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Review: World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria (video)
In this video (with transcript) we review the newest expansion to World of Warcraft, titled Mists of Pandaria. This is the fourth expansion to Blizzard's successful MMORPG, and while the quality of the content remains high, it's becoming increasingly apparent that they're basing it on a game that's been under development for over a decade. On top of that, the MMORPG genre itself is evolving, and though World of Warcraft remains a juggernaut of the industry, juggernauts are tougher to steer, and less adaptable to players' changing demands. The question for the success of an MMORPG expansion isn't simply "does it entertain?" It is: "does it entertain, and for how long?" Mists of Pandaria succeeds on the first count — it refreshes the gameplay, dangles new carrots in front of the players, and brings much-needed improvements to older systems. But keeping players engaged for a long time will be much more difficult. Hit the link below to watch/read our review.
The review touches upon the issue of the ridiculous number of daily quests required. I've been playing MoP myself and I can confirm that Blizzard have got something very, very badly wrong here. The daily quests are too numerous, too essential and far too boring. With a small number of exceptions, they all tend to be variations on the old "kill six snow moose" themes. Except this time it's panda-mooses. And you usually have to kill more than six of them.
It's worse still if you play as a tank or healer. DPS players can at least blitz through individual enemies quite quickly. As a tank or healer, the health pools for enemies take so long to chip down that the daily quest grind can actually take hours. Plus the daily quests are tied into the valor point system, so unless you are a hardcore raider, you're more or less tied into continuing with daily quest grinds even after you max out your reputation. JOY!
In all honesty, I can't see myself sticking with this much longer. I returned to the game in the late Cataclysm era, having quit in the late Lich King era, thinking I'd stick with it on a casual basis. MoP has just turned that into a chore.
It's hilarious to watch the official "blue" forum posters try to defend the daily quest overload. They can't claim that it's fun or enjoyable. They can't claim that it's interesting. All they can do is keep coming up with new ways of saying "yes, it's a boring timesink, but we're not changing it".
I suspect Blizzard are desperate for ways of getting WoW development costs down so they can focus on other things. Their end-game content model is horribly inefficient and expensive. They create new raid and dungeon content, go through an exhaustive and exhausting testing and balancing process, release it, then have it rendered obsolete by the next tier, 4-6 months later.
I suspect the best thing Blizzard could do in the longer term, if they really do want to concentrate on other projects (including a WoW successor) without cutting off their income stream from WoW subs, would be to get to more of a steady-state end-game. Stop raising the level cap (leave it at 100, perhaps, as that's a nice round number) and move from the current "vertical" end-game into more of a "horizontal" model, like the one used by Final Fantasy XI and some other older MMOs.
They could re-tune all of the old raid content up to level 100 standards (which requires some work, but less than creating entirely new assets) and add multiple progression paths. They'd then be able to get away with adding new raid content far less frequently, while giving the player-base something to do that isn't an endless, tedious grind of soloed daily quests.
OK, we've been beating these dead horses for more than a decade. At this point I'm not even sure who HASN'T been bored by these over-expanded, over-merchandised universes.
shouldn't this slashvertisement appear around september 25 or so ?
No thanks, I've already got a full time job. The crazy bastards pay ME to do it, too!
WoW is seriously on the way out... it won't be around in a few years anymore
I'm not a big WoW fan, but I have to ask, was this whole "Kung Fu Panda" thing supposed to be a joke in a Blizzard meeting that somehow made it past the joke stage, or something? Because that seems like a REALLY silly addition to me in a game whose players ostensibly take very seriously. A mean, little bits of humor are one thing, but I wouldn't add a little blue race to the Halo universe called the "Smurfias."
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
As the subject says, LFR was deployed in the middle of Cata, not WotLK.
Previously you just had a system where you put your name in, and if you were lucky somebody would contact you --- It was almost useless.
Seriously, that's where the action is at least at the moment.
WoW was great but now it's done...
tl;dr
I'm going outside.
Just wanted to say thanks to Slashdot for adding the transcript, some of us can't watch the videos, and it's nice to have an alternative.
Now, down to the meat:
They say they want players to interact more with the story, but this move surprises me. Now, if you don’t want to log in and do a specified amount of repetitive content every day, you don’t progress at all.
Why would this surprise you? The entire point of an MMO like WoW is to get you to log in as often as possible, ideally every day, for some period of time. It's not even important to Blizzard what you do, really, just that you log in and do something. That drives up the server count, and ensures you are playing continuously, rather than brief spurts now and again. It's part of the MMO grind system. Blizzard likes WoW to feel full, even if it is just people repeating the same action over and over again. Same reason for this:
Really, it’s part of a larger problem, one endemic to the MMORPG industry in general, which is that developers still require excessive amounts of content repetition if you want to use multiple characters.
