Yes, tying all the quests in the zone to one mandatory quest chain felt too railroady. Sure, having a group of druids restoring a corrupted forest, a faction-specific town fending off bandit activity, and some archaeologists investigating some ruins. But don't make go planting flowers before killing masked men makes a difference, or have me defeat the bandit leader before I'm allowed to find tablet fragments (or make me solve a floor tile puzzle before I'm allowed to take pond samples).

Hyjal was a horrible sticking point. Myself and so many others got stuck so easily because we missed the *one quest* that would progress the zone further. I don't want to be forced to helping the evil satyr and setting him free before I can go help the red dragonflight.

I have to disagree with you, Drak.

For low-level zones, I didn't mind the linearity of the quest structuring. If you really get bored with a series, you could just go to a different zone of the same level- you'll outlevel both of them soon enough. I think cohesiveness, progression and fun within a zone is worth it.

I can sort of see your point for someplace like Uldum, if you've somehow depleted Stonecore and aren't allowed into the Twilight Highlands, but that's almost impossible. Call me a heathen, but I didn't find the Harrison Jones portion to be very compelling. I saved the kittytaurs and skipped off to the eastern kingdoms. If you don't like questing, you simply don't like questing and should PvP or dungeon your way to 85 instead.

I'd also like to add that if you're questing through a zone just to get a particular item, I personally think that you're "doing it wrong." To be fair, several of my friends did exactly that to gear up after they hit 85, so I suppose you should take that with a grain of salt.

IMO, Blizzard over-corrected on this one. In their effort to give the zones a better flow, they are now *too* linear.

As awesome as the Forsaken 1-30 experience has become, everyone goes through it in exactly the same way. Priest or Warrior.....Forsaken, Orc or Blood Elf....once you start the ride it makes no difference.

I understand that there's only so much developer time to go around, but I would love it choosing to play an Enhance Shaman instead of a Rogue meant seeing the world in a different way.

Please, Blizzard, consider reinstating class specific quests (aside from the 20 and 50 "go get some gear from this dungeon" quests.)

Even better would be race specific quests in some zones. Imagine, for example, if a level 15 Orc in Silverpine Forest was given tasks by the Overseer in the zone to keep Sylvanis and the Apothecary Society in check.

Rude Hero, I think it shows a failing when the answer is "go find another zone".


Before, let's make up an example, going to make up some fake quests, say you are in Westfall, and you want to help the farmers bake a pie. You can go right there and help them. Quest done, no follow up. You find another quest hub, do some quests, you are done, breadcrumb quest to another hub. Hub gives you several quests, you are free to take any that you want, or ignore any that you want. You check WoWhead, see a nice item for another quest, you go to that quest, and do it. You are free to pick and choose any quest in that zone you want to do, or ignore. It may not flow together as smoothly as a story, but it's your pace.

Now, when you enter a zone, you are given a quest, you go from that quest, to another quest, to another quest. You no longer choose which quests you want to do. You either do the ones laid out to you in that order, or you don't. Say you don't want to do a bunch of piddly little quests, but one which used to be by itself offered a nice reward. Now you have to do them all to get to it. What if you can't stand a certain type of quest? Had too many "go collect 30 objects that drop off critters in low amounts", and you would rather just skip that one? Well, you just can't finish the zone now.

And when you add in phasing, it just compounds the problem. When people want to quest with you, you have to make sure they are in the same phase as you. You are 30 quests in in the zone? Good luck to them, they have to do everything up to you to get to you.

It should be a quest chain or a few quest chains, and some individual quests here and there, not one long chain that never stops until you are at the end of the zone. It seems like it goes from being a theme park you walk around yourself, to a guided tour where you aren't allowed to stop, and you have to go exactly where the tour guide takes you.

My biggest problem with the strictly linear questing is not that I'm forced to take tedious quests, but that I'm forced to take quests that I just wouldn't take, or that my character would never take.

For example, in Thousand Needles, in order to get to the quest chains involving Magatha and the Grimtotem, I was forced to try and scam a clan of centaurs out of their land with fake gold, and then when that failed, kill them and plant an oil well in their land anyway. This is something my character NEVER would have done, and I (the player) found the actions disgusting. However, in order to progress through the zone, I was forced to do them.

I like the linear questing, but I feel that Blizzard should still have kept the major quest chains separate. The zones would still progress smoothly for the player, but if for whatever reason the player did not want to do a specific questline, they wouldn't have to give up on the zone (and the lead-in quests to the next zone) entirely.

