It was never about quests. It was always about player interactions.
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and a monthly payment to continue doing it
why do real chores when virtual chores
"Honey, can you go out and powerwash the side of the house this weekend?"
"Awww, c'mon... I was planning on playing Powerwash Simulator this weekend! 😩"
Now I kind of feel guilty for enjoying Crime Scene Cleaner. At least in my defense, my house is not covered in blood.
I've been playing Hitman: World of Assassination all weekend.
Not sure if that's better than the alternative.
Real chores give us no sense of pride and accomplishment
If powerwashing the house got me new socks that gave me +.25 an hour pay I'd be doing all kinds of side quests
Compares to gatcha
Hmmm
It was more because it was a virtual chatroom and community in an age where such things were not widespread
Also, I think this undersells how good the game looked.
Yes, you were hunting boar livers but you were doing it in this beautiful tropical jungle beside a giant waterfall. And then you'd peak behind the waterfall, discover a mermaid who was at the gate of a giant dungeon themed like a water park. And you completely forgot about the quest to go play in the water park for a couple of hours.
I'd say the bigger problem with WoW was the gradient of zones. You'd be hunting zebra-taurs on the high planes. And then you'd walk through a mountain pass, see a dinosaur, get all excited, and aggro a creature +30 your level.
it's less about the moment to moment gameplay and more about the vibes and ambiance tbh. Players love zones like Barrens and Nagrand even though a good chunk of both zones' quests are just hunting animals because the vibes of those zones are immaculate.
You're not wrong about Alliance zones feeling more fleshed out.. but over the last two decades of playing vanilla WoW on and off, every single time that I've rolled an Alliance character and tried my best to commit, I would eventually see a primitive ass Horde outpost with hanging feathers and dreamcatchers, with some bulky spiked Orc and a noble Tauren standing there.. and I would feel such an immense feeling of homesickness unlike anything I've ever felt in another game, and I would immediately delete that character and start over in Durotar.
Something about fighting for the honor of the Horde and the glory of the Warchief out there in an inhospitable land, with the inspirational swell of horns and indigenous drums just puts me in it. Like, really puts me in it.
Kinda ironic that alliance zones are more fleshed out, but horde lore and characters tended to get much better treatment.
Yeah but while killing the boars another guy comes round and helps you kill some quicker and then you team up and go around helping anyone else you come across
Now that's just not true.
Repeatable quests weren't added until much later. You had to collect all sorts of organs with shitty drop rates from a variety of animals in different zones.
It was actually barely worth doing quests in the original game, because most of the XP was on the kills rather than quest hand-ins, and the rewards were mostly crap.
I honestly miss playing WoW. It was a fun game, especially if you had a group to raid with. If only I didn’t have to give Blizzard money to play it.
In 2004 (the launch year) the original WoW was an amazing time I lost and entire year of professional growth and productivity to. When the first expansion (Burning Crusade) came out, I was equally excited as as the original launch, but after seeing Green gear fall of simple mobs that was better than the epic Purple gear I spent weeks getting in 40 person raids, I could instantly forecast how the entire rest of the game would be forever: and endless grind with your hard won efforts simply trivialized in the first month of the next expansion. I stopped playing WoW about a month after, went back to school instead, and finished the college degree I had started 8 years earlier. Quitting WoW lead to my actions which launched my career to new heights.
I credit WoW with teaching me an incredible life lesson in my 20s to never get drawn into something like that again.
Learned this exact same lesson and quit. 
My reaction exactly to BC!
And flying? Walking around was a core part of the game, seeing stuff, getting whacked by +10 monsters so you had to sneak around, now you just spend 50% of the game in the skybox.
My first WoW experience was Horde. I created an orc hunter, did the training area and got to the Crossroads in the Barrens. As I was figuring out what traders and so on were available, a bunch of high level alliance characters turned up and started laying into the guards. Word went out and high level Horde characters began arriving from Orgrimmar by wyvern. Ended up with about 20 or more characters on each side. It was epic!
I remember trying wow in their 10 hour demo being like “I’m just killing spiders when does this get fun?”
Then a friend told me “it takes 20 hours to get to the fun bit”. I then uninstalled and never looked back.
It doesn't take 20 hours to get to the fun but, it just wasn't for you.
Yeah def not.
There is fun in changing zones sightseeing and getting really powerful abilities, running in raids. But if the hook for the core kill loop doesn't catch, you're going to have a bad time.
I remember leaving the dwarf starter zone for the first time. Passed some NPC dwarfs, got chased by a mob that was way too powerful for me and barely survived. When I was done running, and was safe, I looked around and saw the entrance to IronForge.
That's when I knew the game was for me
Wow was fantastic when it came out. I never had the money to pay for a subscription so I played on pirate servers. I never got to the endless grind stages, but I adored exploring the early zones with all the original classes. The world looked great, the magic felt real and the fantasy was engrossing. I don't think I ever made it passed lvl 35 on any characters, but thoroughly enjoyed getting there, sometimes with friends and sometimes alone.
I am literally in WoW classic killing boars for their snouts while reading this on the other monitor.
You're forgetting the part where there are 6 boar spawns that respawn every 2 minutes and there are 15 people waiting on the next spawn.
Me, a refined person, playing Guild Wars instead.
Well, in Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, you also have reasons to collect lots of the same stuff to do stuff.
The difference is that you don't have to collect 10 boar asses in boar ass forest for a specific boar ass quest, but instead you may want to craft a legendary bone weapon, so you need to gather bones, and you can go anywhere in the world that drops the bones, or that gives gold you can use to buy the bones from other players, or that grants a special map currency that you can use tyo buy boxes of bones from a map currency vendor, all while doing whatever you feel like doing, progressing your bone gathering in a wide variety of ways.
I picked it up recently with a group of friends on turtle wow (RIP, fuck blizzard), and while I really enjoyed the social aspect, the actual gameplay felt like a chore the whole way through. Plus, it felt like an obligation to keep up with my friends who somehow had much more time to throw at the game.
As a long time player of EQ before WoW ever came out: the drops in WoW were never that bad.
I remember doing the starter weapon quest for the dark knight? One of the dark elf tank classes. Needed a special type of bone for the weapon and killed so many fucking skeletons, by the time I got the materials for the weapon, I was like level 25 or something and had enough money to just buy an even better weapon from the bazaar.
Leveling up with company was fun. Especially when you had an ass-puller like me in the party, running for your lives from all the boars in the area, because he got a new AoE spell.
It kinda boils down to chucking rocks in the river alone vs chucking rocks in the river with friends.
My first PC game was WoW. I didn't know how to use keyboards back then, and so, I was killed by boars 5 minutes into the game.
Fun times.
Now, games have aggressive monetization through battle passes and gotcha mechanics! Truly we have improved.
I think a lot depends on why you play a game. I liked WoW and other open-world games for the vast lands I can explore. I don't give a rats ass about combat or progression. I do just enough to stay alive and spend most of my time socializing and exploring.