Massively Multiplayer Rambling
Not in so many words, but I have essentially been asked: "Why aren't my friends more excited about Warlords of Draenor? At least you're into it, right?"
Well... somewhat. I'm interested enough to watch. At this stage, I can't say for certain that I'm interested enough to play. I mean, the release is probably still somewhere around 11 months away, and a lot can change in a year. Features can be added/dropped. Real life situations can radically change. Also, momentum can be a big thing in an MMO - and a year of not playing is momentum in the direction of continuing to not play.
Personally, based on what I've seen at this early stage, I suspect I will buy the expansion and give it a month or two. Any play beyond that is probably going to depend on the state of the guild. If I log in, see people I know, and have the option to chat and do stuff with them regularly, then I may resubscribe on a regular basis.
That said, it's possible that I'll feel more disillusioned as we get nearer the release and my interest level will drop below the threshold required to buy in. I'm already a little leery about the story. Theoretically, we're defending our Azeroth against an invasion by the Iron Horde of the alternate-past Draenor. But given all the new zones are in Draenor, all indications are the gameplay will be there (save probably a pre-release invasion event in Azeroth). And if the expansion's story and play takes place in Draenor, we're going to be interacting with groups that are not really what I want to see developed:
1) Alternate-past orcs: Spiffy for lore buffs, and a little interesting, but not as enthralling to me given I've been an Alliance player.
2) Alternate-past draenei: Eh... Got a lot of draenei in BC, and I can still only name one lore figure.
3) Alternate-past BC lesser races: Might be some interesting individual stories, but really not compelling overall.
4) Away teams: Representatives of the Alliance (or Horde) who have gone through the portal to Draenor.
Frankly, none of this is what I want to see at the moment.
Cataclysm resparked the faction war. The Alliance lost a lot of territory (admittedly, partly for game balance reason) in ugly ways. Beyond the territory, though, the story seemed to revolve more and more around Horde interests. Worgen had some potential, but faded into the woodwork after their starter zone plot. Meanwhile, Sylvanas was pushed toward villainhood (and has since languished in the background). The first major content patch was big on trolls. They pitched an "enemy of my enemy" sort of approach to Alliance players, but I played through that wincing and thinking "well, okay, I'll take the moral high road." Then Thrall came to the fore, and while Blizzard tried hard to make him a more "neutral" character, he really wasn't, having been the Horde's leader for so very long. So we walked in his shadow.
Then Mists came. The war was fought on foreign soil to both sides, and the story started out fairly neutral, with both sides dealing with natives. As the story developed, though, Garrosh led the Horde on the offensive, leaving the Alliance picking up pieces. While some Horde players would probably argue that they didn't want to fight within their faction, I can only really speak to my own experience - it felt like the Alliance was being totally reactionary, helping its enemies, picking up the pieces... and at the end of the expansion, just walking away. That actually frustrated the heck out of me as other than watching Jaina and Varian flip-flop and hints of some dwarven development, nothing seemed to happen for the Alliance.
So Warlords looks to me like a lot of Horde-side fan service, and that just isn't very compelling to me. I know you can't please everyone with these things, but playing a human paladin, I've felt like the main stories haven't been particularly captivating since Wrath of the Lich King. I want to see more fallout and development, and instead we get a new world to explore. I guess that's really par for the course, but... it doesn't do much to draw me in.
As for other people... well, I've been told about half a dozen guildmates are likely to at least try the expansion. But the same problems remain that we've had for years - without some new influx, the slow loss adds up. I've been wrong with such assessments before, but I have trouble seeing the guild mustering a raid-worthy group within a few months of release.
So, Warlords of Draenor? It's mostly a big "wait and see" for me.
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GW2 has me thinking a lot about two main points...
First, there's the finding of a niche. I really haven't felt comfortable in a spot since the busier days of WoW, but I think about it a lot with GW2. I can sink somewhere around 10 hours a week into the game and... it doesn't matter. That isn't enough to be even a known, much less an important, figure in the larger guild. And the smaller guild isn't active enough to run dungeons reliably, much less do anything else. In the hayday of WoW, that was enough to be raid-ready and in the top 3 or so as far as gearing in the guild. GW2 doesn't have that same vertical measure, but there's also no sense of being "good enough" or even "valuable" really.
