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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.
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?
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.
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.
Funny thing about reviewing MMOs. You really need to play it for a while to get a good grasp of what the game has to offer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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=-
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.