the expansion. Imagine if I just landed on the Dragon Isles and instantly hit the emerald dream. I would be soo freaking lost. Like who is Fyrakk? why are the aspects back, WTF is going on? etc etc
This is called the Curse of Knowledge. It's when a person is unable to look at something with the eyes of someone that is completely new to this thing and assumes knowledge that they cannot have. I had to deal with this when I was teaching people to use various types of software in a government environment, and my assumption was - well, these people deal with hundreds of various systems daily, surely they know x, y and z...? But they don't, why would they? Their job is to just deal with system X and that's it, and they don't care about anything else because they aren't paid to know anything else. Therefore, a good tutorial first and foremost assumes you are completely new, gets you to a ground level that draws from experience you might have, and then slowly adds knowledge on top of that. Exile's Reach does that somewhat well. Problem is, it then completely tosses you into the middle of Big Important Crisis that Everyone Knows, and it's just a mess from there on, because even if it's mechanically simple, the constant context shifts are insane to deal with.
the timeline jumping for new players will be absolutely gobsmacking, incoherent isn't even close to a strong enough word. pure chaos, inchoate, dozens of characters in different states of being and age, villiany or heroics. depending on which expac they are doing , the central Alliance figure, Anduin, could be 12, 16, 20, 25, he could be a young priest, a hostage, a fresh King, or a captured king, and the War Chief will be a new person, all of it will be baffling, and all of it done without any explanation to the new player.
@@keithfilibeck2390 Yeah and to top it all off, if you do a timewalking campaign, it throws you out of whatever storyline you were doing once you hit the level cap and are ready for the "main" expansion. It's schizophrenic to the extreme, I cannot understand why they would do this when they have all the tools at their disposal to do it right.
@@thesunthrone because the competent people got squeezed out by the woke, people bring it up alot so most people roll their eyes, but its what happened, a product like this should be handled more or less by one small team, like FF14, or it will become a mess.
@@keithfilibeck2390 You don't even know what the word woke means. Good lord. I swear people think woke people run companies and not bog standard capitalist executives.
Think of it like going to a new country. Everyone living in that country will know how to navigate their world: the language, customs, law, government. A foreigner? Almost no idea, our basic human behavior only takes us so far when something can't be understood and communication cannot take place. Yet locals will struggle to relate to them because they've lived most of their life there and it's second nature. WoW retail players have 20 years of experience and knowledge.
His recollection of the starting zone experience with the boat and being in jail and so on has the same vibe and level of coherency as the "You. Me. Gas station." meme.
He was a pro-player in Starcraft 1 before moving to commentary and analysis. He's the OG content creator for esports really. His twitch stream ID number was 2.
Ive noticed that people that ive introduced to wow that did exiles reach stopped playing fairly quickly where as people that started in the race starting zones are either still playing or played for much longer, every time i bring a new person into wow from now on i tell them to not do exiles reach. I feel like it removes a lot of the "magic" that is there when you start in the race zones, like walking up to the big cities for the first time with the music changing to the city themes. Some of my most cherished gaming memories are those moments and you just dont get it with the way exiles reach introduces you to the game
There was literally nothing wrong with the old starting experience. IMO exiles reach was just appealing to veterans who could speedrun even faster to unlocking dungeons. Once again Blizzard devs listening to the vocal minority who just want to gogo.
The problem with the day9s experience is not that the game didn't explain things well enough, but it's that the game didn't give time to just DO things. No time to digest the information or experience the game, the tutorial just tried to sort of speedrun the player into the thick of things. And all of that just ended being overwhelming and what day9 calls "contextless information stapling into my forehead"
Btw he was playing for FOUR HOURS (granted a little slow cause he pauses and talks now and then but then made up for it by not reading every quest) and completed ONE quest Its why leveling new characters feels so much like a chore and basically not fun.. by the time you get to really play with them youre just tired
Met Day9 when I was working at the NASL Toronto shows. Absolute gem of a guy. Not surprised he is well regarded in the industry. Massive nostalgia seeing Day9, I used to watch Day9 dailies as part of my regular routine. Wild.
As a returning player, I never got a class trial thing. It just dumped an updated version of the spec I was when last I played. It chose all the talents for me. But I also didn't choose a starting area, thinking i could choose it later. And then I didn't realize you speak to Chromie for that? Is that even right? I thought the notice board, because it looked vaguely similar. I just said fuck it and went to BfA because I couldn't figure it out and that's where it directed me to, lmao. The onboarding for returning players just fucking sucks. And I ain't Googling that garbage. I want to play World of Waecraft, not World of Google.
Funday Monday was a giant part of my middle school / high school routine. Happy to see your thoughts on his WoW video, I was laughing so much during his stream that was released on UA-cam.
Worth checking out his stuff to see if it appeals, these days he's mostly doing variety video game streaming, although he does have Mostly Walking where him and a couple friends play through various adventure games (primarily Point & Click adventure games, but all kinds of odd, weird, hard-to-classify games)
I kinda understand why Blizzard wants new players to easily catch up with friends or enter the latest expansion as quickly as possible, but I always hated that they didn't have a proper concept for continuity from the start and didn't offer interested players maybe even nudged them into a chronically correct playthrough. It certainly didn't help that Cataclysm ruined the whole idea of it. I would still do it with every single character today, sure not every quest in every expansion, but the storylines. Just like I start reading a book from the beginning and not 90% to the end. If the game was still fun enough, that is.
@@AkiRa22084 If there's an actually good reason to do so, then I wouldn't mind it. For example, you have to go through 4 expansions to hit max level in ff14, and overwhelming majority of the people don't have a problem with doing the MSQ, which is probably more time consuming than leveling a WoW character to the max right now. If anything, imo, by allowing players to play the expansions in any order they want, really, REALLY mess up whatever storyline there is in WoW, and make the experience very confusing.
@@athras8822 FF14 is not as old as WoW is. WoW has almost a full decade on FF14 just from the outset, 4 whole expansions before FF14 even got started. FF14 is also going to run into this problem eventually when it gets as old as WoW is. It's already bad enough that ARR and to some extent HW are both plodding and slow to get to any plot. If anything, this Day9 guy would lose his mind at how much dialogue and cutscenes FF14 has.
@@AkiRa22084 Eh, if they condensed the story across expansions it would be doable. It would mean they have to make a new questline and cut off the fat to understand it all.
@@cabellocorto5586 ARR can be plodding and slow to get to more interesting story, but you get actual gameplay pretty quick. It's less overall than wow because once wow actually lets you go it's about as much fighting as you could want, but the opening is pretty dogshit if it's forcing you into BFA. They would legit be better served letting people just do the cata starter zones and leaving it at that instead of exile's reach into BFA, or even exile's reach into cata zones. FF isn't as old as wow, but you have to remember that you do not have to do all of the content in wow to get to max level. Hell, probably half of the actual story happens in raids instead of out in the world, you couldn't do that even if you wanted to. Leveling your first character through the FF MSQ is absolutely more time consuming than leveling your first character in wow right now, the saving grace is you only have to do it once and it's a good story if you want it. Wow leveling before chromie time was just doing the cata zones until 58 then doing 1.5 zones from each expansion with a couple dungeons if you feel like it and then you're done. After chromie time it's do a bunch of WoD zones and some dungeons and you're done. World record is what, like 6 hours now? They're incomparably different amounts of time. Also Yoshi has already talked about how dawntrail is supposed to eventually be a new jumping in point for players so you don't have to do the entire current MSQ just to play with friends, but it probably won't happen for a bit.
When it was Thrall everything made perfect sense to me. But then Vol'Jin took over for whatever reason... then something happened with Garrosh, no idea, but I guess Vol'Jin took over again after him. Then Vol'Jin dies somehow and he gives the seat to Sylvanas cause the "spirits told him".... who has yet to make a non-genocidal decision 😅
@@Broockle at the end of BFA, she got angry after taking a hit in a Mak'Gora with Saurfang. She then screamed something like "all of you mean nothing!" Killed Saurfang, and then ran away to ICC where she tore a hole in reality by breaking the lich kings helmet, which led to the shadowlands. A lot more things happen there, but the writing wasn't very good in shadowlands. Anyways, all the other horde leaders wanted Thrall to come back, and he's like "I don't wanna." And they're like "please, though?" And he's like "fine, but I'm not the warchief. We're all the warchief together."
@@philip0544 dang wow 😆 ye I loved the story in WC3 and I read around 8 of the WC books. love the universe. But I never understood how one assimilates the story through WoW. The cutscenes are cool as heck, but the narrative experience through the game always felt crap to me. You need a guild to even experience the raids... in classic at least. You need to do a lot of piecing together to really get the story, and it's nigh impossible to read quest logs when you got a party waiting for you where no one bothers reading. To this day I still wonder what the big deal with Varian is 😅
As a WoW vet, we don't even realize how much just talking to npcs there is. I completely understand his frustration if you just want to get in there and fight stuff.
its talking to NPC's, and them having zero interesting things to say, whereas by the time of Endwalker, I wanted to know what the crew had to say on everything.
@@keithfilibeck2390 Yep. I go out of my way to talk to npcs after finishing even the side-quests because I KNOW they have something interesting to say. Hell, they even have their own side-plot going on that you would NEVER know if you never spoken to them. Like the Boulder Brothers and their romance with another scion!
They really need something that summarizes the older expansions so new players have a clue about who people are, what has already happened on Azeroth, and what people's motivations are. Or a way to guide them to play them in chronological order for people that are interested. There is definitely a disconnect between the starter zone and the rest of the game.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the video was not supposed to cut off at the end like that before Preach could actually give his thoughts on the video lol
what's baffling about this is the fact that Blizzard, one of the earliest to the MMO gates and a pioneer of MMO in general of it's time... thinks that an MMO needs a fucking "Tutorial area"... dude, it's a fucking MMO. The tutorial is you leveling to max, that's how you learn your class, your role and the general vibe of the game, through leveling.
Considering how fast leveling is now, you don't really have the time for that anymore. I leveled some new chars on retail and it's so fast half the time I forget to spend talents points and the gear you get gets outdated literally 15 minutes later.
