World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria review A couple of years ago I was addicted to Farmville and I've always had a soft spot for Pokémon. As much as I hate to say, it the Mists of Pandaria is coming over all Pokéville 2. Everyone is battling minipets or farming, which all feels a bit twee but I can’t deny it’s also extremely enjoyable... except when I see my baby polar …
This game ruined my mates relationship with his partner, he spent so much time on it he neglected his relationship and it died a death.
She was absolutely georgeous, clever and a great personality, but spending 10 hours a night on WoW ended it all.
Still can't complain, I married her and we have two beautiful children!
But of course you'll get people from either side making their various viewpoints heard.
Personally I think it was disrespectful to have such a long time in the game without new content, and have those monthly fees effectively fund the next expansion, which you also have to pay for.
@AC, yes by 10+ million people.
This is a good review which hews closely to my own experience: a superb WoW expansion which I'm enjoying on almost every level, but I'm ready and waiting for the next big thing from Blizzard. I would also say that for such an ancient graphics engine, they're pushing some might pretty pixels this time around..
Is this the mysterious "Project Titan" that's been alluded to in various magazine articles? It's been worked on for a number of years now iirc. I can't help wondering what the graphical quality will be like and whether it will be much of a step up from Warcraft.
I am truly hoping it's not just WoW 2 or World of Starcraft. It'd be nice to see Blizzard explore slightly more mature themes than fluffy pandas.
@Thomas_4, yup, I was alluding to Titan. For the record Blizz have already stated it is a new franchise. I have my own ideas on what I would like to see in their next-gen MMO (as does everyone, I'm sure), but in the meantime they seem very adept at coaxing money from my wallet every month.
I look forward to Titan as well. I stopped playing at Cataclysm because it was boring and most of my friends had stopped. I re-upped my account for a month to see if I wan't to try the new expansion and the word is no. There is only so much time I can spend playing the same game and apparently WoW has reached that limit.
Not to say that Titan will be better. I am still looking forward to it but after the abortion of a game/blatent cash in that is Diablo 3 I have much less confidence in the company as a whole.
WoW could have gone on for a very very long time, but it's being taken apart as we speak. In trying to widen the audience, the "failed sports so did business" decision-makers have decided to remove all challenge from the experience. What they fail to realise is that a game with no challenge isn't a game at all. What's been happening over the last couple of years is an audience transition. The once massive gamer userbase has been all but swapped out for a userbase consisting entirely of fickle kids and other "casuals". As soon as they lose interest in favour of the next fad, WoW is done.
It's a massive shame too. WoW was really something special once. Nothing like pathetic human greed to destroy all things good.
Challenge? in WoW? As someone who has played off and on since release I can tell you the game has never been "hard" just "grindy" as it took you a long time to do anything, everything was about farming resistance gear, previous tier items, and mats so you could survive the gear checks in the current content.
When Cataclysm was released the developers made the opening content "hard" to satisfy complaints like yours. What happened? The game lost 2 million subs before the next raid was released.
Blizz really cut their own throat listening to the vocal minority there.
When you also factor in that many people playing the game are older now and have jobs, families and responsibilities we cannot all play like we could in our teens any more.
It's a simple as the fact that years ago I could log on and play an actual game. When doing a quest and approaching a group of mobs I had to think about how to avoid pulling too many, for instance. These days no thought is required - in PvE your toon is an indestructible demigod, which renders the experience pointless. Dungeons also no longer require any thought - all those CC abilities, for example, just sit there redundant now that the bad guys universally drop like flies in seconds.
There's really nothing more to the death of WoW than this. If you can play in a coma, it's not a game any more, and its fate is sealed.
While I don't agree with everything you've said, the comments about dungeons really does ring true for me. Granted, it was a massive pain in the ass looking for the right class with the right cc for a dungeon and using "Fear" was often an amusing recipe for suicide but because the dungeons were hard, you *had* to talk to the other people in the group and sometimes you'd even make a friend in the process.
