Oli Welsh has been covering the business and culture of video games for two decades. He started out writing for Edge and other publications (specializing in MMOs and Blizzard, as cover for his World of Warcraft playtime) before joining Eurogamer, where he worked for 14 years as reviews editor, deputy editor, and editor-in-chief; Eurogamer won many Games Media Awards during his tenure. At Polygon, he writes about film and TV as well as games, and provides news, analysis, and criticism on the entertainment we love and the industries that make it, all from his home in London. He loves role-playing, racing, puzzles, tactics, exploration, storytelling, Nintendo, mysteries, spies, fantasy, reality, cars, and classic cinema. He wanted to be a movie critic when he grew up, and now he’s definitely grown up, and occasionally is one. He considers this a win.
Dungeons were heavily nerfed during beta; now they’re back, sort of
Blizzard just gave some ground in its battle to get players to slow down and spend more time in the open world in World of Warcraft: Forever.
The developer applied a hotfix on Sunday that boosted experience points (XP) for killing monsters in dungeons by 50%. It’s Blizzard’s first concession to complaints from players that dungeons, a core part of the WoW experience, had become too unrewarding to play compared to questing in the open world.
Blizzard is struggling to find the sweet spot for leveling in WoW: Forever. The intention is that leveling in Forever should be faster and smoother than it was in classic WoW (which is definitely the case), but that the journey to level 60 should still feel substantial. Additionally, Blizzard is keen to promote the open-world questing experience and avoid players spending all their time running dungeons just to race to the finish line.
When the beta began, XP from killing monsters in dungeons was heavily reduced compared to WoW Classic, while XP for completing dungeon quests was dramatically increased — the idea being that dungeons would be worth running once, but after that, you’d return to questing.
Then, in an attempt to slow down leveling that was generally perceived to be too fast, Blizzard nerfed dungeon quest XP too, partway through the beta. But many players felt this change trivialized dungeon runs to the extent that they no longer wanted to do them at all. Hence this latest adjustment, presumably made after Blizzard noticed too few players in dungeons over the game’s launch weekend.
Players have mostly reacted positively to the change while criticizing Blizzard for flip-flopping and making overcorrections. One thing’s for sure, though — this latest boost to XP will only speed up leveling in WoW: Forever. And this comes after a group of five players became the first to hit level 60 on Friday after just 52 hours. It seems likely there’ll be more changes yet to come.