I love how the arcane explosion use reminds me of that video with woman watching the person using the "put the shape through the same shaped hole" put everything through the square hole.
He wouldn't have been able to do this in classic, first because you can actually die in this version and second because you're not bombarded with new spells every two minutes. It's the game design's fault.
@@Kuolema1337 Arcane explosion also destroys your mana in classic and mage's survivability is entirely down to efficient spell usage, not mindless passive gameplay.
I played WoW for six years before bailing during SL. Came back after BlizzCon last year and this resembles my experience trying to navigate DF. I have no clue what is going on in the story and nothing unlocks in a logical order. At one point I was meeting a guy I had already killed in a dungeon 🤷♂️. It’s really a mess.
Wow players are notorious for the cringiest gatekeeping with their ridiculous acronyms for everything. I’ve seen hundreds of not thousands of interactions with new players where people just use acronym after acronym because they knew the new player would have to ask wtf that meant. Then they could explain more and feel more special.
Hmm if you could choose whichever expansion you want, with an interesting cinematic explaining the overall setting perhaps. Then have a followup explaining how it ended just for closure with that overarching storyline once you leveled. Then an overview for the most recent expansion aswell.
Everything about this has been a problem since they did the level squish, but it was even _worse_ before then because not only were story bits sprinkled all over the place but most of the critical story beats that actually progressed the world were relegated to being cinematics found in end-game raids. So, a player would speed-level through an entire expansion's leveling content and then just move on to the next expansion without knowing what the hell was going on. Now the problem is that Blizzard immediately puts new players in Battle for Azeroth without giving them any context for who or what anything is, with even more whiplash because you're going from being just a lowly, "Poor Fucking Infantry" recruit to suddenly becoming the most trusted secret agent/champion of your faction after killing a bunch of Ogres. NPC's treat new characters as if they'd known them for years, and we're sitting there going, "Who the FUCK are you???"
The issue with him spamming Arcane Explosion is that it was taught to him on the tutorial island before he could even select his spec, so now he thinks that's his aoe eventhough he chose frost spec. Not really the games fault that he has the assumption that is his AOE ability.
Blizzard also changed the classes back to be more like classic in Dragonflight. In previous expansions, your chosen spec would lock off spells that were not a part of that spec. So new players are now allowed to make mistakes, for better or worse.
That comment about Terraria hit pretty hard. My buddy started playing fallout 76 with a free code but he's never played a fallout game before. The other day I showed him how to use VATS. He's level 22. I'm pretty sure the game gives you one small VATS-related tooltip in the corner of the screen that is easily missable
I was confused back in Cataclysm before finding out the reason was a bunch of books were inserted in between expansions. It's gotta be way worse to essentially have the first two seasons of a show (WC3 + expansion) and then just get thrown into season 20 or whatever you'd call this.
You don't even get that. You get like the first 2 pages of 10 different books spat at you in a few cutscenes that make zero sense. Even as someone who played this game since classic coming back after a break of 2 expansions was literally just as confusing. They completely wrecked the entire new player experience in BFA and it's never been fixed.
Preach is the reason I know most of what I know about WoW. Even today, I find myself watching videos to understand stuff like Dragonflight gearing because the game dumps systems and currencies and plotlines onto you and expects you to figure them out on your own then retires half of them in a patch 3 months later but doesn't update itself to make relevant content easily recognizable.
I'm curious to know if his Twitch chat is going to help him once he's done with BFA, because the game doesn't tell you to move to the next region outright after Lv.50 I think. Instead, you'll keep getting these main story quests that leads you to the different areas post-BFA (Gnomes, Naga, PvP areas), but they give you shittier gear than what the BFA story quests gave you.
He's just doing this for a month of blizzard games and has already said he's not reupping for another month of sub, more because "I do not have 40 hours in the day to play wow" rather than any good/bad metric. I don't even think he'll get to the end of bfa if I'm being honest.
The killing innocent guards thing happened in Witcher 3 too. There's like a quest where you steal someones baby and put it in an oven to like, "prank" a demon or something. And the baby's dad's guards attack you for it OBVIOUSLY and you just murder them and go "yeah but look the baby is fine, it was just a prank".
Destiny 2 is indeed a nightmare. I played first when all the content was available up to the Sands of Time/Horus or what ever that desert time warp content was named & it was quite enjoyable. Well, RAIDs were a nightmare with randoms tho. Then I played again a few years later when all the content I experienced before was removed & it was the worst experience ever. I was introduced to character over & over & each time I had the question "Who are you??" (and this was coming from someone that had played most of the removed half, I can't imagine the confusion of a totally new player). You pretty quickly get access to all the content in the game with no guidance, being left to wonder, where do I go next so that the story makes sense.. I can't recommend Destiny 2, even if it was free to play, it just isn't worth it anymore.
it's just so dumb that new players got shoved right into that mess of time lines, surrounded by unknown people calling you hero and champion but your char is 2 hours of age
I think probably the best expanisons to start in leveling a a new player other than vanilla would be Pandaria or Dragonflight. Legion is amazing but it would suck for a new player.
really to me, all Blizzard needs to do is give a "skip to X expansion" option for each expansion that a new player HAS played through. If a new player has not yet played through any expansion, they have to start at Vanilla and play through the WHOLE thing. Once they reach 60 (or whatever level it is now) and did the raids, they enable the option to skip Vanilla if they make a 2nd character. And so on. But new players NEED to play through each expansion at least ONCE, imo. Yes it takes a LOT of time. But it will be a FUN time if done with other people that go through the same journey.
So WoW has always been weird because it sits in like 4 distinct eras. Vanilla through Wrath, Cata through Legion, BFA through Shadowlands, and now DF through the next 3 xpacs. WoW has also always had the problem of the playerbase for a majority of its first era not really caring about story. The game wasnt designed around telling a point A to point B style of story. Cata changed that. Now the story was more in the forefront. Players were expected to play through most of the zones and get story connections. This culminated with Legion which tells WoW first expansion wide story where you arent really allowed to miss parts of it. So BFA comes out and WoW really needs a new player experience overhaul because 120 levels is a lot for a new player to go through in an MMO especially when its content no one really cares about. For years all people cared about was the end game experience. Blizz made it easier for people to get into the game but they still had the problem that WoW doesnt really have a very cohesive story for new players to follow. This will always be a problem sadly because the game just isnt built to accommodate new players in a realistic way. God did they try with Chromie time but it is also something not designed all that well. The main problem being WoW expansions stories dont end when you reach level cap. WoW is a game where a bunch of stuff happens and you dont see a conclusion to most of it unless you are playing when the content is current. I dont really know if there is a way to fix that problem without DRAMATICALLY changing how WoW as a game works.
1 way i think they could make the new player experiance abit better although not perfect is to give the player a story option like the one that was released (i think) when Legacy of the Void was released. When u start a new campaign there is an option called (story so far) and a brief explanation of the major events from SC1 up untill Legacy of the voids release plays. This story recap option is available at any of the 3 versions of the game so if u play it in the Swarm expansion they will ofc only give u info up untill that point to avoid story spoilers. I understand that wow has ALOT more important info then StarCraft has but this could be a great way to showcase some major events from the lore so ppl dont walk in completely blind and has no damn clue what is going on.
I am pretty furious about blizzard's leveling ignorance. They have good introductory quests. Fucking Cataclysm rebuilt the early levels of the entire game but lets not use them because they're 14 years old. Blizzard essentially abandoned leveling and would much rather people pay leap to their treadmill, please and thank you. Its a fucking wall for people to get into the game when people have an easier time getting into a two decade old classic game than your retail mmo.
Every time I see this topic come up, I always mentally go back to the ffxiv player who tried wow out for the first time. Poor guy was utterly confused as to who anyone was or what was going on. If I remember right, he said he had to start wiki'ing basically everything just to have even the slightest idea. But I fear this is a problem all mmo's will have at some point. Simply too much involved to get everyone caught up, just too big of an undertaking. I feel especially bad for ff14 in a few years, that's an insane amount of story to get through.
i think they intentionally killed twinking as being fun and a bit of a challenge, it turned into a 2-3 day chill torture so you have a reason to buy the lvl boost, thats how it felt like for me, when i returned in shadowlands. And i mean Thorgast was so terrible, i stopped twinking altogether, only appeared for raids and did some M+ keys, that i really enjoyed altough some mechanics were clearly harder and less fun than others. It can not be overstated how terrible thorgast was, even when i wanted to switch mains for just one boss, my guild was cool with it, they even said i could stay the whole raid, but not having the optimal gear because you dont want to be forced through hours of not enjoyable content for 4 weeks, thats just not something i cherish or look forward to, its really that simple man. I quit shortly after.
maybe the whole chat GPT thing here would actually be helpful, like you could type /help how do i equip a weapon? what talent should i choose? etc, so players ask for help when they need it instead of whiplash from the staplegun xD
A little bit of extra context: This wasn't just Day9's first time playing WoW, but his first time playing any MMORPG at all. So he had no prior understanding of how MMORPGs generally work - the combat, questing, levelling up, etc. Just an actual, complete newbie~ :P
Another Example for me is Destiny 2 where it is the an even worse case than Wow. Because at least in WoW you do have the option to go back and do the previous expansions. In Destiny 2, they straight up remove those previous expansions. That is insanity. When I tried it with free trial stuff and learned about that when I was trying to look for the campaign storyline stuff, I was like ''screw that. I am out''. Never played it since.
I started playing Destiny 2 in Dec 2023 when one of the collectors editions was free on EGS. I didn't have any issue with it as a new player. I watched the highlights reel of what had happened, I played through some of the Legend missions (like when Cayde-6 died) then I jumped into the expansions that were still available in the order they came out (Shadowkeep, Witch Queen, Beyond Light, Lightfall) and I'm good now. I have a grasp on what's going on. I never played through Forsaken and The Red War, but I have a grasp of what happened in them. Uldren Sov had his brain warped by an Ahamkara (a mafia dragon, basically) and went to the Dark Side, he died, came back as a Guardian named Crow and felt really horrible about what he had done. The Cabal under Calus tried to take over Earth and attacked the Last City and they were fought off, Calus was deposed and exiled by his daughter Caitl. Never played it, but I have the gist of it. Never had any issues as a new Destiny 2 player
@@nicholaswhite7056 that was your experience, not mine. You had a problem with it, I didn't. An individuals new player experience is not The new player experience. I just said I didn't have a problem with it, not that no one would have a problem with it. Experiences are unique to the person experiencing it. You think it's bad, I didn't find it difficult.