The other big thing I thing about is the zerg mentality in the game. GW2 was almost revolutionary (at least, I hadn't seen it before in an MMO) with making open world encounters freely taggable and rewarding to everyone. That has an awesome upside of making it good to see other players around, rather than worrying about fighting over resources. It rapidly developed a drawback, however, as people quickly figured the most efficient way to tackle these encounters is with a large group of people. Now, we have an almost-constant "train" running between champion encounters in Queensdale, overwhelming these targets with sheer numbers and hopping from one to the next. The encounters scale up, but not so much that they don't become easy. It's efficient, but it's mind-numbingly boring. While some edits have been made to the "dragon" encounters to tone this down, they still suffer from the same. Tequatl epitomized this by being only really doable with a zone-maxed group.
In the end, is this better than competing over resources? Maybe. But it's opened a whole different can of worms, offering dull mob-based gameplay instead. I wonder if anyone at Arenanet foresaw that.
Addendum: Okay, a third thought sparked by a blog post I glanced at. It's... interesting... how GW2 started out pitching "doing away with traditional quests" in favor of their heart-system and dynamic events. Their living story updates since release, however, have introduced few, if any, hearts. Instead, we get quests-as-achievements, where "kill X mobs" and "do this Y times" are given as goals by the system instead of an NPC questgiver. This does strike me as a step backwards, though I guess you can't keep introducing zone-based areas of helping our NPCs when you're using existing zones all the time. There was a time I largely ignored achievements, but now that's basically where the gameplay rewards are in GW2.
Well... somewhat. I'm interested enough to watch. At this stage, I can't say for certain that I'm interested enough to play. I mean, the release is probably still somewhere around 11 months away, and a lot can change in a year. Features can be added/dropped. Real life situations can radically change. Also, momentum can be a big thing in an MMO - and a year of not playing is momentum in the direction of continuing to not play.
Personally, based on what I've seen at this early stage, I suspect I will buy the expansion and give it a month or two. Any play beyond that is probably going to depend on the state of the guild. If I log in, see people I know, and have the option to chat and do stuff with them regularly, then I may resubscribe on a regular basis.
That said, it's possible that I'll feel more disillusioned as we get nearer the release and my interest level will drop below the threshold required to buy in. I'm already a little leery about the story. Theoretically, we're defending our Azeroth against an invasion by the Iron Horde of the alternate-past Draenor. But given all the new zones are in Draenor, all indications are the gameplay will be there (save probably a pre-release invasion event in Azeroth). And if the expansion's story and play takes place in Draenor, we're going to be interacting with groups that are not really what I want to see developed:
1) Alternate-past orcs: Spiffy for lore buffs, and a little interesting, but not as enthralling to me given I've been an Alliance player.
2) Alternate-past draenei: Eh... Got a lot of draenei in BC, and I can still only name one lore figure.
3) Alternate-past BC lesser races: Might be some interesting individual stories, but really not compelling overall.
4) Away teams: Representatives of the Alliance (or Horde) who have gone through the portal to Draenor.
Frankly, none of this is what I want to see at the moment.
Cataclysm resparked the faction war. The Alliance lost a lot of territory (admittedly, partly for game balance reason) in ugly ways. Beyond the territory, though, the story seemed to revolve more and more around Horde interests. Worgen had some potential, but faded into the woodwork after their starter zone plot. Meanwhile, Sylvanas was pushed toward villainhood (and has since languished in the background). The first major content patch was big on trolls. They pitched an "enemy of my enemy" sort of approach to Alliance players, but I played through that wincing and thinking "well, okay, I'll take the moral high road." Then Thrall came to the fore, and while Blizzard tried hard to make him a more "neutral" character, he really wasn't, having been the Horde's leader for so very long. So we walked in his shadow.
Then Mists came. The war was fought on foreign soil to both sides, and the story started out fairly neutral, with both sides dealing with natives. As the story developed, though, Garrosh led the Horde on the offensive, leaving the Alliance picking up pieces. While some Horde players would probably argue that they didn't want to fight within their faction, I can only really speak to my own experience - it felt like the Alliance was being totally reactionary, helping its enemies, picking up the pieces... and at the end of the expansion, just walking away. That actually frustrated the heck out of me as other than watching Jaina and Varian flip-flop and hints of some dwarven development, nothing seemed to happen for the Alliance.
