Last night the Genshin Impact servers went down for maintenance, and after my fourth night of failed attempts at the horseman mount I found myself a little listless. I attempted to log into Destiny 2 and flew into the tower and then pretty much logged right back out again. Not sure what to do I opted to test the new player experience that went into World of Warcraft with the Shadowlands pre-patch. Instead of starting in the original starter zone, new characters can choose to instead begin on Exiles Reach. I believe this works for any character that is not an Allied Race, given that those appear to still go through the original racial starter experience.

I have some friends on Wyrmrest Accord, and as such I opted to create a clone of the original Belghast over there. From what I understand the flow of the content is effectively the same on both Horde and Alliance. You start with some cinematics laying out the mission before you of trying to find an expedition that has gone missing. While ship side your team similarly encounters issues and finds themselves shipwrecked on an island… conveniently the same island that the earlier expedition shipwrecked on.

Across the board the experience feels like a much more streamlined and simplified version of something like the Ghostlands or Azuremyst Isle. Everything is very self contained and neatly divided into areas that you will only actually go through once as you traverse the island. Along the way you will meet characters that I am certain you will never see again during your entire time in World of Warcraft. That aspect is a little disappointing, but Blizzard might prove me wrong and integrate Captain Garrick for example into future content. You however go through a sequence of events that see you rescuing most of the original expedition and figuring out the central conflict of the island.

A group of Ogres has apparently set up on this island and is trying to use necromancy to resurrect some dragon. I mean it is a generic set up, but also sorta awesome because we have not really seen much from the ogres since Draenor. This is an expert reuse of a bunch of models that had not seen the light of day since the Warlords expansion. Additionally the necromantic dragon seems to be an asset flip of Nythendra from the Emerald Nightmare raid, but similarly it was a cool model and deserved to be reused. Everything though flows together nicely and ends up being a much quicker starter experience than what I remember from the other zone options.

The culmination of the starter experience is a dungeon… but one where the NPCs serve as the tank and the healer and everyone is just effectively following them around and DPSing. I am not going to lie… I would not mind if they did some more of these dungeons for leveling purposes because it didn’t feel horrible. I almost wonder if this is an attempt at them playing with the concept of being able to run dungeons with NPCs much like they have with the Trust system in FFXIV. So far the experiment seems to have worked however because it was a pretty solid experience. I got zero loot from the dungeon but I did watch as other players got things… so maybe spend some time evening that out a bit. It would feel better if everyone exited the dungeon with a shiny blue.

Upon exiting the island you go through an entire sequence where you are introduced to Stormwind, and welcomed back as a hero of the Alliance. This is nice especially since it leads you through some of the important things like binding at an Inn. It also gives you access to your first mount, setting you up to start the game proper. The quests all appear to take place in the Old Town area, which is fine… but everyone knows the Dwarven Quarter is the only good part of Stormwind. I could definitely see this being a good introduction to World of Warcraft for a brand new player.

What felt really odd was that the game immediately went into the Battle for Azeroth content without me really choosing it. I guess as a brand new player this would flow nicely, but I kinda wanted to poke around with the Chromie system. Right now I am rolling with it because it seems like the BFA systems have been modified slightly as well to accommodate a brand new level 10 character. For example I didn’t get to choose which area of Kul Tiras that I wanted to start in, but instead was only given the option of Tirangarde Sound. I never really got into the BFA content for Alliance and maybe playing on a fresh character on a server I have no presence on… would make it feel more meaningful?

I like the experience that is presented here, but I also sorta think it is wasted if Blizzard does not make some fundamental changes to the way that World of Warcraft works. This is an experience ideally designed for someone who has never played this game. I just feel like at this point that if you have owned a PC capable of gaming, that more than likely you have already had access to World of Warcraft. With the introduction of controllers to the game on an official level, it is time for Blizzard to roll this game out to the console players and maybe to mobile players as well. In both cases I think it would work best if they shifted from the subscription only to offering some sort of free to play track as well. However for the purpose of this post… the experience of Exiles Reach is good. I would probably run new characters through it… were it not for the fact that I already have a stratified army of one of each Alliance and Horde class that are at a minimum of level 40 in the new squished system. I’m already at the point where I have way more racial options than I have classes to play them with, and I think maybe it was a bad idea to not allow the Allied Races to go through the Exiles Reach starter experience. Have you played through the new starter zone? Drop me your thoughts down below in the comments. The post Exile’s Reach appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.