That isn't a problem from the developers point of view, thats a feature. Literally anything that gets people to spend more time in the game, and more importantly to spread out their enjoyment over a longer period of time (rather than getting a large enjoyment at once), is a fantastic thing from their point of view. It's basic addiction 101: give people small rewards over a long time with the promise of potential future rewards, rather than giving them a large reward all at once for relatively little effort. Keeps them addicted. You see the exact same methodology employed by Zynga and in tons of F2P and MMO type games. That's why they do that sort of thing, and it won't change so long as they keep charging (and people keep paying) a monthly fee. It's also why (from what I've heard) Guild Wars doesn't do that: because there isn't a monthly fee, they aren't trying to get you to grind as much as possible every day, they can give you the end rewards all at once.
Finally:
They've further refined their “phasing” tech, which allows two different players standing in the same spot to see different things. Quest givers and objectives were phased to a greater degree this time around, and sometimes only visible to each user individually. This effectively reduced wait times.
Nice to see Blizzard implementing only the latest MMO techniques... that were Lord of the Rings Online (only an example, others may have done it earlier) featured 5 years ago.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I have said it before but MMO's need to kill players. Well, their characters at least. D&D always had the issue that at max level, you were a god. And god isn't fun to play. Superman has this issue, he is unstoppable, so you have to keep coming up with their weirdest stuff to make him at least temporarily vulnerable.
In MMO's, the level cap keeps being raised, more content is tacked onto the end and the players despair of having to grind yet another set of gear, yet another factions reputation while all the fun has gone from the game.
D&D solved this, you are NOT supposed to keep the same character around for ages. Hell, most games fixed this. In the Sims, your characters age and die, in Sim City and Transport Tycoon and Civilization, you start a new game when you "won" the old one. Only in MMO's do you keep the same character and play with it long after you "finished" the game.
So, get rid of it. Create a game with a tutorial area, a mid level and an endgame that kills you. Then you restart the game, skip the tutorial and try a different path.
Expansions flesh out the middle, where everyone is playing. New players find a busy active world and not everyone huddled at the end game claiming they are bored.
It is a simple tried and tested mechanic but MMO's have become filled with people who want to wave their e-penis around no matter how much they hate the process of getting one, they want to show of their raid gear. Because putting in a hundred hours grinding makes them leet.
WoW is for those gamers, the rest have long since left. Not that most other MMO's dare to offer anything different. First Lotro introduced gated content, now GW2 is doing the same.
And all over, gamers are playing regular games with no grind, just for fun. Are MMO developers so insecure they feel they can't rely on the fun of their games rather then gated content and raid gear?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I don't think this is too much of a problem for WoW, since you can always start up an alt that's a different class/faction. (And of course hours and hours of grinding on one of your max level characters)
My UID is prime... is yours?
In the Sims, your characters age and die, in Sim City and Transport Tycoon and Civilization, you start a new game when you "won" the old one.
Wow. You actually pulled Transport Tycoon as one of the archetypes of that sort of endgame? I'm actually impressed anyone remembers that (and didn't go straight for referencing it as OpenTTD instead). Well-played, sir.
Just because the quests are there does not mean they are required. Then again this is like any other feature of an addictive MMO, players feel cheated if they don't.
Far too many people are convinced they would be part of the elite if they only just... and then did ..... and they had ....
So yeah there are a bazillion quests, but guess what. Given Blizzard's track record your going to have two years before the next expansion and honestly, do you need every grade of shiny purple items, items that usually are reduced in value with each point release let alone expansion?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
D&D had resurrections too. If you lost your D&D character because of a dumb reason, a DM has the power to hand wave them back. In D&D a DM can say, "Ok, you can start your new character at level 10". In D&D, sometimes people pull out their old characters, or DMs will have them make cameos in a new campaign.
In an MMRPG, people don't like to lose a character that they've invested hundreds (or thousands) of hours in because someone turned on a microwave and caused them to temporarily disconnect from their Wi-Fi. In an MMRPG, people don't like losing their character because another player is griefing using a hack, or by exploiting game mechanics. In an MMRPG, people are more likely to stop subscribing if their characters reach mandatory retirement, rather than continue chasing the ever-moving carrot.
MMRPGs are not primarily designed to make people happy, or to make people have fun. They are primarily designed to keep people playing.
That sounds awful, also being god IS fun.
I had a guild and we did raids. We weren't the best but we tried and sometimes got lucky and succeeded purely through determination. But Cataclysm changed that. People with years of experience and WotLK elite gear were like babies in a minefield. Cataclysm was no longer for casual gamers, it was for elitists only. The twitchers and the number counters. I did ok, but it alienated a lot of people. People I liked to play with. So what's the point of doing dailies alone all the time? I want to go with my guildies into group events but if the group events are frustrating suicide missions what's the point? Are they going to change that? Is MoP going back to a more easy on the old people approach or it is it moving further into the either your awesome or your a useless noob. If the latter, then it seems like the number of noobs is growing and the problem is they give Blizzard the same amount of money as those few and far between uber-elites. Just that noobs don't like to hang around for the abuse and frustration and quit after awhile.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
I've been playing WoW since it was on beta, and I can tell you that MoP is a breath of fresh air. I really don't understand the claim that WoW is hard to steer and not adaptable, as this expansion is very different from the previous ones.