I think that destiny 2 has a pretty bad onboarding scheme objetivly. However it seems that every big MMO has this issue, that doesn't mean that its okay but Destiny 2 seem to take so much shit for it compared to other MMOs. Dude in the background also presented the tutorial skip in Destiny 2 pretty bad. Dont know if that was intentional to "dunk" on Destiny 2 but it doesn't really matter. The tutotrial skip for Destiny2 is only availabe for new characters after the 1st. So you do have to progress 1 time. Also the tutorial part you can skip is mostly the what does each key press do. WASD, sprint, shoot melee, abilleties (destiny has 3 sometimes 4). The differences is not that big on the 3 classes as destiny 2 is a pretty øight mmo where the differences in classes isnt that huge. Preach also seem to not be in touch with the casual audience here. He could be, but how he talks in this vid does not come off that way. Saying that everyone will just google problems is not what most casual players do. Watch yips and tricks videos is not a casual thing either. You are already more invested than most players at that point. I must also say that Preach seem to have alot of hate towards destiny 2 spesifcly. I have seen the videos of him playing for the first time amd i think he raises alot of hood points. However not very groundbreaking points. Then nitpicks very much and if he personally doesnt like a creative direction he does present is a an objectivly bad design. I think its funny that Destiny 2s playebase is very careful when recomending the game as they know the onboarding is poor, this is something i never hear other communities talk much about. Even though their onboarding is pretty awful aswell. Will disclose that im a Destiny 2 player and i might be bias in some viewpoints. I do belive taht the feedback is valid still. Also to the original commententor im not saying that just because Destiny 2 has bad onboarding that it cant be good for some people. Glad you felt that it was a good way to enter the game.
@@catierambles so you had a different experience, which means...there might be a problem???? thats my point, the way your post read you just rambled on and ended "i didnt have a problem" and impled that since you didnt have a problem no one did, maybe next time make it clear you understand that your experience wasnt the end all be all.
I've watched most of his streams, and between that and my own experiences, I really feel like this is where Retail suffers. Old school 04-05 players went through ALL the content to get to present day. New players are dropped in the middle of high-level content, and even if it is intended to catch them up, there's never a feeling that you're a starting grunt. The exile's reach is too hand-holdy, and yeah, too many modern concepts are introduced. They should look at making a completely new level-up experience. An MSQ, if you will, that takes you through the key moments and quests to introduce you to the world, and maybe quickly bring you through all expansions. That would be incredibly ambitious, but imagine if they could pull it off. New players to FF are brought through the entirety, so by the time we get closer to the end, we've experienced all the story. BFA being the default WoW starter experience is preposterous, and expects you to know all kinds of things from step 1. Day9 is a great vessel to witness this confusion and frustration. He had SUCH a good time in Classic, because that's the magic that captured so many of us. The current new player experience is just insane. I thought I heard they were revamping it for TWW, so here's hoping they do, and it's a vast improvement.
From TWW it's updating to Dragon Flight which is very obviously where exiles reach has always been intended to take you. The outro mentions an expedition on a nearby island that you'll be heading to, even the NPCs carry over. Beyond that you get dragon flying super early and a logical progression in story and difficulty with very few walls of text where you're stood still waiting for a conversation to end. Characters are introduced slowly and you're made familiar with who they are as they appear... There are still some places where you're assumed to have some knowledge of the games history but it's far less of a dump into the middle of a story (for example the BFA intro quests aren't included in the current new player storyline which means that new players have no clue who anyone they're talking to is)
Now this is proof to me, that FFXIV has been doing the new player experience right from the very start. You may be doing the lame quests but you’re learning about the world and the characters and there is a very clear path. WoW really needs to make the new player experience better (and their story telling as a whole). Everything is so disjointed.
If WoW was made exactly how FF14 is made, people would complain it is too linear. This Day9 guy would especially be kvetching over cinematics, since there's multiple instances in FF14 where you spend 30 minute stretches of just watching cutscenes and clicking dialogue boxes.
It kind of reminds me of starting at a new (big) company and they throw all the acronyms at you that don't mean anything. Takes at least a month or 2 to get settled.
16:50 I have over 500 hours in terraria and I didn't find out until recently that you could auto place items in chests to be fair, though, I started playing terraria back when it first became available in 2011
I'm on a shipwreck, ok I guess I'm a new member of an elite paramilitary group called the Horde. Oh No! Zombie City is under attack! Lordaeron? Sounds French. Also I am a champion now. Ok, now I'm on a stealth mission to rescue someone. Who? IDK. DINOSAURLAND! Lets go to the other island. Oh no, this place has Witches, Witches are scary. I'm in the Desert! There's no escape! Wait, I can just leave? ....and now I'm in dragonflight.
16:34 - I think googling solutions to a video game is a gamer mindset - I don't think my GF for example would even consider that as a way of solving an ingame problem
I tried playing retail WoW and granted I knew a lot of MMO jargon, I knew a lot of facts about WoW, and I had the exact same navigational problems in BFA as he did. Genuinely, that harbor town is so pretty, but it's so confusing to navigate, and it might just be because they waypointed everything instead of giving me actual directions.
One of the funniest and saddest things I've watched. As an X-WoW player it sucks he got so stuck on rails going through retail. While the Isle of Introduction was OK be stuck for literal HOURS watching cutscenes and listening to talk about a world you know nothing about is crazy. Played all the way up to Shadowlands myself before my PC couldn't run it anymore so I know BFA. I loved the Haunted Woods atmosphere of that first Alliance zone. It was so good. Wish they had let him out to experience that earlier. I think long running MMOs and the MCU have a similar issue. "Did you not watch/play part/expansion 4? Well then you'll be lost joining us on expansion 6 cuz that guy, yes that one, is back and important now." Kind of an insane thing to say but Developers and Directors seem to assume you've done your homework and absorbed all the parts already. Newcomers are left behind because they have to keep their long time subscribers happy and pay off this bit of lore or that thing foreshadowed in an earlier part. It sounds crazy saying there is too much content when for years all I've wanted was more content to play when I was on the other side of the fence. Wonder how much longer it can sustain before it is forced to break down and "lets make Wow2/GW3/MCU-rebooted" is a thing? (yes I know gw3 is in some form already, I assume wow2 as well).
I’ve many times tried to get into retail and I just can’t do it. The gameplay is boring (while leveling at least) and the story is confusing and generally uninteresting, and there’s very little feeling of progression. I think I’m going to give SoD a try next, maybe we’ll see how War Within turns out for me. I’m still interested in giving the game a try.
TL;DR Took a break, came back. Woah that's a lot of stuff! Not great. Took a break from retail at the end of last patch, not intending to play fated raids and intentinding to come back prepatch/new exp. Logged back in today and I gotta tell ya... the whiplash of coming back to retail after chilling in SOD was an eyeopener. All my chars had a lot of bag space compared to SOD, but my god those bags had so much stuff in them. I had no memory why half ot was there and trying to decide what to even do in the game.... nah, i just logged out. There's just so many systems and mechanics and differents tiers of items... I didn't even realize the breadh of it until I took a break. No wonder new players can't gel with it. :D
They felt that bfa was a good starting point for the story going forward since bfas stuff goes into shadowlands. But in war within dragonflight is gonna be the new starter expansion
Oh, I can also say with confidence that I did not retain any story information whatsoever because the storytelling itself is so bad. They do pull you in with some really cool events right at the start, but then before getting to do much real gameplay at all, you just get like a 20 minute lore dump on the Houses and Factions and stuff and aaaaaaaaaa yes, I, like day9, Just Wanted To Cast Spells.
When I started playing WoW, BfA was the current expansion. Started my journey in Gilneas as a Worgen Warrior. Probably the best way to start fresh for new players is do your racial starting zone & go explore. And/Or go do Chromie time after. I dont know how true this is that it throws new players right into BfA, but I doubt it and Day9 got fed some bs.
People keep spamming abbreviations in newcomer chat as well. I'm then labeled as a villain for asking them to be more considerate of newbies when it comes to making them more understandable.
The new player experience should just be Vanilla/Cata. It's not like the quests are *that* different, now. Vanilla: "Kill X-Y-Z" Dragonflight: "Kill A-B-C" Vanilla: "Loot bear asses" Dragonflight: "Loot dragonbear asses" Vanilla: "Gather flowers" Dragonflight: "Gather dragonflowers" Vanilla: "Go kill this elite" Dragonflight: "Go kill this elite" Main reason I say this is, a new player knows *NOTHING* of what lead up to the expansion they're playing in. Why the fuck not just start at the beginning, slapped down in a massive and beautiful world?
To be fair, the entirety of WoW's lore at this point is us as "heroes" getting in the way and murdering "villains" that were actually right and the true heroes all along.. WE'RE the villains.
The new player experience has *never* been good, as long as it has been "needed." They could make it so good, go all out - have like Arthas himself talk directly to you in a dream sequence or something where he recruits you during Warcraft 3's lore leading up to vanilla, and then you're fast forwarding through time with other heroes and villains of significance. They could get weird with it, throw in WoW's greatest hits to touch on all the expansions, the best-of moments, etc. But instead...we get Exile's Reach. WOOF. They really need to get on this - they're talking about where the game will be at 30 years old - if they're going for another 10 years, they need to revamp the new player experience YESTERDAY.
