Since I began playing Warcraft back in Vanilla WoW, this is the first expansion that I haven’t ordered as soon as it became available, waited for eagerly, preparing by getting banks and final achievements and so on done and been waiting to hit the servers as soon as they opened. This makes me feel a bit melancholy…I’ve played this game for so many years and always been in and out of love with it. I feel nostalgic and sad.
At this point, loving Guild Wars 2 and with several other games that I could happily go back to (The Secret World, Rift) it just isn’t economically feasible. I probably will buy it and play at some point, just not immediately. I’ll play through it to the new level cap and then get bored and quit as always. Warcraft is a raiding game, in the end. Quests and content are wonderful, and I thoroughly enjoy levelling through new content. I don’t raid anymore, however, so dungeons are out, and with no friends playing I won’t run small instances. “GoGoGo” epeen jerks on their thousandth run of an instance aren’t kind to players new to the encounter, and it is rarely pleasant.
I also have bad memories of the MoP beta, and the poor quest design – memorialised in the screenshot below. Making something that one person at a time has to click, and making that thing a roadblock to further advancement, was a shockingly naive design decision to make…and it wasn’t the only one.
And yet…and yet it still makes me melancholy, as though I have moved on from a relationship with someone that I once loved.
“Wow is a raiding game.”
No truer words were ever spoken. It was my realization that I found raiding tedious that ended my playing of the game. People keep asking me why none of the expansions have tempted me back. I think it’s because I know that it all eventually winds up in the same place: more raiding.
I have a friend who hates MMO’s but apparently likes Secret World. That makes me curious. I’d sort of decided I didn’t want to do another MMO ever again, but that’s the only one that tempts me.
Secret World is amazing. You have to give it a chance to shine, but after that the storytelling really kicks in. Such great characters and dialogue. I will say that Secret World is better with other people to play with, as some areas are quite punishing.
Such a shame that Funcom bailed on the game, rather than allowing it to be the really good niche game that it was meant to be. It’s not WoW, it is not for everyone…but unfortunately that is what they were hoping for.