Comments on: New WoW Expansion: Cataclysm

By: nill

nill — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 09:24:14 +0000

The trailer for this actually had me rather sucked in — and I haven’t played since the very early days of TBC — but then I saw the Tauren Paladin, laughed my arse off and remembered why I had lost interest in the first place. Well, amongst other things.

By: Gorgeras

Gorgeras — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 23:40:56 +0000

Ah it’s the old ‘few mistakes’ gambit.

Everyone who has ever handled anything disastrously, dishonestly, without shame and with venomous contempt for criticism no matter how mild, uses the ‘few mistakes’ gambit. They think that just because they give a grudging admission to a ‘few mistakes’ they have demonstrated open-mindedness and maturity.

Not sure who Sebmojo is addressing; I’ve certainly not called WoW ‘crap’ and those that have made it clear they don’t see the appeal and probably have not spent a lot of time playing it. I congratulate any new player who can muster the will to get through the mid-late level grind which remains as a legacy of Jeff Kaplan’s leadership.

WoW has been as great and successful as it has in spite of Jeff Kaplan, not because of him. The art direction is it’s most gob-smacking stand-out feature alongside the technical muscle backing it; but it was wasted on unambitious non-talent that insisted on recycled game assets to create raid instance after raid instance. The open-world was a chat room for most the time but still a good one; it’s social bonds that keep people playing and even moving to servers they don’t respect(roleplay servers no longer exist in practicality due to even the incredibly lax policy on them not being enforced at all).

Jeff Kaplan wasn’t merely not given the fictional Guide to Making the Perfect Game; he had never even worked on a major title in his life but was given a senior position, followed shortly after by the MOST senior position when WoW was more than two-thirds finished(he could not possibly have been working on WoW from the start while he was running the Everquest guild Legacy of Steel full). I can’t even find any record of him working in the games industry at all. It almost seems like Rob Pardo gave him the job simply because they played Everquest together and Kaplan managed actually influence the development of that game just as a very pushy and obnoxious player.

Essentially; Jeff Kaplan was about as qualified to be Project Lead as any of the critics that posted on the WoW forums before they were all perma-banned. He was once like them and probably still is.

By: R.

R. — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 12:27:13 +0000

I would also add that Jeff Kaplan has, if all his interviews in the last 12 months are anything to go by, realises and accepts he made more than a few mistakes in terms of accessibility and design choices. If a man can learn from such things, I don’t see why there’s a need to damn him so harshly. It’s not like anyone’s given a Guide to Making the Perfect Game when they get in the business…

By: sebmojo

sebmojo — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 11:48:21 +0000

This might just about bring me back to WoW.

And for the love of God can we have a little less nerd macho posturing about Blizzard? I’ll say this very simply.

If you have put more than 1000 hours into a game, you don’t get to call it crap.

By: Gorgeras

Gorgeras — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 11:47:06 +0000

It’s nostalgia, trust me.

Anyone that isn’t nostalgic for Soviet WoW has no heart(like me), anyone that wants it back has no brain.

It wasn’t so much that there was lots of end-level content that few ever saw that bothered me; it was the fact that there was a lack of anything else. Under Jeff Kaplan there was absolutely no opportunity for persistent open-world fun. All his favoured content: instances, didn’t require a persistent open-world or the server infrastructure that WoW has. It could have easily been run on dedicated third-party servers. The *World* of Warcraft was nothing more than a glorified chat lobby.

By: Zaphid

Zaphid — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 11:19:33 +0000

Gorgeras: The irony is that I had way more fun raiding in vanilla and TBC than I had in WotLK, belive it or not, the fact that I couldn’t see the whole game kept me more interested than the idea of easy and hard modes. Although at this point it is hard to distinguish how much of it is nostalgia and how much of it was fun or simply new to me.

By: l1ddl3monkey

l1ddl3monkey — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 09:50:27 +0000

Great; that means at least three of my staff will be off “sick” the week this comes out and I’ll be in trouble with our paymasters again. Fcuking WoW.

By: Wulf

Wulf — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 07:41:11 +0000

@Skalpadda

Heh, that was one of the many things that bothered me for the short time I played World of Warcraft. I’m thrilled by the idea of sailing our good Earth’s seven seas, I was always iffy about the idea of getting on a boat and sailing upon Azeroth’s semen seas.

By: Psychopomp

Psychopomp — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 06:14:36 +0000

Same with me, Dark. I attempted to go back to EVE.

Didn’t work.

By: Darkelp

Darkelp — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 05:59:46 +0000

I chose the wrong week to quit World Of Warcraft.

By: motherpuncher

motherpuncher — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 04:50:15 +0000

Can the monk brew beer? That is all that matters. Beer.

By: Z

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 04:11:28 +0000

As a new player who’s just hit Outland, trialling a way over-powered DK, the new changes sound awesome. I hope they compress all the starter areas down so there’s way less travel time. The Tauren area was the worst for this. I could run 2-3 Draenai through their start zone in the time it takes a Tauren to finish.

Compressing the barrens? Awesome. Basically, Bliz is taking what they’ve learned from the history of the game and remaking their product. Kudos–I may just stick around.