I wasn’t subscribed during MOP and with current levelling speeds I zoom right through it. I spend more time in the revamped Old World Cata zones actually. I do not have a feel for what it was like for Horde back then.
How does MOP when it was actually happening compare to now ? I want to play again, but admit I let my sub expire last month because I feel like I am treading water until 8.3 or so when the Horde finally finds out what the hell they are doing with the whole Sylvanas is not Garathos or is she storyline. It just feels unpleasant in the current situation. Furthermore I am concerned if ths expansion is salting the Azeroth for alts. It’s a big expansion of “we know you love this game because you are getting so unhappy about what we are doing.”
I’m hoping an expansion or two later with roe colored glasses this expansion will age better than it is being recveived live.
They’d told us before MoP even launched that we’d be raiding Orgrimmar at the end to depose our mad warchief, so being forced to serve the story’s villain for 3/4 of the expansion was a bit less awful. The big questions were who the new one would be, how Horde-Alliance relations would play out afterwards, etc.
I’ll personally always love MoP for what it did with my now-favourite racial leader, Lor’themar, taking him from a joke/throne warmer/nobody to a lot of people’s top pick for warchief in the space of two patches; that was impressive. Those two patches (5.1, 5.2) also happen to be some of WoW’s best IMO.
They also halfway succeeded in giving us “morally grey” storylines, like the purge of Dalaran, which people still argue about here today. BfA failed spectacularly in that regard.
I don’t know, the civil war plot just felt like a storyline that didn’t need to be repeated. The Horde having to look inwards and fix itself was a bit trite the first time, considering it already did so in WC3. Now it’s just laughable, and as you mentioned, the devs’ comments on how badly the community has reacted to MoP 2.0 are a bit worrying.
Well, first things first, MoP was actually well done on multiple fronts. Class balance was good; raids and other content were enjoyable; there wasn’t truly useless content like islands or warfronts cluttering things up; the game was actually released in a generally well-polished state rather than a perpetual beta; etc.
From the story standpoint, it had a good mix of faction war affairs as well as Pandaria / native faction affairs. It felt much more organic in nature - you didn’t have every leader conveniently standing around to comment on how horrible Sylvanas is for doing whatever she just did. You also didn’t do near as much NPC hand-holding while questing as you do now. Finally, you didn’t need so many cinematics trying to correct certain NPC’s images or reputations (Baine, Jaina, Saurfang, etc). The story worked by itself, for the most part. Yes, it did have it’s dumb or silly moments (helping Garrosh test the bell by helping Anduin kill the affected NPC’s), but the experience was generally positive.
I ultimately look at it this way. MoP was mostly a success with a few things done wrong. BfA is mostly a failure with a few things done acceptably.
As said above it was a different time(for the playerbase). The story was less contrived with shock value and more about exploring Pandaria in a lighthearted tone, with the final boss known ahead of time. The plot felt more original, we hadn’t had an aggressive Horde in WoW itself and we hadn’t been playing musical warchiefs.
I liked everything that had nothing to do with the faction war in MoP. The Yaungol, Sha, and Mantids were all welcome opponents.
Well, I liked the storyline in Jade Forest as far as faction war goes. The rest was eyerolling and just waiting for Blizzard to put the Horde out of its misery.
Then they gave us WoD so there was plenty of orcs to kill for everybody.
I didn’t like the faction storyline in MoP, but I really liked the Pandaria storyline.
And gameplay was so much better than Cataclysm, particularly for my class/spec. Ret had finally become good in WotLK, and they introduced holy power and basically wrecked us for Cata. By MoP they finally worked out the kinks and ret was back in a decent place. So the game felt a lot better. And the raids were so much better than in Cata. Plus, I really liked pet battles for awhile there.
MoP felt so much better than Cata in general, and that made it well received.
I hated Garrosh’s character from the start, so hearing that he’d be the final boss didn’t really phase me beyond not liking that the rest of the horde had to get dragged along with him for most of it. I also disliked the faction war in general, and remember being frustrated with what they did to Jaina’s character in the pre-patch. I also raised an eyebrow at the quest to enter the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, because proving yourself meant killing an image of Varian Wrynn while his son stood by and watched you. Apparently Varian was what my character hated the most all of a sudden.
