More Lich King Details, Apologies For Burning Crusade? 165
1up is hosting content from the most recent edition of Games For Windows magazine. The front page of that august publication features the grimacing face of Arthas, poster boy for the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion to World of Warcraft. The article inside has a bunch of new details on the game update, as well as a lengthy discussion with Blizzard's Chris Metzen on the first WoW expansion, Burning Crusade. Some of Metzen's comments along those lines are a bit surprising: "'It had a lot of high-concept ideas, high-concept environments,' he says, calling to mind the psychedelic mushrooms of Zangarmarsh, the tragic majesty of Tempest Keep, 'but other than some really nice moments, there was nothing really personal about it.'"
august? (Score:5, Funny)
File this under "old news." We're already in October, Zonk. Sheesh... : p
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-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
2. a sharply ironical taunt; sneering or cutting remark: a review full of sarcasms.
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-month
1. referring to the month when people should stop wearing white in summer
2. referring to the month when people should stop quoting thing
3. a time when the Lich King will take your soul for pubbing silly asides that have nothing to do with WoW
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So put your soul into a phylactery and the phylactery into a bank vault of a Swiss bank. As a nice side effect you'll lose weight, your voice will get lower and sexier, and your looks will improve, increasing your sex appeal - at least if you're a typical Slashdotter.
There's not that much different between your parent's basement and a crypt, you know.
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High concept (Score:3)
interestingly enough, I felt EXACTLY the same (Score:2)
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I thought Hellfire had a much more interesting mix of quests, as did Netherstorm, and the quests in Blade's Edge and Shadowmoon required more cooperation and less boring grinding.
Not an apology (Score:4, Interesting)
They want a more personal experience in Lich King, in the sense that Arthas will be more in your face. Think Pathaelon the Calculator, who you keep running into as you level in BC. They want Arthas to be more visible and more interesting, rather then off in the background most of the time.
I view it as a good thing. They learned a lot from BC, and that should make for a better expansion this time.
Re:Not an apology (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure some people will eat it up. I'm just not one of them.
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I do similar, except I read the story bits. The WoW content people write pretty good quest stories, so I like to read them and get an impression of what's going on in-character.
Re:Not an apology (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not an apology (Score:4, Insightful)
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If people ran around more, summertime would be more aesthetically pleasing. But instead they drive around in cars, polluting the environment and collecting fat. Not that I should speak, sitting down writing this message instead of being at the gym, but still...
Do your civi
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oh, right, Homeland security.
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Fascinating. With a few rare exceptions, I find that it's usually faster to just read the damn quest descriptions (which generally tell you exactly where to go) than to head off to thottbot for coordinates.
Yes, really.
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Really? I can't say that's the case for me at all.
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Then why do you even play the game?
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That's an excellent point - every time I was doing a quest in which Pathaelon popped up and turned up to be the antagonist behind the scenes, I'd think "Not YOU again! You bloody troublemaker! Some day I am going to hunt you down in the Mechanar and farm you silly".
Some kind of incidental music that goes "Dun dun DUUUUUN!" every time Arthas pops up twiddling his moustache would be good too. "Where is the rent? I must have the
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"We're still playing far too much of The Burning Crusade -- but, for some reason, Blizzard vice president of creative development Chris Metzen seems to be apologizing for it."
hence the word apology. If you'd read the first sentence, you'd probably have read just as much as the submitter, since that's the only place where there's an apology, but you'd have at least read some of it.
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The Expansion they wish they made first (Score:3, Insightful)
My main bone of contention though is that the 1-70 grind is not getting much attention. Do they feel that all of that is throw-away? I understand adding new content to the end game to keep fanatics engaged. My guild is just finishing TK and getting ready for Black Temple so the timing is perfect to keep them all interested in future content. But what about adding new players, and expanding offerings for players that are new?
Re:The Expansion they wish they made first (Score:4, Informative)
Level 20-60 Quest EXP has been increased, while EXP to Level has been decreased
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So essentially, they're making changes so that the "middle" level grind is shorter.
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I agree. Even by going all the given quests, getting to 10 is easy, and 20 is harder only if you get bored easily or have to pee. Nothing particularly interesting gameplay-wise happens between 20-60, sadly. Sure you "get stuff" and improve abilities, but most of the time it's quest-quest-grindgrind-run-from-bored-70's-that-need-to-get-their-stupid-asses-in-a-raiding-guild-instead-of-ganking-in-stv-quest-quest
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If they're doing something to speed up the levelling doldrums t
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I'm going to have a lot of fun burning my alts through the levels once the change comes out.
