Why World of Warcraft’s Racial Starting Zones Are A Better Initial Experience

World of Warcraft’s new player experience was supposed to be improved with Exile’s Reach, but is it actually better?

I’ve discussed issues with World of Warcraft in my Mythic Plus article (which I’m working on a follow-up to). Still, I want to discuss the new player experience in World of Warcraft and how I think the unique racial starting zones are being misused. 

The new player experience is a crucial part of any game, but this is especially so with MMORPGs. Fans will say, “It gets good after 100 hours.” In some cases that may be true, but ask yourself this, why would anyone want to play something that isn’t fun for 100 hours to reach the fun part?

In most instances, the answer is simply that they wouldn’t. They would stop playing and play a different game. The new player experience is important because of that. In Shadowlands, World of Warcraft got a brand new revamped universal starting zone for all races called “Exile’s Reach” and it was fairly well received when it was first introduced.

I thought it was fun, well-designed, and did a good job introducing new players to various elements of WoW’s design. To a certain extent, I do still think that today as well. 

Exile’s Reach does a great job at what it sets out to do, however, I think the original racial starting zones are better and healthier for the game. In their current state, perhaps they’re a bit behind Exile’s Reach, but with a little bit of developer attention, I think they’d be a better option long term. Let’s discuss why.

Vibe

Exile’s Reach is functional, but it’s extremely generic. You’re in a shipwreck caused by a storm while at sea and you wash up unconscious on a beach. Off the top of my head, Path of Exile and Neverwinter do that. I’m sure a billion other games do too. It’s such a generic way of starting a video game.

It takes place on an island a new player doesn’t care about, with characters they don’t care about, doing things they don’t care about, to stop ogres they don’t care about, before getting to a capital city they don’t know anything about. Let’s compare this to the human starting zone experience.

A new player spawns near a church and immediately gets to helping members of their race. You chose to make a human, it makes sense your journey begins with you surrounded by humans. The context of the game is that the player is an adventurer; not that the player is a random grunt of either faction rising through the ranks of the military.

As an adventurer, it makes much more sense that you’d be in a more local area that you’re familiar with to help people you identify with. It makes far less sense for you to be on a military vessel already doing military business with your faction immediately at level 1.

Racial Significance & Identity

The various races of Azeroth, playable and unplayable, are extremely important aspects of the game’s universe. From a gameplay perspective, the different races have different active and passive racial abilities, different starting stats, and completely different appearances in various armor types.

Players love being able to identify with their characters whether it be through their class, spec, or their race. A human paladin and a dwarf paladin are very different characters. Gameplay-wise, they may be the same, but in the mind of the player, it’s a radically different aesthetic.

To be clear, I’m not talking about full-blown roleplaying either. That applies too, of course, but many players also just have a general mood or aesthetic they want with their character even if it doesn’t go to full roleplaying levels.

Exile’s Reach makes it virtually impossible to truly appreciate the race you’ve picked. It makes it impossible to naturally experience your race’s cultures, customs, and shenanigans, and experience what it truly means to be human, to be an orc, etc.

New players are missing out on naturally developing a sense of racial significance and identity through practical gameplay. The racial starting zones achieve this in a way that a generalized starting experience never could.

Uniqueness & Narrative

One key problem of Exile’s Reach is that it’s the same experience every single time. With the use of the racial starting zones, unless you make every class the same race, you can get a variety of unique and interesting leveling experiences that will carry you seamlessly through many zones; and not just from levels 1 to 10.

To continue with the human example, you’ll go from Elwynn Forest to Westfall, to Redridge Mountains, to Duskwood, to Stranglethorn Vale all in a seamless natural way that will get you a high amount of levels. It’s a seamless experience that all starts with that initial racial starting zone from 1-10.

The other key aspect of this regarding the significance of uniqueness is the narrative. To further build on the previous point of establishing racial significance and identity, the narratives of each racial starting zone allow the player to focus on a threat that would reasonably be something they’d want to focus on. An orc would care about helping orcs more than helping anybody else.

I believe that it would be a better experience for new players to have the first Warcraft narrative they experience be one tightly crafted around the race that they chose to play first over all the other options, than a generic one about some ogres on an island.

How can Blizzard improve the racial starting zones?

It’s no secret that in their current state, the original starting zones are not in any shape to be the de facto first experience of a new player. They do require a bit of attention to reach that level. So what can Blizzard do to get the zones to that level?

Well, for starters, there are 3 main things that Exile’s Reach has that the starting zones don’t:

1. A class tutorial

2. A dungeon experience

3. Lots of voice acting

How can each racial starting zone get each of these traits? First things first, Blizzard would need to add an area in each starting zone that contains the class trainers for each class playable by that race. 

In this fenced-off section (I imagine a fighting pit-type area with the trainers lined around the outside and trainee NPCs or training dummies inside the pit), the player would go through the same class training quests they currently do in Exile’s Reach. 

The second thing to address would be the dungeon experience. The amount of work this would take would vary from race to race. Humans, for example, already have The Deadmines. While yes, Deadmines is technically in Westfall and not the human starting zone of Elwynn Forest, it’s close enough that I think it counts.

They could even take advantage of the Follower Dungeon system to allow new players to have the same tutorial-like dungeon experience that they get in Exile’s Reach. I’m not a game developer, so I’m not going to pretend to know how much effort this would take or if it would be worth it for Blizzard to do all this.

I’m just speaking, with logistics aside, about what I believe the theoretically best possible new player experience would be. The final thing they’d desperately need to address is the lack of voice acting in the original starting zones.

At the end of the day, having an abundance of quality voice acting can go a long way to creating an environment that feels better for the player. For most people, it’s going to be more enjoyable to listen to dialogue than to read it. It’s going to be more interesting to hear a trainer tell them how to do something than it is to read how to do that something. I would assume the voice acting is where this idea would likely become not worth it financially or effort-wise for Blizzard.

Exile’s Reach is serviceable and there isn’t a ton inherently wrong with it, but I do believe Blizzard is wasting some of its best work by not taking advantage of the gold mine that is the original racial starting zone.