When did stuff that isn't end-game raids become non-content?
Does new area only count if they're high level raids?
In WoW, which i played till around level 65 in TBC i think, you have plenty of areas to explore, theres tons of quests, theres dungeons, theres new skilsl and items all while leveling.
Heck, i found the game a lot more enjoyable before i turned 60 (vanilla wow) and everything just turned into farming for items.
When leveling, especially when you're sortof new to the game, the whole athmospphere and deep game world was awesome. There was improvement everywhere, new items, new levels, new zones, tons of new quests, new skills.
When you reached max level ther ewas a new instance every 3 months or so, which you had to farm repeatedly to get the gear that was worth anything to you, there was no new areas to explore, no new skills.
And the actual instances wasn't very satisfying for me, since the whole athmosphere was gone when you we're farming the same place for teh x'th time, killing the same bosses. There was just the combat, which IMO is pretty lame. It's not really challenging you, only the gear you've got.
A trained monkey could prolly code bots that could do the raids as well as the skilled players, and it's not that weird, as an RPG, the combat is mostly stat based, and about strategy, which can be exciting if it wasn't for teh fact that you shouldn't discover (unles syou we're amongst the first guild in teh world to kill the boss) it, but read it on a web-page and just follow the instructions (which we're often spam your 3-4-5 skills to get the most efficient DPS) which is soemthing a, you guessed it, trained monkey could do.
I've seen my brother play WotLK, and while they've done something more than just ye average tank and spank + a single gimmicky thing with some of the boss battles, it's still not requiering very much from the players side, apart form having farmed good enough gear to win the battle.
So with WoW, i figured out MMORPG's (at least teh ones that work like WoW) doesn't interrest me, cause the end-game lacks most of the cool things about RPG (story, athmosphere, discovery), and has very little but repetitive combat made even less interresting by the fact that:
it's required of you to know the combat beforehand, it's like playign a game follwoign a walkthrough (which i can't stand)
You're one out of (now) 25 people, which means you're role is kinda small, so you're just spamming through your dps cycle, which challenges the player less than playign guitar hero on very easy. As opposed to, say, BG2 where you controll the entire party, you have to figure out the combat, and you're never grinding the same combat (you play it unfully several times if you die ofc)
If i wanted to play a game fully centred aroudn combat, i would go for a genre in which it's a very strong part of the game, fighters, action-games/hack'nslashers(or whatever games like ninaj gaiden is called), FPS, RTS etc. Not a génre where combat is usually not the main focus.
I think the problem is that alot of new games with faster access at the same time dumb down the games (COUGH-Deus Ex 2-COUGH), and so the knee jerk reactions of older gamers is to end up seeing faster access to 'the fun bits' as being a sign of dumbing down.
