Rokal said:
They're trying to finish off this expansion as quickly as possible, and they're re-using a lot of art assets and such to get it done. 4.1 included ZA/ZG remakes, of which ZA was barely changed. 4.2 had a small raid and a daily quest hub that used the same art assets. 4.3 will be another small raid that takes place in a zone we've already been to (with some changes made to its appearance I'm sure) and 3 dungeons that also take place in pre-existing areas of the game.
It makes the expansion feel kind of cheap, but my hope is that they've poured all that energy into the next expansion and it'll really be substantial. Like cutting out 2 raids from this expansion is maybe okay if they really have an enormous amount of content in Mists. They clearly realize they screwed up with this expansion, so my hunch is that they decided to cut their losses and invest in the next one early. I guess we'll see when Blizzcon rolls around next week.
I seem to recall they stated AQ20 was coming back in some form and then it never got mentioned again. I feel almost certain you will see Karazhan be reused at some point in some form.
I don't have any insight as to why they drastically cut down content beyond the claim they spent all their time on redesigning the old world. Which is fine and all, except that it's just a terrible move because all that content is stuff most people won't be doing much and even if they do, it's too easy to just blow through it without reading the quest text or anything.
What we need in the next expansion is:
1) a new continent/world. The whole thing where they grafted some new zones on top of the existing world really just didn't work. It felt like you were in those zones for a short period of time, and then spent all your time in Stormwind/Orgrimmar, which you could already do in the base game. It just didn't feel like an expansion and there really was no particular connection between any of these zones.
2) The new quest model kind of sucks. The problem with it is that you essentially have to do every quest in a zone in a fairly locked in order. What this ends up meaning is that it ends up feeling a lot like any other single player game, but retaining all the grinding aspects you didn't like.
3) Full-sized raids. I don't care if the first 4 bosses are Flame Leviathan easy, but you can't pull out this shit where you act like hard mode doubles the boss number. It doesn't, and more people seemed pissed off that raids were short than people seemed happy that they didn't have to raid so much, from my experience.
4) New class. Goblins and Worgen added nothing to the game but a new character model since all the classes you played with them were the same ones you already had access to. I get that PvP makes them hard to balance, but Blizzard just should deal with it.
There's a lot of other problems in Cataclysm, but those seemed like the most glaring to me. It just wasn't as good of an expansion as either of the first two packs.
