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Blizzard Launches Third WoW Expansion, Cataclysm
Last night marked the launch of Cataclysm, the third expansion for Blizzard's World of Warcraft. Cataclysm includes: two new races, both of which have their own starting zones; five new high-level zones that span the new 80-85 leveling content; seven new five-man dungeons (plus two heroic versions of classic dungeons); three end-game raids; a new profession; two new PvP battlegrounds; and one world PvP zone. In addition, Cataclysm features a revamp of Azeroth, the portion of the game world that went live when WoW originally launched in 2004, providing a much improved leveling experience for new players and alts. MMO-Champion posted a comprehensive collection of information about the new content. Of course, Cataclysm's launch has brought the video game addiction debate back to the fore.
Nevermind, my queue popped.
With all the player friendly changes finally incorporated into the old world the game is essentially new enough for people who have never touched WOW. It also is freshened enough for existing players to want to revisit the old world. Overall, its a much better expansion than BC and possibly better than Wrath. Is it perfect, no, but rarely will changes please everyone.
FWIW, someone made maximum level with the help of their guild within hours of the game starting up in Europe. Should be fun seeing all the people crush through the zones and race an un-winnable race
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
they are all busy playing
therefore, if my understanding of the Slashdot demographic is correct, there will be a total of 22 comments in this thread all day, and all of them will by non WoW players commenting how much WoW sucks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
According to the level 80 shaman that lives in my basement, Blizzard has basically slashdotted themselves - there are *so* many people trying to play that their servers are basically non-responsive. Players on the WOW forums are suggesting that people open 16 games simultaneously (in windowed mode), and then start to play whichever one responds first - which, of course, makes the entire scenario 16x worse.
I gave away all my gold (about 120k), sold all my gear, deleted all my characters, waved good bye to guild friends (which is one of the major pressures to play) and un-subscribed.
Boy have I been tempted to go back, but if the urge gets too great, I take a lump of wood, whittle a small penguin, stare at it for 5 minutes, look in the mirror and tell myself that I have achieved more in those 5 minutes than any achievement/raid boss kill would ever do.
Interestingly enough our fortnightly games night had become a WoW LAN party (5 of us). With me quitting WoW, we have rediscovered board games and those nights have been a lot more mentally stimulating than any WoW dungeon crawl I can remember.
WoW is an amazing life-sink that you justify because of the other 20-40 other people in your guild wasting their lives away playing a game that never ends. I can't fault them for playing, but some of them are failing school and divorcing over this game.
I "played" Fable III until about midnight last night. I mean, I was constantly interrupted but it's a great story line. I'll put in my 40-60 hours playing through the storyline and just enjoy it. Same thing with WoW. I don't understand why people treat WoW any differently. Given the monthly fee, I would think it'd make more sense to beat the regular content in that first month and let the end-game go. It's a case of diminishing returns.
Oh, one more note, if I have extra time at the end of the month, I'll sometimes go back to old content and enjoy old end-game material that is now mid-game material that I never got to experience. With the new races, you can sometimes find a pickup group to go with you.
and all of them will by non WoW players commenting how much WoW sucks
WoW doesn't suck but it's not the last game I want to play. I am a WoW player but I'm at work right now. I am the elusive sensible responsible WoW player that you seem to claim doesn't exist. If you actually looked at the numbers though, a lot of us players are in this category. We're just not omnipresent in the game so you won't see my characters in game non-stop and now it's only when the new content comes out.
My work here is dung.
Yeah, I know what you mean. After an EQ addiction and then a a bout of WoW addiction, I realized that as fun as MMOs are, they throw your life out of balance. It's one thing to have an escape every once in a while; but when you live your life in escape, those memories just aren't meaty enough to have been worth it. Memories of time spent with my family are more valuable. Learning something about science, technology, politics, economics, or history is more valuable than having my brain filled with the prices of virtual pieces of magical armor in a virtual world.
It's kind of like a guitar hero addiction. Sure, have fun with it for a few hours here and there. If you have enough time to spend hours on it a day, though, why not take up playing a REAL guitar?
That said, I think I started to drool a little when I looked at the new WoW expansion and thought about spending my Xmas holidays in Azeroth.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
And, basically, who cares? Not all games are made to be won or lost. There is also no winning Elite, or Tetris, or Pac-Man.
What matters is whether you had fun playing it for X hours or not. Which fun can come from gear and achievements, but it also can come from doing quests, or exploration, or social interaction with other people, or just trying to be the biggest dick without getting banned, or really whatever floats your boat.
Essentially if the only point you can see is comparing dick size and complaining that the game doesn't give you an "OK, you won" popup, then I can see how maybe it's not the game for you. I'm sure there's a bunny-hopping and teabagging simulator... err... FPS out there more suited to your needs.
