Crazy how they based this whole game on Hearthstone huh

its so annoying having to listen to everyone in his chat saying that he shouldn't have chosen the tutorial zone when you literally dont have a choice on your first character for a new account. It's like they want to seem smart and they just come off as moronic.

The sheer devestation in his voice when he heard about the level scaling sure was something.

"I like games where I can look at the center of the screen, and don't have to look at the minimap" - Brood War player

"This is the most exercise you get during the day if you're a World of Warcraft player." SHOTS FIRED!

Questing in retail is like hunting for easter eggs but you know where all the eggs are.

2:18:02 - This is what I came here for, and I was not disappointed.

The tutorial taking the absolute piss out of what a "quest" entails is as hilarious as it is absurd. Shoot a training dummy. Quest complete. Walk back to camp, quest complete, have some pants. Truly a thing of beauty.

The option to play tutorial island or original race starting zone only shows up if you've reached max level at some prior point (in the 20 year history of retail). Brand new accounts don't get a choice. Similarly once off tutorial island, you either get to go where you want or if it's a new account you have do BfA content. When next expansion comes out (later this year?) the new account default will be Dragonflight. Or you could do like D9 and just wander off and start doing Cataclysm content.

Level scaling is a scourge on all RPGs. So glad Day 9 understands this.

So, long long ago I worked as a Blizzard Game Master, from Burning Crusade through Mists of Pandaria - one of the continuing goals of the dev team while I was there was that they wanted the playerbase to connect with the story. Vanilla and BC had a lot of story, that you had to go and find. And there were a lot of players who never knew who Illidan was in BC, because they never ran that specific raid. So each subsequent expansion, you see the story getting more in your face. Wrath had the Lich King showing up all over the place. Cataclysm literally had Deathwing nuking zones from time to time. Mists of Pandaria doubled down on a lot of the phased systems, and one central story. I haven't played since Battle for Azeroth, so I'm not super up to date on how things are now, but I suspect they've kept going in that direction.

1:59:41 nailed it. Blizzard intention was to provide a smorgasboard of experiences that would lay ahead of the player to compel them into pursuing the world further. But As you said, that's not at all what beginning (or even veteran) players want out of a starting experience. They want to be nobodies starting in a sleepy backwater of the game where nothing happens. That's tantalizing, that tickles the imagination.

As someone who played WoW back in classic and then for the first two expansions, I also didn't appreciate the boar scene. I think what happened is that, over the many years of trying to keep the game fresh Blizzard constructed more and more elaborate forms of quests. And then they try to make this new tutorial and because they don't know how to do it normal anymore they end up putting in all these strange types of quests that they've created. But weirdly, those quests only made sense to be introduced to a player after many kill ten boars quests had gotten so stale that Blizzard had to invent new types of quest. It seems super weird because its like you're playing "future quests" from the future of the game.

My favourite Day9 statement of this video "I just like games that are very punishing to be honest" (Starcraft) xD I totally feel the same, love the challenge!

Sean, you didn't ask why, but here's why. Over the years there have been a couple of level and stat squishes. Classic started with 60, then it was +10 for expansion 1 and 2 (TBC and WotLK), then +5 for expansion 3 and 4 (Cataclysm and Pandaria). Then again +10 for 5th, 6th and 7th expansion (WoD, Legion and BfA). At lvl 120, expansion no.8 (SL) squished all of that to lvl 50, with max being 60. (because values for items and damage were getting ridiculous) Since then, we had expansion 9 (DF), with +10 levels, and expansion 10 is around the corner. We are going to be at max lvl 80 this summer with new expansion. As someone on reddit wisely said, "They 1. Never balanced it 2, Will never Balance it. 3.Most likely Don't know wtf to do with it". Hence the scaling. Also it's not uniform across the world. *(citation needed)* * Starting Experience: - Levels 1-10: Starting zones specific to each race or Exile's Reach, a universal starting experience for all new and returning players. * Default Leveling Experience: - Levels 10-60: Currently, the default leveling experience for new players is through Battle for Azeroth content using Chromie Time. This will transition to Dragonflight content later this year as the new expansion releases. * Chromie Time Alternatives to Default Leveling Experience: - Levels 10-60: Players can choose to level through the content of previous expansions via Chromie Time, including: * The Burning Crusade * Wrath of the Lich King * Cataclysm * Mists of Pandaria * Warlords of Draenor * Legion * Battle for Azeroth * Shadowlands * Scaling Outside of Chromie Time: - Levels 10-30: Classic Zones in Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor. - Levels 10-30: Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King zones. - Levels 30-35: Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria zones. - Levels 35-40: Warlords of Draenor zones. - Levels 40-45: Legion zones. - Levels 45-50: Battle for Azeroth zones. - Levels 50-60: Shadowlands zones. * Current Expansion Content: - Levels 60-70: Dragonflight - latest expansion and its new zones, quests, and endgame activities tailored to the newest expansion storyline and mechanics.