So Warlords looks to me like a lot of Horde-side fan service, and that just isn't very compelling to me. I know you can't please everyone with these things, but playing a human paladin, I've felt like the main stories haven't been particularly captivating since Wrath of the Lich King. I want to see more fallout and development, and instead we get a new world to explore. I guess that's really par for the course, but... it doesn't do much to draw me in.
As for other people... well, I've been told about half a dozen guildmates are likely to at least try the expansion. But the same problems remain that we've had for years - without some new influx, the slow loss adds up. I've been wrong with such assessments before, but I have trouble seeing the guild mustering a raid-worthy group within a few months of release.
So, Warlords of Draenor? It's mostly a big "wait and see" for me.
-
GW2 has me thinking a lot about two main points...
First, there's the finding of a niche. I really haven't felt comfortable in a spot since the busier days of WoW, but I think about it a lot with GW2. I can sink somewhere around 10 hours a week into the game and... it doesn't matter. That isn't enough to be even a known, much less an important, figure in the larger guild. And the smaller guild isn't active enough to run dungeons reliably, much less do anything else. In the hayday of WoW, that was enough to be raid-ready and in the top 3 or so as far as gearing in the guild. GW2 doesn't have that same vertical measure, but there's also no sense of being "good enough" or even "valuable" really.
The other big thing I thing about is the zerg mentality in the game. GW2 was almost revolutionary (at least, I hadn't seen it before in an MMO) with making open world encounters freely taggable and rewarding to everyone. That has an awesome upside of making it good to see other players around, rather than worrying about fighting over resources. It rapidly developed a drawback, however, as people quickly figured the most efficient way to tackle these encounters is with a large group of people. Now, we have an almost-constant "train" running between champion encounters in Queensdale, overwhelming these targets with sheer numbers and hopping from one to the next. The encounters scale up, but not so much that they don't become easy. It's efficient, but it's mind-numbingly boring. While some edits have been made to the "dragon" encounters to tone this down, they still suffer from the same. Tequatl epitomized this by being only really doable with a zone-maxed group.
In the end, is this better than competing over resources? Maybe. But it's opened a whole different can of worms, offering dull mob-based gameplay instead. I wonder if anyone at Arenanet foresaw that.
Addendum: Okay, a third thought sparked by a blog post I glanced at. It's... interesting... how GW2 started out pitching "doing away with traditional quests" in favor of their heart-system and dynamic events. Their living story updates since release, however, have introduced few, if any, hearts. Instead, we get quests-as-achievements, where "kill X mobs" and "do this Y times" are given as goals by the system instead of an NPC questgiver. This does strike me as a step backwards, though I guess you can't keep introducing zone-based areas of helping our NPCs when you're using existing zones all the time. There was a time I largely ignored achievements, but now that's basically where the gameplay rewards are in GW2.
WoD is putting a spotlight on the glaring issue with Blizzard's story team. They don't have a plot outside of past games. Wrath wrapped up WC3's hook with Arthas as Lich King, Cataclysm brought back Deathwing who wasn't even a figure except in the novels, really. (Might've had a WC2 nod) Mists of Pandaria, while a nice asian influence, was still spawned off the hero character of Chen Stormstout from WC3. And just what has been the past plot of the games? Orcs vs. Humans. Orcs (and demons) had always been the force of action and change and humans, with elves and dwarves, had been picking up the pieces. They want to keep the game "War"craft, as they are fond of saying, which means forcing wedges between Horde and Alliance relations. The problem has been giving the players expansions focused around a solitary bad guy that the two factions need to team up to take down. Illidan and Kil'Jaden, Arthas, Deathwing. They try to create political conflicts, but don't follow up on it, instead just giving us a big bad to fight. I feel an issue is that the Alliance isn't active because the leadership honestly hasn't been. Varian should have been hounding for Sylvanis' head along with Garrosh's in Cataclysm. Moira should have been, visibly, seen taking efforts to consolidate the Dark Irons into dwarven kind. Sure we got Operation: Gnomergan, but outside of that, what do the gnomes do, as a political force? Tyrande, probably one of the largest Alli lore characters, sits on her butt in the Temple to Elune. Orcs cutting down Ashenvale's forests? Eh, we make a PvP themed battleground about it, but like there's any real quests about it. (Though with Cata they put a few in to sabotage the Horde exploitation of the forest at least) I dunno. I'm not sure where the story has to go for the future if the focus is having Horde vs. Alliance as plot if they don't have the Alli even do anything as a strike against the Horde. The Alli bid for peace in the face of greater adversity, and forgive, perhaps too easily, what was done to them. (Except Jaina who is full-blown warmonger now)
