charlequin said:
This strikes me as a completely wild complaint. "Sure, they revamped the entire old world from 1-60, but they only took it from having terrible quest design to having really good quest design and not any farther!"
Oh, don't get me wrong; the redesign of the old world quests was long overdue and brought them up from terrible to tolerable. Just getting questgivers in the same area and eliminating the wild goose chases across multiple continents is great. That's a welcome change and I'm not overlooking how significant that is. But that's something we saw implemented way back in TBC.
What I'm getting at is, the jump between WotLK quest design and Cata questing didn't really bring anything new to the table. TBC brought better quest organization, improved drop rates and daily quests (along with more variety like bombing runs, etc). WotLK brought more variety too (vehicles, jousting, etc.) and added the quest tracker, and some degree of phasing in certain quests / zones.
The only thing Cata quests do over WotLK quests is auto-update without having to return to the quest giver. Normally I'd say that's a
HUGE improvement, but from 80-85 and 0-mid-40s, I saw it used very sparingly (more in the higher level zones) and missing in
lots of places where it made a
ton of sense. There were still a lot of situations where I'd kill 15 mobs, turn it in, and then have to return to the exact same spot to steal 10 crates or some such.
And you can tell that the potential is there because Silverpine was AMAZING. The whole zone felt like an epic story from start to finish. Maybe that set my expectations too high, but nothing I played after that was anywhere near as cool, and a lot of zones felt like the same quests were just
slightly adjusted, and in some cases not even that. The Goblin area was pretty impressive too.
I'm just wondering why it feels like the best of WotLK quest design was distilled and applied liberally to some zones and others feel like they were just given a quick once-over. I mean, they're revamping the entire old world; Cataclysm is basically the only chance Blizzard is going to get to do that kind of thing, to reboot. Where was all of this time spent if much of the game still acts very much the same in all but a handful of zones?
Again, I don't want to get all J-rezzy here, but... there's less new zones than any previous expansion. No major profession. No new class. The number of dungeons is lower (I think, don't quote me on that) and none of them are exceptionally large in size. A great number of art assets have been reused, even when they glaringly stick out against the new design.
I'm not asking for the moon, but why is it there are only a handful of Silverpines and everything else just feels half-assed? That's what I'm getting at. Old-world questing has never been better, but apart from a few amazing exceptions, the only major things that have changed are the quest text and giver locations, and that fails to deliver on the potential we saw in WotLK.
charlequin said:
Well, I mean, I get it too, but for someone who didn't spend a year hanging out in Northrend, Cataclysm really is basically like subbing to WoW 2. (And I'm not sure how much I buy the idea that WoW is drastically inferior to any other comparable-genre MMO in terms of questing and zone design.)
I'm not sure I follow so I'll keep this short and sweet. Are you implying that anyone who was a pre-cata subscriber should just shut up and let the new or pre-wotlk returning players enjoy the upgrades, knowing that the full potential of WotLK-era quests isn't being utilized?
As far as other MMOs, WoW questing is a little behind, and could catch up (and surpass) quite easily if they tried. Again, Silverpine is easily the best zone I've ever quested in, in any MMO. I don't want to ignite a huge WoW vs. other MMOs debate, but WoW is still very very very good compared to other MMOs, but that gap is closing very quickly and WoW still has a lot of very mechanical game-y stuff that other MMOs have done away with.
DeathNote said:
The core of the gameplay has been the same for 6 years. Quest in these zones, pvp in these battlegrounds, do these dungeons, do these raids, stepping stone gear, grind this rep.
Every expansion and patch has just been an improvement on existing concepts. Adding new zones, races, professions, raids, flying, improve queues, improve old zones , improve talent trees, improve the way you get gear outside of raids, UI, improve how you get rep.
They didn't add a new profession, but would that magically make the game more fun? Just another improvement.
That's just it though; it would make the game more fun and it would be more than '
just another improvement'. By your logic, adding zones, races, professions, raids, talents, etc. are '
just improvements'. I'd venture to say that EVERY expansion is nothing more than a collection of '
just another improvement's. When you look at Cataclysm, the number of those improvements feels strangely lessened.
DeathNote said:
It is wow 2.0 for someone who was in vanilla or TBC, but I think it's 1.5 for WOTLK folks. All the veteran that are getting burnt out are wanting an official WOW sequel.
Again, I don't think "Cataclysm ROCKS if you've never played WoW before" is justification for Cataclysm being less than up-to-snuff, nor is "Well, you guys are going to play our next MMO, so be happy with this half-assed expansion." I know that sounds entitled and I'm not saying Blizzard 'owes' me an amazing expansion; I'm just saying that the "Cataclysm isn't for WotLK players" justification doesn't follow.
DeathNote said:
A big graphics upgrade is step 1. Step 2 is more intuitive game play design. I think the next few years of WOW is just improvement and that the core gameplay will always be the same. The only graphics improvement will probably be more polygons in models. They should have done it this expansion.
I think it's more than apparent to everyone at this point that WoW is basically going to tread water for the foreseeable future. Cataclysm feels like Blizzard's best chance to really reboot WoW and while they did upgrade it quite a bit, it still has some glaring holes. Character models, for example, are looking particularly dated, and I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed.
But what has Cataclysm brought to the table that's new, not just long-overdue improvements? More importantly, what's new in the context of not just WoW, but other MMOs? Other than just sheer market volume, how does Cataclysm overtake the competition which has slowly been gaining on them in subscriptions and overtaking them regularly in the features department?
I don't feel like it did, and all the expansion has done is fixed holes. I mean, what are you actually getting in the Cataclysm box that wasn't patched in already? Actually, that's kind of the point; Cata feels more like a huge content patch rather than a full expansion. For a returning player that's gret, but... all Cata did was raise the quality level of the old content up to WotLK levels, and not much further.
....
Hmm, other posts I want to respond to but this one is a bit long already. I'll end here and check back later. I'm glad we can actually have a reasonable discussion on WoW in this thread.
So far, I've only done Heroic Tol'vir and Stonecore, but they went pretty well. Tol'vir we just steamrolled, but Stonecore took some work. Definitely noticing that the biggest thing that will make life easier or more difficult for the healer is how on the ball everyone else is. When everyone was cc'ing, interrupting, and not standing in bad stuff, there was very little in the way of incoming damage. At some points I just found myself twiddling my thumbs, watching my judgement CD. 