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DAoC, in its later revisions, introduced the ability for people who had max-level characters to start another character at an advanced level, in order to avoid the low-mid-level grinding (which was pretty bad in that game at times). This was done partially for the reason you mention, and partially to increase the diversity of character types for PvP (which was much better in DAoC than WoW, if you ask me). Since some character classes are also, obviously, harder/more tedious to level, and since DAoC has so
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I say, what does it matter, when people buy characters or buy leveling services, have a high-level alt, and STILL don't know how to play.
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I say, what does it matter, when people buy characters or buy leveling services, have a high-level alt, and STILL don't know how to play.
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Correct. The players that want to learn their characters will, but the PvE content previous to end-game raiding doesn't exactly concentrate on preparing people to do group work (not to mention some of the pet classes can do a *lot* of the group quests while solo).
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I'd rather fear rushing people through the levels 20-60, that's where you learn to play in a group. Until 20, you're mostly on your own anyway, and play style is vastly different solo vs. team.
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At least for horde, if you have a high level toon to get gold and gear, you can get an alt from 1-20 in a couple of weekends, and still have time for real life. If you don't care about real life, you can do it in a single weekend -- its boring as hell, but at least it moves quickly.
If it were up to me, you'd always be able to create alternate characters at the same level as your highest charac
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I think they should actually re-tune those zones and quest lines to be post 60 content so that it's used. Put some rare spawns in there, give us a reason to go to WPL, Winterspring, and EPL. (I know that Nax is turning into the first lvl 80 instance)
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What would you consider an addition that would make it more meaningful?
Not that I'm disagreeing with you (I might be, dunno), but I'm curious as to what would make 20-60 meaningful in your eyes.
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I haven't played WoW since 3 months after the release, I can't speak to the game as it is today (I hit 60 and got bored. Sold my accout and came back to EQ). Actually right now I'm playing a
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There's some value to your ideas, but I think you're overlooking the fact that WoW has a huge allowance for the casual player. So making the system increasingly complex will hurt their revenue stream.
I'm not convinced that having more and more options is better, anyway. Inevitably the "choices" get narrowed down to a set of fairly-well-known templates that are optimal for a given task, and the other specs get left along the road.
Also, I don't really think that experience loss makes leveling more meaning
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It wouldn't have to be overly complex. You start out as a man, woman or orc. You have four bubbles on your stat sheet which have to total to 100%: one is experiance, one is healing, one is spell damage, the other melee damage, the fifth is personal enhancement. You can change at any time, from kill to kill, etc. Pick what you want to do.
Of course WoW would never go it. You'd quickly disenchant your least-common-denominator player, o
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But I don't think its impossible for a new studio to think small. See, profit = net - costs of operating. So if you can minimize your operating cost, you can profit with a much smaller number of users, or more users at a lower subscription rate. So instead of shooting straight for millions of users, shoot for a more moderate level, reduce costs accordingly and you can survive with a smaller player base.
People (here, notably) keep preaching gamepl
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Honestly, no xp loss for death is one of the very reasons that wow is so much more popular than eq. People don't like having their time wasted. Especially if it's not their fault. People like being able to take risks without it destroying hours of xp gain.
This game has always, and will always begin at level cap. It's the way it's designed. Slowing people up by making t
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Everquest. Been doing it since 1999. Was king of the hill at the time and paved the way for bigger and better. It is still holding strong, releasing its 14th expansion in November.
Honestly, no xp loss for death is one of the very reasons that wow is so much more popular than eq.
I'm not sure. I keep hearing my friends bitch about how much you have to pay to repa
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Up to lv 20, you learn how to play the class. You get a new skill every now and then, then you get to play around with it and find an application. Up to lv 20, you also get to see all the "quest flavors" (i.e. bring A to B, kill X of Y (and its variant, kill X for Y and bring me Z of Y), find A and bring him back here...). In other words, you have seen everything when you're 20.
And that could be changed, for example. After lv 20, it is actually a grindfest up to endgame. Th
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All I know is I've got lots of level 4 to 29 characters and somehow the grind makes me not push hard to make them higher level.
It would help if they more clearly marked group quests.
For example, if I have to go into a physically constrained mine, in oh say, the Barrens, to get an elite level 25 surrounded by 10 level 20-24 warriors bound to aggro me, that's a Group Quest - not
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I do believe that at least the Cosmos addon will mark quests with a "g" as known group quests.