I tried ignoring the faction war aspect when I could, but that got progressively harder to do as the patches rolled out. SoO ended on a sour note with the cutscene capping off with Varian’s threat of ending the horde before it dovetailed into the dumbest plot concept I’d ever seen in a videogame with WoD.
I did enjoy my class relatively more back then, though. Even if the level 90 mage talent tier at the time was horrendous, and my personal dislike of the Alter Time spell. The class was already starting starting to slide in the direction it’s in now, but the mega pruning hadn’t happened yet.
The fact that they would compare what they are doing to the Red Wedding is just mind-boggling to me.
I do think it’s what they are attempting to do. But they are not writing appropriately for their medium, not do they have that kind of source material to draw upon.
GoT is episodic television. You experience it in one hour chunks. Perhaps a few times if you really loved the episode. But it keeps progressing forward. WoW is a game where the players experience a small amount of story content over and over for months.
I loved the Red Wedding episode. I doubt I would have loved it if I was asked to watch it again and again for six months without any sense of story progression. I would have liked it even less if I was expected to be in the story as a member of one of those two factions. Imagine being asked to be a doomed Stark over and over again for six months. Or a despicable Frey. Yet that is, in essence, what Blizzard did to its players this expansion. Blizzard, you have stuck us in the middle of the Red Wedding episode for almost a year now!
Having feelings in response to art is a good thing. Having bad feelings is powerful. Having bad feelings that you are forced to dwell on over and over for months because thats the way this medium works…that’s not fun.
Blizzard seems to not understand the consequences of how this game is actually played and how that causes the storytelling to affect players profoundly differently than in a television show or a single player RPG.
I admit, it got a pretty hard chuckle out of me that they thought this was Red Weddings outrage, like all we had to provide was only emotional outrage, as if everything was consistent and this was just something devilish.
I wish it was like that. It isn’t.
It’d be a delight if we could actually have extended dialogue with CDev, rather than speaking with them one dimensionally.
Interestingly enough the statement came from Ion… Danuser showed love towards Daenerys burning down King’s Landing as well.
It seems both Ion(whose expertise is Raids not Lore) and Danuser are on the Game of Thrones train and Ion is likely the one who suggested Teldrassil burning as his version of the Red Wedding.
Ion being versed in Law and Raids has less understanding about Story than other WoW staff and yet he is the one in control until he leaves.
Danuser(who loves Daenerys’ rampage unlike the other Lore writers like Matt Burns) is the guy in charge of Expansion Narrative so he’ll definitely use Daenerys’s rampage as inspiration.
What? Scenarios were exactly like that! Especially once you got to a certain gear level. The only reason to do scenarios at that point was to cap your valor point.
If anything it is because factions leader didnt get as much to do in MoP, sans Varian and Vol’jin.
Scenarios had two redeeming factors to them. First, you didn’t have to do them if you didn’t want to - there were other sources of valor to do. Second, if you wanted to do them, heroics, and lfr for valor (or gear for alts), the dps queue times and completion would line up nicely such that finishing the scenario would usually put you immediately into the heroic, which would then put you into lfr. Being able to solo most of them as a rogue didn’t hurt either.
Valor having a much more finite cap than Azerite also helped a lot as well. They weren’t great content in and of themselves, but they at least fit in fairly well with the other systems.
There’s still something inherently dumb about making sure everyone’s in attendance just to take a role call and let the player know exactly how much everyone hates Sylvanas today.
Has there been a change at Blizzard since the time of the Broken Shore ? Things feel different starting with Argus and especially with BFA. Were they finishing off old storylines? Did staff change ? Is it just the popularity of GoT
How did MoP feel?! Oh let me tell you, brother, it was something to remember:
Gameplay was fun and most classes were well balanced aside from a select few. (immortal, 1v3 Blood DK anyone?)
Loads of content throughout the expansion, especially after making it through the grindy dailies from launch. 5.1 introduced the fun mini pvp areas in Krasarang that people could do while doing quests which made it more interesting.(Not to mention, allowing us to solo run old raids for transmog) 5.2 introduced Isle of Thunder with lots of different things to do being able to select between pve and pvp questing, which was alot of fun. 5.3 came with its’ debatable Battlefield Barrens event, but then came 5.4 with the renowned Timeless Isle, on which the devs have based nearly all of their outdoor content upon ever since.
