World of Warcraft Hates New Players

Very little feels better than successfully tanking a dungeon in World of Warcraft. I played Protection Paladin, and the plate-spinning dance of managing my positioning, threat levels, efficient interrupts and damage uptime—all while combating the social pressure of knowing four people unaware of my inexperience relied on me alone to set the pace and rhythm—was as exhausting and exciting as any action game on the market. They have been making World of Warcraft for a long, long time and over the decades they have honed that central appeal of tab targeting, group-based combat design to a razor’s edge. Your first dungeon may in reality be an extremely forgiving affair, so far removed from Mythic+ Raiding as to essentially be a different game, yet that doesn’t matter while you’re so new. You can’t tell. What matters is it gives you a taste. When the boss falls and you played your role perfectly the satisfaction is so palpable that you understand exactly why so many millions have given two full decades to this game.

It is a shame, then, about everything else.

No need to beat around the bush: the new player experience in retail World of Warcraft is an intergalactic disaster. The newest expansion, The War Within, is now out—and widely praised! WoW will never be the giant it was in the ‘00s again, but the playerbase is happier than they’ve been in a long time, revitalized by Dragonflight’s excellent new movement mechanics and the narrative momentum of the brand new three-expansion Worldsoul Saga. I would love to tell you about any of that, but I can’t. World of Warcraft in 2024 is a game that regards people who have not yet played World of Warcraft somewhere between begrudging allowance and open contempt. From the opening minutes on a contextless tutorial island to hitting level 70 at the grand climax of the Dragonflight expansion, there was not a single moment where I understood what was happening, why I should care, and what the point of any of my decisions were.

The first, most obvious and most widely documented problem is narrative. The game has two full decades of content, lore and story. The War Within is WoW’s 10th expansion pack, and forcing new players to experience hundreds of hours of narrative in largely barren zones of abandoned content cul-de-sacs is understandably a barrier to entry they would want to remove. Yet the approach taken is akin to defeating the infection by cutting off the leg. And also both arms. Exile’s Reach, the tutorial island, tells you how to play the game well enough, but introduces you to a cast of throwaway characters that in no way help provide context to the world and your role in it. And then it’s off to the latest expansion, being addressed as champion of Azeroth by characters you’ve never met before but seem to be very familiar with you, as new and shocking revelations have come to light—the Dragon Isles have returned! Oh. That’s good. I didn’t even know they were sick.

It’s not just that you’re skipped into the ninth chapter of an ongoing story with no warning, but that story itself was never written with the intention of being an onboarding point, dense with unexplained proper nouns and hey it’s that guy cheer moments. The plot itself is so simple it’s almost insulting: oh no, evil has returned! We need to gather the primary colored orbs to restore hope, or darkness will win. But then there’s an extended sequence where you’re hanging out with a data recreation of a character who died in Wrath of the Lich King, and it becomes genuinely difficult to know as a new player when you do and do not have the context to understand what’s being discussed in any given moment. It’s impossible to divine which particular Dragons are new and which ones have been iconic fixtures in Warcraft Lore since 2002. This story that has had a lot of time, effort and production budget behind it ultimately all congeals into static, very rarely breaking through with earnest moments that rise above the noise.

My personal favorite was a digression to a village of Tuskarr, little Walrus guys who are just adorable hanging out in their frozen village. Their short contribution to the main quest has you burning a funeral Pyre for the recently deceased chief, and—for a newcomer at least—it is far and away the strongest moment in Dragonflight’s main story. Just the right mix of quiet, charming and melancholy, and with absolutely no sense that I felt like I was missing something.

But it’s not just the story. Anyone starting World of Warcraft today knows that they aren’t going to follow what’s happening. Personally, I think if you want to play through the game in order Blizzard should at least make it easier for you to optionally do so rather than completely impossible, but there’s a far more fundamental problem: the level scaling.

Level Scaling (and the Level Squish) were implemented for the exact same reason that you skip straight to a recent expansion now: the game is just too damn big. And much like with the narrative, they achieved their aims to the letter. To compare it to Final Fantasy XIV, which contends with similar hurdles for similar reasons, but finds itself on the other side of the fence: FFXIV stretches its ability rollout for six expansions and 90 levels, so unless you’re deathly efficient it’s going to be at least 150 hours and four expansions before you have an enjoyable and challenging rotation, despite earlier content staying in the duty finder permanently. On the other hand, WoW has you playing your spec to a baseline level of complexity within a matter of hours, which is an exponential improvement in approachability. Maybe it was the right choice. And all it cost was the total destruction of the entire game’s world, reducing its sense of identity into an unending sludge of Pure Content.

It is hard to exaggerate how destructive this single decision is. Every enemy, from 1-70, takes basically the same time to kill, unless you forget to upgrade your gear and fall behind the curve. There is no pushing harder into higher level content to test your luck. No stomping the early zones that used to give you so much trouble. No difficulty peaks or valleys that give zones a sense of unique identity. No reason to explore whatsoever—there’s more than enough XP to go around and none of the gear you find in the world is going to come close to what you can find in Dungeons. And under no circumstances will there be any partying up in this multiplayer game. Just follow the markers, and make the number go up. It doesn’t do anything but make it go up all the same. It is a choice that feels insulting to everyone who worked so hard on the rest of the game. The world is simply designed with too much care and intentionality in its layout, art and even the flow of its questing zones to be rendered this meaningless. It’s like the game is annoyed at you for having the audacity to play it, to want to stop and smell the roses, to do literally anything but sprint to the seasonal endgame grind—also known as the point in an MMO where I stop playing til the next patch.

This isn’t even getting into the smaller things; the reliance on addons is out of control, with basic features such as proper controller support and a decent quest UI left entirely to volunteers. Do servers matter? I joined one marked New Players and spent the whole time slightly concerned that I’d made a huge mistake, yet kept running into other players from other realms. The issue isn’t whether I had, but that I didn’t even understand the boundaries of the choice I had made in the first place. For want of a better word it feels shoddy. It feels cheap and roughly hewn—a jenga tower comprising 20 years of features incrementally implemented and stacked on top of each other, threatening to collapse at any moment. However, I will say this: the one thing that you best believe worked perfectly and at no point was I ever confused about its functionality and purpose was the in-game store.

It is what it is. Steering a ship this large takes time, and many of these problems can’t be solved but merely balanced between two competing tensions. But the fact remains that World of Warcraft is, while not the industry defining juggernaut it once was, still one of the biggest games in the world. Yet neither Activision nor Microsoft have yet been able to allocate the resources it needs to be something that a new player won’t rightfully throw away in a couple hours to play literally anything else.

I’m going to stick with it. When the game is good, it’s exhilarating, and I’ve not found tab target combat this good elsewhere. But forcing myself to push through to the other side is something I’ve done in spite of the game’s design, not because of it. There’s a new expansion out and everyone’s having a great time. I want to play World of Warcraft. I just wish it wanted me to play it too.

Jackson Tyler is an nb critic and podcaster at Abnormal Mapping. They’re always tweeting at @headfallsoff.