So, you know, don't? I keep hearing that complaint, and it never ceases to amaze me in it's pencils-up-the-nose underpants-on-head idiocy.
Guess what? There is no paragraph in the TOS that says "Blizzard can ban your account and kill your dog if you play less than 5-10 hours a day." You can play just half an hour a week on weekends or take a month off, if you wish. The game was designed to be playable in whatever portions you wish.
Heck, even if you're in a fairly obsessive "raiding guild", we're no longer in the pre-BC age of 40-man raids that take all night. You can do some reasonable raiding in two hours a day, which still falls short of the 5-10 hours a day bullshit. Or you can find yourself a social guild and never have any schedule at all.
Frankly, it seems to me that the only ones who come up with that stupid objection are those who think they're basically playing to prove penis size. It can't be a coincidence that it almost always comes together with the "but you can't win!!!111eleventeen" objection and with the whining that all there is to do is collect the best gear and all achievements. They end up caught in some race to have all the penis size symbols, and have them yesterday if possible, and not even seeing any other way to play than grind 10 hours a day towards that coveted King Of The Hill Position.
In reality, it's a race that exists only in your own mind, and a prize that exists only in your own mind. In reality, almost nobody actually gives a flying fuck about your being King Of The Hill or not, nor about how fast you got there. If you don't want to put 5-10 hours a day in a race that exists only in your own mind, then don't. It's really that simple.
Of course, you may have to find yourself
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The guild leveling system is fun. You can level your guild to level 25, each level gives a perk (%5 more xp, 10% faster mounted speed, etc) The guild levels by members completing quests, dungeons, and battlegrounds. Everyone contributes a little.
There is no way to win the game. The only point is to get the best gear and achievements and then sit as 'King of the Hill' until someone else comes along and knocks you off, or you get bored and quit.
You're doing it wrong.
The point isn't to win (though some people seem to think that). The point is to have fun.
It's a diversion. It's escapism. No different from reading a book or watching TV or going to the movies or whatever else people do with their spare time. Sure, some diversions like board games and most video games have a clear winner... But plenty of diversions like reading books and watching movies have no winner. It's just a way to kill some time.
My wife and I both play WoW. We play with a guild we've been members of for about 10 years now. They're people we know. They're fun to hang out with. Half the fun of the game isn't actually mashing buttons and killing critters - it's the social aspect.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
To be fair, the bulk of the revamp of Azeroth is to get rid of the mindless/endless grind. They've even tweaked experience gains from instances so that your best bet for levelling quickly is to immerse yourself in the storyline and do the quests.
The new races added with this expansion are especially good at that... I have only had a chance to play a Gilnean (worgen), as I only had an hour before I had to leave for work this morning, but I didn't run into a single FedEx quest. (well, ok, I did run into a couple, but they were well embedded into the story line and easy to do at the same time as others). What I found, instead, was a well developped story line that moved quickly and kept me wanting to do that next step in the quest chain. Levelling is also much faster at lower levels (I made level 9 on my little druid), and you get into the class skills that actually make you *feel* like your preferred spec as soon as you can choose that spec... there's real distinction between specializations right at level 10, whereas you used to have to be in the late 40's or 50's before you saw a meaningful difference. That does help to keep the levelling interesting, I find.
That said, endgame is still going to be a grind. Particularly once you reach max level and get into the raiding game... I currently have 2 characters I raided with in ICC, and the only thing that kept it interesting was having dual spec... when I got bored of healing on my priest, I could switch to shadow, and when I got bored of DPS on my shaman I could switch to heals again. (and yes, healing on a shaman is very different from healing on a discipline priest, so there was enough difference there to keep me interested, too :))
Can't do anything about the drama and immature people, though. My solution to that is to join an 18+ guild with a strict no-drama policy, and turn off trade chat. It helps that I'm on an RP server, as there's not quite as much stupidity in chat as you find on a regular server.
There is no way to win the game. The only point is to get the best gear and achievements and then sit as 'King of the Hill' until someone else comes along and knocks you off, or you get bored and quit.
Seriously, who over the age of 25 has 5-10 hours a day to spend playing a video game?
I see this said a lot. I really don't get why people bring this up, open ended games have been around for a while. (Myst, being the first one I can think of). Oblivion is another one. Point is, there is no way to "Win" these games either. And those ones aren't even multiplayer. Yet I know people who have played Oblivion past the final story arc multiple times through, different characters and all that.
World of Warcraft HAS story in it. You just ignore it. Most people ignore it. They are so wrapped up in trying to get the best gear that they don't read the quest log. There is an insane amount of writing in amongst all the quest data. On the Alliance side, you can actually play all the way through to level 60 as if it were one massive chain quest - it will direct you to the next zones when you are ready (usually via another quest) and then finally it'll send you back to Stormwind and you can start the annoying Behemoth that is the Onyxia tuning, and then downing her.
