The expansion is out and while end game tends to be the main focus of the game, leveling is still where it starts. How is the leveling experience this time around? In this post, I’ll talk about the introduction, the maw, each of the zones, and how long it took us, plus my overall opinion of it. Hint: It wasn’t terribly long, but it felt like it in some places. Also, slight spoilers in here.
Intro / Maw
The storyline of this expansion is pretty awesome. I love the going to the afterlife, learning more about the Warcraft universe. The themes and set pieces and art and ideas are great. But most of the first few hours of this game are walking and talking simulators. The beginning of this expansion is easily the most boring start I’ve played of a WoW xpac. I don’t think I’d have finished leveling or even come close if I wasn’t invested in the end game.
The maw, while being part of the beginning, I’ll mention here further because it’s boring and annoying in the introduction, then it’s boring when you have to come back and continues to be frustrating when needing to farm it daily at max level. The maw is bad and it should feel bad.
Being unable to mount isn’t a feature, it’s a punishment. And while, yes, it’s supposed to be “hell”, it’s also a video game and fun comes first. It’s not making it harder, it’s just making it slower, longer, and more tedious to quest there.
Zones
Bastion – This zone is gorgeous. The game play is miserable. So much walking, talking, RP and none of it done well. The story is fine, getting to meet the real villains of Shadowlands is kinda nice (maybe a future post about that), but wow is it all implemented so poorly. Coming off the maw and over all lame introduction, this area really dragged on.
Maldraxxus – This area is pretty ugly, which it’s supposed to be, but is also fairly boring visually since it’s all familiar scourge/plague architecture and creatures. However, the pacing of the zone quests was excellent. I think the group I leveled with most enjoyed this zone, of all of them. Including the many moments we got to do the Thundercat pose with the runeblade.
Ardenweald – This might be the best zone, overall. It’s likely the best looking zone that WoW has ever produced, the story is interesting, the drust are cool the pacing is good. The pacing and quests for maldraxxus were probably better, but this zone looks sooo pretty. While World of Warcrafts graphics are incredibly dated, their art team did wonders with this zone.
Revendreth – Thematically neat, relatively interesting quests, snobby vampires – it’s not a bad zone. However, starting out (spoilers) acting like we’re going to team up with the establishment when they are ultra clearly bad guys from the get go, only to switch it up feels like weak story telling. Either hide the moustache twirling villains better or just have us come in and help the rebels to right away.
How Long and How Fun?
It took about 12 hours for us, in a party of 3, to level to max. This included a player who was a fresh boosted character that morning, a character that naturally reached max level 1 week before Shadowlands, and one equipped in a set equivalent to heroic raid. We took breaks, explored some treasures, killed unnecessary rares and did a couple of dungeons on the way up. It was fun playing with friends. A couple of the zones were good… really 3/5 of the zones were good even, but overall the leveling was incredibly bleh. Outside of when I started the game and was trying to level in Burning Crusade, solo, as new holy paladin, this was the worst leveling experience. It just… missed basically every mark outside of art design.
By the time we were done, we were frustrated at the repetitive talking and escorting and waiting for role play and doing nothing for several hours. Out of 12 hours, at least 2-3 was spent doing essentially nothing. Either watching characters talk, running back and forth (slowly at times in the maw), or escorting basically every NPC in Shadowlands… just, bunches of nothing.
I think that first image at the top of this post sums up the leveling experience. It has a great theme, it’s visually well done, but it just seems like we’re chained down, slowed, and unable to enjoy what was crafted for us.