Playing through Classic again I can quickly see a variety of reasons why Cataclysm is horrible.
One painstakingly obvious thing about Cata is it destroying the world we as we know. Sort of. The real issue is creating all this new content while unfinished content sat around the players unused. I’ll give an in game example connected with something in real life.
Jotunheim. Awesome area. Absolutely no reason to go there after a couple of quest. Clearly looks unfinished. Considering players were brought here for a quest one would only assume that something big is going to happen here, right? Right?!?!
Now imagine a historical building passes your view everyday to work. It’s beautiful and obviously someone spent alot of time making it that way. Wouldn’t it make sense to do something with that beautiful building that passes your view every day? Or does it make more sense to put up a cardboard city in another location and say its all new.
That’s Cataclysm in a nutshell. You have all these unfinished zones in the World as we know it. Instead of finishing them, Cata decides to make a shanty town with guardrails and a conveyor belt of content.
So instead of making a new game that no one wants, can you finish the game that players have been addicted to for 15+ years?
I’m sure there are a variety of zones and areas that never got the opportunity to live up to their potential.
i just want Cata and MoP, i had a bunch of fun during those expansions and want to play them again. all they gotta do is shorten the final phase of cata and it will be perfect, and MoP as well is already such a good expansion baseline, i just hope we get enough time to level up a monk during prepatch
Is that not what Wrath of the Lich King questing is? Telling a story through layering and linear questlines? Why don’t people bash WotLK then? Linear does not equal bad. It can make for some excellent storytelling and action-based quests, such as The Bomb in Kalimdor, a story spanning three zones with a climactic end (the druid grove in Stonetalon being nuked), and tension only growing between the two factions.
Something big did happen here though. Jotunheim in lore is the place where the vrykul were first awakened in Northrend, and is the largest Vrykul settlement by far. If you played through all of Icecrown, you’d know that you’d kill multiple leaders, thanes, and warriors in Jotunheim, and then lay waste to the village, claiming it for the Knights of the Ebon Blade.
That’s the downfall of not using Mob Scaling to keep all zones relevant at all levels.
…why waste development time fleshing out something like Grim Batol’s subzone, when players will just be blitzing right through the main zone, and never coming back.
They should have given a journal so we cpuld read along as the story happened. The problem i have is that i at first didmt read all of the quests. Even if i would have, i hit 80 way before i finished the storyline. By the time i got back to finishing the quests i had foegotten who was who. Those names are not the easiest to remember. If thete was a diary or a journal. I could have read it and been able to make sense of what was happening.
At least that’s what I had always thought, but with the popularity of HC Classic, which is pretty-much an intentional solo-mode, repeatedly slow leveling experience, I’ve come to think that perhaps a large enough portion of the WoW playerbase has a playstyle of making new characters, and leveling them through questing in old content.
The only problem with cataclysm world changes, is that the world isn’t dangerous anymore. You can chain pull like 5 mobs on any class and be okay. It makes the only dangerous area of the game the dungeons.
Readjusting quests so you can do all of westfall in one swoop instead of doing half of westfall, then half of redridge, then going back to westfall to finish it off is annoying.
The STV, Barrens, and Darkshore revamps did make them annoying to navigate, but the new player experience or the leveling experience in general is way better.
In cata at level 10 you get your core abilities. In vanilla-wrath, you don’t typically get your base kit until the 60s.
Cata takes place almost entirely in azeroth. The tempest or whatever is basically a new area, but the other zones are on the surface of kalimdor and eastern kingdoms. It would be nice if the Cata leveling could let you bypass outland and northrend, but that’s probably a bit much to ask.
I would looove if vanilla WoW were “finished”. Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that none of the people who poured their soul into WoW to make it what it is work at Blizzard anymore. Good riddance, obviously, given the stories of creep behavior. But that doesn’t change the fact that a team finishing vanilla WoW in 2023 will still end up making a retail level product because that’s just where we are in the timeline. All that content that we see as “thrown away” would be like gibberish to the team working to finish it, because they didn’t think it up in the first place. At least that’s part of why I think Classic+ is a pipe dream, even if it exists someday it’ll never be what we (or at least I) want.
Thar is kinda how lots of the new game stuff feels even if the quality of the art is technically better. Its really strange to me how alive and organic “Vanilla” feels and how synthetic Cata update feels,
I will play MoP and Cata knowing just how many problems they actually have.
Saying it now just like I warned everyone about Wrath, its got problems and its not perfect (cata)… There will be a lot of gripes by players about various things
MoP, people will cry about that too, although MoP is the superior game because the classes (5.3) MoP were incredibly balanced. 5.4 if they used that will show how flawed it was very quickly.
The crying about various things did not take place in 5.4 because changes and balance passes in the 5.4 series of patches was super frequent, there were like no kidding 8 versions of 5.4 that went live, and things got worse as time went on. Then there is the confusing state of Base resilience added in later patches to compensate for gear bloat… how doea that get done? Will it follow an original path (as it should) or will Blizz tune it as they want it to play? Will the PvP trinket set bonus wait until later or be a thing in from day 1?
I love Cataclysm/Retail all together because it took most things away from Vanilla.
Good think Era servers is a thing for those who don’t want Cataclysm.
I think redesigning the old world and filling out its empty areas which were never used is a great idea IF it was done up front, not on an expansion after everyone is already 70 or 80. Cataclysm could not decide if it wanted to be a new game, an expansion, or fail by trying to do both. A cataclysm rehost needs to be fresh realms only, no transfers, no clones, no boosts, and ideally move the new content down to level 60, dumping outland/northrend entirely. Also dump flying mounts.
You know that game people have been addicted to for 15+ years has had the Cataclysm area longer than the non-Cataclysm area right?
I get the sentiment, but this statement makes no sense.
The only real issue with Cataclysm changing the old world was there is no way to get back to it so all of that content was lost… and to be fair they might not have had the tech at the time, but they do now, and for whatever reason they haven’t had Chormie or that other bronze dragon gal send us back to that point in time.