I wouldn't worry about WoW losing subscribers just yet. MoP is so friendly to casual players that it makes Solitaire look like a game meant only for the most hardcore of players in comparison. My only problem with it is that it's now the third expansion in a row that trains players to play badly; so-called "heroic" dungeons have literally replaced the "normal" dungeons and are tuned accordingly, epic items are a dime a dozen, and actually challenging content just seems to be its own reward, which, again, makes sure that most people play badly.
Saying that WoWlike MMOs need to have permadeath is like saying that fighting games should incorporate city-building elements. It's a gameplay mechanic that simply doesn't fit with the genre.
Contrary to the general cynicism displayed in these parts, WoWlike MMOs do have a fairly solid gameplay core that is much more than just "keep people playing the subs". Leaving player-vs-player aside for now, they are, at heart, large-group co-op games (and often very difficult ones).
At the heart of a WoWlike is raiding. And at the heart of raiding is fighting against bosses. Leaving aside casual-oriented "raid-finder" modes, raid bosses are generally tuned so that, at the level of gear players will have when they are first encountered, they are challenging fights with little room for error. The satisfaction in the game comes from overcoming that challenge and working with others to defeat the bosses. The level of co-operation required goes far beyond that found in most other genres. I have no shortage of criticisms of WoW, but I can attest from personal experience that the "rush" associated with my first kill of certain bosses (Illidan, Kil'Jaeden, the Lich King) was like nothing else in gaming - and that was irrespective of whether I got any gear from it.
But with the difficulty tuned as high as it is, death is inevitable and very much part of the game. You learn from your deaths and adapt accordingly. Imagine Dark Souls with permadeath? A WoWlike with permadeath would be like that... but worse.
I mean END OF LIFE dead, reach lvl 50, go on end game epic quest, die/retire/ride into the sunset.
In D&D you did have resurrects BUT once you reach a silly high level you were supposed to roll a new character, not keep playing a lvl 20/40 character over and over.
So not dead because you fell of a bridge but dead because your hero's journey has com to an end.
And yes, I agree, MMO's are about grinds but if you keep begging for the grind, don't be suprised that is what you are going to get.
Be ready to let go of your lvl 80 blinged out alt if you want MMO's to change and become FUN again.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
As the current top comment states, there's wayyy too many dailies. Let's see if I can remember them all... Klaxxi, Tillers (which have a half-dozen individuals with their own rep meters mostly independent of the main faction -- so when you get exalted with Tillers, you might barely be a bubble up on half the members!), Golden Lotus (which you must grind to then open up more grinding with Shado-Pan and August Celestials), the Lorewalkers, the Anglers, and the Order of the Cloud Serpent. For some of them, the set of dailies can take up to an hour to do (I'm looking at you, Klaxxi, with your stupid 40-kills and wing pieces).
And they're boring as hell. But it seems near impossible to really advance without getting just about all the reps up to exalted. I hate doing it on my main character, more than ever before in previous expansions. Now I can't imagine going back through this on my alt. This review brings up an excellent point -- it's time to make rep apply across all of your characters of the same faction. Account-wide pets and mounts was a good start, but now it's time to do the next logical thing and give us account-wide rep.
1) All instances have become a foot race when you've dropped into LFG.
2) Limited number of dungeons from 85 to 90.
3) Gear from 85 to 90 doesn't leave you in a position to go to heroics, even if you get all the gear available.
4) Content for pre-85 is too easy, blink and you miss it.
5) Vast parts of the world are now ignored.
6) Pre-85 level instances have been greatly dumbed down. Average time of 15 minutest to complete. See previous comment about footraces.
7) Difficulty of communicating with vast number of players from realms that speak different languages. One night I was with a random instance group where the languages spoken were, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese of some sort and French. No one could communicate other than the Spanish and Portugese speakers, and they only hurled insults at each other.
8) Pandas. Wow, they are stupid.
and i completely agree with comments about the future of the game. While I've had fun running two toons to 90, the grind for my other toons may not happen at all. I'm tired of it. Blizzard needs to make XP and rep for alts, once you've run through content once or twice, greatly accelerated. Then I'd have more fun with the end game content.
As much as I'd love to spend every one of my 15 mod points furiously thrashing this whole thread, I think a much better justice will be done by first asking:
1. Really? Now you are going to post a review on a game that has been out for almost a month? Nevermind that the beta was well published and visited by many who got to buy their way in. Nevermind that WoW at this point has almost more websites devoted to it than cats. Nevermind that the game itself is PTR testing the next major patch. Now, now /. is going to grace us with a thread about WoW? Really?
Now that I've gotten that out of the way I'll give a few more points in no order.
2. IMO this is the 1st major version of WoW that Greg Street (AKA Ghostcrawler) has had total control over the game. And it shows. Daily quests are now pretty much mandatory, much to the PR arm's (which includes cleverly the use of their fans), denial. Of course even Greg is not stupid, he does have a PhD in Biology (and that makes him a Lead Dev in an MMO...why?), so he (or someone smarter than him) eventually lifted the Justice Points rep grind on gear.