You mean like that (Group) marker? (Score:2)
Granted, they haven't gotten around to doing every single Elite-Mob-Bearing quest yet but it's there.
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Seriously, most of us waste a lot of time before we clue in it's a Group quest they didn't mark as "Group".
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But they aren't labelled as such. It's fine for my hunter or rogue to do them.
And pulling inside caves doesn't work well for warriors.
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Really, you want to keep the people playing so you need to please the end game people. They are the ones that have played the longest and invested the most. The early game content (while dated) is still quite go
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Was just talking about this with someone else. The original WoW noob zones could really use some fine tuning, as there's some situations where you run out of quests for your level and have to old-fashioned grind to get back up to speed. Plus the chaining of quests isn't all that well developed.
The Blood Elf and Draenei 1-20 quest chains, though, are extremely well developed not only with regards to keeping you stocked with appropriately leveled quests (and making those quests seem interesting and immersi
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Re:The Expansion they wish they made first (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, I don't get the impression a lot of people are running the old 60 uber-epic quests anymore. Not much point when you're just going to be replacing those Tier 1 and 2 epics with greens as soon as you get to the outland. If that's true, they could just make those dungeons challenging for 70 (or 80) level characters in groups of 5-10 and add some incentives to go back in there. There's no point in letting those dungeons go to waste.
It'd also be nice if they could add incentives to play classes that are needed. It's generally priests and tank guys but I bet they could come up with a dynamic way to encourage class creation of any class that's out of balance at any given time. Possibly give them better starting gear or a boost to the professions they choose or something along those lines. If the current state of affairs is going to continue for healers and tanks, lowering the respec cost caps for those professions would definitely be a nice gesture (If a priest is going to HAVE to respec for solo questing it should either cost a lot less or he should get some free ones every week.)
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When the concept was announced, this is what I thought "heroic mode" dung
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So yeah, now it is more of a gold sink, although the cost of changing still makes people think about their talent choices more thoroughly, I think. It's just not as restrictive.
Ideally, player
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And with some I was quite glad they did. There are some quests where you have to wonder how to do them with a few classes. When a mage or priest faces a twisted tunnel, he knows he's not
Allegedly (Score:2)
Personally, I think that's all they need. There's plenty to do for lower level characters, the only problem is that for someone who's new to the game the higher levels, and thus the ability to play with their friends, can seem very far away. So allegedly they are going to quicken the pace of the lower levels some, so that 80 isn't so far away.
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The expansion decline (Score:5, Insightful)
I give WoW another one or two expansions before work begins on a new MMO incarnation. Whether it be WoW II or otherwise.
Re:The expansion decline (Score:5, Insightful)
As you said, the investment to "catch up" become huge, competition becomes fierce, the amount of cheaters go up (to try and catch up), and its just a downward spiral. While its easier to say than do, MMO devs (not just WoW) need to stop thinking that the end game, "long term" players are their main customers. At any given moment, they indeed are, but for the continual longevity of the game, its not these people that will fuel it, its the constant supply of "newbies", so to speak. People rediscovering the trip from level 1.
The games should make it interesting to continually start over, that way new players and old are closer together, mix better, etc. Originally FFXI had that decently, making players continually start back up, mixing up with the new, it was quite the experience. Then somewhere along the line they got caught by the vocal majority and down it went. Its not to say that adding content at the end isn't a good idea: people who are attached to some characters will continue paying longer, but it shouldn't be the main concern like it is in 99% of long lasting MMOs out there.
Re:The expansion decline (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, in some ways I second this, I'd love to see some new content lower down the levelling ladder, as the old instances and quests can get a little boring after having run through them a lot of times, and they never quite have the same magic redoing them on an alt as they did when you first when in and everything was new and mysterious, but you do need to consider that of the subscribing playerbase, quite a large proportion is at the endgame stage, ok, maybe not Black Temple/Mount Hyjal/etc, but a large proportion are level 70. (Census details [warcraftrealms.com])
I'd actually quite like to see some more stuff to do around the karazhan level, for those who aren't really interested in the 25-man stuff, or who can't commit to the time/organisation required. Zul'Aman could be quite good for this, but we shall have to see how it turns out.
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Tons of 5 man dungeons, once you get through them, you can then do them on heroic. No need for a larger group.
Battlegrounds. Hop into a battleground anytime, the battles are usually over in less than 30 minutes.