I just noticed the music during the tutorial kicks into one of the Warcraft 2 Alliance songs. Incredible.

showing a problem before showing the solution is such a great way of putting it

Whoever said WoW 1 vs WoW 2 at the end nailed it. WoW isn't a forever game. It's a living thing and a lot of what made classic great was the novelty of everyone experiencing it for the first time. Some of that is still retained in classic, but WoW as a game exists as a period in time, and the movement toward an "endgame focused dumbed down fighting big bosses with your friends adventure" is the natural progression of the thing. It can't be the first time every time.

I'm diggin the shaven look Day9

2:14{35 really loving the ironic placement of the line "whoops, I drooled" XD

I thought Sean hated the diamond tracker so much, he preferred death over it hahaha

That Captain Garrick sounds like Ashley Williams from Mass Effect.

38:12 that whole commentary is so true. Like he said while playing classic, a game is a set of (easy or hard) problems that you (the player) have to overcome. That's where the fun is of playing a game. Take that away and you might as well just watch a movie or read a book..

That rant about death as a learning tool is one I agree with, but I also have many friends who hated classic because they died too often and didn't seem to learn anything from it

Glad my assumption that you would be blown away by the glowing was right LOL

I'm the last one to defend what retail has become, but regarding the giant boar sequence, I think it was intended to introduce you, a brand new user, to the possibility of quirky and specialized vehicle quests. But primarily, I think they wanted to show you a bunch of damage numbers flashing on the screen, because that's the dopamine rush some people need to be interested.

Hey Day9 haven't watched you for about 2 years now, but shouting shoot her feels like coming home 😊

Classic is a game based on exploration. Instanced group content is kind of an afterthought. But weirdly the end game of classic is all instanced group content. And so as players hit max level and did the end game content, there was a gradual shift in expectations that WoW isn't the exploring things game, it's the instanced group content game. And gradually as the game moved from expansion to expansion, the balance tipped more towards providing what's in the end game and hurrying people to the end game point. Spend thousands of hours gradually grinding up to level 120 and exploring each nook and cranny along the way? Absurd! That will put thousands of hours between players and the REAL GAME (instanced group content). So it's interesting to see Sean react to that disjunction. He got kind of acclimated to the classic experience and retail is, in so many ways, a COMPLETELY different game. I think both the exploratory classic experience and the instanced group content of retail are fine, good things. They're just SUPER different.

So enjoyable to watch him play. I love his humour.

Damn indeed, I'm pretty much having the exact same feeling about the tutorial, showing all available quests and objectives and scaling. Retail is pretty fun if you play very hardcore but that's about it.

55:39 "I'm old school, I wanna play myself." 🤣

"creative confidence" remains one of the funniest things I saw in 2023.

Sean is remarkably charitable about provisionally holding off on what his instincts (which are strong) are telling him -- about scaling, the absence of exploration in what is ostensibly an open-world game, of complicated abundance in the face of few meaningfully strong obstacles. What he's actually missing is only the scale of cynicism in front of him: the story aspects are shallow so as to allow a person to not care about it in the least. The scaling exists to deliberately remove incorrect decisions: when the correct decisions are already known by people who have played the game for years, this kind of shift would feel liberating, allow playing in a way that is different to how they had rotely executed before. And, of course, the fact that the 'real' game is actually the endgame: when every player character has the same base stats prior to customising talents and equipment, the obstacles can be calibrated into puzzles with specifically correct approaches and insurmountable punishes. Even more so when classes are homogenised into the three archetypes of dps, healer or tank. All this is obfuscated by an amusement park of minigames and micro-customisations, and all of this is in the service of maintaining a paradigm that hasn't really changed at its heart since WoW initially copied EQ: to create something that is most often a low-effort time sink, that is psychologically addictive and pacifying; an immense and impressive distraction that never fully ends. It is a hideously exploitative thing that is artistically bereft on purpose.