And actually in Breaking News!, one of the major topics on the General Forums as of last night was Blizzard actually willing to talk about how people are not happy with the rep grind in the game. Seems that after this game has been around for so many years and that people who have fleets of toons at this point are not happy that it is going to take them a metric fuckton of time to get each one of those toons all the rep they need is not popular!
They are still playing this one as Risk Management 101 in which I will refer to you to Mass Effect 3 if you want a primer on how that works.
3. The gameplay is actually not bad. As are the visuals and, if you again have a metric fuckton of time to spend, you can actually get some really cool stuff. There are also some pretty neat additions to the game with turn based pet battles, farming, and some actually neat play mechanics for all the classes.
4. However there are still bugs and while that is to be expected modern MMOs have reduced their downtime/hotfix window much more than Blizzard has. Now I know that dealing with legacy code is annoying at best. But given the cash flow that Blizzard has enjoyed over the years, that we still have to deal with Tuesday outages, sometimes that last 8+ hours, is unacceptable.
They have said before that 'hiring more programmers won't just fix things'. Well, not really Blizzard. There are whole sets of methodology of how you program code to make it bug free. And with the amount of revenue you have you should make it happen. Your business should not be all about getting your execs their next new BMW.
5. Overall Mists is OK. Again another linear quest path to the level cap, however pretty. I've got an 85 (some 90 now) of every class save a Monk and the gameplay is actually good on some of them. On others needs work but that is something that I've learned to accept since vanilla. However the grind, and this is coming from someone who did the TBC grind, is unacceptable.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
> MMO's have become filled with people who want to wave their e-penis around... ... WoW is for those gamers, the rest have long since left.
>
Yep. The guys who sit in the cities blocking the main paths atop their "epic mounts" while calling everyone else a "scrub" in Trade Chat are pretty much all that is left.
WoW has gone on for far too long. Guys who have been playing "since Vanilla, you fucking scrub" ruin the game for all newcomers. It's time to wipe the slate.
So go play some Achron, Splunkey, DwarfFortress, X-Com, Slash'em, Dungeon Crawl, Braid, Cortex Command, FTL, Aquaria, Minecraft, Cave Story, Defcon, SpaceChem, or whatever floats your boat. No one is stopping you. But if people enjoy the classics, don't hold that against them.
Don't get me wrong, I understand where you're coming from. I'm kind of a hipster when it comes to Pen&paper RPGs. I enjoy inner-party conflict, sleeper agents, plot twists, revolutionary tactics, and story-based motivators. And all too frequently I see yet-another-angsty-Drow going on a homicidal rampage because he's misunderstood and it makes me throw up a little inside. But I also understand that sometimes it's nice to have a classic dungeon dive with a fighter, rogue, wizard, and a cleric clearing out a death maze with a lich at the end. While it's good to try new things, there's comfort in the known.
Yep. I spend most of my gaming time on Minecraft these days. I'm tired of the same old WoW gameplay mechanics, even more than the grinding. The low level players never want or need any help because it's too easy. I don't want to spend a lot of time learning each boss's tricks and having to run back countless times.
Still, I love the lore and I love the world and music and characters Blizzard has created. Give me a game with these elements with the customizability, open-endedness and player creativity of Minecraft and I'll be waving money at you. Give me something different - the mechanics of WoW have had their day in the sun.
In a single player game, you usually save your game quite often, or it does it for you (or both). So if you fuck up, you are back at the checkpoint, not back at the beginning. This is how most popular MMOs work. If you fail to kill a boss and wipe out, the boss resets. You cannot move on through repeated failures, but nor do you move back.
It -is- a joke, Blizzard's joke in fact. Back in the early days of WoW they did an April Fools joke, saying that you'd be able to order food from Panderan Express (a play on the real company Panda Express) in game with the /panda command. More info: http://www.wowwiki.com/Pandaren_Xpress.
It was a joke at the expense of Sony, who really had implemented a /pizza command in Everquest 2 that would call up Pizza Hut's web page so you could order pizza.
However apparently Blizzard is completely fucking out of ideas, and forgot it was a joke, and so now kung-fu pandas are part of WoW.
Not really. And here's why:
We're just a little over a month before Christmas, a MAJOR point in times when people buy stuff. Even people who couldn't be bothered buying something for September, are likely to buy stuff for Christmas. Either for themselves or for someone else.
So I'd say expect to see more of this kind of advertising over the next month. Or actually more accurately: PR firms and departments generating buzz. In fact expect it to ramp up over the next month.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The low level players never want or need any help because it's too easy. I don't want to spend a lot of time learning each boss's tricks and having to run back countless times.
So the game is too easy but you don't want to put in work to learn a boss's fight?
Please make up your mind if you want a hard game or an easy game.
My review of Mists comes down to dividing players into four groups:
1. You are an active WoW player.
Well, you don't need a review of Mists because you most likely already bought it.
2. You are a former WoW player, and you're kind of thinking that you'd like to come back to the game.
Then please do come back. Blizzard did a pretty good job with this expansion. Lost of the rough edges have been smoothed. There's some good content. Fun to be had.
