The irony? I called Blizzard yesterday and they gave me 5 days to see if the game got any less boring (I have 0 expansions because up to this point I really didn't care) So at 5:00 My timer starts once more
Zero Punctuation: World of Warcraft: Cataclysm
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
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I've been hooked on these games since WarCraft 2: Tides of Darkness. I love the lore behind the games even if it is getting a little convoluted. I've had a lot of fun playing all of Blizzard's games. That being said, I don't think I'll be buying Cataclysm, at least right away. I'm not great at doing anything in moderation, and I don't want to be glued to a computer chair for 3-4 hours a night.
What I'm puzzled by is how he managed to do get around to making this review, wasn't Brisbane evacuated? I swear I heard him mention he lived near there. My sympathies to everyone affected.
That aside, brilliant review as always even if I didn't get half the references since I've never been within a mile of WoW since I left university. My briefest encounters with it was occasionally glancing over my housemate's shoulder out of curiosity. That was ages ago, though. To give you a rough scale; it was around the time of Halo 2's release.
That aside, brilliant review as always even if I didn't get half the references since I've never been within a mile of WoW since I left university. My briefest encounters with it was occasionally glancing over my housemate's shoulder out of curiosity. That was ages ago, though. To give you a rough scale; it was around the time of Halo 2's release.
If they were just a novelty, how the hell did I get one to 58 without getting bored?ForgottenPr0digy said:
Answer: It's not a novelty. Wolf-men are fucking awesome. Next question!
If you play it right you can get a level 60 character in a week, the subscription cost wouldn't be an issue. Seeing as he's already had experience and had the time to play it, that wouldn't surprise me. Plus he said he'd only play it over the christmas period, which is just a week or two.SomethingAmazing said:
Numbers!
glad to see Yahtzee has a similar view of MMOs as I do though I never played wow i have played others and find the whole raiding system a giant black hole of a time sink
glad to see Yahtzee has a similar view of MMOs as I do though I never played wow i have played others and find the whole raiding system a giant black hole of a time sink
And what about paying for a service like cable TV or internet? You're paying to access the WOW servers and interface with Blizzard 's scripts and triggers. There's a reason private servers suck; they don't have any of the npc abilities.Fangobra said:
I play WoW, but I have never raided, barely PvP, and none of my friends do. I'm an RPer, and find that my server's community to be one of the best experiences in my life. (Steamwheedle Cartel EU. His thoughts of it just being numbers v numbers is something I've thought about once or twice, it's hard not to when you play WoW often.
Also, when he described the area (thousand needles) to be filled water, to have a reference to the horrible flooding over there. Does that make me a bad person? IMO, no. Watch Zero Punctuation made me a bad person long ago, thinking that is just bad taste.
And yes, I did create an account to say this, but it's less to do with a love of Warcraft but rather a fear of the Hamlet essay which is creeping around on my shoulder, whispering sweet nothings and wanting to condemn me to a life of.... Normality.
Also, when he described the area (thousand needles) to be filled water, to have a reference to the horrible flooding over there. Does that make me a bad person? IMO, no. Watch Zero Punctuation made me a bad person long ago, thinking that is just bad taste.
And yes, I did create an account to say this, but it's less to do with a love of Warcraft but rather a fear of the Hamlet essay which is creeping around on my shoulder, whispering sweet nothings and wanting to condemn me to a life of.... Normality.
I was going to say that I raid because I actually enjoy it as a challenge, but that would likely;
A) get me called out as a liar (I'm not (in this case))
B) get me insulted because raids have become "lol ez-mode" (at least they were in Lich King)
Also jealous that Yahtzee got the killed by Deathwing Achievement. Yes it's actually something you want to get.
Also I love how people say that they refuse to play WoW because it consumes so much time when these same people have probably spent a net total of at least two years of their life playing other video games. I go on WoW binges, but when I'm on a WoW binge I'm not really playing other games.
A) get me called out as a liar (I'm not (in this case))
B) get me insulted because raids have become "lol ez-mode" (at least they were in Lich King)
Also jealous that Yahtzee got the killed by Deathwing Achievement. Yes it's actually something you want to get.
Also I love how people say that they refuse to play WoW because it consumes so much time when these same people have probably spent a net total of at least two years of their life playing other video games. I go on WoW binges, but when I'm on a WoW binge I'm not really playing other games.