I feel like there must be some way to make a game that combines the best of both worlds - the slow exploration-based no-handholding experience of classic combined with the much more improved quality of life features and combat of retail. I feel like we could have a truly Elden Ring experience if this was done right - a massive world chock full of danger and the unknown with excellent moment-to-moment combat encounters that never feels boring and yet you can take it at your own pace.

1:16:44 I have to wonder if he would have just gone down into the hole/cave thing if the game had not put dots on the mini map, because it feels like the most yellow paint moment. You were given quests by people standing in front of the mouth of a giant hole in the ground and twice he heads off in different directions. Now the first time he did have another quest to do so it does make sense, and he is also reading chat, but him missing that running off to the side like that seems like it would not have happened in classic.

One small benefit of the level scaling, with the fast leveling wow has, is that if you’re into the lore and the quests you won’t out level the quests in a zone where you want to experience the whole story going on there. Most people probably don’t care, but some people do.

3:59 Block invites, etc. 😂👍 I was looking for such options. Thanks!! 😄 55:40 I came back to WoW after 8-10 years and decided to actually read quests and.. if you read quests there is a gameplay you’re taking about. I’m being PvP oriented for whole life, but personally liked wow quests so much and stories, campaign. I’m playing slowly, enjoying. Try it :) Try to play it slower :) And also - you will die often during leveling up, don’t worry :) Everything you’ve mentioned - will happened at level 30+- And dungeons (raids for low levels heh) got harder actually since pandaria. Love now pick heal role, it’s a challenge! Nice Campaign is very interesting, just read quests please! I hate reading too :) but it’s your native language at least, you will get used to it and game should be more enjoyable

Day 9 started a side job as a bouncer. I can see him out there with a cap on and some chains keeping the riff raff out of LA's finest clubs.

Retail wow revealing that Sean doesnt have 2FA on his Blizzard account.

All your points are exactly why I'm playing classic

You saved my life, mount me!

1:27:22 you had magic missiles and 2 fire spells and other usable items =) wow is also generally a multiplayer game, increasing the types of attacks you have by working together.

35:28 (ish) That Gnome is definitely voiced by the same guy who did Mayuri Kurotsuchi in Bleach. Some voices you just recognize instantly.

I was watching the steam live when the Creative Confidence BG3 moment happened. Had to pause this video to go watch that again because I was absolutely crying laughing.

recently got into wow, but I never really enjoyed the questing aspect. I primarily enjoy the endgame content of Raiding / Mythic+ dungeons. I treat leveling a character on retail to max level to be the actual tutorial for how to play the class, as you are slowly introduced to each new ability/ talent tree. It's a flow state of doing enough individually taxing things that accumulate to an overall enjoyable experience. unless i already knew people who played at the endgame, I don't think i would have stuck around long enough to see it to then enjoy it.

Day9 your videos recently have been a blast!

A dangerous and powerful wolf called. Sir grey wolf, the most generic of all the subordinates

57:51 This part killed me 😂😂

2:14:00 Genuinely did not know that. What's the point of exploring if there's no danger anywhere?

We ever gonna revisit BG3?

I hadn't played retail in like 10 years and tried it again a few months ago, and I have this same feel that I was on rails in this foreign area, and I got to the mid 20s in it and never felt like I had control over what to do or had time to like, go to town and just explore things. It was feeling like the new user experience in Retail now is more focused on simply accelerating you to the high level so you could play what other people are playing.

Egg Man Sean has returned

Retail WoW is what happens when a developer is asked to imagine what it's like to be a new player or what players would enjoy doing, as opposed to actually being allowed to develop it based on their own passion as a gamer. It's very obviously "design by committee".

plays retail for 25 minutes "You know what I would prefer? Death."

