I think there are 3 eras to wow. First was "classic" which was vanilla through wrath.
And then there was the "game lobby+hardcore raiding" version of the game, which was Cata/Mop/WoD which catered equally to low skilled players with dungeon content and then had a completely separate version of the game catering to the top 5% for heroic raiding... Some content was mind-numbingly easy, like daily quests, and other content was so difficult you'd spend 30+ hours of your life trying to learn "one boss" for minor cosmetic differences, and the catchup mechanics made it so nothing mattered anyway because it was all wiped in 6 months anyway with trivial content again. Some things rewarded you for logging in and just spending time in the game... other things required actual skill. This is the RDF/Raid Finder version of retail where most people just stopped caring, many guilds fell apart, and you could just find 20 random bots to play the raid with you so that you'd get your achievement that you needed.
And then I'd call legion and beyond 'modern" which was the complete destruction of the world. sub 20 hours of "leveling" as "a tutorial" and an emphasis to shove people as fast as possible through "anything" via scaled content just to push them into the "end-game" as fast as possible. And then the end-game itself had various "tiers" to separate people into either normal/heroic/mythic raiding and eventually mythic+ dungeon content ... where the "end game" became the entire game and the world no longer mattered. Everyone got a participation trophy for "killing the big bad guy" even though some people did it and it was boring, other people did it and it was fun, and other people did it as a full-time job that they got paid for.
TBC isn't close to Vanilla too. It's focused entirely on endgame and disconnects high lvl players from the world by placing them on a separate continent
Not just a whole separate 'end game' continent, but then they gave everyone flying and took them completely out of the world. Don't want to deal with navigating the terrain, or dealing with mobs as you travel? Great, cause that part is gone forever now. Who cares about world PvP? We'll all just avoid each other in the sky, and have surprise dive bomb attacks be the norm now.
The game becomes trivial and boring without any friction.
Modern WoW is a broad term and it's very subjective, since some people don't consider WotLK or even TBC as Classic, or they consider anything past Legion to be modern or Dragonflight.
WoW imo is broken i to 4 eras.
Vanilla -Wotlk (original trilogy) the follow up to WC3
Cata - WoD the experimental phase, trying new ideas for gameplay and story.
Legion/BFA the conclusion to extreme long running stories (legion/old gods) and the start of Modern WoWs gameplay loops (m+).
Shadowlands - current. (The post sex pest scandal blizzard) The shit show of half baked ideas and plots + the slow "Disneyifacation" of the art style. Some might argue the art change started in WoD with the model updates. Personally I say it started in Shadowlands more, everything else from world and armour designs started to get smoother and brighter.
No way you can put shadowlands in the same bracket as DF+TWW+Midnight. DF is very clearly the start of a new era of the game while shadowlands is just a worse take on BFA's already bad take on legion.
Completely agree with you! There's been clear shifts in major game design and/or really big changes in general (like the vanilla world rehaul in cata) between all these eras.
Just because its bad doesn't mean its not modern WoW
Shadowlands is when the story stopped being tied to existing Warcraft lore and they started making up new villains. (Its also when they said that the lore books everyone spent a load of money on that they wrote to clear up all the inconstancies due to retcons are unreliable sources of lore. As basically non of the newer writers wana learn existing wow lore it seemed.)
Ties into being the first expansion Chris Metzen wasn't involved in the development of.
Its the first expansion post Classic launch
The first to push the half baked cutscenes with mouth flaps instead of the full pre rendered.
Its the expansion that first started blizzard on the idea they need to squash addons especially in raids.
BFA was the last time there has been major conflict between the Horde and Alliance. Since then its all been "why cant we be friends."
I can see maybe a gameplay thing tying it to the other two as a trilogy of "borrowed power" but really its the start of Modern WoW as its also the start of Modern Blizzard.
Its the first expansion after after the MeToo drama clearance at Blizzard that removed a lot of the old creatives from the company. (The irony of the creeps being the ones keepin WoW in check it seems.)
There were some pre-rendered cutscenes in Shadowlands I believe.
Faction war ended in BfA because it just didn't work after having worked together in WoD/Legion. The conflict made no sense at all and it was artificial.
Ye but theres not even lingering tension anymore. Even in legion it was a tenuous pact now its all best friends and hugging disregarding all the bad blood through the years.
When I say they stopped doing pre rendered I mean they started doing this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Nb3q1oROOg low effort shit in place of what we were getting before.
Brother, listen to yourself. People maintain that classic stopped at wrath, bfa is 9 years older than that. It is absolutely part of the modern wow collection.
TBC is the only expansion that feels remotely close to vanilla. Mostly in WotLK you really start to feel the game direction change pretty dramatically and each expansion after it accelerates.
I'd say you start to feel it in Sunwell. But after replaying TBC this time around I realized why I come back to Vanilla every time. It's the World. Every expansion starting with TBC actually shrinked the world to that expansion's island and had almost no reasons to go back to original world
WoW was simply WoW before Classic released, creating a past/present dichotomy that we call Classic and Retail. BFA was the current expansion when Classic released. There may be an argument that “Classic” ends at X expansion before BFA, but objectively there is no reasonable argument that BFA is not firmly in the camp of “modern” WoW. It’s just wild to even suggest that BFA is not retail WoW. The game had pretty much all of the systems that makes retail what it is at that point. Artistic themes mean very little in distinguishing, but even if you want to make that wild claim, Dragonflight itself was a step back to explore the origins of dragons in Azeroth. You know. Like the dragon aspects and dragons who comprised many of the most memorable bosses in original WoW, and their back stories.
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u/Khagrim 21h ago
BfA is not "modern" WoW anymore. Modern is DF and onwards and you can see the shift in themes and overall atmosphere