World of Warcraft: I changed my mind
You know how I often make a point of emphasizing that my judgements about this or that are contingent? It's so times like this won't be so embarrassing. Short form: I'm enjoying WoW at the moment and looking forward to the upcoming expansion pack. This will be long, so going behind a cut tag.
First up, the pandaren themselves. Are they being played for laughs and fat jokes? While keeping in mind that substantial redrawing can happen late in beta (it did to blood elf males and worgen females, and for the worse both times), these look really good to me. The emotes do include a lot of silliness, but that's true of all races in WoW. Pandaren are noticeably not goofier than any other in this regard.
The sheer vibrancy of the animations is a big selling point to me. Right now the goblins are the most active race, and I just don't like playing them. I love the idea of creatures that active whom I do find very appealing in visual style.
Second, the linearity problem. Bunches of us have griped about this in the past, about how in the current expansion, each new zone has about one (1) path through it, with successive stages being inaccessible until you unlock them by completing the preceding one. It was reassuring to hear the developers acknowledge this frankly as a problem. But what really gave me peace of mind was the news from a big preview event earlier this year that they were adding two new zones to the planned five for levels 85-90. They discovered that they simply had more neat quest and setting ideas than fit comfortably even in the large zones they'd planned, so they spun off some sub-zones into whole new zones of their own. Unless something very unwelcomely surprising happens in beta testing, Mists of Pandaria will be like Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King and unlike Cataclysm (apart from level 80-81) in having actual choices about where to go, and therefore a much higher ceiling for "oh no not this again" tedium when it comes to leveling up multiple characters.
Furthermore, speaking of zones, while I'd thought I'd had my fill for now of riffs on fantasy China and fantasy eastern Asia generally, I love these looks:
And what look (and read like, in text descriptions of changes to overall flow and such) to be fantastic updates for my two absolute favorite dungeons from the original release:
Third, yet another change to the way characters get the abilities for their classes and players choose special talents individually. This was one of the biggest turnoffs for me, as I am very tired of having to relearn a whole mess of mechanics with each expansion pack. Overall, Cataclysm achieve some simplification but very little increased clarity, in the sense that if you don't go look up advice from others about how to assign talent points, you're very likely to completely unintentionally saddle your character with penalties in the areas that are central to that class. (Likewise when it comes to deciding which secondary stats to favor in equipment choices, and some other areas.) Leveling up some fresh characters now has only reminded me of all this.
So...it turns out, from everything I can read about the Mists setup, that when the developers said "we've been listening and want to improve all this", they meant it. Yes, player choice is being cut back, but not character niftiness. When I poke at the talent calculator, I see a ton of stuff that makes me happy in the roster of stock, guaranteed abilities/spells/powers, and the sets of three talents every 15 levels offer genuinely challenging choices since they're pretty much all good.
They're also doing something genuinely intriguing and surprising (to me, anyway) with the glyphs, a supplemental set of bonuses. Right now you get a prime glyph slot, a major glyph one, and a minor glyph one at level 25, a second round at 50, and a third at 50. Prime ones tend to be important to getting the best results for your character's efforts, while the major and minor ones are either very situational or otherwise context-dependent, or nice but not crucial. Well, they're removing the prime category. It looks like most of what each class now gets from prime glyphs will simply be part of their stock roster of abilities as they level up. And they're greatly expanding the ranks of major and minor glyphs with stuff that's varying combos of fun and useful - interesting choices that apparently won't ever leave you at a significant disadvantage if you go for what makes you ooh and ahh or laugh or feel sagacious and efficacious.
Of my big concerns, that leaves the developers' propensity for what I regard as very unwisely frequent tinkering. Will it be a problem? I don't know. It's nice in WoW right now because the last major patch is done - there won't be another until the point where the new Mists mechanics are all incorporated into play, shortly before the expansion itself ships. It's anyone's guess how much the developers regard the current expansion's history as undesirable. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm hopeful about it right now, but there's so much unexpected goodness in Mists development that I feel it wise to leave myself open for happy surprises here too.