Will you stay with the game for months? I don't know. But you'll be playing at that point, so you can make up your own mind.
3. You're a former WoW player but you're still pretty down on the game.
If the very thought of being told to "kill 10 panda-moose" makes you sick to your stomach, then for god's sake, don't come back. While Blizzard is on their game for this expansion, it's still basically the same game you left and the things that made you leave are mostly still going to be there.
4. You've never played WoW.
Well, my advice for all multiplayer games (MMO's, FPS's, etc, etc) is to play whatever your friends are playing (real-life or online friends).
Online multi-player games are infinitely more fun when you play with your friends. So if your friends are playing WoW, play WoW; if your friends are playing Team Fortress, play that; if your friends are playing Hello Kitty Online... well, make new friends.
Almost agree with everything 100%.
> Are MMO developers so insecure they feel they can't rely on the fun of their games rather then gated content and raid gear? ;-)
Shhh! You're not supposed to let the MMO dirty design secrets out that MMOs are just "all about acquiring virtual power via fake items and let men* play virtual doll house! "
Ask any player who has more then 1,000 hrs of L4D gameplay why they keep (kept) playing? ;-)
* Yes a lot of women play MMOs.
> I have said it before but MMOs need to kill players.
1. That is one solution; the problem is most players won't go for it - because they don't understand the problem:
The root problem is that games need to keep challenging the player. When a player cheats on a game they quickly lose interest because there is no longer any challenge. WoW's expansion packs are trying to address that problem.
2. The second problem with MMOs is that they are not games they are toys masquerading as games. i.e. There is no way to win at WoW! That is HORRIBLE game design.
Traditional games have a "game over" -- what I call a "hard win." They don't expect the player to spend hours, days, months, grinding for gear. Modern MMOs have corrupted their game design for greed - because they want players playing (and paying) for as long as possible -- they don't want players to see the facade the game is. IMHO they have no soul because they have sold out to corporate America (i.e. Craptivision.)
"Old-school" games are like movies. You watch / play them. Have a great time. You move on. Portal 2 is a great example. Linear story, but a great experience. The co-op aspect introduces new maps, and it is optional if you want to do "speed runs". You keep playing it because you want new puzzles -- that is, new challenges. But you never feel remorse when you quit. Ask any MMO player who has been playing for a few years how they feel when they quit. They finally feel free! Why?! MMOs pretend they are games and make you feel guilty when you quit because you have all this time "invested" in that you don't want to "Let It Go" move on and enjoy life.
The problem with MMOs is that their fundamental nature is flawed. They stopped caring about being "good games" and sadly focused on "how long can we keep people playing our game?"
Learning a boss's fight isn't the kind of "hard" I'm looking for, I guess. Once you learn the tricks, it's memorization.
The MUD that I played for years in college had a system where you could "re-mort" and level again. You had to be at max level and complete a series of fairly difficult fights and challenges. If you succeeded, your character returned to level 1. You essentially rerolled at that point and started from scratch, except with a new ability available only to those who remorted. You could do this multiple times, with a new unique spell or ability each time.
This MUD also had death traps that would claim all of your gear and anything in your bags, as well as perm death if your experience points dipped into the negatives. As interesting as some may find these features, they would not be popular in WoW, especially at this point. As others have pointed out, a good portion of WoW's subscription base is driven by lock-in these days. Just like my buddy feels stuck with his iPhone because all his stuff is in iTunes, it is hard to walk away from a dozen well-geared characters and several years of time invested to start over elsewhere. If those characters aged and died, it would ease the movement to other games, which of course Blizzard doesn't want.
The problem with this is that the main appeal of MMO's is building up your character. People have been standing around showing off their epics in Ironforge, Stormwind and Orgrimmar since the game began, and that's both the main motivator for a lot of people working up their characters and for most of the endgame players.
If you're just playing your characters like slightly longer lived Battlefield 2 spawns you won't keep coming back to work on your character.
I liken it to learning a dance... you start out clumsy, but through practice and repetition, you work out the kinks and finally you get through it correctly the first time. From there, you keep re-doing it, getting more and more nuanced until you get to where it has transitioned from "oh crap I hope I don't mess up" to a very zen, fluid expression of art.
except it's got epic lewtz.
The Digital Sorceress
3) Gear from 85 to 90 doesn't leave you in a position to go to heroics, even if you get all the gear available.
This is not accurate. The "Heroic" dungeons are basically the entry-level lvl90 dungeons. You do not need specific item levels to queue for them or complete them.
I think that you are thinking of the Challenge Mode dungeons which are designed to be very difficult and so you probably will not have adequate gear for them when you first hit 90.
Kewl, a review, nearly 2 months after the release of Mist of Pandaria.... a review with mostly no negative critics. the day rift : storm legion release (the mmorpg that have hurt WOW the most and the second one in terms of paid subscribers).... and 2 days before swtor goes free to play. this really sound like a paid advertisement from blizzard. i'm sorry, but your review has absolutely no credibility.
