Mists of What Now?

Opinion from Matt - Thursday, 27 October 2011 @ 2:06am

I haven't written or spoken much about the next expansion for World of Warcraft. And I should. I'm fairly well known as a (recovering) player of the game, and an opinion should be forthcoming.

So here it is:

WTF?

Ok, there's a lot to go through in this expansion, but first of all I want to establish what I'm not. I'm not one of those people who is so obsessed with stats and high end play that I freak out when a change is made. I'm not a lore nazi who gets angry when a detail is retconned or inaccurate, and claims the sky is falling. And I'm not one of those losers who every time a change is made to the game he seems to have some personal ownership states that it's all over and the game is done.

So let's start with the window dressing. There's a lot of it, and some of it is the usual. Revision of the talent system, etc. This kind of stuff gets changed and simplified pretty often. We've had it in the past, paring down the talent trees and making us earn talents at specific points in the game, etc. Honestly I don't know if the changes will achieve what has been desired, but I'd give it a go. Why not?

There's a new class - the Monk. It's nice to see a new class added. Might mix things up. I have to say one thing I've always really liked the idea of (in theory) is a melee healer. I know it's a stupid idea and probably unworkable, but fundamentally all heal classes work roughly the same at the moment, and the thought of some sort of "healing rogue" with a "health dagger" is rather appealing. Honestly I don't think that's what the Monk's healing works like, but I like to speculate wildly. It will be interesting to see what the presence of another hybrid does. I hope it's not such an extreme hybrid like the Pally experience has been. Top DPS, top healer, top tank... A healer/dps/offtank, for example, would be useful. Or one that could play in multiple roles simultaneously, like shamans are often able to...

Still, what else is there? Dungeon Challenge modes are an interesting idea. Basically timed dungeon runs for extra... actually I don't know what. "Rewards". Maybe loot, maybe rep or something like that. But having to do things timed will keep the challenge in dungeon groups for some time, before they're trivialised by overgeared no-lifers.

Now you start to lose me: Pet Battles. Pet battles? Really? Was the ingredient that was really missing from the World of Warcraft gameplay experience really Pokemon? Also... As so few classes actually HAVE a pet, this seems like a bizarre attempt at pandering to Hunters.

Speaking of pandering...

See what I did there?

Pandas. Pandering.

Wait, pandas? Pandaria. Pandaran. Honestly I don't get it. This is where they have lost me completely. I don't give a flying fuck about the Warcraft universe's lore, really I don't. When an expansion is announced I have to look up shit on wowwiki so I know what the hell a Deathwing is, or why I should care about the Lich King. Seriously. I care that little. But there does seem to be some interesting areas to investigate, some content to explore. Considering all but Burning Crusade has occurred on Azeroth, generally in an area that appears rather startlingly on the map, perhaps it's time to go offworld again? Alternatively there's lore that matters. References have been scattered about of something happening in The Emerald Dream, maybe we should be looking into that? What about the naaru? They doing anything fun?

But no. Apparently we have to piss about Kung Fu Panda.

I'm not going to declare the end of the world of warcraft here or anything, but are we all aware of the origin of the Pandaren? They were originally conceived as a suggested playable race and given their back-story in a Warcraft III update back in 2005. April 2005. April 1st, 2005. April Fools Day, 2005.

They were a joke.

When 2005's April Fools Day joke is 2012's expansion, maybe the wheels have fallen off a little. Or at the very least they're wobbling. What made Pandaren a joke back then makes it an awkward fit now - it's absurd, it's silly. It's still absurd and silly. That hasn't changed because some people said "LOL! THAT WOULD BE FUNZ!"

It's worth pointing out that the Pandaren are an existing race in the Warcraft universe. They've been around. Only here and there, and they've been in the background. But at least they're a new race. I was pretty critical of Cataclysm for making previously NPC races into playable characters, because I felt it was a cop-out. Lich King brought NO new races, just dead versions of whatever was already there, and that means we haven't had a new race implemented since Burning Crusade.

I can't help feeling that Mists of Pandaria continues a theme in World of Warcraft expansion, where shortcuts are taken in lore and assets. If an existing race exists, that will do, makem playable. Why make a new bad guy when you can just (literally) dig an old one up? Choices that are hard, though, like new classes, seem to be done with great distaste. We had a hero class added in the Death Knight, but none since? Not a demon hunter, or some sort of healer, or... something?

I'm going to say up front that I'll probably play Mists of Pandaria. I'll probably do what I did with Cata - level to cap, do a few dungeons, then stop because I have too much shit to do.

But this expansion has left a question in my mind.

Have they gone from extending and growing the story to nothing more than an ever tightening circlejerk? Wow's subscriber numbers have been quite widely publicised as going down, rather than up. Could it be because World of Warcraft's expansions in fact stopped expanding? Has that universe started collapsing in on itself?

Harold Camping, noted Rapture evangelist claimed October 21st would be the end of the world. Maybe it was actually the World of Warcraft?