That said, I was a bit late to the party this expansion and picked up Warlords of Draenor quite some while after it was released. It took me 4 days of casual playing to get to level 100, geared up and raid-ready. I completed the first raid available (Highmaul) and got some neat gear out of it. I upgraded my Garrison as far as I could and even went as far as starting to collect treasures hidden around the game world.
I'm not entirely sure if I've burned through the expansion this quick due to the design, or my leveling tactics. However, one thing that is for sure is that the game is a heck of a lot easier than it's ever been and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that yet.
All classes have had their spells redesigned and removed in order to have less buttons to push in battle. Questing, much like in Mists of Pandaria has been streamlined to the point of being linear and seem to funnel the player exactly where they are meant to go. Quests even have a chance to reward epic gear while leveling, to get you geared that much faster. Where the fuck is crowd control? I have not seen a single crowd-control spell yet and every dungeon consists of running through and bashing everything with the biggest stick you can find.
The biggest notable difference is the sense of community. There just...isn't anymore. You join a guild, not because you want to network, but because it's been incentivized and makes you feel you must in order to reap the benefits. Heck, you jump in a dungeon with random people and nobody utters a word until someone fucks up or they need to take a break. Warcraft is starting to feel like a single-player game again.
Maybe I'm seeing it through rose-tinted glasses, but I remember when my server was a bustling place filled with all sorts of interesting and wonderful characters. There were prestigious guilds with notable players that you'd inspect in town and longed for their gear. You knew players because they had reputations and accomplishments. Guilds had rivalries and they were common knowledge to the rest of the server, especially when some sort of "We're the best" debacle came about. We'd host huge raids on the enemy faction for fun, since back then there were no rewards from it. There was a great sense of camaraderie and that seems to have all but died in the Warcraft of today.
The absence of community is attributed to two things: cross server play and looking for group functions. Cross server play removed the border restrictions of playing within your own server's playerbase and you'll often see players from other servers questing in the same zone as you. I get Blizzard's reasoning for this - it's not fun to play on a low population server and hardly ever see players in the game world. However, one of the consequences is that it limits your ability to make friends on your own server while questing. Long gone are the days of grouping up with randoms while questing and getting to know each other to become friends that you can actively play with often.
Looking for group is a similar double-edged sword. On the one hand, you don't have to spend hours forming a group, travelling to the dungeon and praying to the The Light that nobody leaves and you're able to complete it. On the other hand, you're not getting to know anybody that you group up with in a dungeon. Very seldom do you get paired with someone from your server, and even in that rare occurrence, chances are that nobody will really chat enough to get acquainted. You go through the motions, get your loot and be on your way, oftentimes with not so much as saying hello or goodbye.
It's not just the social aspects which have changed in nature, but also gear acquisition. Epics in vanilla WoW were exactly as the name implies - epic. There was something about inspecting someone in town and seeing them draped from head to toe in purples that made you awe in astonishment. It meant that the player was a successful raider, that they put the time and effort into getting 40 people together and tackling some rather formidable monsters to earn their rewards. Epic gear was not something that you got from a random quest reward, as it is today. You worked hard for your epic gear and got the due recognition because of it.
One change that I have to give Blizzard credit for is the questing system. From having hundreds of unrelated quests littered around a zone with no sense of direction, to the current streamlined system is a welcomed change. The story delivery since Wrath of the Lich King has greatly improved, with animated cutscenes and integrated scenarios, the way the story unravels to the player is in a better state than it's ever been. Beautifully scripted stories and animations brings you closer to the story and characters than ever before and I'm glad that Blizzard took this approach and hope to see more of it in future expansions.
I don't think that WoW will ever return to its social roots. There's too much information out there with sites like Wowhead and MMOChampion giving us insight into new content before it even releases, so it's not like we have to interact to know what is where and how things work. There's no need to spend an hour in trade chat looking for a group any more because doing all the stuff that took time is literally one click away now. Everything is built around you, the player, and trying to accommodate you into making bite-sized chunks of play feel rewarding and fulfilling at the detriment of the one thing that made WoW what it is today - a community.
Looking for group is a similar double-edged sword. On the one hand, you don't have to spend hours forming a group, travelling to the dungeon and praying to the The Light that nobody leaves and you're able to complete it. On the other hand, you're not getting to know anybody that you group up with in a dungeon. Very seldom do you get paired with someone from your server, and even in that rare occurrence, chances are that nobody will really chat enough to get acquainted. You go through the motions, get your loot and be on your way, oftentimes with not so much as saying hello or goodbye.
One change that I have to give Blizzard credit for is the questing system. From having hundreds of unrelated quests littered around a zone with no sense of direction, to the current streamlined system is a welcomed change. The story delivery since Wrath of the Lich King has greatly improved, with animated cutscenes and integrated scenarios, the way the story unravels to the player is in a better state than it's ever been. Beautifully scripted stories and animations brings you closer to the story and characters than ever before and I'm glad that Blizzard took this approach and hope to see more of it in future expansions.
I don't think that WoW will ever return to its social roots. There's too much information out there with sites like Wowhead and MMOChampion giving us insight into new content before it even releases, so it's not like we have to interact to know what is where and how things work. There's no need to spend an hour in trade chat looking for a group any more because doing all the stuff that took time is literally one click away now. Everything is built around you, the player, and trying to accommodate you into making bite-sized chunks of play feel rewarding and fulfilling at the detriment of the one thing that made WoW what it is today - a community.
No comments:
Post a Comment