After growing overly tired of WoW getting more and more simple (e.g., dropping the need to skill up a weapon in order to use it, skill tree crappy overhaul), I moved through a few games Rift (good game, lacked replay-ability), SWToR (Great story, got kinda boring), DCUO, and a few other f2p. I got into GW2 beta and thought at first that it was the game to play. Then I got in beta for the secret world (closer to release, I heard early beta was bad) and is hooked me. More adult oriented content, phenomenal voice acting, open skill system, monthly content updates, devs who believe in their product. Its worth checking out the free trial, if only to save you from WoW for a few days.
I don't think this is too much of a problem for WoW, since you can always start up an alt that's a different class/faction. (And of course hours and hours of grinding on one of your max level characters)
To put this into perspective, WoW has 13 playable races (Alliance: Human, Dwarf, Gnome, Night Elf, Draenai, Worgen; Horde: Orc, Troll, Forsaken, Tauren, Blood Elf, Gnome; Both: Pandaren) and 11 playable classes (Warrior, Monk, Paladin, Rogue, Hunter, Druid, Shaman, Mage, Warlock, Priest, Death Knight).
The problem is that there are only so many choices for zones to level up. This is particularly obvious once you enter Outlands at around level 60... your only zone choice is Hellfire Peninsula in Outlands. I suppose you could skip straight to Zangermarsh or Terrokar Forest, but if you try to skip too far ahead, the enemies will outlevel you.
At least Outlands has separate quests for each faction, which can't be said for most of the level 55-60 quests. Hell, Silithus hasn't changed since the end of the opening of Ahn'Qiraj event in 2006. At least Blasted Lands (the other 55-60 zone) got a makeover in Cataclysm.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Is the server up yet? *sigh*, I hate Tuesday maintenance.
Whatever happened the days when you ran your new toon into a dungeon to hack, slash and plunder? Any game that requires a BSc, BA, MA or, as is the real case with Eve - a bloody MBA.
Listening to the arguments above reminds me of fine arts students debating Picasso. Sure, it's a nice painting, but if I need to know what kind of brush he used to truly appreciate it, I'm out.
WoW is too big and too complicated and every expansion they add compounds the problem. To put it simply, without all that knowledge and without all that time invested you take your 'weak', 'squishy' or 'basic' character into at-level content and you wipe. Everytime. Not to put too fine point on it, but that gets really un-fun after a while. It's like a fun penalty.
I want to have fun when I game and WoW isn't fun, it's work.
I used to help run a Diku based MUD (CircleMUD OLC, Merc/Envy as the main engine) which did the remort thing as well. You have to be the top level (which was 30 back then [1].) Then you remorted to another class. You ended up level 1, but you had some abilities:
1: You had all your talents and practices.
2: You could use any weapons/armor -- no level restrictions.
3: You had your HP.
4: You gained an "emblem" which allowed you into areas where others who were not remorted couldn't enter, and the areas had better challenges/treasure/etc. This was before the days of raiding, so at best you had 5-6 people attempting a boss.
5: You got a few abilities, such as an "undo" button for a death every 24 hours. Since the penalty for a death back then was half your exp to the previous level, and possibly losing all your gear if you couldn't get to your corpse, dying hurt.
One could remort more than once to get access to other areas, as well as another class's abilities. (the MUD only had the four basic classes for simplicity reasons, but thief/rogue was extremely popular as a class just for the backstab ability as an opener.)
These days, maybe a MMO should do a variant of that -- if someone does a quest, they end up back at level 1, except with their HP/mana pools and the ability to wear gear of any level, and they end up with an item that is very powerful, something similar to the heirloom armor in WoW, but can last someone not just to end tier level, but perhaps even as a tier comparable to raid tier gear. Perhaps have it be a charm or trinket. To further add to it, perhaps allow subsequent remorts to further add stats to that item.
Yes, there will be people running 1-level cap multiple times to get full benefit from a "remort trinket", but it would keep the newbie areas busy, and help with the low level dungeons/battlegrounds.
[1]: There was argument that 30 was higher than the old-school AD&D standard of 20 where a character ended up a deity (and thus out of the player's hands as an NPC.) However, since old Merc 1.0 MUDs used 30, we stuck with that.
I guess it will be byebye after i finish the main questlines...
Too much grind!
except it's got epic lewtz.
Which might drop for you on run #50 at 3am.
Panderia is a grind. More of the same just with Panda colored packaging.
Every damn word out of the mouth of an NPC Panda can likely be traced right back to a fortune cookie somewere. . .
( I swear if I hear " Slow down ! Life should be savored " one more GD time Imma throw my mouse into the river )
Once you hammer out the 85-90 grind ( takes a while ), then the real grind starts in the form of daily rep. Ugh. :|
Think I'll go learn a new language instead. It's more entertaining
I'm going to go sacrifice a ( insert small animal here ) to the gaming gods and ask for something that doesn't require a time commitment on par with a full time job, isn't a rehash of the same old playstyle ( eg, level treadmill ), has an outstanding story and is actually ( gasp ) fun to play. Oh, and I want some sort of Divine Smite on the developers who release any DLC material on the same day as the game comes out. A giant crackling lightning bolt of doom will do nicely.
