Levelling in World of Warcraft is about to undergo its biggest change in a decade – maybe ever

Massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft don’t get sequels. That was tried once and it turned out to be a bad idea. EverQuest 2, the 2004 follow-up to the enormously influential 1999 game, just ended up dividing the audience of a game that had been doing just fine before it came along. Most players were far too invested in the characters they already had, the systems they could feel in their bones and their muscle memory, to start again. It flopped, and OG EverQuest never quite recovered from this filial blow, although it soldiers on to this day.

So MMO developers just keep releasing expansions (apparently, EverQuest has 26 of them), edging up the level cap each time, layering on vast shelves of content like the segments of an increasingly precarious and indigestible cake. This isn’t a big issue if you just take an existing, max-level character through the new content each time, but for new players – or serial fresh-starters like yours truly – the path to the top, and to the latest stuff, looks increasingly daunting as the game gets older. That, and the bottom layers of the cake, made all those years ago, start to go stale. It’s a problem.

It’s a problem that the developers of World of Warcraft, now drawing to the end of its 16th year in operation and approaching the release of its eighth expansion, Shadowlands, have been wrestling with since at least 2010. That was when they undertook what must be the most radical act of transplant surgery I’ve ever seen in a live game. The Cataclysm expansion rewrote almost all the levelling content of the original game, overhauling the questing mechanics, improving the storytelling, smoothing the grind. It was a massive undertaking and has been vital to the game’s continued good health.

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But time is a cruel mistress. In 2020, the Cataclysm-era rewrites themselves are showing their age, to say nothing of 2007’s wild and woolly The Burning Crusade. Beyond those, there is just to move through: literally continents of it. Meanwhile, as the maximum level stretches all the way to 120, the ever-escalating numbers start to get meaningless, and character progression – which Blizzard has had to constantly prune back to avoid overwhelming complexity in the class design – is increasingly thinly spread across the levelling curve. A 2014 stat squish helped a little. The early 2018 introduction of level scaling across the entire game, which matched content to your level and also grouped expansions together in bands, allowing you to pick your route through the content to some extent, helped a lot. But it is still just too much.