I tried the WoW trial version for some time. I did a bit of sightseeing a bit everywhere with a bunch of races (the landscape and scenario variety was the aspect os WoW I was most curious about). Saw a little bit of the Barrens, Mulgore, that Alliance city whose name I don't recall (Stormwind maybe?), Darnassus and my curiosity was quenched.
Haha, a sound review. The game is still well designed, even moreso now, yet evil. Does that stop me from playing it? Nope. After hitting 85 and maxing my reputations, I log in 3 times a week at set hours to go see the raid content and down it, then go back to playing all the swag I got from the Steam sale. So no matter how soul crushing it is to other people, I can still enjoy myself without feeling like I'm killing my life.
I had a similar view of wow, not of all mmos, tho i fear mmos are trending to see who can copy wow the formula to the letter.
See my first mmo was ahserons call, back in the old school days of you know simple game mechanics, but ac had 100s of dungeons 95% of them all unique, yea at the start many of them were pretty pointless other than to explore them, but each month we got free updates that added new quests, new items, and most importaly told a story. story arc went in about 6 month increments where they would opne up one arc and tell the story over the course of the 6 to 8 months it ran, many arcs had epic quests that unfolded during the course of the arc, people that solved the epic quest arc first would get unique skinned rewards, so there was always fierce server competition to be first. BUt even the epics some of them had server broadcasts announcing to the server that you had beat x epic quest. Other event arcs had dev run characters, including the god of pvp who went around smiting carebears. And if you were good you got to talk to lord asheron form time to time when a dev played them if you muddled your way to the end stage first.
But the continuing story and deep lore and how the lore was woven into ac made me play it for 5 years, in which time i missed many games because i was playing ac, which conversely saved me alot of money since i was not spending 30 to 50 bucks on a game i would play a week or two then put on my shelf never to be glanced at again. and gaming nagazines had me running out spendng 100 bukcs or more a month on the must get games that month.
My experience with wow however was along the lines of get to max level and go ok wtf am i supposed to do now. Coupled with pladins being total asshats since they were the op class at the time and rollong on every item i needed as a warrior to be a halfway decent tank coupled with my complete crap rolls meant i had no gear at all "end game."
SO i quit, spurred on by a friend to play agian some year later or whatever i reluctantly, tried again, this time palandins were nerfed, now rogues were the op god class so all the asshats moved to that class so now i was not rolling against aholes for loot i needed so i was getting loot i needed. SO i got my blue set after a month or two of grinding noob instances, did a pug molten core run with a guild and they were impressed with my skills so they invited me to join them, and since my current guild was of the opinion that only their core players should be raiding and you had to sit and wait, i happily agreed.
SO my guild was a bunch of people that got wow was a game and people play games to have fun, so raid time our vent server was loud and filled with jokes, singing and general merriment while we did mc, bwl, etc, only calmed down when it came to boss time when we all did our jobs and killed boss x y and z got loot etc.
Loved my guild best bunch of people i ever played a game with really. But at some point of doing ony, mc, bwl, aq and the extreme grind of pvp and the ques that ok months of waiting to get in a pvp match. It got to the point the only reason to log into wow was to raid. I was done with the pvp (pre bc pvp where if you did not pvp 24 hours a day 7 days a week never eat never bathe and let your family friends children starve to death, or you could not get past rank 4 or whatever) so it was raiding.
But even with the best guild in the world, filled with a bunch of skrewballs that could raid with the beast raiding guilds in the game, it was like doing dungeon over and over and over and over to get gear to the raid the next dungeon, the whole end game was starting to feel more like a job than a gain oh is it monday, wednesday or friday and saturday raid day i better login and do ony for the 50th time, mc for the 30th time, bwl for the dozenth or so time and aq 40 we were just starting to work on etc but it all felt utterly pointless, and the game felt more like a job i was expected to do rather than a game i played for fun.
ANd if wow had any story ot lore to it they hid it well cause there seemed to be nothing in the quests, game or anything that told any kind of tale or layed out any kind of lore, and yes i am one of those that read the quests when i do them and wow was about as deep as go here do stuff then you got onde i that town go there do stuff. THen you got to end game it was go there kill something for loot. that was it. utterly pointless and hollow.