Imagine, on FF14, you launch the game for the first time, and it gives you complete freedom to play any expansion of the game at any time, in any order. So you look at the expansions... A Realm Reborn, sounds kinda cheesy. Heavensward, eh, not into religion. Stormblood sounds kinda cool. Shadowbringers, oh that sounds badass, I'm going to start there! So you launch it, and your first cutscene is walking through the gates of the Crystarium to be greeted by the Crystal Exarch, who tells you that all of reality is at risk of collapsing at the hands of an ancient race of magical people called Ascians, and that you aren't actually a member of this world, but was pulled into this world from yours by the Crystal Exarch, so that you could stop the threat to all of reality. As long and arduous as the story in FF14 can be, it starts you SMALL, with BABY STEPS. You're a humble adventurer trying to make a name for themselves in the world. You haven't achieved anything yet, you haven't accomplished anything, and you aren't important enough to be trusted with a mission like "Save all of reality as we know it from being erased." I'm a WoW Classic kind of guy. Played vanilla back in the day, played private servers through the 2010s, even resubbed to play Classic WoW when Blizzard finally decided to give us official classic servers (after of course suing every large private server host into oblivion)(after saying in regards to the demand of wow classic "you think you want it, but you really don't.")(after Blizzard realized how incredibly profitable it could be and what a large market there was for the classic experience)... I tried retail about 3-4 months ago, and when I say I had Z E R O clue as to what was going on, who these people were, what the actual threat is... I mean, at one point I had a cutscene showing me Queen Azshara dying, and then 3 minutes later after doing another quest, I get a cutscene where Queen Azshara is alive and well! I guess I somehow got the chronologically-later scene first...
As someone coming back to the game after a very long break, I decided to level an alt through each expansion. I'm still split on if I disliked Shadowlands or BFA more.....because of the slow, forced story parts. There were so many "walk with me while I talk" moments it felt soooo long. I felt Day9's "let me play the game!!" so much
These devs got real sick of people skipping quest text, so they shoved in unskippable voice acting to make your questing experience horrible. Yes, that is exactly what happened, and no one will ever ever be able to convince me otherwise.
"Who is Day9" Day9 is the original twitch streamer. He was on twitch before it was called twitch. He is an OG pioneer in streaming video games. Wrote his master's thesis on it. His streaming ID was 2.
I think the real question is, "Who is DayJ?"
@@RyotbhThe real ones know 😄
And who is crimina|
@@Jitterzz The number J.
Day9 legit the goat
to say that Day[9] is as old as TwitchTV is an understatement. Twitch was launched in 2011. Day[9] had been covering Starcraft: Brood War pro scene pretty much as early as 2004 (I think he was 18 back then) He is THE founding father of gaming content creating
Weird that I only met with his content during the hearthstone times.
Dude, at 2004, Day9 was part of the Starcraft: Brood War pro scene himself, he was still at tournaments until 2007.
@@oguzcanoguz5977 yeah you can be a pro player and at the same time pumping vids with deep dive analysis
@@oguzcanoguz5977 are you under the assumption that if you are good at a game you cannot produce content for it?
"I'm on a boat with the characters from Frozen yelling at each other"
LMFAO!
The fact he almost correlated BfA with "Big Fucking (Accident)" on his own without any prior information to work with is amazing to me.
I laughed so hard
As a lore nerd I think how new players feel is what alot of players feel playing this game. Who is that? What do they do? Where is this? Where am I? Why am I doing this? What most people get after the first long dialogue is "You know what? I don't actually care just let me hit something."
Part of the problem with this, and it got stressed by other people, is literally EVERY bit of lore he is being forced through right now will never matter. None of these people matter. This city doesn't matter. The proudmoores don't matter. So even if they want to care about it, their first interaction is going to be learning almost none of it matters.
@@Endoken The problem I have with the above, is that no lore anywhere will ever matter. Doesn't matter the game or the quality of story telling. unless you're playing a story game, just go hit things and win loot.
@@blueoutrider Correct. That is why it's the duty of the storyteller to make them care.
In terms of lore it's the same thing even in Vanilla. The difference Classic actually lets you hit something and you figure out the lore later..... if you want at all.
When I played WoW, I spun up new alts regularly, had my max slots filled almost all the time, but once every 2 years or so would feel like playing solo for a while, no raiding, no dungeoning, just playing the story and it was mostly when BfA hit that the experience of starting from scratch and following through all quests, zone by zone, turned into a complete mess.
There are far to many skip mechanics in the game now that lead you to current content that aren't clearly marked as paths to catching up to current content.
And lets not even get started about all the OG content that was straight up removed, that make the modern solo lore play through straight up no fun anymore.
Simply going from Stormwind to Westfall and Duskwood used to be a magical and immersive experience that you could spend days in completing everything. These days, they feel soulless and empty.
I disagree heavily on the idea that the average player will just google shit. They will turn off the game and play something else
When I play a game for the first time I try to use google as little as possible because i want to figure things out for myself and i dont want to be spoiled. I think most casuals will just turn the game off and most hardcore gamers will try to avoid google.
Yes! And lbr, we didn't google back in the day either. We asked in chat and made friends and enemies.
And I completely disagree with you on that. Whenever I get stuck on something, I google it and when I say stuck is literally 5 minutes while checking if I'm actually clueless.
These days I've been playing planet crafter and the moment I get an item that lets me get more items I immediately went to google where to use it for what I wanted.
The average player will google shit if they are enjoying their experience. If they are NOT, then I'd say the average player will just quit.
If I need to google anything about the story or gameplay within a couple hours I do just turn off an MMO. Unironically making everyone do the MSQ for FFXIV is a good thing. I don't care if people find it dull, it doesn't leave anyone feeling utterly confused.
They will google shit if they’re invested. But if googling is needed 10-20 minutes into the game then I agree, they would just say fuck it and leave.
You know Asmongold had a conversation with a chatter while watching this video, where the guy tried to argue that he is a new player and this isn't their experience. Despite having played since Legion. The only reason they consider themself a new player, is because the game is so convoluted that they still feel lost half the time even after having hundreds of hours played in the game.
And Zack was also clear to point out that if you have 200 hours in almost any other game, that's an OBSCENE amount of play time! You can do two pretty thorough playthroughs of BG3 in that amount of time! The level of cognitive dissonance that veteran WoW players have is absolutely insane. I'm saying this as someone who has played WoW since 2006 and has probably 5k+ hours in the game.
They could use Chromie time to fix this, when you choose what expac to level in theres a short cutscene detailing some of the lore going into it.
One of the only other games I’ve played where this mindset is accepted is TF2. In that game, 2,000 hours is considered “respectable.”
@@jwebcoding7289 Right but at least in TF2, you aren't subjected to 3 hours of lore prep and tutorials before you get to play the actual game.
"How has Day9 never played WoW?" He mentioned during the stream that back in the WoW launch era his attitude was "Why waste my time on anything that isn't competitive?" so he ignored it completely to play StarCraft
There's plenty competitive stuff in WoW, even a lot that isn't pvp
@@1un4cy he was a professional starcraft brood war player
@@1un4cy classic wow, compared to brood war, is child's play, its a saturday morning cartoon to opera, cereal to a gourmet meal, a baby's first puzzle to theoretical physics.
Not better or worse, just much, much, much, much easier
@@7PlayingWithFire7 Lol what? One had an esport and the other didn't. That's what he was referring to. No one knew that guilds like Nihilum will end up driving a competitive raiding scene
@@chameleonedm I believe wow arena was once part of MLG and was removed after they decided that comps were what decided wins/losses at the highest level.
So glad you checked this out. When I got to this point in Day9's vod I knew you'd appreciate his perspective. It really is a baffling experience how the introduction works. Kicking you to BFA first thing after exile's reach is absolutely insane.
BFA is not a good starting expansion for anything following up. You need Patch 8.1 & 8.2 endgame quests to really get any follow-up knowledge for further expansions.
Add to that: The alliance BFA start seems to be 30 minutes of cinematics while on horde side you land at the harbour, go up into the main capital, take a round for the Quality of Life features and then you are off doing quests/playing the game.
He literally got the worst starting experience he could get.
BfA story continues directly on Warcraft 3.
@@AkiRa22084 no it doesn't? did you play warcraft 3?
@@AkiRa22084 in what world LUL.
@@Sobepome @Hype_Incarnate Jaina's Kul Tiras storyline continues straight from War3 to BfA. Are you people daft? Passage of time does not matter, the storyline is there. Did you not watch "Daughter of the Sea"?
Day9 is very clever, thoughtful and well-spoken. Always a joy to watch his rants.
The ONLY exception was his commentary "additions" to T90's Hidden Cup tournament
Preach. the problem isnt the story cause "everyone is saying there isnt enouhg story". it is HOW blizz treats the story. adn no one knows when is what and what is what.
We see the reason that nobody knows what is what is because they're not paying attention to the cutscenes or dialogue where characters explain who they are. This guy doesn't care about any of it, by his own admission, and just wants to hit stuff with spells. The BFA story is actually really good until you get the the faction war and n'zoth stuff, where it kinda falls apart. The opening for the zones is good, you just have to like, not be a grognard about it.
If Blizz pays attention to the story, people complain it's too much RP. If they don't pay attention at all, people complain they don't know why they're doing what they're doing.
WoW has problems with its story, huge problems. But where this guy is at isn't one of those problems.
@@cabellocorto5586 It's fine for someone who has already been playing wow this whole time, which is kinda the point preach is making with it.
It's the same problem Xenosaga had, where you'd play the game for about 10 minutes and then watch an actual hour and a half of cutscenes to be exposited at, and then it dumps you back into gameplay and expects you to even remember what it was you just did. Even FF doesn't lay its story on as thick, everyone you talk to in the beginning is about getting you going as an adventurer, and you can just walk out and go fight stuff for a bit to play the game.
Wow's opening was better before exile's reach, and it's wild they force players into BFA because of the "who's the warchief" problem when that isn't really a problem. Putting a mile of shit between new people and playing the game is a real problem.
Modern media has fried your brain if that's the case. The characters literally stand in a field and shout "They're making weapons out of the planet's blood?! That's not good! Hero, you have to stop them!" if you can't figure out what's going on after that, nobody can help you.
@@cabellocorto5586 As someone who has never played, and watching the Day9 vods, there is a lot of lore dumping. What happened to show don't tell? Why does the story feel so crammed in there? It's like watching a movie where everybody just tells you what's going on, vs showing you. Games actually can be more immersive than a movie. They don't have to tell you what's going on, you can actually experience it in real time. Wouldn't that be more evocative. It's literally a lore dump.