I'd like to see dungeons go back to the time time when CC was essential and planning careful pulls was the mark of a good tank. It is really is just "go nuts with you AoE, don't forget the loot on the way out".
I still remember the dungeon runs people did for the Warlock and Paladin epic mounts back in vanilla. They were ball busting challenges and truly deserving of the "Epic" epithet.
Now get the hell off my lawn you goddamn punk kids.
@nexshil: I totally agree. I would say right up to the end of BC there was challange. Things were gated for a reason and that reason was that once you were actually able to work your way to open new content (grinding isn't all bad) it was an achievement and more importantly felt like one. Starting at the end of BC with Badge Items all the way down to now everything is being handed out. There is no achievement in getting the same thing that the next guy 10 guys have because you spammed your AoE skills in 10 instant form dungeon groups. Giving away gear for badges cheapened the entire experience and they just keep adding in shortcuts until the point that the game will be akin to whack-a-mole.
Firstly, you complain that there is no challenging content yet have made no mention of the challenge or heroic raid modes of the game which are designed to provide the challenge to those that enjoy it.
Everything is *not* being handed out. Dungeon gear to get ready for raiding, yes, Normal raid level gear to get ready for heroic raiding, yes via ease of encounters to anyone experienced and valor / reputation grinding. Heroic mode raid loot is an achievement to get. There is a definite sense of achievement at beating a significant challenge to be had if you look for it. Challenge mode gold runs are difficult to get if you cannot spare enough time to raid. Either of these will fulfil your clear need to feel superior to others while playing a video game.
I would enjoy seeing you manage to achieve either of these spamming your AoE skills.
I would argue that the heroic content is mechanically and logistically more challenging than any content previously added to the game. I've raided every piece of released content when it was relevant, barring encounter specific issues, it is far more challenging simply due to the complexity of encounters. Nobody can argue that the very first encounter in this raid tier is mechanically less challenging than original Patchwerk, for example.
Secondly, you're failing to see the bigger picture. If the raiding is hard, and only 0.1% of the playerbase ever gets to experience it, from a development mangement perspective it makes *zero* business sense to put any development resources into the upcoming content. We'd see even more of the farmville/pokemon distractions. LFR is the single best thing to happen to the game from a raiding perspective. Now the content is available to 100% of the playerbase, and it makes business sense to plough development and testing resource into upcoming content. Raid content from this point on *should* only get better and better.
Finally, to those complaining of the grind. You do not have to do dailies. You can just as easily only raid, or only PvP as you previously used to. Dailies allow you to spend the valor points you accumulate but you do not have to spend them in order to get gear. You choose to do them because you enjoy the feeling of reaching the carrot. There will always be someone else in the guild/realm that bothers to get the 28 slot bag recipe, or weapon enchants.
In response to the article, at least WoW has something to do at max level, I've never dropped an MMO upon reaching level cap as quickly as I dropped GW2.
I also abandoned WoW due to lack of challenge.
While as dj1234 points out there may be heroic (and now challenge) modes, but these are built around re-running content which you've already done only 'harder'. Some people may enjoy this, but it doesn't work for me or most of the people I played with.
As someone else notes, the game population now seems to consist mainly of 'give it to me now' kids.
For anyone who liked the older style WoW but with up-to-date graphics and loads of dynamic content such as zone events I suggest you check out Rift. That game looks like going from strength-to-strength with its new expansion due in a couple of weeks, which triples the game world size.
@Tim, there is really no other solution for a theme-park MMO than running the same content in different modes. At least with WoW there is a *lot* to see before you have to start repeating yourself. Comparisons with other games in the space, as though they don't share exactly the same problem, are plain crooked.
I recently installed a 10 day trial to see what WoW is like these days (I stopped playing mid way through BC). I've been levelling my mage up from 70 and I have to say I'm pretty disappointed. I used to describe her as a glass cannon, she'd take down non-elite in three or four hits but would die quite easily if I messed up and pulled a huge mob. Now I can kill anything in two hits (opening with pyroblast followed by instacast infernoblast) and seem to be nigh on invincible. Mobs don't even appear to run off when near death any more so there's no risk of pulling more than you can handle.