I have some other WoW topics I hope to post about soon, but this bundle feels like a post of its own. So there you go.
First up, the pandaren themselves. Are they being played for laughs and fat jokes? While keeping in mind that substantial redrawing can happen late in beta (it did to blood elf males and worgen females, and for the worse both times), these look really good to me. The emotes do include a lot of silliness, but that's true of all races in WoW. Pandaren are noticeably not goofier than any other in this regard.
Click to viewThe sheer vibrancy of the animations is a big selling point to me. Right now the goblins are the most active race, and I just don't like playing them. I love the idea of creatures that active whom I do find very appealing in visual style.
Second, the linearity problem. Bunches of us have griped about this in the past, about how in the current expansion, each new zone has about one (1) path through it, with successive stages being inaccessible until you unlock them by completing the preceding one. It was reassuring to hear the developers acknowledge this frankly as a problem. But what really gave me peace of mind was the news from a big preview event earlier this year that they were adding two new zones to the planned five for levels 85-90. They discovered that they simply had more neat quest and setting ideas than fit comfortably even in the large zones they'd planned, so they spun off some sub-zones into whole new zones of their own. Unless something very unwelcomely surprising happens in beta testing, Mists of Pandaria will be like Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King and unlike Cataclysm (apart from level 80-81) in having actual choices about where to go, and therefore a much higher ceiling for "oh no not this again" tedium when it comes to leveling up multiple characters.
Furthermore, speaking of zones, while I'd thought I'd had my fill for now of riffs on fantasy China and fantasy eastern Asia generally, I love these looks:
And what look (and read like, in text descriptions of changes to overall flow and such) to be fantastic updates for my two absolute favorite dungeons from the original release:
Third, yet another change to the way characters get the abilities for their classes and players choose special talents individually. This was one of the biggest turnoffs for me, as I am very tired of having to relearn a whole mess of mechanics with each expansion pack. Overall, Cataclysm achieve some simplification but very little increased clarity, in the sense that if you don't go look up advice from others about how to assign talent points, you're very likely to completely unintentionally saddle your character with penalties in the areas that are central to that class. (Likewise when it comes to deciding which secondary stats to favor in equipment choices, and some other areas.) Leveling up some fresh characters now has only reminded me of all this.
So...it turns out, from everything I can read about the Mists setup, that when the developers said "we've been listening and want to improve all this", they meant it. Yes, player choice is being cut back, but not character niftiness. When I poke at the talent calculator, I see a ton of stuff that makes me happy in the roster of stock, guaranteed abilities/spells/powers, and the sets of three talents every 15 levels offer genuinely challenging choices since they're pretty much all good.
They're also doing something genuinely intriguing and surprising (to me, anyway) with the glyphs, a supplemental set of bonuses. Right now you get a prime glyph slot, a major glyph one, and a minor glyph one at level 25, a second round at 50, and a third at 50. Prime ones tend to be important to getting the best results for your character's efforts, while the major and minor ones are either very situational or otherwise context-dependent, or nice but not crucial. Well, they're removing the prime category. It looks like most of what each class now gets from prime glyphs will simply be part of their stock roster of abilities as they level up. And they're greatly expanding the ranks of major and minor glyphs with stuff that's varying combos of fun and useful - interesting choices that apparently won't ever leave you at a significant disadvantage if you go for what makes you ooh and ahh or laugh or feel sagacious and efficacious.
Of my big concerns, that leaves the developers' propensity for what I regard as very unwisely frequent tinkering. Will it be a problem? I don't know. It's nice in WoW right now because the last major patch is done - there won't be another until the point where the new Mists mechanics are all incorporated into play, shortly before the expansion itself ships. It's anyone's guess how much the developers regard the current expansion's history as undesirable. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm hopeful about it right now, but there's so much unexpected goodness in Mists development that I feel it wise to leave myself open for happy surprises here too.
I have some other WoW topics I hope to post about soon, but this bundle feels like a post of its own. So there you go.