@@TheKilogram1000 What would showing instead of telling look like in the intro to Kul Tiras?
1.BFA should never have been picked for new players. It is way worse on alliance side than on horde regarding the starting pace (too many cinematics, too much exposition).
2.During leveling you get next to no information that will be relevant for (back then) Shadowlands (which needs a ton of prior information) and Dragonflight (which requires way less).
3.DF might do a better job and I hope they send people through the 10.2.7 and pre-patch story before sending them to the first TWW zone. The "you are max lvl, now go to the next expansion"-interruptions are just bad.
This. I don’t understand why they don’t set a difficulty rating on the Chromie start areas. They could even make a 1-20 starting area and people would be happy.
"Bfa is bad because it's ... ineffecient and it has "le story" ". Bruh, some people actually care for other things besides leveling speed and gear.
@@Frozenkex people aren't saying BFA is bad, at least not in the context of a new player. They are saying BFA is bad "STARTING" experience for onboarding a new player. As it was specifically stated by Day9 in the video is that you are bombarded which a bunch of contextless information that means nothing to you as a person because you have zero prior knowledge of anything. Exiles reach does nothing to bridge the gap between its self isolated tutorial that is arguably too short and what is actually going on in the over arching story of WoW.
On Horde BFA starting experience is Zuldazar city, horrible to navigate without flying. It's literally a giant pyramid that forces you to take elevators and stairs, along with huge walk paths to get around. I couldn't wait to get out of that city I got lost so many times and I'm an experienced WoW player.
Before all the twitch and Starcraft 2 videos and casting etc. Day9 is a Starcraft:BroodWar pro gamer, that had some international success. That is where he started and how he got a following for streaming and got famous in Starcraft scene.
So before judging his skill, know that this guy was a succesfull pro gamers for the OG esport and one of the hardest ones.
As someone that came from FFXIV to try a bit of WoW at some point last year, I gotta say the whole experience was just frustrating and I haven't touched it since.
I wasn't expecting a grand narrative like 14 but even then, the story experience was awful. Just an endless list of characters talking at me that the game seems to assume i already know and also act like they already know me. Who am I? Where am i? What am i doing here? Who are you? Wtf is going on? Don't think about it, now go get me 20 crab shells for no reason other than XP.
What really killed it for me though was the dungeon experience. Very first dungeon, load in and people immediately mount up and start speed running, jumping over buildings and shit, moaning at me for accidently aggroing stuff i'm apparently not meant to aggro and then they kill a single boss and left. I remember being stood there alone and completely dumbfounded for 2mins before just logging off and uninstalling. If that's what blizzard uses as their introduction to the dungeon experience in WoW then haaard pass.
The funny thing is that i perfectly know which dungeon that is, only from that description
I totally get it. The problem with WoW atm is that its a schizo wet dream. If you are a new player they instantly start you at the most current expansion and a newbie has to basically go in and play what the rest of the player base did with 15+years of knowledge. Forget having introduction tutorials. There is no amount of catching up they can do to understand the plot. And get this, unlike XIV, a lot of the GOOD juicy plot points are not even in the freaking game. You have to go read a novel to get certain character's motivations and why you start doing certain things. Legit unhinged story telling.
My first dungeon experience was my running through some mine I think and at some point we jump down a hole which you are probably supposed to walk down on the sides, if you are not in a rush, and I take a lot of falling damage and die to some trash mob. I respawn, seeing a portal (thinking it will port me close to my group like in ffxiv) and I leave the dungeon. I am asking the group how I get back in, noone answers, they finish the dungeon without me and I quit the game for like 2 years. Second time I did a dungeon was the exact same dungeon you went through with the exact same experience you had, except someone shit on me for not using my curse on warlock (at least here I learned that those are important).
Third attempt was classic wow and that just went better cause first thing I did was type in chat "I am new, if theres something important in here let me know please" and people were actually helpful. The dungeons were also very simple so not much you can fuck up except stand far a away from the group and pull extra mobs, but it was a lot more enjoyable.
@@sr7olsniper Not to mention that Cata completely removed the old world, stories and quests. Retail literally makes no sense if you don't play Classic first or watch a story synopsis.
@@cattysplat yeah.. I lowkey wish they would just do a Zidormi on every zone like they did in Silithus and Lorderon. So basically any zone that got cataclysm you can use the time warp and go to a pre cata zone. That why you can still do quests and what not and its up to the player. This has to be left to the player tho. Like for me I came back to play some DF and the game kept trying to rush me to the emerald dream. Instead i just did every quests in order step by step and was able to follow the plot of the expansion. Imagine if I just landed on the Dragon Isles and instantly hit the emerald dream. I would be soo freaking lost. Like who is Fyrakk? why are the aspects back, WTF is going on? etc etc
This is called the Curse of Knowledge. It's when a person is unable to look at something with the eyes of someone that is completely new to this thing and assumes knowledge that they cannot have. I had to deal with this when I was teaching people to use various types of software in a government environment, and my assumption was - well, these people deal with hundreds of various systems daily, surely they know x, y and z...? But they don't, why would they? Their job is to just deal with system X and that's it, and they don't care about anything else because they aren't paid to know anything else.
Therefore, a good tutorial first and foremost assumes you are completely new, gets you to a ground level that draws from experience you might have, and then slowly adds knowledge on top of that. Exile's Reach does that somewhat well. Problem is, it then completely tosses you into the middle of Big Important Crisis that Everyone Knows, and it's just a mess from there on, because even if it's mechanically simple, the constant context shifts are insane to deal with.
the timeline jumping for new players will be absolutely gobsmacking, incoherent isn't even close to a strong enough word.
pure chaos, inchoate, dozens of characters in different states of being and age, villiany or heroics.
depending on which expac they are doing , the central Alliance figure, Anduin, could be 12, 16, 20, 25, he could be a young priest, a hostage, a fresh King, or a captured king, and the War Chief will be a new person, all of it will be baffling, and all of it done without any explanation to the new player.
@@keithfilibeck2390 Yeah and to top it all off, if you do a timewalking campaign, it throws you out of whatever storyline you were doing once you hit the level cap and are ready for the "main" expansion. It's schizophrenic to the extreme, I cannot understand why they would do this when they have all the tools at their disposal to do it right.
@@thesunthrone because the competent people got squeezed out by the woke, people bring it up alot so most people roll their eyes, but its what happened, a product like this should be handled more or less by one small team, like FF14, or it will become a mess.
@@keithfilibeck2390 You don't even know what the word woke means. Good lord. I swear people think woke people run companies and not bog standard capitalist executives.
Think of it like going to a new country. Everyone living in that country will know how to navigate their world: the language, customs, law, government. A foreigner? Almost no idea, our basic human behavior only takes us so far when something can't be understood and communication cannot take place. Yet locals will struggle to relate to them because they've lived most of their life there and it's second nature. WoW retail players have 20 years of experience and knowledge.
His recollection of the starting zone experience with the boat and being in jail and so on has the same vibe and level of coherency as the "You. Me. Gas station." meme.
He was a pro-player in Starcraft 1 before moving to commentary and analysis. He's the OG content creator for esports really. His twitch stream ID number was 2.
Ive noticed that people that ive introduced to wow that did exiles reach stopped playing fairly quickly where as people that started in the race starting zones are either still playing or played for much longer, every time i bring a new person into wow from now on i tell them to not do exiles reach. I feel like it removes a lot of the "magic" that is there when you start in the race zones, like walking up to the big cities for the first time with the music changing to the city themes. Some of my most cherished gaming memories are those moments and you just dont get it with the way exiles reach introduces you to the game
gonna add a little correction here, i tell them not to START their first characters in Exiles reach
There was literally nothing wrong with the old starting experience. IMO exiles reach was just appealing to veterans who could speedrun even faster to unlocking dungeons. Once again Blizzard devs listening to the vocal minority who just want to gogo.
Sean is a legend, I love this guy, I've been following him since the early SC2:WoL days and he's the only reason I even watch the PC Game Show
You friends with him?
@@omensoffate Sadly not haha
The problem with the day9s experience is not that the game didn't explain things well enough, but it's that the game didn't give time to just DO things.
No time to digest the information or experience the game, the tutorial just tried to sort of speedrun the player into the thick of things.
And all of that just ended being overwhelming and what day9 calls "contextless information stapling into my forehead"
Btw he was playing for FOUR HOURS (granted a little slow cause he pauses and talks now and then but then made up for it by not reading every quest) and completed ONE quest
Its why leveling new characters feels so much like a chore and basically not fun.. by the time you get to really play with them youre just tired
Met Day9 when I was working at the NASL Toronto shows. Absolute gem of a guy. Not surprised he is well regarded in the industry.
Massive nostalgia seeing Day9, I used to watch Day9 dailies as part of my regular routine. Wild.
Damn, I wonder what happened to NASL sound guy FeelsBadMan
As a returning player, I never got a class trial thing. It just dumped an updated version of the spec I was when last I played. It chose all the talents for me. But I also didn't choose a starting area, thinking i could choose it later. And then I didn't realize you speak to Chromie for that? Is that even right? I thought the notice board, because it looked vaguely similar. I just said fuck it and went to BfA because I couldn't figure it out and that's where it directed me to, lmao.
The onboarding for returning players just fucking sucks. And I ain't Googling that garbage. I want to play World of Waecraft, not World of Google.
Funday Monday was a giant part of my middle school / high school routine. Happy to see your thoughts on his WoW video, I was laughing so much during his stream that was released on UA-cam.
This is the first time I've seen Day9 since the heyday of SC2.
Worth checking out his stuff to see if it appeals, these days he's mostly doing variety video game streaming, although he does have Mostly Walking where him and a couple friends play through various adventure games (primarily Point & Click adventure games, but all kinds of odd, weird, hard-to-classify games)
I kinda understand why Blizzard wants new players to easily catch up with friends or enter the latest expansion as quickly as possible, but I always hated that they didn't have a proper concept for continuity from the start and didn't offer interested players maybe even nudged them into a chronically correct playthrough.
It certainly didn't help that Cataclysm ruined the whole idea of it.