When the game was still young- that was considered the end. If you downed her, you won.
As for the time spent playing a game - my girlfriend is out of town, as a result, I have around 4 hours a day monday through friday and 15 hours on the weekend where I have essentially "Free" time, if I wanted to play WoW I could.
I just don't find it as entertaining as it used to, things have gotten too easy.
It's certainly one thing to motivate some people, but not the only one by far. E.g., Bartle's famous paper dates from the days of MUDs and identifies 4 types of players:
1. Achievers (Diamonds): these are the kind you describe. They play to achieve something, be it a more epic sword, more money in the bank, a funky title, or a higher score.
2. Explorers (Spades): these are the kind of people who play to find out stuff. It can be some mountain pass that nobody else heard about, or how the game works, or try to find every single quest, etc. For example the kinds that put numbers in a spreadsheet to find out the exact numbers in COH's attack formulas were explorers. Essentially these guys play to reverse-engineer the game.
3. Socializers (Hearts): these guys basically treat the game as a chat room that incidentally has a video game attached. They're there to make friends, chat, organize some guild event, tutor newbies, etc. Even actually playing the game is only a tool towards interacting with people.
4. Killers (Clubs): these guys are not the PvP gang, but the people who live to harass, annoy, gank, and make life as miserable as possible for others. Their highest reward and achievement is getting someone to leave the game entirely, effectively perma-killing them in the game. Hence the "killers" name. The rest of us tend to call them "griefers" or simply "asshats".
Bearing in mind, though, that nobody is 100% in one category, but you can still classify people that way by their predominant interest and behaviour.
And that's actually just one of many classifications.
At any rate, the moral of the story is: please don't generalize. There's nothing wrong if you're an achiever, but do realize that other people play for very different reasons than you do.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Agreed. It's not that I couldn't, probably, still sit for hours playing an MMO. But I get this niggling feeling of responsibility to myself, my home, my dog, etc. Should I be raking the leaves? Walking the dog? Showering? Or even doing something else I enjoy like tennis, etc. One my friends out-leveled me and I realize the simple gameplay mechanic of EQ wasn't worth much without the joking around and other social aspects, I was never drawn back into the MMO scene.
I had this pipe dream of an MMO that interconnected everything so what you did mattered: you hunt deer, to sell to the market for meat, and you can use the hide to make clothing. The meat you sell is actually available in the store for other players and even NPCs. If no one is hunting and selling meat, a city's NPCs could decline -- no more city guards, no more Molly the Baker selling cherry pies. And you would build relations with NPCs in order to get discounts or quests or access to certain areas or just an extra story line. If an orc raid occurs on your little town, and there aren't enough NPC guards, and you're not around to assist, Molly the Baker may end up captured or dead...and you lose the bonuses that relationship brought you.
And don't overhunt the deer, or the dire wolves will be looking for something else to eat.
What about the guy who follows every football game is doing nothing but hitting refresh on ESPN? The same guy who is in multiple fantasy football leagues? What about if they start doing it for money?? The same guy who goes to work thinks about how soon he can get out of work to go home and play Madden or setup more simulations for the season to better his predictions in the fantasy league. And while at work yammers at the water cooler about football constantly to the point no one cares.
I hate how games are being made out to be the "bad influence" when I look out at the office and see people just as obsessive with "harmless activities". Being obsessed with anything can throw your life out of balance where just saying "They should do something productive" or "Why not do the real thing?" while ignoring the guy trying to tweak their spreadsheets for the nth time planning out their fantasy football drafts for hours on end.
The problem is obsession not the game or activity. If your kids are begging for your attention and ignore them it doesn't seem to matter if the excuse is because they are watching a football game or running around a virtual world.
you can often pick up most quests while they are still red.
you can manually queue up for dungeons that are orange at the very least.
yes things resist you, thus challenge.
plus you can never underestimate the added challenge of grouping with people who are horrible and/or stupid.
The gathered that previous poster was looking for a harder game, I was trying to provide him with one.
What it turns out he was really commenting on is that wow is not as much of a time sink as it once was (unless you want to make it so), and things came cheaper and quicker than they once did.
Wow is certainly more convenient than it used to be, but it's not -easier-. Not really.
time taken to do a task does not necessarily indicate the difficulty of a task. Some things take less time and effort now. That's all. Other things still take a ton of effort.
I had the pleasure of raiding both c'thun before AQ40 opened up (the classic definition of hard raid encounter) AND heroic Halion (fairly comparable encounters really) and you know what? The game is still hard. I didn't do heroic 25man LK, I hear that's even worse than heroic Halion.
The original Star Wars: Galaxies (pre-CU) had this kind of economy. It was *amazing* - and pretty much the ONLY thing the devs managed to get right, primarily because they didn't have anything to do with it.