I wasn't expecting to be in a top raiding guild again, I don't have the time and tbh anything less than a 40 man doesn't really feel that epic. I was expecting to have some fun questing though but from what I can see there is no challenge left in it.
I think they're really running out of ideas and can't do anything original. It also looks amazingly like Blizzard are trying to expand their player base to the under 8s... the whole damn thing is pretty much kung-fu panda meets pokemon! You can't do that without intentionally targetting young children.
While it was revolutionary when it came out (in some ways, not others), the game is very, very repetitive... a.k.a. grinding for those who are used to MMO terminology. While this expansion has added a few new twists, the majority of the PvE game is "Collect/Kill X of Y" or "Take X to Y". Instances, bosses and PvP do add a lot more interest to a game as they force human to human interaction which is what makes these games fun, but there's still not a lot there.
It will be nice to see what, if anything, Blizzard can come up with next - but it'll have to be very clever and well thought out. The intricate dynamics of an online economy and repetitive, or accessible, game play that covers both casual players and addicts alike is not something that is easy to get right, or even to get not utterly-broken-and-easily-exploitable which is the usual starting point!
Regardless of any previous "appearance" of the Pandaren in WC3 (as someone pointed out it was a joke), the jarring transition from a "Lord of the Rings / D&D" style epic fantasy world to a Pokemon / Kung-Fu Panda playground was too much for me. I loved the feeling of immersion, of being transported to another world, because of that "epic otherworld" D&D feeling Azeroth created. Now it feels like a Disney movie.
Which is why I cancelled my account as soon as I got confirmation that an old April Fool's joke from years ago was to become canon. Goodbye WoW. It was awesome while it lasted.
It is a solid expansion, plenty of fun things to do with scenarios, pet battles, tillers farm, besids the usual Heroics and Raiding.
My bigest bugbear is the sheer amount of dailies to unlock valour point gear and the small amount of rep dailies provide. The whole Golden lotus, Shado Pan, August celesials repuation grind feels far too reptitive and grindy to even consider doing on more than 1 character.
I note you make a couple of references to GW2 but you shold make readers aware that GW2 is a freaking nightmare. The bot problem is severe and completely fucking with the economy. The end game material is severely lacking. There are no raids and the pvp could be a lot better (they recently implemented a "fix" for WvW PVP which makes players invisible to try and simulate lag!?!?!?!?)
Most of GW2 is based entirely around RNG and whilst they allow exploiters to keep the gains of their exploit whilst continuously nerfing honest players ability to do things, the community is getting very pissed off.
And to pour salt on the wounds, if you dare to mention any of these things on the forums the mods issue infractions like they are a fashion item. Meanwhile the bots and exploiters are ignored...
GW2 may look very pretty, but the reality is, it is a terribly boring game with a huge amount of problems. (And no I don't play WoW)
It sounds like you gave up on the game about a few weeks ago or so, and that you are completely ignoring developments since then.
I have personally not yet seen a botter; I've only seen recent statements about multiple-thousands of accounts terminated for botting. It looks like Anet was waiting and banning in batches, in industry standard practice (so that botters don't find out what triggered the bans).
The invisibility in WvW was acknowledged as a bug and patched two days later, together with an in-depth discussion about why this was happening.
The 'End-game' is only lacking if you expect the game to turn into something else just because you hit 80. It is the same game all the way through, pretty much like GW1 (where max level in no way signalled the end of content or even a change in content).
The game does have problems, bugs, and issues (necro skill bugs come to mind) but it is nowhere as bad as you make out. And they have just pulled off one of the most memorable holiday events I've seen in an MMO.
WoW, on the other hand, does look a bit stale in comparison, and I know which game I'd rather play tonight. I find the review pretty much spot on.