Arena. You do need a regular group for these, but the regular group can be as small as two people. Not difficult for casuals to access. The matching system will try to match you against similarly rated groups, so while you may get b
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Which is exactly like 90% of other MMOs out t
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Which is exactly like 90% of other MMOs out there, and what I meant :)
I believe that the problem he was referring to is not that as the game gets older and expansions come out, newcomers have more levels to get through before hitting 'endgame'. It's more what we have between expansion packs. For instance, heroic dungeons are meant to help players gear up for 10-man raids, but the 'bubble' of raiding players has passed heroic dungeons and it's now impossible to get a run on my server. Same thing with Kara - high end guilds can only get new players by poaching them from up-and
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Tons of 5 man dungeons, once you get through them fifteen to twenty times, you can then do them on heroic.
Fixed that for you. The rep grind to get into heroic dungeons is a pain in the ass if you didn't farm the lower level dungeons as you levelled up, and even then you're running for rep long after you've got all the loot you need. And this is set to get worse:
"When is a game more than a game?" says Metzen. "When it's making you feel creepy or elated or heroic -- it's not just a mechanical experience of clicking and looting and killing and raiding. We want to provide as much context and fiction and psychology as possible, at least the first time -- you'll probably roll this dungeon 80 times -- but the first time was a hoot!"
<rantmode>Why the hell would they ever believe that running the same dungeon 80 times is fun? It's not. NOT FUN. NOT BLOODY FUN! Hell, I probably ran UBRS a total of 30-40 times between all my lvl 60 pre-expansion characters, and that was way too
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It's rather hard to read from the graph since you have many small bars compared to one huge, but if you filter for level 70-70 you see it's a little over 2mio out of 6.2mio players or 1/3rd that's at level 70. That means that 2/3rds is *not* at level 70, though I suppose it might be more important to make sure players don't "dead end" than just making general improvements.
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This fact alone seems to be more than enough to make the old-skool raid instances into ghost towns.
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My guess is that the idea was that raids are a financial risk for all classes. Where priests need to buy good drinks and mana pots and rogues need to buy goodies for their poisons. But with mages being water fountains and teas pretty much losing all their meaning by lv 60, those "problems" don't exist for any other class.
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1) It's got a raid timer.
2) It's got a 1-week raid timer.
3) There's only 1 ten man instance, and it's Kharazan.
4) It's actually difficult.
These are all problems which could probably be solved with a few minor changes. If you reduce the length of the raid timer, you increase the opportunities to run it. Zul'Gurub and AQ20 had 4 day raid timers, that made it much easier to have mixed groups. UBRS was 10 man and had no raid timer at all. The only similar content in
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They should start everyone at 60, but that would obsolete everything before the first expansion, so they'd have to rebalance those areas. That would be pretty fun, because it would be great to have an actual reason to run something like LBRS or UBRS or Naxxramas even after you are into the 60-80 zone.
A better solution is to just focus on the content and challenge (strategy, tactics, etc.) instead of: expansion = current level + 10. If it's always about level, new players don't want to play, and old p
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Blizzard has had open postings [blizzard.com] for people to work on "next-generation" MMO development for some time now. Since they certainly can't think of World of Warcraft as "next-generation," I think you're right. Personally I'm hoping for a Diablo game.
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I can see two ways how you can get people to play with new low level players. First, make something like th
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Phase 1: shiny new MMO comes out, marketinggoes into overdrive, solid number of initial sales, rampant teething troubles in many cases, complaints that players are paying to beta test the game.
Phase 2: population grows solidly, as much through word of mouth now as marketing. Server issues tend to stabilise and the worst of the bugs are fixed. This is probably the mo
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I disagree - "catching up" is really only for people who want to "race to 70" so they can raid. For everyone else, more expansions mean more content to explore and more playtime until you "hit the brick wall at 70."
In reality, it's only a small percent of people who raid. Most of us can't afford the time investment. Personally, I'd get v. bored doing the same ins
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But there were a few morally dubious quests in the game, especially from some of the undead questgivers. Take the one where the undead woman is angry that her neighbours survived the plague unscathed and still have a running farm - you have to head off and kill them. Or the 'new plague' questline where you end up poisoning a bunch of captives (Geneva convention anyone?) And another in Hillsbrad where you have to hunt
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Imagine a neutral battle ground between Tuskarr and Nerub, where the faction you befriended determined what side you were on
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