NPCs didn't sell anything, I think. Players would start off and pick a general profession, like "Crafter" which would let them make very basic weapons or devices like mineral harvesters. The crafter would start off by prospecting until they found a good source of whatever material they needed and then they would scrabble in the dirt to get a few. Eventually they'd get enough resources to make a few guns or whatever, which would give them crafting xp, and let them build more complex stuff. You'd eventually be able to build small harvesters that you could place atop a source of resources and you could have up to 10 of those. At some point you could specialize, and if you became an architect, for example, you could build factories and huge structures etc.
Crafters would often hire other players to get them materials - in my case, I had maybe 20 people on my "galaxy" (server) who would go out and hunt animals and bring me their bones, meat and leather. They'd also rent me their "lots" so I could have more than 10 buildings. I also wound up doing server trades with people, where I would make a character on their galaxy and let them have my lots, and in exchange they'd do the same for me. At one point, I wound up having over 300 different people directly in my supply-chain - resource gatherers, lot renters, people who would make sub-components for me to make big items or hunt up rare components to be used in special requests. And some of those people had people working for them - I'd place an order for 1,000,000 units of a specific type of copper and they'd find a way to get it to me. There were even entire player built cities that would spring up with different abilities - some were better for crafters, some for people wanting to hunt monsters, some for PVP. You'd even have different players buying and re-selling wares. I wound up supplying some of the best armor on my galaxy directly, while I would sell my mass produced (and somewhat worse) armor in bulk to merchants who would sell it near big areas where fighting happened.
Everyone in the game was participating in this economy at some level or another, and it was really, really glorious. Of course, SOE being SOE, they completely wrecked it, but it was incredible while it lasted.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Cataclysm is by far the best World of Warcraft yet in terms of how you interact with the game, the game systems and the quests and story-telling and probably in every other way as well. It's very obvious that a lot of care by a lot of competent people have gone into this. The only problem is that the skeleton of what WoW is is being stretched in the direction of even higher quality, but the identity of WoW was set when it came out and they can't just make Cataclysm a new game. It still has to be WoW, and the formula inherent to WoW has e.g. storytelling issues. WoW is not voiced and it is not cinematic - you don't get to see facial expressions of anguish as Mankrik implores you to find out what happened to his wife. You get to read a short blurb about how he is imploring you. They can't change that because then it wouldn't be WoW, yet those non-classic-WoW elements are a main part of what lends Wrath of the Lich King and especially Cataclysm their superior story telling. So what they have to do is try to make these things work in an engine that isn't made for it without having players feel that they changed the nature of the game too much. They are doing an extraordinarily good job at that, it's just that it's a lousy task to be set and the outcome is not quite cohesive.
Most of WoW is not voiced or cinematic - indeed most of the story in wow is throw-away and transparent excuses for having you go kill mobs - sprinkled with lots of puns, pop references and crazy goblin engineering. So when a tiny bit of WoW becomes voiced, kind-of cinematic and has a deeper and cohesive story, it makes the rest of WoW look shabby in comparison. That's probably why they rebuilt the whole of the original game for Cataclysm, but they have to stay true to what WoW is and so they can only go so far. E.g. the attempt is frustrated by the fact that the player character in WoW has no significant identity of his own in the game. That let's you imagine whatever you want, which is probably the point of that, but it also means that the character you are playing is always the all-important cog in the machine that makes things work out all right. Yet he has no identity or place in the story of WoW. He is an important but faceless technician that fixes the world and is never talked about except in generic and interchangeable ways, and even often in plural form like "the great heroes of Azeroth fought off the scourge." You can still do great story telling with that, as Blizzard is showing us all without a doubt - perhaps in the same way that the special olympics participants can probably all run much faster than you or I because they are so good at using what they've got. Yet the special olympics are not the real olympics.
When you look at the successive expansions to WoW, it's clear that Blizzard is putting more and more of their resources into providing their game with an ever-better-told story. It's the only reason they put phasing into their game where the world changes progressively as the player goes through the story laid out in the various quest lines. Yet the kind of game they built 6 years ago will only support them in taking that story-telling ambition so far now.
Compare this to the story telling style of BioWare's Mass Effect 1 and especially 2. I don't think Bioware has better writers than Blizzard does, it's just that WoW has not been constructed from the beginning to support excellent stories and they can only do so much to change that now - which is a lot but still there is a limit. With the resources Blizzard is increasingly with each expansion pouring into specifically story and narration, I think it's pretty clear that Blizzard themselves see this as something they must take as far as they can within their game's limitations. Bioware is coming out with The Old Republic in 2011, which is an MMO built from the beginning to support excellent and varied stories. If Bioware can approach the quality Blizzard has put into the rest of World of Warcraft outside of the story, then they will eventually supplant World
At the moment? Those three things have been the norm for pretty much all of human history.
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