I would still do it with every single character today, sure not every quest in every expansion, but the storylines. Just like I start reading a book from the beginning and not 90% to the end.
If the game was still fun enough, that is.
You can't expect people to play through every expansion to get to max level.
@@AkiRa22084 If there's an actually good reason to do so, then I wouldn't mind it. For example, you have to go through 4 expansions to hit max level in ff14, and overwhelming majority of the people don't have a problem with doing the MSQ, which is probably more time consuming than leveling a WoW character to the max right now. If anything, imo, by allowing players to play the expansions in any order they want, really, REALLY mess up whatever storyline there is in WoW, and make the experience very confusing.
@@athras8822 FF14 is not as old as WoW is. WoW has almost a full decade on FF14 just from the outset, 4 whole expansions before FF14 even got started. FF14 is also going to run into this problem eventually when it gets as old as WoW is. It's already bad enough that ARR and to some extent HW are both plodding and slow to get to any plot. If anything, this Day9 guy would lose his mind at how much dialogue and cutscenes FF14 has.
@@AkiRa22084 Eh, if they condensed the story across expansions it would be doable. It would mean they have to make a new questline and cut off the fat to understand it all.
@@cabellocorto5586 ARR can be plodding and slow to get to more interesting story, but you get actual gameplay pretty quick. It's less overall than wow because once wow actually lets you go it's about as much fighting as you could want, but the opening is pretty dogshit if it's forcing you into BFA. They would legit be better served letting people just do the cata starter zones and leaving it at that instead of exile's reach into BFA, or even exile's reach into cata zones.
FF isn't as old as wow, but you have to remember that you do not have to do all of the content in wow to get to max level. Hell, probably half of the actual story happens in raids instead of out in the world, you couldn't do that even if you wanted to. Leveling your first character through the FF MSQ is absolutely more time consuming than leveling your first character in wow right now, the saving grace is you only have to do it once and it's a good story if you want it. Wow leveling before chromie time was just doing the cata zones until 58 then doing 1.5 zones from each expansion with a couple dungeons if you feel like it and then you're done. After chromie time it's do a bunch of WoD zones and some dungeons and you're done. World record is what, like 6 hours now? They're incomparably different amounts of time.
Also Yoshi has already talked about how dawntrail is supposed to eventually be a new jumping in point for players so you don't have to do the entire current MSQ just to play with friends, but it probably won't happen for a bit.
I always chant "Warchief, Warchief, who is the Warchief?"
When it was Thrall everything made perfect sense to me.
But then Vol'Jin took over for whatever reason... then something happened with Garrosh, no idea, but I guess Vol'Jin took over again after him. Then Vol'Jin dies somehow and he gives the seat to Sylvanas cause the "spirits told him".... who has yet to make a non-genocidal decision 😅
@@Broockle the original order is Thrall > Garrosh > Vol'Jin > Sylvanas > whatever council thing they have now.
@@philip0544 no more Sylvanas?
What happened to her? 🤔
Only saw those wack cutscenes of her defending Lorderon and attacking Darnassus.
@@Broockle at the end of BFA, she got angry after taking a hit in a Mak'Gora with Saurfang. She then screamed something like "all of you mean nothing!" Killed Saurfang, and then ran away to ICC where she tore a hole in reality by breaking the lich kings helmet, which led to the shadowlands. A lot more things happen there, but the writing wasn't very good in shadowlands. Anyways, all the other horde leaders wanted Thrall to come back, and he's like "I don't wanna." And they're like "please, though?" And he's like "fine, but I'm not the warchief. We're all the warchief together."
@@philip0544
dang wow 😆
ye I loved the story in WC3 and I read around 8 of the WC books. love the universe.
But I never understood how one assimilates the story through WoW.
The cutscenes are cool as heck, but the narrative experience through the game always felt crap to me.
You need a guild to even experience the raids... in classic at least.
You need to do a lot of piecing together to really get the story, and it's nigh impossible to read quest logs when you got a party waiting for you where no one bothers reading.
To this day I still wonder what the big deal with Varian is 😅
As a WoW vet, we don't even realize how much just talking to npcs there is. I completely understand his frustration if you just want to get in there and fight stuff.
its talking to NPC's, and them having zero interesting things to say, whereas by the time of Endwalker, I wanted to know what the crew had to say on everything.
@@keithfilibeck2390 Yep. I go out of my way to talk to npcs after finishing even the side-quests because I KNOW they have something interesting to say. Hell, they even have their own side-plot going on that you would NEVER know if you never spoken to them. Like the Boulder Brothers and their romance with another scion!
They really need something that summarizes the older expansions so new players have a clue about who people are, what has already happened on Azeroth, and what people's motivations are. Or a way to guide them to play them in chronological order for people that are interested. There is definitely a disconnect between the starter zone and the rest of the game.
Honestly, WoW should have just ended with Wrath of the Lich King.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the video was not supposed to cut off at the end like that before Preach could actually give his thoughts on the video lol
what's baffling about this is the fact that Blizzard, one of the earliest to the MMO gates and a pioneer of MMO in general of it's time... thinks that an MMO needs a fucking "Tutorial area"... dude, it's a fucking MMO. The tutorial is you leveling to max, that's how you learn your class, your role and the general vibe of the game, through leveling.
Considering how fast leveling is now, you don't really have the time for that anymore. I leveled some new chars on retail and it's so fast half the time I forget to spend talents points and the gear you get gets outdated literally 15 minutes later.
@@DrewPicklesTheDark none of what you said removes the idea of that being the tutorial...
@@TheMikesc15 My response make zero sense to your comment, was there another comment that got deleted? Or maybe I replied to the wrong one.
@@DrewPicklesTheDark don't think there was another nah, can't tell you what happened there mate lmao
I love how the arcane explosion use reminds me of that video with woman watching the person using the "put the shape through the same shaped hole" put everything through the square hole.
He wouldn't have been able to do this in classic, first because you can actually die in this version and second because you're not bombarded with new spells every two minutes. It's the game design's fault.
@@Kuolema1337 Arcane explosion also destroys your mana in classic and mage's survivability is entirely down to efficient spell usage, not mindless passive gameplay.
What I would give for a traditional leveling experience in Retail again.
Why? Chromie time is obviously superior to just blasting 1/3 of the zone of an expansion then leaving.
I played WoW for six years before bailing during SL. Came back after BlizzCon last year and this resembles my experience trying to navigate DF. I have no clue what is going on in the story and nothing unlocks in a logical order. At one point I was meeting a guy I had already killed in a dungeon 🤷♂️. It’s really a mess.
Wow players are notorious for the cringiest gatekeeping with their ridiculous acronyms for everything. I’ve seen hundreds of not thousands of interactions with new players where people just use acronym after acronym because they knew the new player would have to ask wtf that meant. Then they could explain more and feel more special.
Hmm if you could choose whichever expansion you want, with an interesting cinematic explaining the overall setting perhaps.
Then have a followup explaining how it ended just for closure with that overarching storyline once you leveled.
Then an overview for the most recent expansion aswell.
Day9, Tasteless, iNcontrol, and Artosis at the twitch starcraft holiday bash was peak twitch streaming, loved Day9's take on wow classic/retail.
Everything about this has been a problem since they did the level squish, but it was even _worse_ before then because not only were story bits sprinkled all over the place but most of the critical story beats that actually progressed the world were relegated to being cinematics found in end-game raids. So, a player would speed-level through an entire expansion's leveling content and then just move on to the next expansion without knowing what the hell was going on.
Now the problem is that Blizzard immediately puts new players in Battle for Azeroth without giving them any context for who or what anything is, with even more whiplash because you're going from being just a lowly, "Poor Fucking Infantry" recruit to suddenly becoming the most trusted secret agent/champion of your faction after killing a bunch of Ogres.
NPC's treat new characters as if they'd known them for years, and we're sitting there going, "Who the FUCK are you???"
The issue with him spamming Arcane Explosion is that it was taught to him on the tutorial island before he could even select his spec, so now he thinks that's his aoe eventhough he chose frost spec. Not really the games fault that he has the assumption that is his AOE ability.
Blizzard also changed the classes back to be more like classic in Dragonflight. In previous expansions, your chosen spec would lock off spells that were not a part of that spec. So new players are now allowed to make mistakes, for better or worse.
That comment about Terraria hit pretty hard. My buddy started playing fallout 76 with a free code but he's never played a fallout game before. The other day I showed him how to use VATS. He's level 22.
I'm pretty sure the game gives you one small VATS-related tooltip in the corner of the screen that is easily missable
I was confused back in Cataclysm before finding out the reason was a bunch of books were inserted in between expansions.
It's gotta be way worse to essentially have the first two seasons of a show (WC3 + expansion) and then just get thrown into season 20 or whatever you'd call this.
Stores arent bad.
Bad stories are bad.
Forced bad stories are terrible.
You don't even get that. You get like the first 2 pages of 10 different books spat at you in a few cutscenes that make zero sense. Even as someone who played this game since classic coming back after a break of 2 expansions was literally just as confusing. They completely wrecked the entire new player experience in BFA and it's never been fixed.
I kind of want to see Day9 go through all the other MMOs now. This was gold.
Preach is the reason I know most of what I know about WoW. Even today, I find myself watching videos to understand stuff like Dragonflight gearing because the game dumps systems and currencies and plotlines onto you and expects you to figure them out on your own then retires half of them in a patch 3 months later but doesn't update itself to make relevant content easily recognizable.
He got big making guides for the game so makes sense.
I'm curious to know if his Twitch chat is going to help him once he's done with BFA, because the game doesn't tell you to move to the next region outright after Lv.50 I think. Instead, you'll keep getting these main story quests that leads you to the different areas post-BFA (Gnomes, Naga, PvP areas), but they give you shittier gear than what the BFA story quests gave you.
He's just doing this for a month of blizzard games and has already said he's not reupping for another month of sub, more because "I do not have 40 hours in the day to play wow" rather than any good/bad metric. I don't even think he'll get to the end of bfa if I'm being honest.
i think this is the issue with starting new players in an expansion instead of the base game
Base game had no story in wow lol
The killing innocent guards thing happened in Witcher 3 too. There's like a quest where you steal someones baby and put it in an oven to like, "prank" a demon or something. And the baby's dad's guards attack you for it OBVIOUSLY and you just murder them and go "yeah but look the baby is fine, it was just a prank".
