So I’ve been going over the MMO-Champion summary of Blizzard’s MoP press tour. One thing that drew my attention was their stated goal of bringing the “feeling of adventure” back into the game. They are talking about the original open-ended World of Warcraft, where there was no single unifying storyline (as there have been in all three expansions so far), and a lot of the things to do were not in-your-face – they required a bit of learning and preparation.
Even if you learned everything from other players or Thottbot or Allakhazam (anyone remember those? It’s strange to think that Wowhead wasn’t always there), having to get there by ground, and finding interesting (and often dangerous) things blocking your way lent a feeling of exploration and of actually being out there in the world. Obviously the fact that the game was new played a substantial part.
It’s a laudable goal, and I wish one could believe in their commitment to it, but given the devs’ behavior pattern, it’s tough to buy what they’re selling (literally). Several problems stand out embarrassingly close to their noble stated goals: flying mounts, readily available once a player reaches maximum level; this, coupled with the (forgive my candor) joke that leveling has become, essentially guarantees that people will trample each other on the race to level 90 and then proceed to farm their sacred dungeon and raid finders, seldom bothering to leave the cities and doing so in their 310% fliers when they do.
(Those things are, in some ways, like Social Security and Medicare: long-term bad ideas that nevertheless become untouchable once they’re in place. With time, their adverse effects become more pronounced, but by that point people have become, by force of habit, unable to imagine a world without them. So the farce goes on until the system dies, with either a bang or a whimper. Well, Blizzard has sold their scheme as effectively as Western governments, with the significant difference that you don’t go to jail if you refuse to pay your WoW bill.)
Ultimately, the determining factor in my negative opinion of Mists of Pandaria remains the fact that they’re very clearly moving towards a “standard pace of character power progression for everyone”. Everyone from Jackie Rendspam to Julian Worldfirst gets their periodic fix of item level increases, with the difference between them boiling down to a handful of stats and a lot of vanity. Here, come do hard modes, there’s a differently colored dragon in it for you! How cool is that, huh?
Sorry, but I’ll pass. “Bragging rights” as a reward is a concept that makes me ill.
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