See my first mmo was ahserons call, back in the old school days of you know simple game mechanics, but ac had 100s of dungeons 95% of them all unique, yea at the start many of them were pretty pointless other than to explore them, but each month we got free updates that added new quests, new items, and most importaly told a story. story arc went in about 6 month increments where they would opne up one arc and tell the story over the course of the 6 to 8 months it ran, many arcs had epic quests that unfolded during the course of the arc, people that solved the epic quest arc first would get unique skinned rewards, so there was always fierce server competition to be first. BUt even the epics some of them had server broadcasts announcing to the server that you had beat x epic quest. Other event arcs had dev run characters, including the god of pvp who went around smiting carebears. And if you were good you got to talk to lord asheron form time to time when a dev played them if you muddled your way to the end stage first.
But the continuing story and deep lore and how the lore was woven into ac made me play it for 5 years, in which time i missed many games because i was playing ac, which conversely saved me alot of money since i was not spending 30 to 50 bucks on a game i would play a week or two then put on my shelf never to be glanced at again. and gaming nagazines had me running out spendng 100 bukcs or more a month on the must get games that month.
My experience with wow however was along the lines of get to max level and go ok wtf am i supposed to do now. Coupled with pladins being total asshats since they were the op class at the time and rollong on every item i needed as a warrior to be a halfway decent tank coupled with my complete crap rolls meant i had no gear at all "end game."
SO i quit, spurred on by a friend to play agian some year later or whatever i reluctantly, tried again, this time palandins were nerfed, now rogues were the op god class so all the asshats moved to that class so now i was not rolling against aholes for loot i needed so i was getting loot i needed. SO i got my blue set after a month or two of grinding noob instances, did a pug molten core run with a guild and they were impressed with my skills so they invited me to join them, and since my current guild was of the opinion that only their core players should be raiding and you had to sit and wait, i happily agreed.
SO my guild was a bunch of people that got wow was a game and people play games to have fun, so raid time our vent server was loud and filled with jokes, singing and general merriment while we did mc, bwl, etc, only calmed down when it came to boss time when we all did our jobs and killed boss x y and z got loot etc.
Loved my guild best bunch of people i ever played a game with really. But at some point of doing ony, mc, bwl, aq and the extreme grind of pvp and the ques that ok months of waiting to get in a pvp match. It got to the point the only reason to log into wow was to raid. I was done with the pvp (pre bc pvp where if you did not pvp 24 hours a day 7 days a week never eat never bathe and let your family friends children starve to death, or you could not get past rank 4 or whatever) so it was raiding.
But even with the best guild in the world, filled with a bunch of skrewballs that could raid with the beast raiding guilds in the game, it was like doing dungeon over and over and over and over to get gear to the raid the next dungeon, the whole end game was starting to feel more like a job than a gain oh is it monday, wednesday or friday and saturday raid day i better login and do ony for the 50th time, mc for the 30th time, bwl for the dozenth or so time and aq 40 we were just starting to work on etc but it all felt utterly pointless, and the game felt more like a job i was expected to do rather than a game i played for fun.
ANd if wow had any story ot lore to it they hid it well cause there seemed to be nothing in the quests, game or anything that told any kind of tale or layed out any kind of lore, and yes i am one of those that read the quests when i do them and wow was about as deep as go here do stuff then you got onde i that town go there do stuff. THen you got to end game it was go there kill something for loot. that was it. utterly pointless and hollow.
Yep...the whole numbers thing does wear on you, but its the social aspect really that glues people in so...luckily for Yahtzee he doesn't have to worry about that part so much. 
But as usual...story is still just a filler, in spite of the quests being less bothersome...and the talents have pretty much gone down such a simplistic route that I feel tired adding one every 2 levels nowadays. So...twas bye bye WoW for me at Cata launch alas.
But as usual...story is still just a filler, in spite of the quests being less bothersome...and the talents have pretty much gone down such a simplistic route that I feel tired adding one every 2 levels nowadays. So...twas bye bye WoW for me at Cata launch alas.
Sadly, I do run into raiders like the one he brought up. "I raid to get better gear so I can progress to raids higher up on the ladder." I raid because it's more fun to me than PvEing and RPing. Do I like advancing? Sure, but I don't let it get in the way of enjoying the game.
I'm tempted to try to defend Worgen, but... I can't think of any decent counter-arguments.
Also, I now really want to hear Deathwing say, "Pardon me, old boy," at some point in-game before I leave for TOR...
I'm tempted to try to defend Worgen, but... I can't think of any decent counter-arguments.
Also, I now really want to hear Deathwing say, "Pardon me, old boy," at some point in-game before I leave for TOR...