The raids were all pretty stellar with instances like MsV, ToT, and especially SoO. As well as alot of the dungeons, which had fun and unique mechanics.(Stormstout Brewery)
Pandaria is a gorgeous continent with great music and even greater characters. The Asian themes and aesthetics were well done. Lorewalker Cho was simply an absolute pleasure to quest with and Taran Zhu and the Shado-pan gave people complaining about MoP making WoW a “Kids game” a run for their money. The lore behind the continent was some of the best in the franchise. The backstory of the Mogu as titan creations gone awry, how the Thunder king stole of the power of a titan watcher, the Sha being echos of Y’sharaj, the most powerful of all the known Old gods on Azeroth who had to be personally killed by Aman’thul, the twist about Shaohao never being able to defeat the Sha of pride. It was an strong way to bring Pandaria into the WoW universe in a way it can be taken seriously.
Leveling was fun an varied, with 6-7 brand new zones to explore that took you from lush forests to verdant plains, from snowy mountains to corrupted wastelands.
And finally, the most important one imo, the Story. How do i even begin? Well for one, like i said before some of the characters were great; Taran Zhu and Lorewalker Cho. But where I think the expansion REALLY shines, and this is going to sound pretty ironic as of right now, is the Horde Civil war. Yeah, I said it, the Horde Civil war was actually GOOD in MoP. It felt organic, It was a natural progression from where the Hordes’ story was in cataclysm, how Garrosh had an incredibly tenuous relationship with other Horde leaders having slain Cairne Bloodhoof and being heavily contested by Vol’jin very early on in his reign. It wasn’t a great start, so it didn’t help that he had Theramoore nuked at the start of the expansion, psychologically scarring a long time friend of the Horde, Jaina.
Then when Garrosh began his decent to madness with the assassination attempt on Vol’jin, the story really kicked into gear. From Shadows of the Horde telling of Vol’jin’s brush with death and his deep relationship with Bwonsamdi, his old friend Chen and new human friend, Tyrathan Kohrt. It was an excellent journey that took Vol’jin from being a relatively obscure, C-list, Horde leader to one of its’ greatest heroes and first non-Orc in the Hordes’ history to wear the mantle of Warchief. It symbolized how the Horde has moved on from Orc-based leadership and that any Horde race with virtue in their hearts can prove worthy of the title. Lor’themar also has a great mini arc in 5.2 that gave him a alot of good character moments and was likely many players’ introduction to the character since much like Vol’jin, he was a very obscure character and didn’t really have alot of exposure even in the expansion he was introduced in. I know Alliance didn’t get too much attention in MoP, but where it did get the attention was in Varian and Anduins’ relationship which, while not much, did set the foundation for what would be, imo, the greatest moment in WoWs history. I could go on about the questing in pandaria or some scenarios, but i think I got my point across, pretty great story and much better than most people give it credit for.
So how did MoP feel? It felt like a REAL story with strong character progression with realistic motivations and conflicts that made sense. Not like the artificial trash heap that is the story of modern WoW in which everything is all flash with no substance. MoP felt like a high risk taken by the devs, that paid off very well but then was completely crapped on later in which everything important that happened in it was made completely inconsequential.
-Garrosh who was spared at the end of SoO to set up for an eventual redemption arc, was made a plot device just to set up for WoD and was promptly discarded before even the first patch.
-Vol’jin, who was made Warchief for his heroism and valor was completely unused in WoD and was discarded an expansion later in favor of Sylvanas for pretty much no reason other than faction parity and to set up for the travesty known as BfA.
-Thrall came back to the Horde at the end of MoP and led it during most of WoD, just so he can leave again because he even realizes that he shouldn’t have killed Garrosh
-Jaina essentially spits in Anduins’ mouth at the start of Legion and abandons him IMMEDIATELY after his dad died because she’s an insensitive jerk who’s hatred for the Horde overrides any sense of compassion she has for her young “nephew”.
BfA is literally just a direct insult to anyone who actually like MoP and was emotionally invested in its’ story as I was.
I heard on this board that there are two teams who work on alternate expansions. So while the “A” team is touching up Legion and getting it ready for launch, the “B” team is already doing early development on BfA. This is just something I heard on the board, though. I don’t know the source for it.