This is the way of cataclysm. Questing is for the solo player. You are a part of an advancing story. If you want to play with your friends then you're better off running dungeons or pvping. I've always found questing in a group to be more trouble than it's worth anyway. You have to find twice as many quest items because you're getting enough for 2 people. Waiting for the other to finish so you can keep going. Sure you kill things twice as fast, but come on, they're world mobs. It's fun taking the story at your own pace and enjoying it. Why hassle yourself by questing in a group?

Dantis, because some people have friends and don't see taking a little longer to get those seconds drops as a problem.

Completely agree with Drakkenfyre. While it is interesting and meaningful in some circumstances to have chained, linear quests (death knight, goblin, worgen starting zones), I feel it was way overdone for Cataclysm.

Multiple hubs, multiple quests makes for player choice. And players can make meaningful choicesas to which quests are important and which are not.

I agree a lot with Drakkenfyre. I think part of the problem for me is that being on rails makes the world feel smaller and with less depth. I kind of liked not making a difference. I'm only one person, I shouldn't be able to resolve all the problems of every single town I encounter!

Mycroft wrote:
"Hyjal was a horrible sticking point. Myself and so many others got stuck so easily because we missed the *one quest* that would progress the zone further. I don't want to be forced to helping the evil satyr and setting him free before I can go help the red dragonflight."

This, a thousand times this. I tried everyway I knew of, to advance through Hyjal (on my second toon), because I was damned if I would let that scoundrel free.

Sintra E'Drien of the Ebon Blade, né Sindorei (I'm tired of fighting, I'm going to pick flowers)

@Mycroft

That sucked in Hyjal. Epecially because the one quest I tried to get around was the squirrel/rabbit gathering one. I was forced to do it on all 6 80s I ran thru there to advance get to the next set of quests. It was quite frustrating. I didn't run into this problem anywhere else really. I wonder if the horde had any similar quests. It's almost as if the developers said FU to us questers on that one. Well they said FU whether they meant it or not. :(

as blues have already pointed out on the forums, the relative linear approach to questing within each zone wasn't the best decision either. We're now spoon-fed a breadcrumb series of quest from the time we enter a zone, to a zone-specific storyline conclusion.

it doesn't feel like WORLD of warcraft any more, rather COUNTY of warcraft. Oh look, there's another county. great. ¬_¬ Personally a balance between this, and questlines that have us travelling the world would have been better. Quests that encompass the world as a whole generally feel more epic, and more worthy of a story that needs to be told, and as such are far more engaging to players. But not every quest.

It's definitely too linear. There's not much replayability, and I say that as an altoholic who started 4 new toons at Cata launch and got 4 toons to 85 before I got bored and quit.

I don't mind linear questing the first time questing through a zone. But when I come on my alt, which has experience bonuses (rested, guild perks, heirlooms) I would prefer to skip the quests I don't particularly like and only do the favorites.

Quests are DEFINATELY too linear now.

One of the things I always enjoy doing is farming zones for particular items while I lvl or "if I missed something" that I need after the fact.

When leveling through Outland or Northrend, I would go "gee, I have really horrid bracers", I'd then look up quest rewards for level-appropriate bracers, find what I need, go to the proper zone and do the quest(s) that drop the bracers I want. I might be able to go straight to the bracer quest, or I might have to do a few quests before getting the item that I want, but it was okay, cuz if I wanted it, I know I could find it and skip over 80 quests that I may have no interest in to get to what I want.

Now with Cataclysm, it seems near-impossible to get anything you want without doing damn-near the entire zone due to the very linear fashion the quests are given in. Case in point, I had two lvl-85 tanks that had the worst luck with the RNG in getting a proper stamina tanking trink, and both my heroic-geared lvl-85 tanks were still stuck with WotLK Corroded Skeleton Key stamina trinks. Despite countless runs in Stonecore (normal and heroic), the RNG Gods laughed at my attempts to get a stamina trink, so in frustration, I searched the lvling zones and found that Twilight Highlands had a pretty decent 318 stamina trink that blew away my old WotLK stam trinket... I thought "gee, this will be a great replacement, i'll just do a few quests and get that instead, 100% garaunteed drop, no RNG Gods laughing at me".

Much to my surprise, I realized that I had to do damn-near half the zone quests just to unlock the quest hub that dropped my stamina trinket. Quest hubs are nice... I like them... I do NOT like quest hubs that must be unlocked in linear fashion from one hub to the next before you can get from quest hub A to B to C.

