They did what now?
Well… not exactly.
But the local environment scales to a large degree with your character. Like what the various zones in Legion did, but now extended over the entire game.
If you take your level 20 paladin to, say, the Barrens the NPC’s and enemies will all be level 20. And if you take your level 40 druid to the exact same Barrens then all the stuff around that toon will be level 40. It does give a lot more flexibility to where you can level up a new toon. You no longer have to go through every single expansion to get a character from 0 to max level, you can pick and choose.
There are limits to the effect - if I take my level 60 Shaman (max level) to the area at the base of Thunderbluff the mobs are only level 30. So there are still some low level areas that stay that way, and some areas you can only go at higher levels.
But PvE is a lot flatter these days.
So what happens now is that everything scales to you, personally. If you are level 27 and you fight a griffin in some zone, it’ll be level 27 too. Even crazier, if some level 15 guy runs up and attacks the same enemy, it’ll be level 15 to him at the same time it is level 27 to you. I don’t think that’s the case everywhere with every enemy, but that scaling is done in a lot of the adventure/leveling zones.
At times it feels like they removed the leveling treadmill and replaced it with a bean bag chair.
So I could make a character at level 1 and punch the raid boss? And he’ll flinch?
~Max
That definitely falls under the “not scaling everywhere” category. 
But at the pace they’re going, maybe someday.
A few years ago WoW introduced “Chromie Time” where you can choose to level an alt entirely in a specific expansion and the leveling zones and dungeons associated with that expansion will scale to match your level. Personally, I think it’s great – rather than having to run an alt through all the expansions in order (and out leveling each expansion within the first zone or two) I can decide I want to level in Wrath or WoD or MoP and experience the expansion more as it was meant to be played.
There are very few new WoW players, almost everyone levelling up a new character is probably on like their 10th character. It makes a lot of sense not to bind everyone to the traditional path, just let them go enjoy the areas of the game they like and level up that way. It also probably lets them see more content in multiple zones (from multiple expansions) that they would level too fast in the old system to see, instead of running The Barrens for the 900th time.
It also lets friends of different level play together easier I assume, and lets random strangers that meet up play together better by loosening the requirements that their levels match. I haven’t played WoW in over a decade so I don’t know if the system actually works, but it seems reasonable in theory.
Honestly, that sounds like an improvement. It’s been a LONG time since I played WoW, but there were definitely entire zones that I skipped altogether and never got to see the storylines for because I had outleveled them whilst dealing with the Defias Brotherhood for the 50th time and it felt unfulfilling to try to play through them when I was OP.
Do the quest rewards scale to your level as well? What about crafting?
Don’t know if you’re tracking this formally or if you just assembled it for the post, but the Guerrilla Games suite (notably including the Horizon franchise) should be included under the PlayStation Studios banner, shouldn’t it?
I’m all for level scaling to some degree, but not level matching. It should still be more work at a lower level to take something out.
It more like they made it the same effort even if you’re higher level. You still have work to level up. The big change is that a high level character can’t just show up and curb-stomp everything in sight.
There are areas that require a minimum level to go into, so no, a level one character can’t walk in and punch a boss in the nose without getting squished underfoot.
While I’m sure there is someone out there who hates it - there is always someone who hates the new thing - for the most part folks seem either indifferent or positive about the change.
Not so much.
In regards to crafting, though - leveling up is done for the expansion the area is part of. If, for example, you start alchemy in Legion you don’t have to go back and level it from 1 to 300 in the old world, then go to Burning Crusade Draenor, then Wrath, and so on to even start doing alchemy in Legion, you can start at 1 in Legion and just do alchemy in those areas. You don’t get any recipes prior (unless you go back and work those areas) but it’s an enormous time-saver and eliminates what had become a huge, pointless grind.
So are, for example, mineral deposits level-scaled as well? If I start at Level 1 in WotLK, am I going to be mining copper and tin and making bronze armor, or am I going to be mining cobalt and making cobalt armor that’s scaled down to my level?
That being said, though, I do kinda miss the sense of achievement you had back in vanilla from some of the longer grinds. I spent weeks farming thorium ore and using it to make Imperial Plate that I sold on the auction house so I could raise the money for the mats for my paladin’s epic mount quest, and after I finally got a team together that was willing to go to Scholomance with me to do the special event to finish the quest, it really felt like I’d accomplished something.
If you start mining at level 1 in WotLK you’ll be getting WotLK ores, NOT the copper/tin/silver/etc of the Old World. If you have blacksmithing you’ll be crafting WotLK items, not Old World items.
This can, potentially, get a little weird - if you maxed out WotLK ores/blacksmithing then went back to Kalimdor you’d be at level 1 in Kalimdor crafting and have to start at level 1 mining copper and level up through tin/silver/iron/etc. to max out Old World crafting.
Yeah, that sounds almost as weird as back when you had to grind up your weapon skill if you switched from a mace to a sword (after you found a trainer who could teach you how to pick up a sword, that is).
The advantage is that you don’t have to level a craft in a particular expansion if you don’t want to do so. You never have to level Kalimdor/Eastern Kingdoms crafting if you don’t want to do so. If you switch to blacksmithing next Tuesday you can just level Shadowlands blacksmithing and never have to back track to blacksmithing anywhere else. Unless you want to do so.
I remember doing that back in the day!
“Time to get to the tram area and beat up a bunch of rats.”
I still think the entire spending spree is to get leverage to open a Game Pass on PlayStation, then get PlayStation exclusive games opened up. then get out of the hardware business entirely after this gen.
Just assembled for the post, but I did forget about Horizon.
~Max
You think Microsoft is going to get out of the gaming hardware business? That would be throwing ~$2+bn a year in revenue away.
~Max
The hardware is sold at a loss.