I just noticed during the long speech that he muted, one of the player characters on screen was "Twitchchat".
Destiny 2 is indeed a nightmare.
I played first when all the content was available up to the Sands of Time/Horus or what ever that desert time warp content was named & it was quite enjoyable. Well, RAIDs were a nightmare with randoms tho. Then I played again a few years later when all the content I experienced before was removed & it was the worst experience ever. I was introduced to character over & over & each time I had the question "Who are you??" (and this was coming from someone that had played most of the removed half, I can't imagine the confusion of a totally new player). You pretty quickly get access to all the content in the game with no guidance, being left to wonder, where do I go next so that the story makes sense.. I can't recommend Destiny 2, even if it was free to play, it just isn't worth it anymore.
it's just so dumb that new players got shoved right into that mess of time lines, surrounded by unknown people calling you hero and champion but your char is 2 hours of age
I think probably the best expanisons to start in leveling a a new player other than vanilla would be Pandaria or Dragonflight. Legion is amazing but it would suck for a new player.
The Mostly Walking series day9 does with some game designer friends is great
It's so good! 😂
This is the crossover I've dreamed of for years
The problem isn't the story, it's the storytellers.
27:50
I almost pissed myself laughing at that last minute...
My God he nailed it!
really to me, all Blizzard needs to do is give a "skip to X expansion" option for each expansion that a new player HAS played through.
If a new player has not yet played through any expansion, they have to start at Vanilla and play through the WHOLE thing.
Once they reach 60 (or whatever level it is now) and did the raids, they enable the option to skip Vanilla if they make a 2nd character. And so on. But new players NEED to play through each expansion at least ONCE, imo. Yes it takes a LOT of time. But it will be a FUN time if done with other people that go through the same journey.
So WoW has always been weird because it sits in like 4 distinct eras. Vanilla through Wrath, Cata through Legion, BFA through Shadowlands, and now DF through the next 3 xpacs. WoW has also always had the problem of the playerbase for a majority of its first era not really caring about story. The game wasnt designed around telling a point A to point B style of story. Cata changed that. Now the story was more in the forefront. Players were expected to play through most of the zones and get story connections. This culminated with Legion which tells WoW first expansion wide story where you arent really allowed to miss parts of it. So BFA comes out and WoW really needs a new player experience overhaul because 120 levels is a lot for a new player to go through in an MMO especially when its content no one really cares about. For years all people cared about was the end game experience. Blizz made it easier for people to get into the game but they still had the problem that WoW doesnt really have a very cohesive story for new players to follow. This will always be a problem sadly because the game just isnt built to accommodate new players in a realistic way. God did they try with Chromie time but it is also something not designed all that well. The main problem being WoW expansions stories dont end when you reach level cap. WoW is a game where a bunch of stuff happens and you dont see a conclusion to most of it unless you are playing when the content is current. I dont really know if there is a way to fix that problem without DRAMATICALLY changing how WoW as a game works.
1 way i think they could make the new player experiance abit better although not perfect is to give the player a story option like the one that was released (i think) when Legacy of the Void was released. When u start a new campaign there is an option called (story so far) and a brief explanation of the major events from SC1 up untill Legacy of the voids release plays. This story recap option is available at any of the 3 versions of the game so if u play it in the Swarm expansion they will ofc only give u info up untill that point to avoid story spoilers.
I understand that wow has ALOT more important info then StarCraft has but this could be a great way to showcase some major events from the lore so ppl dont walk in completely blind and has no damn clue what is going on.
I am pretty furious about blizzard's leveling ignorance. They have good introductory quests. Fucking Cataclysm rebuilt the early levels of the entire game but lets not use them because they're 14 years old. Blizzard essentially abandoned leveling and would much rather people pay leap to their treadmill, please and thank you.
Its a fucking wall for people to get into the game when people have an easier time getting into a two decade old classic game than your retail mmo.
Every time I see this topic come up, I always mentally go back to the ffxiv player who tried wow out for the first time. Poor guy was utterly confused as to who anyone was or what was going on. If I remember right, he said he had to start wiki'ing basically everything just to have even the slightest idea. But I fear this is a problem all mmo's will have at some point. Simply too much involved to get everyone caught up, just too big of an undertaking. I feel especially bad for ff14 in a few years, that's an insane amount of story to get through.
i think they intentionally killed twinking as being fun and a bit of a challenge, it turned into a 2-3 day chill torture so you have a reason to buy the lvl boost, thats how it felt like for me, when i returned in shadowlands.
And i mean Thorgast was so terrible, i stopped twinking altogether, only appeared for raids and did some M+ keys, that i really enjoyed altough some mechanics were clearly harder and less fun than others.
It can not be overstated how terrible thorgast was, even when i wanted to switch mains for just one boss, my guild was cool with it, they even said i could stay the whole raid, but not having the optimal gear because you dont want to be forced through hours of not enjoyable content for 4 weeks, thats just not something i cherish or look forward to, its really that simple man. I quit shortly after.
maybe the whole chat GPT thing here would actually be helpful, like you could type /help how do i equip a weapon? what talent should i choose? etc, so players ask for help when they need it instead of whiplash from the staplegun xD
A little bit of extra context: This wasn't just Day9's first time playing WoW, but his first time playing any MMORPG at all.
So he had no prior understanding of how MMORPGs generally work - the combat, questing, levelling up, etc. Just an actual, complete newbie~ :P
Another Example for me is Destiny 2 where it is the an even worse case than Wow. Because at least in WoW you do have the option to go back and do the previous expansions. In Destiny 2, they straight up remove those previous expansions. That is insanity. When I tried it with free trial stuff and learned about that when I was trying to look for the campaign storyline stuff, I was like ''screw that. I am out''. Never played it since.
Now imagine you paid money for that content/game and it's just gone. Everyone who bought Destiny 2 at release got screwed.
I started playing Destiny 2 in Dec 2023 when one of the collectors editions was free on EGS. I didn't have any issue with it as a new player. I watched the highlights reel of what had happened, I played through some of the Legend missions (like when Cayde-6 died) then I jumped into the expansions that were still available in the order they came out (Shadowkeep, Witch Queen, Beyond Light, Lightfall) and I'm good now. I have a grasp on what's going on. I never played through Forsaken and The Red War, but I have a grasp of what happened in them. Uldren Sov had his brain warped by an Ahamkara (a mafia dragon, basically) and went to the Dark Side, he died, came back as a Guardian named Crow and felt really horrible about what he had done. The Cabal under Calus tried to take over Earth and attacked the Last City and they were fought off, Calus was deposed and exiled by his daughter Caitl. Never played it, but I have the gist of it. Never had any issues as a new Destiny 2 player
I did, nothing made any sense because they just dropped me past when a bunch of shit happened and said "deal with it" and that sucks and is bad.
@@nicholaswhite7056 that was your experience, not mine. You had a problem with it, I didn't. An individuals new player experience is not The new player experience. I just said I didn't have a problem with it, not that no one would have a problem with it. Experiences are unique to the person experiencing it. You think it's bad, I didn't find it difficult.
I think that destiny 2 has a pretty bad onboarding scheme objetivly. However it seems that every big MMO has this issue, that doesn't mean that its okay but Destiny 2 seem to take so much shit for it compared to other MMOs.
Dude in the background also presented the tutorial skip in Destiny 2 pretty bad. Dont know if that was intentional to "dunk" on Destiny 2 but it doesn't really matter. The tutotrial skip for Destiny2 is only availabe for new characters after the 1st. So you do have to progress 1 time. Also the tutorial part you can skip is mostly the what does each key press do. WASD, sprint, shoot melee, abilleties (destiny has 3 sometimes 4). The differences is not that big on the 3 classes as destiny 2 is a pretty øight mmo where the differences in classes isnt that huge.
Preach also seem to not be in touch with the casual audience here. He could be, but how he talks in this vid does not come off that way. Saying that everyone will just google problems is not what most casual players do. Watch yips and tricks videos is not a casual thing either. You are already more invested than most players at that point.
I must also say that Preach seem to have alot of hate towards destiny 2 spesifcly. I have seen the videos of him playing for the first time amd i think he raises alot of hood points. However not very groundbreaking points. Then nitpicks very much and if he personally doesnt like a creative direction he does present is a an objectivly bad design. I think its funny that Destiny 2s playebase is very careful when recomending the game as they know the onboarding is poor, this is something i never hear other communities talk much about. Even though their onboarding is pretty awful aswell.
Will disclose that im a Destiny 2 player and i might be bias in some viewpoints. I do belive taht the feedback is valid still. Also to the original commententor im not saying that just because Destiny 2 has bad onboarding that it cant be good for some people. Glad you felt that it was a good way to enter the game.
@@catierambles so you had a different experience, which means...there might be a problem???? thats my point, the way your post read you just rambled on and ended "i didnt have a problem" and impled that since you didnt have a problem no one did, maybe next time make it clear you understand that your experience wasnt the end all be all.
I've watched most of his streams, and between that and my own experiences, I really feel like this is where Retail suffers. Old school 04-05 players went through ALL the content to get to present day. New players are dropped in the middle of high-level content, and even if it is intended to catch them up, there's never a feeling that you're a starting grunt. The exile's reach is too hand-holdy, and yeah, too many modern concepts are introduced. They should look at making a completely new level-up experience. An MSQ, if you will, that takes you through the key moments and quests to introduce you to the world, and maybe quickly bring you through all expansions. That would be incredibly ambitious, but imagine if they could pull it off. New players to FF are brought through the entirety, so by the time we get closer to the end, we've experienced all the story. BFA being the default WoW starter experience is preposterous, and expects you to know all kinds of things from step 1. Day9 is a great vessel to witness this confusion and frustration. He had SUCH a good time in Classic, because that's the magic that captured so many of us. The current new player experience is just insane.
I thought I heard they were revamping it for TWW, so here's hoping they do, and it's a vast improvement.