Damn Day9, looking fresh man. Nice cut!

damn having played wow back when it released, ending up raiding nax before burning crusade, this is so painfull to watch...

I love the moment when he realizes arcane explosion is incredibly overpowered at low levels 🤣

not gonna lie..... spent the whole time thinking how lame it is that backseatboss was just waiting for day9 to get to the dungeon portion to que up at the same time so he could be in there with him.

Some of the sounds effects legitimately were used in Hearthstone before World of Warcraft, In particular, Frostbolt

Game suggestion: Chants of Sennaar. I mean the real suggestion is Outer Wilds, but....😢

Anyone else stopped playing wow for good quite some time ago, watched Sean play and now feels the urge to play again?

I played WoW for a number of years and god all of the Lore Master achievements. I could likely count on my hand the number of quests actually read. There is something to be said for classic actually forcing you to engage with the content.

I am so glad that you tried playing WoW Classic without any addons so that you don't recognize the question marks on the map. That was added to the retail game since every player used an addon (and people playing classic are still using it and 90 % of the people don't even want to bother to do any quests without it) that gave you guidance on where to go to do the quests just how it was in your tutorial playthrough. I am not sure if there is an option in the settings to remove that but they should put that as if you never played before that really ruins the exploration part of the game. About the zone scaling I really hate it too, as the only difficulty while leveling is trying to kill mobs that are higher level than you (the higher level the mob the less chance you can hit them and they can do double damage to you if they are +4 levels than you),but I understand why it is there - if it wasn't there you would never step to 90 % of the places on the map like ever because the old zones are old quest hubs and their whole purpose is leveling. To level to max level you can complete like 4-5 zones and you are done so all the other zones are completely unused (except the end zones of the current expansion)and if you start a new character(alt) you can choose 4-5 different zones and that way your leveling experience will be completely unique and enjoyable somewhat. At a point in time in the expansions the max level for a character was 120! Imagine leveling 120 levels from 1 to 120 like in classic on average you spend like an hour to get a level - thats 120 hours until you get to the endgame. When you spend 120 hours on a modern game you are probably almost done with it like the whole playthrough and WoW retail says - oh you have just started now that you are max level the endgame content begins. I think because of that philosophy they redid leveling, squished the levels and numbers down (characters were doing millions of damage and they still do just not in one hit anymore) and made it so you can get to max level faster. Anyways I am ending this wall of text with a message to say - I really like how you are noticing the good and the bad things of the game and realize that they may be good to some and bad to some. I think that's the whole problem of WoW retail - it tries to cater to such a wide audience and it is destined to fail because there are so many different WoW players that want to do different things in the game. Hope you enjoy the rest of your playthrough.

"if every decision can be made.... none of them can" -syndrome incredibles, 2004

i love how in 2 hours of play, Day9 sums up all (or most of) my problems with retail WoW and illuminates why many of us still flock to Classic, SoD, and private servers. Sadly, after blizz has treated SoD, my hopes for a true Classic+ have gone down the pooptube. I want to enjoy leveling, i want to feel weak and overcome that gradually, i want to be immersed in the environment and engage with the game. I don't want to teleport to max level. I want rewards to be earned. It's tragic that this has somehow become a minority opinion and all MMO's have resorted to spoonfeeding and handholding.

"Backseatboss" lol

Captain Garrick sounds like ashley williams from mass effect!

24:45 Sean really relating to Gen Z lol

Wild seeing someone play through the first time modern wow. I can see why we dont get new players :D

@day9 I would love it if you played some Guild Wars 2. Just saying

Good choice shaving your dome. Looking good my man

Beautiful

Your commentary at the end there about level scaling is one of the reasons I stopped playing retail WoW after Legion. When they introduced level scaling throughout the entirety of the game, it killed any incentive I had to play. It was incredibly stupid to me that I could kill a kobold in 2-3 hits at level 10, but that same kobold at level 50, 60, whatever, now took 20 seconds and 12 attacks to kill. Level scaling didn't just render leveling up ineffective; it actually did the reverse. It made you get weaker the more you leveled up. It's one reason why twinks will cap their level at around 10, because then they are the most powerful and OP they will ever be, and doing dungeon runs with, say, a level 10 or 11 twink Monk tank when they're one-shotting everything, and you simply cannot match them as you're leveling up at level 35, 40, 50, whatever, is just so incredibly stupid.