To Blizzard... if you redo Outlands and/or Northrend in the future, and want to make sure there are nicely grouped quest hubs... that's fine... just let each quest hub stand independant so I don't have to complete every quest in the zone to unlock the quest I want at quest-hub Zulu.

I must admit that whilst I will always understand the concern of something being linear, I don't understand how a more interesting story that is told from a set path is worse than some very random chore-quests which more often than not told no story.

Yes, you must to quest a) to unlock quest b), this was also the case in Vanilla and has only changed by how numerous these quests are now.

Now, here's my issue with the complaint some people are giving. When you guys played vanilla, and you were just grinding an alt, did you honestly give up on quests because they became green? Personally, I didn't. I always attempted every quest in every progression zone, whether it was orange, yellow, green or grey.

Because I always did everything in a zone, the change from running all over the place (often finding your self going back to the same place 3-4 times because the quests were so fragmented *shakes fist at Hillsbrad*), to a controlled, efficient path to be more enjoyable on the initial playthrough and equally as tedius on the second. For me, I lose nothing this way round were previously, I could lose 1-2 hours of my time just running back to west side of a zone to do one quest then run back to the east to do the other 3.

If you only do quests when they're yellow, then hell yeah, it's a pain, but since quests take less time when they're green, I can't see the issue being a grand as some people are making them out to be.

I'm pretty shocked to find out that anybody had problems finding their way through Hyjal. I have some sympathy for those who have a character-based objection to certain quests. I don't play on an RP server (because there are NO oceanic ones) but I do like to think of my characters as having personalities and sometimes do the voices for them, and definitely think that there would be things they would/would not do.

I guess, though, the only person who will know is you. I at some point would like to cobble my various ideas and sketches into yet another WoW comic, and I would definitely throw into flux quests that my characters had done or were yet to do. According to my canon, only my tank went anywhere near Icecrown!

I do quests when they are green. Before, you had a choice of which quests you wanted to do. If you didn't like a quest, or the quest was objectible to you (some people cannot stand the torture quests, or the dig-thru-poop quests) you could avoid them.

Now, you are forced to do quests in a certain order. You are led thru the zone like a tour guide is guiding you. It makes some of the zones feel like a single player game.

It's not about the efficiency of leveling, it's about the feel of questing, period.

"Hi there, quest-giver, how may I help you?"

"Sorry, you didn't do two quest hubs back, you can't help me yet."

There was always the chance you missed a quest, and stumbled across it later. Now, when you are done with the chain, you are done, and the zone is now worthless.

But then you can look at the chains back in vanilla, because they were there and no one can deny that they were piss poor.

Things like turning up in Westfall and;
"Hey friend, kill some defias for us will you?"
15 minutes later
"Thanks for that, oh, it looks like there's some more defias we need you to kill. They're at the farm to the west. Be a darling and kill them too. Thanks"
25 minutes later
"And a moonbrook, thanks. Just go past that field I just sent you to and hang a left."
30 minutes later
"Ah, yes, behind Moonbrook is dagger hill. Duff them up for us too, thanks"
15 minutes later.
"Ok, great, thanks. Ok, now there's a friend of mine in the lumber mill, he wants some defias bandana's. He wanted them from when you got here, but because the questsonyourminimap feature hasn't been implimented yet, you never saw him. Oh well, sucks to be you."

Not only were they frustrating as hell, they didn't tell a story. They were chores. That's what pretty much all of the quests in Vanilla were, but that's why they got away with not being linear. You can't just drop people in the middle of a quest chain when it tells an advanced story, not with a game like WoW, it's not designed that way (yet).

You can either run around however you like, doing random quests that tell little or no story, or you can follow a story from start to finish. If Blizzard could add dynamic quest text to allow the game to write the story based on what you did previously, then great. Fantastic, I'm all for it, but I just don't understand this aversion to quest chains NOW when the only note-worthy stories in Vanilla were ALSO quest chains.

I'm wondering now that I typed all that, is the issue here really about quest chains or is it about quest logisitcs? Because THAT is something that annoys me a little. By quest logisitcs I am referring to how a quest that has NOTHING to do with a questchain only becoming available after completing a step within a quest chain, just because you're going in that general direction, or how all dungeon quests are now at their entrance instead of being a little scattered and giving the world a bit more scope.

Scarlet Monestary, for example, had questgivers in Hillsbrad, Desolace and I think Stormwind, which made it feel that the events in that place had an effect across the world. That has been lost in my eyes.