> The "Heroic" dungeons are basically the entry-level lvl90 dungeons. You do not need specific item levels to queue for them
You sir, are incorrect. There are indeed iLevel gates for 5 man heroics.
I resubscribed to have a look at the new content having not played for a year or so.
When WoW first came out I played and I loved it. Just exploring was interesting. There was real challenge in trying to complete some quest lines solo. Getting through instances was an achievement and took time. Raids took many experiments to get right - you had to figure it out for yourself rather than read up on the tactics on one of the many sites telling you exactly what to do.
It's not that there's nothing to enjoy in the new expansion; it's just that really it's all so samey, and compared to the old days just too easy. The month I've paid for has run out and I don't plan to subscribe again anytime soon, quite possibly the next time there's a new expansion...
tdome?
Sorry, left WoW a while ago and am really enjoying Guild Wars 2. GW2 isn't perfect by any means, but it looks like they did a lot of thinking about WoW's (and other MMO's) plusses and minuses and they kept most of the plusses and rethought/fixed the minuses. Not sure why I'd step back to a game like WoW that was fundamentally flawed in so many ways.
I started playing wow just after launch. I played threw BC (hated it and quit shortly after), I came back for Wrath, Played one character to 85 on cata and said no more. I have no desire to play a panda, no desire to grind daily or rep. How many hours did I spend killing furblogs?
I have tried every "wow killer" mmo out there and the only game that has kept my attention is guild wars 2. Maybe it's because I don't have the time that I used to have to sit and play video games all day after work, maybe it's because I have grown up and matured. Nahhhhhhhhhhh, its because WoW content just repeats. You can only kill so many bosses where you Don't stand in the fire or don't get hit with bombs before it's just enough.
This is exactly the OPPOSITE of what MMO's are designed to do, they are designed to keep you paying your sub and gobbling up content if you are a raider. Raid guilds already had the problem, at least when I played, of whenever the latest and greatest expansion/dungeon was conquered a few players would decide they beat the game and quit meaning it required recruiting and re-gearing replacements. If you turned that into a "congrats you won, now why don't you start the grind over from level 1" that becomes a natural place to say "nah, thanks, I'm good now that I have nothing invested in the game anymore I think I'll just click cancel on my subscription."
The problem is that you cant even spend your vp without being revered (and each slot is attached to a different rep, so you have to do them all) which takes at least a few weeks to do
Once you have a character at 80 or so, just buy lots of extra tabards for the rep you're grinding and send them to the characters low on that rep.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Which would be nice except there ARE no reputation tabards for the MoP factions.
Did you even play MoP?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I have four pandas right now.
Unlike you, I have a life, so none are in their 80s yet, and my main is only 83 at the moment.
I'll join the rest of you in Farmville ... um "end game Pandaria" when I get done having fun.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Unlike you, I have a life
Wow, way to make yourself sound like a troll, there.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Dungeons & Dragons Online has a similar "True Reincarnation" system.
Once your character reaches level 20, you can acquire a "True Druidic Heart of Wood", which you then use to "reincarnate" as a fresh level 1 character, changing anything you want except name and gender; certain permanent things like tomes carry over, although they may kick in gradually.
The first two times you do this, you get more points with which to buy your starting stats, and the XP you need to level up increases. EVERY time you TR, you gain a bonus "Past Life" feat for the class you had the most levels in, each of which gives you a minor bonus (fighter, for example, will give you +1 to attack rolls) that will stack with themselves up to 3 times each (ie, reincarnate from a fighter three times and you'll get a total of +3 to attack rolls). Having the "free" Past Life feat for a class also allowed you to take another feat "active" Past Life feat associated with your class.
My sig can beat up your sig.
You should really learn how to spell or pronounce what you're going to review.
By producing these videos, you've actually given me several years of life by actually reminding me how boring and repetitive WoW really was and why I refuse to waste any money on it.
I actually spent yesterday downloading the entire client (all 20Gigs of it). I was going to revisit to see how things had developed. But I now know that WoW is a waste of lifespan. I think I'd rather do something useful with my free time, like learn a new language, improve my memorization skills, train for a professional certification, even read a book.
I play other games where I can dip in and out like Team Fortress 2. But MMORPGs are a frightening waste of time. If I were unemployed then MMORPGs would help pass the time, but not help me get back into work.
That's why I read Slashdot - somebody else wastes their time so I don't have to.
Thanks Slashdot!
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
If WoW had permadeath they would not need to make the drop rates so low. People could play through an instanced dungeon 1 time, and if they lived, they get the loot.
Dungeon Tactics : Free Open Source SRPG
This is an interesting idea and also an incredibly stupid one.
First, WoW does not have any "different paths" to offer you to make leveling again and again really interesting... slightly different surroundings and slightly different colors when pressing 1-2-3 are not interesting, different paths. They would have to fundamentally change the game to the point it becomes a different game.