Actually I log in daily praying they have fixed it and your reply is completely false:
1. The game is still littered with bots.
2. The WvW invisibility issue has not been fixed and the last official response I saw about it was that this was by design to remove the advantage people with high end gaming rigs had over every one else.
3. The Halloween Event was terrible, thousands of people got duped into spending $100s each to buy keys they thought would give them nice new weapon skins out of chests - the reality was people were finding that even after spending such a colossal amount of money they never got any skins because of the RNG nature of the game. I saw reports of people opening hundreds of chests and never getting a single skin.
4. Known exploiters have been permitted to keep "legendary precursor" items and take joint control of the game's market (joint control with the gold sellers) seeing precursor weapons rise in price by over 2000% in the last 6 week whilst the chance of obtaining them through other means (mystic forge) has dropped and dropped -people reporting throwing thousands of weapons into Mystic Forge and getting no precursor at a real world cost of $6000+ dollars if you were to look at the Gems to Gold conversion rate.
As someone who waited for years for GW2, pre-purchased, played the beta weekends and the early starter promo, I am disgusted at the way the game is going. ANet have lost -all- credibility and the game is just PTW now.
And again, I don't have a WoW account nor do I play any other MMOs (I don't have time). Everything that was promised by ANet with GW2 was a le. The events are not dynamic, the world is not persistent and it doesn't remove the need to grind - it is not a genre changer at all, it is merely a very pretty representation of forgotten promises and RNG.
GW2 I've seen more game breaking bugs in it than any other game I've played period. It took me 3 days to complete 5 maps just because 1 NPC on each weren't spawning. I had to swap servers each day, and luckily the last server I hit the NPC was up in the overflow server, but was down on the normal. This is just one I've seen events that never ended so you couldn't warp to the points, but instead were forced to walk long distances. A few of those stuck events were the main event in the zone that gave the treasure chest so yea thats fun...
I've also seen insane amounts of bots running around. In the snow level 70-80 area I've seen well over 50 bots at a time, and in the WvWvW I've seen tons of bots too doing figure 8's
Will say the graphics blow the living shit out of wow's extremely dated graphics the game looked stunning at full res, and ran at 60 FPS(lowest was 33 FPS when I was fighting a dragon wit like 60 other people) unlike wow which I've almost had crash when I was in a raid with 30 people it got so choppy on medium settings... I also liked the layout of the land in GW2, and thought it flowed quite nicely. Now if they could clear up the bugs, add in something like the wow dungeon finder I might go back, and remove that annoying anti farm code (not fun getting stuff you need).
I agree with you completely about GW2. The game is boring, boring, boring.
I was in on the beta tests and, at first, I thought the boredom was caused by the fact that I had to keep creating a character for the tests. Sadly, that wasn't it. As soon as it was launched, I dived right in and found myself glad to walk away from it about a month later.
The combat is ridiculous. It's all about having large numbers against the foes: no tactics, no finesse, nothing. Because of the severe level capping, you can never level up and kill a monster with fewer players. Some of the powers of the foes are just ridiculous; the bandit boss in the cave near Divinity's reach can kill anyone in 2 hits, no matter what elite skills that player might have. Not to mention that idiotic troll...
Pardon the pun, but the lack of heaing is a killer. I had a feeling this would happen when they said that there would be no dedicated healing class, but I had hoped that I would be proved wrong. The reason I had had this feeling is that I used to play Runequest - old-fashioned pencil and paper role-playing, that - and it spread the healing around. What happened is that no-one felt responsible for healing anyone else, and the self-healing was not often no sufficient to prevent characters from being killed. That is exactly what happens in GW2. The healing, I have heard it say, is just supposed to help out if a character doesn't manage to dodge a hit, but this is ridiculous because dodging has a long cooldown period. You will get hit. You will not have sufficient healing. No-one will heal you. Engineers, if any are about, might have a healing turret out, but this will be insufficient. You will die if other players don't take out the foe or if there are insufficient players to take out the foe.
