Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street, lead systems designer for World of Warcraft, wants to bring the eight-year-old MMORPG closer to its roots. Last week’s Patch 5.2 marks yet another step in that direction, bringing with it a renewed emphasis on ground travel, a sense of server-wide progression, a new raid, and an under-the-radar island that pays homage to the gameplay of WoW’s past. “This game’s been out for, gosh, eight years now and while we have millions of players, we also have a lot of players who’ve stopped playing for whatever reason,” he said. “It’s great to give those players a reason to come back and try it again, and appealing to their nostalgia is a good way of doing that. ”

That nostalgia manifests itself most prominently in the new Isle of Thunder, a new hub with dozens of daily quests that unlock more content via server participation in an manner that recalls 2008’s Isle of Quel’Danas from the Burning Crusade expansion. The process, Street hopes, will provide a more engaging daily questing experience than players have experienced in the Mists of Pandaria expansion to date. “One of the problems we had before with all our daily quests is that we just threw them all on players right away, so they burned out on the individual quests pretty quickly,” he said, adding that unlocking a new tier will grant access to an entirely new set of quests and further progression in the story.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at IGN Video Games