Second, any sort of perma-death or real consequences in the game like you see implemented extremely well in "EVE Online" make the game much less simple-fun and much more of an actual, real-world-like challenge. What I mean by that is, you cannot just play "end-game" EVE without giving a single frakk because any and all of your actions can have very dire consequences and the typical EVE-player probably enjoys that in a masochistic way - but the typical WoW raid and battleground zerg will very likely not enjoy this AT ALL. And these kind of consequences are pretty rare in most popular video games, for a good reason. A lot of players just want to play and relax and NOT worry about actually losing things they put a lot of time into. You have enough consequences and serious things to worry about in daily life, video games should offer you a different world and a temporary escape, much like books and movies.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
You've missed my point completely - it's absolutely nothing to do with the loot.
If all of the dungeons in an MMO could be beaten with no deaths on the first attempt, the game would be seriously lacking in challenge. The actual fun in WoWlike MMOs (and yes, they can be a lot of fun) is in overcoming difficult (sometimes extremely difficult) fights in a large group by the use of co-operative tactics. You're going to die. Repeatedly. That's part of the game. If you want permadeath, then you've either made the game impossibly difficult and time consuming, or you've compensated for this by turning it into a very different, much easier (and far inferior) game.
So, get rid of it. Create a game with a tutorial area, a mid level and an endgame that kills you. Then you restart the game, skip the tutorial and try a different path.
You can end a character without killing it: in our pen and paper role playing group we've had several characters that retired from the adventuring life. It can be an individual goal that has been achieved (avenged my brother's death) or a group goal (defeated the big evil), but at some point it just makes more sense for a character to settle down than to continue as an adventurer.
It could even be done on a world scale: if all players together defeat the big evil or if one faction defeats the other, the server could be put in "archive mode" where you can still log in and enjoy the views but have no further conflicts to resolve. The players would then create a new character and save a different world.
I think the reason no MMO dares to do this is that such an end of a cycle is a moment at which players will ask themselves whether they want to continue playing in the next cycle or drop out. It's a pity in my opinion, as it reduces the meaning of the player's actions, since nothing ever really changes in the game world. It seems to be a trend in mobile games as well: "games" designed to keep the players busy rather than give them memorable experiences.
WoW is like nuclear war - the only way to win is to not play.
I have been really enjoying a real world social life now, plus found time to pick up a few real world skills like playing a few tunes on the piano. I rid myself of the compulsion to keep trying to maintain 3 level 85 toons and grinding for gear, some time around the first Darkmoon fair for the cataclysm expansion. It was grinding for all the damned herbs for darkmoon cards that finally broke the WoW experience for me. Wish I'd quit way earlier - haven't missed it at all.
Playing WoW seriously is like nuclear war - the only way to win is to not play.
FTFY, and that applies to many other things
Moderation is key.
I quit WoW after 5 or so years. I did a whole bunch of different things, but I didn't do it all. I was hardcore at times. I was casual at times. Whatever happened, happened. Do I regret my time there, and my time was wasted? Nope.
I had my fun. Now I'm doing other fun things (like trolling slashdot ;p). I don't have much of an urge to go back to WoW today, but I wouldn't rule out going back in the future.
It doesn't look like many people will get the genius of what you're saying.
And this is coming from a Wow player who is still playing strong.
What you're saying here makes sense.. and is a solution to the problem presented in your parent post as well.
Raising level caps just makes previous endgame content obsolete. Continually fleshing out the middle game would make your re-lives different and more interesting. With nothing persistent but achievements, the game would be about the journey and adventure. Not about the goal. Which as is obvious from any MMO ever, does not work in the long run.
I think that MMOs need to look at characters that age, and can have descendents. Create a heritage for your kids, pass on items, establish a family history, etc.
Also to survive, gameplay needs to be emergent. The things you can do in game should give rise to the fun you can have by letting you be inventive, letting you interact with other players and make changes to the world.
I have recently started playing the SWGEMU (www.swgemu.com). I am in the process of being elected to be the mayor of a player city, I am building up businesses crafting, and I am slowly building a guild up. All of those activities are things which emerge from the possible activities my characters can engage in inside the game. Sandbox gaming is what is missing from today's MMOs I think, and it has far more potential for a long lasting appeal.
Note: the swgemu is not finished, its in an alpha state so lots of elements of the game are not functioning yet but it is playable provided you have a copy of the install disks for the game. It is not illegal - they have permission from SOE's attorneys, and its free. The server code (as of patch 14.1 on the old game, so just prior to the Combat Upgrade) is being recreated by volunteer programmers and they are doing a fantastic job.
EVE has sandbox gameplay, it has a player driven economy and is probably the best example of that style of gameplay in a current MMO. Sadly its never appealed to me - I guess I like walking around as a character - but I should give it another try.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
In order for a perma death RPG to be challenging the dungeons need to be extremely hard. See Nethack.
Dungeon Tactics : Free Open Source SRPG
Nethack is not an MMO. No persistent world, no game economy. Saying MMOs should be like Nethack is like saying Street Fighter should be like Sim City.
Nothing wrong with either game, but they have fundamental and irreconcilable differences.
It's not really art though is it, you're just going through the motions, doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing. There's no creativity or expression, just regurgitation.
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