The road to nowhere

24 hours.  Level 34.  Standing at the entrance to Western Plaguelands after running (most of) Arathi Highlands and (all of) the Hinterlands.

I'll be here for a while.

I don't have much to say about Arathi Highlands. It never was the most interesting zone, and that hasn't changed.

Level scaling continues to break things. Having went from Ghostlands to Arathi I found I had to double back to the eastern edge of Hillsbrad to find relevant ingredients to continue levelling up alchemy. I didn't mind much. The Dun Garok questline is nicely written and there's an amusingly gratuitous quest to kill gnolls for no other reason than that they're gnolls.

Still, it's not very intuitive.

Progression in World of Warcraft, from zone to zone, and from hub to hub within a zone, was always carefully structured. The mobs you fought, the nodes you needed to keep levelling your professsions, the story... it was all interlinked.

Not anymore. I got bored with Arathi and rode up into the Hinterlands, and the first quest hub I came to at Hiri'Watha I was handed the third and final part of the zone's story arc, despite the fact that I hadn't done the first part, in Revantusk Village, or the second part, in Jintha'Alor, because I'd just entered the zone and hadn't been to either of those places yet.

WoW's narrative timeline has been inconsistent since Cataclysm – since levels 61 to 80 take place before levels 1 to 60, but in Hinterlands the game fails to keep the story straight across a single zone.

Nothing that happens in Hinterlands has any bearing on what has gone before in prior zones or what comes after in later zones. It's all entirely self contained in this one zone... and Blizzard still managed to fuck it up.

I never thought that there'd be anything in World of Warcraft that I'd dislike more than Cataclysm, but right now I'm looking back at those over-scripted, tonally inconsistent, on-rails guided tours of Azeroth and thinking maybe it wasn't so bad after all. Yes, it dumbed things down. Yes, it was crushingly linear. Yes, the experiment in advancing the storyline fell flat on its face because the Cataclysm zones that did most to advance that story are now hopelessly dated.

Garrosh who?

Cataclysm was a misfire, but it didn't break the game. Level scaling has.

Every zone feels the same. Every fight feels the same. There's no sense of progression or rising to meet new and greater challenges. It robbed me of my dungeon soloing and – as in Hinterlands – it's literally broken the story.

Despite all this there has still been moments when World of Warcraft still feels like the best MMO ever made. The core of the game is still rock solid, but that core is so buried in dross now it's only rarely glimpsed.

The best thing I can say about WoW as it is today is that now I'm really looking forward to Classic.