From TWW it's updating to Dragon Flight which is very obviously where exiles reach has always been intended to take you. The outro mentions an expedition on a nearby island that you'll be heading to, even the NPCs carry over.
Beyond that you get dragon flying super early and a logical progression in story and difficulty with very few walls of text where you're stood still waiting for a conversation to end. Characters are introduced slowly and you're made familiar with who they are as they appear...
There are still some places where you're assumed to have some knowledge of the games history but it's far less of a dump into the middle of a story (for example the BFA intro quests aren't included in the current new player storyline which means that new players have no clue who anyone they're talking to is)
Now this is proof to me, that FFXIV has been doing the new player experience right from the very start. You may be doing the lame quests but you’re learning about the world and the characters and there is a very clear path.
WoW really needs to make the new player experience better (and their story telling as a whole). Everything is so disjointed.
If WoW was made exactly how FF14 is made, people would complain it is too linear. This Day9 guy would especially be kvetching over cinematics, since there's multiple instances in FF14 where you spend 30 minute stretches of just watching cutscenes and clicking dialogue boxes.
@@cabellocorto5586 The difference is that those cutscenes don't come in a 4.5 hour block right at the start of the game with nothing to break it up
Wow should have just ended at Wrath of the Lich King.
It kind of reminds me of starting at a new (big) company and they throw all the acronyms at you that don't mean anything. Takes at least a month or 2 to get settled.
Everyone asking who is Day9? No one asking how is Day9...
Day9 now plays Magic the Gathering. He plays Magic Arena mostly with a Hall Of Fame player in Brian Kibler.
Just watched Asmon's reaction, let's see what Mike has to say.
Would be cool if you got the chat's reaction to this too, considering these are stream highlights. Adds a community element to these videos.
Day9 was great content during those early Hearthstone years.
"larger and larger man" is still the GOAT Hearthstone meme.
That's where I remember that name! I knew Day9 was really familiar, but I never saw his SC2 content so I was trying to remember where I watched him.
16:50 I have over 500 hours in terraria and I didn't find out until recently that you could auto place items in chests
to be fair, though, I started playing terraria back when it first became available in 2011
I'm on a shipwreck, ok I guess I'm a new member of an elite paramilitary group called the Horde.
Oh No! Zombie City is under attack! Lordaeron? Sounds French. Also I am a champion now.
Ok, now I'm on a stealth mission to rescue someone. Who? IDK.
DINOSAURLAND!
Lets go to the other island. Oh no, this place has Witches, Witches are scary.
I'm in the Desert! There's no escape! Wait, I can just leave?
....and now I'm in dragonflight.
16:34 - I think googling solutions to a video game is a gamer mindset - I don't think my GF for example would even consider that as a way of solving an ingame problem
I tried playing retail WoW and granted I knew a lot of MMO jargon, I knew a lot of facts about WoW, and I had the exact same navigational problems in BFA as he did. Genuinely, that harbor town is so pretty, but it's so confusing to navigate, and it might just be because they waypointed everything instead of giving me actual directions.
Watching a frost mage spam arcane explosion is the best.
One of the funniest and saddest things I've watched. As an X-WoW player it sucks he got so stuck on rails going through retail. While the Isle of Introduction was OK be stuck for literal HOURS watching cutscenes and listening to talk about a world you know nothing about is crazy. Played all the way up to Shadowlands myself before my PC couldn't run it anymore so I know BFA. I loved the Haunted Woods atmosphere of that first Alliance zone. It was so good. Wish they had let him out to experience that earlier. I think long running MMOs and the MCU have a similar issue. "Did you not watch/play part/expansion 4? Well then you'll be lost joining us on expansion 6 cuz that guy, yes that one, is back and important now." Kind of an insane thing to say but Developers and Directors seem to assume you've done your homework and absorbed all the parts already. Newcomers are left behind because they have to keep their long time subscribers happy and pay off this bit of lore or that thing foreshadowed in an earlier part. It sounds crazy saying there is too much content when for years all I've wanted was more content to play when I was on the other side of the fence. Wonder how much longer it can sustain before it is forced to break down and "lets make Wow2/GW3/MCU-rebooted" is a thing? (yes I know gw3 is in some form already, I assume wow2 as well).
When is the warchief?
I’ve many times tried to get into retail and I just can’t do it. The gameplay is boring (while leveling at least) and the story is confusing and generally uninteresting, and there’s very little feeling of progression. I think I’m going to give SoD a try next, maybe we’ll see how War Within turns out for me. I’m still interested in giving the game a try.
TL;DR Took a break, came back. Woah that's a lot of stuff! Not great.
Took a break from retail at the end of last patch, not intending to play fated raids and intentinding to come back prepatch/new exp. Logged back in today and I gotta tell ya... the whiplash of coming back to retail after chilling in SOD was an eyeopener. All my chars had a lot of bag space compared to SOD, but my god those bags had so much stuff in them. I had no memory why half ot was there and trying to decide what to even do in the game.... nah, i just logged out. There's just so many systems and mechanics and differents tiers of items... I didn't even realize the breadh of it until I took a break. No wonder new players can't gel with it. :D
That's when I just start a new character every expansion pack. Dealing with mountains of old irrelevant items in bags is too much hassle.
i watched Day9's fi;; stream and there was no class trial. An NPC on exile's reach asked Day9 to shoot frostbolt at him 3 times.
thank you for making my monday a work bearable. This is so great
They felt that bfa was a good starting point for the story going forward since bfas stuff goes into shadowlands. But in war within dragonflight is gonna be the new starter expansion
holy shit, Day9 looks like an 80s army drill sergeant now
Oh, I can also say with confidence that I did not retain any story information whatsoever because the storytelling itself is so bad. They do pull you in with some really cool events right at the start, but then before getting to do much real gameplay at all, you just get like a 20 minute lore dump on the Houses and Factions and stuff and aaaaaaaaaa
yes, I, like day9, Just Wanted To Cast Spells.
When I started playing WoW, BfA was the current expansion. Started my journey in Gilneas as a Worgen Warrior.
Probably the best way to start fresh for new players is do your racial starting zone & go explore.
And/Or go do Chromie time after.
I dont know how true this is that it throws new players right into BfA, but I doubt it and Day9 got fed some bs.
People keep spamming abbreviations in newcomer chat as well. I'm then labeled as a villain for asking them to be more considerate of newbies when it comes to making them more understandable.
The new player experience should just be Vanilla/Cata. It's not like the quests are *that* different, now.
Vanilla: "Kill X-Y-Z"
Dragonflight: "Kill A-B-C"
Vanilla: "Loot bear asses"
Dragonflight: "Loot dragonbear asses"
Vanilla: "Gather flowers"
Dragonflight: "Gather dragonflowers"
Vanilla: "Go kill this elite"
Dragonflight: "Go kill this elite"
Main reason I say this is, a new player knows *NOTHING* of what lead up to the expansion they're playing in. Why the fuck not just start at the beginning, slapped down in a massive and beautiful world?
To be fair, the entirety of WoW's lore at this point is us as "heroes" getting in the way and murdering "villains" that were actually right and the true heroes all along.. WE'RE the villains.
The rotation spec thing was on the flying boat when you left tutorial island. Did they remove it?
Still there but it's only the first 2 abilities you get.
I'd love to know when the last time anyone in charge at Blizzard played their own game from scratch.
The new player experience has *never* been good, as long as it has been "needed." They could make it so good, go all out - have like Arthas himself talk directly to you in a dream sequence or something where he recruits you during Warcraft 3's lore leading up to vanilla, and then you're fast forwarding through time with other heroes and villains of significance. They could get weird with it, throw in WoW's greatest hits to touch on all the expansions, the best-of moments, etc. But instead...we get Exile's Reach. WOOF. They really need to get on this - they're talking about where the game will be at 30 years old - if they're going for another 10 years, they need to revamp the new player experience YESTERDAY.
Holy shit. I used to watch Day9 all the time. I haven't even thought about him in years.
Imagine, on FF14, you launch the game for the first time, and it gives you complete freedom to play any expansion of the game at any time, in any order. So you look at the expansions... A Realm Reborn, sounds kinda cheesy. Heavensward, eh, not into religion. Stormblood sounds kinda cool. Shadowbringers, oh that sounds badass, I'm going to start there! So you launch it, and your first cutscene is walking through the gates of the Crystarium to be greeted by the Crystal Exarch, who tells you that all of reality is at risk of collapsing at the hands of an ancient race of magical people called Ascians, and that you aren't actually a member of this world, but was pulled into this world from yours by the Crystal Exarch, so that you could stop the threat to all of reality.
As long and arduous as the story in FF14 can be, it starts you SMALL, with BABY STEPS. You're a humble adventurer trying to make a name for themselves in the world. You haven't achieved anything yet, you haven't accomplished anything, and you aren't important enough to be trusted with a mission like "Save all of reality as we know it from being erased."
I'm a WoW Classic kind of guy. Played vanilla back in the day, played private servers through the 2010s, even resubbed to play Classic WoW when Blizzard finally decided to give us official classic servers (after of course suing every large private server host into oblivion)(after saying in regards to the demand of wow classic "you think you want it, but you really don't.")(after Blizzard realized how incredibly profitable it could be and what a large market there was for the classic experience)... I tried retail about 3-4 months ago, and when I say I had Z E R O clue as to what was going on, who these people were, what the actual threat is... I mean, at one point I had a cutscene showing me Queen Azshara dying, and then 3 minutes later after doing another quest, I get a cutscene where Queen Azshara is alive and well! I guess I somehow got the chronologically-later scene first...
As someone coming back to the game after a very long break, I decided to level an alt through each expansion. I'm still split on if I disliked Shadowlands or BFA more.....because of the slow, forced story parts. There were so many "walk with me while I talk" moments it felt soooo long. I felt Day9's "let me play the game!!" so much
These devs got real sick of people skipping quest text, so they shoved in unskippable voice acting to make your questing experience horrible.
Yes, that is exactly what happened, and no one will ever ever be able to convince me otherwise.
"Who's the Warchief?" No, Who's in Silvermoon, What's in Undercity, and I Don't Know the Warchief.
I feel bad that I stopped watching him years ago when he stopped doing starcraft 2