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, I'm not even entirely sure what I want to see out of the story in specifics, just that recent expansions haven't really been providing it. I think part of it might be a matter of payoff. - Wrath built things up and went right where it said it was going from the outset - the defeat of the Lich King. - In Cataclysm, beating Deathwing was good, but it was less satisfying. I think part of that may have been because focus seemed more scattered. The increased faction war didn't direct things toward him at all. Also, it felt more and more like Thrall's quest to me - he stole the limelight more than Tirion did. - In Mists, things faltered more as far as I'm concerned. Facing Garrosh feels a little like coming full circle back to the invasion conflict, which is okay, but the win is totally hollow. Maybe I'm biased for not having seen it personally, but seeing him beaten only to be handed over to the Horde and watch the Alliance walk away was like a kick in the gut. As an Alliance player, it felt like nothing was really accomplished. I'm not sure that would have been real satisfying even to Horde players unless maybe they're big personal fans of Vol'jin. Hearing he gets away is even worse. Will Warlords be better on that point? Can it be better? I can't render any final judgement when it's just been announced, but I have reason to be skeptical. Garrosh "Isn't the end boss," so while his story might get closed along the way, that won't be the climax. And the whole "it's not exactly time travel" alternate timeline aspect... well, it makes me skeptical about possible narrative payoff. It also causes other issues, but I'll get back to that in a minute. No matter who shapes up to be the big opponent(s), and no matter how personal and sound a victory at the end might be, players will be defeating representatives of an alternate timeline. How satisfying can that really be when the very premise means it could happen again? And again. And again... It makes me very skeptical. Online surveys are always questionable because you're hitting such a limited base, but WoW Insider put up one today that is (as I look now) showing over 50% of respondents saying Wrath was their favorite expansion. Coincidence? - Re: The Timeways Introducing this "alternate" Draenor also seems like a change to the way time works in the Warcraft universe. That's hardly the first thing Blizzard has retconned (the Diablo setting probably having gotten the worst of this treatment), but... ugh. The Bronze Dragonflight, keepers of time, have been telling us for years that tampering needs to be prevented in order to maintain the timeline leading to the present. That isn't to say there weren't some hole in this logic, but it's what we were given: "the Infinite Dragonflight has gone back to interfere in our past, go fix it!" Suddenly, Garrosh goes back (with aid of a Bronze dragon, if I understand correctly), changes things, and gets an alternate timeline from which he makes some sort of new/hijacked portal to invade present Azeroth. That means (or at least strongly implies) that all those tweaks the Infinite Dragonflight wanted to make would have spawned alternate timelines/worlds as well, rather than changing the WoW-prime (for lack of a better term) one. So... why did we care? Maybe we should have allowed the creation of a world in which someone talked to the inhabitants of Stratholme rather than wiping them out? I don't really like that development, and it drops a whole big "Why should we care?" over the Caverns of Time.
ReplyDeleteWrath definitely seems to be the magnum opus in terms of story, and it's no coincidence it's when our guild really gelled from a bunch of friends to "Hey! We can raid!" As for timey wimey wibbly wobbly stuff, it is potentially possible what the Infinite was doing -was- going into the timeline of Azeroth Prime to mess with things instead of this pseudo-time skip that Garrosh pulls off. The dragonflight no longer has the power over timeways any more, so this alternate past is the closest thing any of them can do now.
ReplyDeleteYeah, they don't. Except... apparently they still do. Maaaaybe it's lessened. Maybe it's just Nozdormu who lost his powers. Whatever the case, post-Cataclysm, there's still a Timewalkers faction that specializes in watching and protecting the timeways somehow. And we've got Kairozdormu from the Timeless isle who gets the players' help in making an artifact that lets him look through timeways to see certain possible futures. And them he sends Garrosh to a/the past from what we understand currently...
ReplyDelete