Originally Posted by
Eli85
That is really not every RPG in the history of RPGs. I can think of a lot of games that do not follow it. Speaking in MMOs, Asheron's Call, Final Fantasy XI, and EverQuest were all not like that; you went zone to zone but it was more mob grinding without any real quest options (in fact, since we're here, WoW was the first game that moved away from mob grinding to questing as the main source of leveling up). WoW was the first MMO who said, "OK, let's hide the grind behind quests and zone story," which the other MMOs did not do. At all. So, again, in this particular instance, this is not "polishing what was done before," but instead radically changing the way a particular facet (leveling) was done in the genre.