The level scaling in WoW is objectively a net positive. And chat never clarified that the whole world doesnt scale DOWN to you, it can only scale UP to you. Every zone still has a MINIMUM level required to go in, but now you can stay in it for longer. Elwynn Forest was a 1-10 zone, now it is a 1-20 zone. Westfall was 10-~20, now it is a 10-60. The point of "oh I leveled, but so did the mob, so I dont feel much stronger" is only half right. The only thing that the mob got was slight increase in damage and health, but you got a talent point AND stat increase. They implemented this because it was very disjointed to level in Elwynn, go to Westfall for maybe 2 or 3 hours, then have to go to Duskwood, be there maybe an hour, then go to Dustwallow, then travel continents to get to a level 40 zone, then travel expansion continents to get to 50, then travel another continent to get to 60. It streamlined it to let people play one expansions worth of content. Scaling allowed Sean to leave the Tutorial area, go back to the human starting zone, and get xp for killing the Blackrock Spies and the Wolves and the corresponding quests. Had there been no scaling, there would have been no kill xp and the quests would have barely given 1% xp. And he was still 2 shotting the mobs

This is like my dad learning about video games

Did he ever discover TAB targeting?

2:06:46 Why can't it be both?

In film they say "show, don't tell". Maybe the analog for games is "challenge, don't show or tell".

Man that guy looks oddly familar to the dream character in bg3 haha 😉

I can't eat a sandwich without mayo. But, I can eat one without mustard. So I'd have to pick mayo.

You should give Elder Scrolls Online a try. I’d like to see you give it a try. Think you would like it

SHOCKING how different, and bad, the retail experience here is than classic.

What a boss move, going all-in on the bald while playing WoW retail to support Asmongold.

This version of the game is basically what Sean and his mods would've kept banning entire playthrough of Classic Era. The handhelding and "backseating" starts before you even touch the keyboard and it quite literally never stops. This time it's just not the chat backseating, but it's the game itself. And that's something that killed the whole community and made the whole game into a pipe run with 95% of it being dead content until you reach max level of current expansion. It does look shiny and new tho, with smoother animations. (Compared to Classic)

As far as level scaling, the game that made me hate it was actually Diablo 4. I went from disliking it to hating it. I remember when I got to fight The Butcher and went "Man, if I'd been a few levels lower I would have won" because I'd been using the same gear for a while.

I personally prefer retail over classic but c'est la vie. Something for everyone!

You can be critical of something without disliking it 😊

Level scaling was a necessary evil because many people outleveled the zones they were in, quickly. A lot of the zones are also narrative driven so the fact that you couldn't level up any more in that zone means you'd have to abandon that zone to be "efficient". Classic is paced where you can likely experience a zone in its entirety before moving on.

I don't remember the tutorial being this hard?

Man i wished you would do a 1-60 classic!

As a long time WoW player (and day9 fan) I find it fascinating how he is completely not drawn in by the games core systems. Talents, gear, to some extent leveling, etc. are all built to make you want to progress and get to the next objective - leveling is just a way to introduce it to you slowly. It is really interesting that despite being a super analytical SC player he isn't drawn into WoW's (imo very engaging) systems.

100% on lvl scaling!

'its a geomancer and it forgets its skills and headbutts me' well it is a quilboar.........................................

Why won't he loot?

Imagine playing a game like Elden RIng, then BG3, WoW Classic, and then WoW retail waiting to find out things on your own.... Oh my sweet Day9, you are so adorably naive.... #CamelForLife

He doesn't understand what he wants is in the end game for retail rather than in the start like classic, but the problem then is the reliance on addons to do everything for the player. Hot button topic.

Altenton is the goat!

2:04:52 you said it, brother

see i wish you played Classic a little bit longer, long enough to get Blink, Frost Nova, and Cone of Cold, then you feel like a real mage

It's so stupid it never leaves you alone to immerse yourself in the world....