Next World Of Warcraft Raid Dungeon 281
GrandGranini writes "The New York Times has an interview with World Of Warcraft Lead Game Designer Jeff Kaplan (Tigole), in which he talks about the next raid dungeon after Ahn'Quiraj, the necropolis Naxxramas." From the article: "Naxxramas is going to be the most difficult thing in the game until the expansion pack comes out. It will be the pinnacle, and it's absolutely massive. You'll see this big necropolis floating above Eastern Plaguelands. It's a 40-man raid zone, and it's bigger than the Undercity [one of the main cities in the game]. Things could change, but we're up to something like 18 bosses in there, and they are really cool, too. But it's going to be hard. Really hard. We're hoping to release it in the spring." If you told me two years ago that I'd be reading about an upcoming instance in the sport section of the NYT, I'd have called you a damn dirty liar. May you live in interesting times, indeed.
Re:Elite Quests and Dungeons (Score:3, Interesting)
Raids (Score:2, Interesting)
First, I find them a lot of fun but not for 8 hours. So, I don't join competitive guilds, I join more relaxed guilds, generally with higher numbers (about 140 or so) that has people willing to go on various raids if you'd like to that week
Second, They aren't required.
I spend more of my time on wow playing battlegrounds and leveling alts. I also like the concept of making a lvl 29 WSG character (that being a character that I don't level passed level 29 so he can play in a lvl 20-29 bracket in an instanced pvp arena) and getting the best possible gear for him and seeing how bad I can beat people (since its not going to happen in the 60 bracket.) Then do it again with a different race/class.
To me it's amazing working together in a 40 person group to accomplish a goal. It's cool to see all the rogues running around and hunters and mages unleashing ranged attacks from 41 yards. But, it does get redundant. I equate getting the best gear and (in an MMO world that means being the best generally) to being a dedicated athlete, it takes boring and redundant good ol' fashioned work! The best rewards shouldn't be easy to obtain and if you don't like it you probably should stick to FPS or RTS.
Why is WoW Any Different? (Score:3, Interesting)
At that point I stopped playing EQ and didn't mess with any of their competitors. But everything I'm hearing about WoW is that it seems almost identical to Everquest. It has all the same problems that plagued EQ. So what makes it a big deal? Is is just new and different eye candy but the same design? Same group sizes; same raid setup; instanced zones; epic weapons; everything?
I actually really enjoyed non-instanced dungeons. I'd argue whether the WoW and EQ2 standard is better. Yea, it's better if you want to live in a little sealed, unrealstic world, but the non-instanced dungeons were a lot more fun. Raids would accidently/intentionally train each other; opposing groups would help each other out; you could watch a powerful group break into a secured area and then sneak in and get some good loot... these are very real-world, realistic type scenarios. Instanced dungeons are lame. So exactly why is WoW such a hip game? From what I gather, it's totally derivative of other MMORPGS.
Re:NO MORE HUGE RAIDS! (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm all for MMOs requiring players to work together, but Blizzard's raid dungeons killed the game for me. Competition between raids, PVP, and the lesser high-end dungeons made it nearly impossible to put together a group big enough to handle a raid, and the smaller dungeons just got tedious in no time.
Well, I'm cancelling. (Score:5, Interesting)
I, on the other hand, am in a guild that is essentially a small group of friends. I've never even set foot into Molten Core, since we tend to RP more than anything else. I raid every now and then, but I get terrible migraines if I have to stare at the screen for too long. Between that and my full time job, my character has completely stagnated. I've got top of the line crafted gear, but it'll never get better unless I seriously raid. In essence, I've finished the game... There's just nowhere for it to take me now.
Now we have the announcement that the next big thing is, amazingly, another megaraid dungeon. Whoop-de-doo.
The expansion will probably add a decent amount of casual-friendly content (new areas to explore, 5 and 10-man dungeons that don't have to be completed in daily segments, etc.), so I'll probably be back when that's released. But for now, there isn't a single reason for me to keep shelling out $15 a month.
Re:Well, I'm cancelling. (Score:3, Interesting)
Bad answer (Score:4, Interesting)
A. It would be almost impossible for us to do, and this is a philosophical decision. We need to put a structure in place for players where they feel that if they do more difficult encounters, they'll get rewarded for it.
Sadly, the above quote indicates that difficulty in the mind of WoW designers has nothing to do with player skill so much as the ability to follow a narrowly predetermined script for N hours. The sad truth is that it's really fairly simple to macro instance runs down to putting your character on "follow" mode and taping down the macro hotkey. This simply isn't the case for 5-man content as it requires a wider set of skills and the ability to adapt, since the loss of even one person can be disastrous. Now, even 5-man dungeons in WoW aren't really difficult as they too have a predetermined script to follow, but the more granular party makeup at least makes it less likely that this can be accomplished by some well-written macro code. I've long since given up on WoW's item acquisition fetish bent for Guild Wars, in which the best items in the game can typically be bought in town. In practice, this seems to refocus the game on player skill and cooperation, and "winning" the game simply can't be achieved through perseverance.
Whatever (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that Blizzard's idea of what constitutes 'difficult' is 90% number of people involved and 10% technical difficulty of the content and fight organization. If you need 40 people to kill something, you get epics. If you only need 20, you get blues. That's all there is to their system.