The GW2 team likes to brag about its events that take the place of quests, but this sort of thing already happened in GW1. For those of you who played it, remember the farmer in pre-searing Ascalon, the one with the pigs that would escape? Sometimes you could get money for rounding up some of them, and sometimes you couldn't. Some foes roamed and were only sometimes a danger depending upon where they were. I'm thinking about the level 19 corsair that sometimes lurked a little too close to the entrance of of the not-too high level areas in Nightfall.
The crafting system is nice, but the materials are just too hard to find in any number. This is just part of the reason that the economy is all messed up. Cost burdens on characters are too high and gold and other items are too hard to get. The GW2 team does this to prevent farming, but, in reality, all it does is play into the hands of the gold farmers. They just set their bots up and let them run; if it takes a few more hours, so be it. Ordinary, innocent players, though, with perhaps only the time to play a few hours a day lose out big time. This just drives people into the arms of the goldsellers if it doesn't drive them away from the game itself.
The personal story that the GW2 team crows about is nothing at all. It is a bit of over-hyped hack writing and it quickly collapses into the same story. As well, the 'talking head' cinematics are boring. I loved the cinematics in GW1, especially the one where you first see the Eye of the North. They really were full of emotion; you felt you were an important part of the story. In GW2, you are just a pawn and you know it.
Then there are those stupid jumping games. I hate jumping games which is why I don't buy platform jumpers. One minute, you are a noble or whatever and the next you are Mario. It does nothing for the role playing aspect of the game which is already lacking.
Oh yes, not to forget the complete lack of guild-versus-guild PVP action. I wasn't into that in GW1, but many people are and they can't understand why it isn't there. WvW is just another numbers game. Worse, the WvW servers are clogged with PvE players who don't want to be there but find they must in order to completely explore the map.
Oh yes, the graphics are beautiful and I have never seen towns as well done as they are in GW2, but it isn't enough, not enough by far.
You are right about the mods on the GW2 forums, too. They stop all discussion. Any criticism, no matter how mild or constructive, is stomped on, but the fanbois are free to call anyone who doesn't bow down before GW2's altar a 'hater'. That's another thing that drove me away from the game.
Oh, and I don't play WoW either and never have.
Firstly this is a fair review, and it almost makes me want to start playing wow again... almost. But not quite. Pet battles and farmville is nice, and it sounds like it gives the wow world some much needed diversity. But in the end it will all go down to farming instances and raids over and over and over until the next expansion, just as it was before. Plus the new raids and instances will yet again be easy and predictable as in: phase1 do this, phase2 do this.... and so on. Not to mention it's way overpriced, both the subscription and the expansion.
Blizz has gone the wrong way about it in my opinion. Why have only 1 flavour when you could potentially have every flavour! What I mean is - they should have kept developing (or at least fixing bugs in) every version of wow and have one realm for every older version with the rules and the environment that existed during that particular expansion but still release new content on the majority of their realms. That would help retain customers who did not like where the game was going and still allow to attract new ones. Obviously if you were on a classic realm and then you felt like moving on to BC then you'd have the option to upgrade (transfer) your toon to that expansion.
Pandaria has one attraction for me that stands out - the imagery and scenery are just stunning. And somewhere in the guts of the game there's been a subtle change made -- I play on wine; my frame rate plummeted with Pandaria release, *but* I've been able to enable graphic features I didn't have access to previously. Since I'm on wine, I'm playing in OpenGL mode, not DX - I suspect that they've added some openGL features that weren't there before. The game is still playable -- even with everything cranked to max on my system, but I'd be turning things down to raid.
Overall I'm pleased with the expansion, just haven't had the time to jump to 90 in 3 days like a substantial portion of my guild did. I have yet to make new raid level content, but the few random Pandaria dungeons I've seen are indeed "aoe to your hearts content" type content. I hope the raids actually do require more thought.
And who'd have thought that a WoW article would have received this much commentary from folks that clearly play regularly on the Reg?.
(suggestion Games forum Reg Admins?)
This post has been deleted by its author
As someone that already has 3 level 90's MoP is IMO hands down the worst expansion to wow.
The quests I find it extremely annoying how linear the quest are sure there is not a little more option compared to Cata, but its no where near what it was prior.
Itemization: Quest rewards virtually worthless. I played a Disc priest (healer to non wow players) I'd say 80% of the gear was for DPS with no healer option. Very limited trinket options (all the quest ones were worthless I saw). Same with weapons majority were junk I seen. Luckily my priest was a tailor and I got lucky and made some nice BoE Blues or I probably would have quit as I find shadow now painful to play.
Blizzard said originally way before the beta was released for MoP they wanted to remove the rep grind as they figured out players didn't care for it, so they put all badge gear, tailoring, leather working, and some other plans all at a vendor that requires rep... This was not a huge problem in cataclysm or Wrath seeing you could fling a tabbard on and go run dungeons, even BC dungeons gave rep with certain groups so you could keep running those in the quest for gearing up. No in MoP you NEED to do insanely mind numbingly repetitive quests on a daily basis that make productivity meeting at work seem fun, and productive(I've never been to one that was fun or productive btw). They even lowered the req quests give now from 250 as its been since I think BC(or even vanilla) to 125 (or is it 130). Now I wouldn't be pissed with this if the rep was account wide, and if you hit exalted it would go to all like the achievements, but no you have to do it for each character which for one faction it generally takes 20-60 minutes (depending how many others are on the same thing fighting over spawns) so lets multiply it by several characters...
Skill tree's: I also loved when they said they want to add variety to the game saying it was too cookie cutter... so to do this they removed the extremely customizable skill spec's where we had choices (they already dumbed it down greatly for cata) to where we get to choose 5 skills only. And in most cases only one is viable for a build so there is pretty much 0 choice. Yup they made it not cookie cutter by removing choices so everyone is the same...
Profession's mat cost being unbalanced. Seriously the mats for some are ludicrous (I have every profession maxed) This new mote of harmony crap is insane. Some professions need a lot early on, some need a few later, some don't need a damn single one. Again like I said also earlier some professions also require you to have somewhere from honored to exalted with some faction to get some of their recipes, where others don't need any rep. Its really lopsided. The only thing they did positive with professions was make engineering items not 100% worthless as the trinket can be used by non-engineers(I found this ground breaking by blizzard)
Lack of flying till 90 in new area. OK they want us to see their pretty scenery that is nice. OK fine one play through I can see(even then I got sick of the copy and pasted bridges, and repetitive textures) like in wrath, but come on let us buy a tomb of flying like was available in wrath for every other character after. I want to level another character as I leveled everything on one realm to level 85 in cata, but hell being forced to waste time on a ground mount for a 4th time is killing my ambition to even bother. At least in cata I could fly fast to get the monotonous linear quests over 1,2,3 in MoP we have to suffer, and dismount after a light tap...
The blatant pokemon side game ripoff... I wish I could say something bad about this, but honestly I find this to be the most fun part of the expansion so far (as well as a lot of people in my guild said the same thing) which is not saying much about this expansion...
So that is how I feel about this expansion I honestly don't see myself playing this long term(or even through December) like all the other expansions wow has had in the past that kept me very entertained.
I am on a short break from the game while I am working in Ireland (and using a crappy laptop that doesnt run the game at all well) but once the break is over, I will be spending time levelling, gearing up and then getting out and raiding. But, as I said, for now I will keep playing and when The Elder Scrolls Online comes out, I will be giving that a serious look because for me at least, WOW has become too child-like and is dumbed down dramatically. I started playing not long after TBC and continued through Wrath and Cata and while this expansion seems pretty... it has also removed a lot of the stuff I loved about the game. The complexities of getting your character the best combination of gear, enchants and gems to go raiding. It will just have to wait and see what the future brings for it all.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
