World of Warcraft: Cataclysm
by Blizzard Entertainment
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Product Summary
Brand: Blizzard EntertainmentAudio: English (Unknown)
Format: DVD-ROM
Release Date: 2010-12-07
Platform: Mac OS X Intel, Windows Vista, Windows XP
Model: 020626728478
Color: One Color
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Product features:
- Requires the full version of World of Warcraft, The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, and a Battle.net Account to play.
- Level Cap Increased to 85
- Classic Zones Remade and New High-Level Zones
- Two New Playable Races - Goblins and Worgen
- Flying Mounts in Azeroth
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Video Game Reviews of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm
Customer Review: Cataclysm may be the final nail in the coffin for my time in WoW
Summary: 2 Stars
I am a six-year veteran of WoW, and while I have taken long breaks from the game in the past, I always thought I'd come back each time. Until now. It's sad to say, after all the good times I did have, but Cataclysm does not do enough to keep me wanting to play. I don't trust the developers anymore, either, so it's going to be a hard sell to get me to play again.
At first, the expansion seems worthy. The questing content from 80-85 is, despite the issues of linear questing, more fun than past content. However, past questing content was not particularly fun to begin with. It's never been challenging or dynamic enough to compete with any number of quality console games. What brought me to WoW was always the total package and promise of an MMO: that you will find redemption in working with others to tackle huge challenges.
Once you get to 85, though, and all the questing is over, you find that the endgame has only gotten worse from the past expansion. Wrath of the Lich King did so much wrong from the easy heroics to quickly-trivialized raids to horrible balancing issues in Wintergrasp PVP, so everyone was hopeful for Cataclysm to fix many of the known problems. In the end I feel most veterans will come to agree that it did not get better, though. Let's take a closer look:
PVP in Cataclysm is so underwhelming it's almost astounding; Blizzard just will not fix their model of giving PVP players a fraction of the content. It's nothing new that Blizzard put less time into content for their PVP, but it doesn't make it any less astonishing that the most profitable MMO in history continues to keep the bar so low in this department. What's new in PVP? Two battleground maps and one outdoor zone that replaces Wintergrasp. That's it! Tweaks to classes and how you acquire items be damned: those are not real changes that genuinely affect gameplay. The fact is you'll still find yourself sitting in Warsong Gulch the same as you did in 2005. Why do we have to play the same exact battlegrounds as we did when battlegrounds were first released? Can you imagine the poor guy who subscribed to WoW since day 1 and considers himself a PVP player? This guy got an average of less than 2 new battleground maps per year for all his hundreds of dollars. It's amazing that Blizzard has not put more work into PVP when they have an industry-leading game. I want to see a whole new set of maps every year, and phase out the old maps like what's done for PVE dungeons. I understand "the battle for Warsong Gulch rages on", so make a NEW map for it. Make 5 new maps. Make 10 new maps. Is it that hard to throw together some more maps for one battleground type? The PVP player does not have enough to keep his subscription, and that's truly sad. I don't care if Blizzard listens to my idea or implements another, just give the PVP players more in some way!
I'm more of a PVE guy myself, so let's take a look at that. Blizzard did something ostensibly good, which was make dungeons harder. I was a huge fan of this. I did kill raid bosses and finish every heroic 5-man in short order, but it was tougher than in the past. Here's one problem: the things which kill you are generally just instant-death type of mechanics. There are exceptions to this, and some of the content is still VERY EASY, but if you do die, chances are it was some kind of instant-death thing that one guy forgot about. I know what you're thinking: you shouldn't succeed when people don't perform. That's true! That's why I'm seriously glad they tried to make it harder. It's just that I want a better way to increase challenge than what was presented. A larger problem with the 5-mans is more that you're supposed to run them every day. For the amount they have, that gets old within a couple months at best. I don't expect unlimited content, but we got fewer 5-mans than we got in the past two expansions. The last time we had this small amount of content was back in Vanilla, but back then people didn't even finish the dungeons most of the time, so they didn't get stale quite as quickly. I should also mention the time investment required. Yes, if you have a good group the time spent in a 5-man is not horrible, but if you get a new guy in your party, you're probably looking at a 2 hour time-investment. I don't find this to be game-breaking, but it's something to mention.
Raiding is also largely no fun. Clearing trash still feels like a chore; WHY? It doesn't have to feel like work, but it absolutely does. Some aspects of the boss design are alright, but many of the wipes are the same type of thing as in 5-mans where one person doesn't perform one stupid mechanic one time, and the entire raid ends up dead. Missing your assignment and causing a wipe is generally nothing more than accidentally not pushing one skill at some exact time. This sort of design is artificially extending the life of what little raid content there is. One guy forgot to interrupt? Wipe. That's it. I had no issue clearing content. I had issue with the way we died when we died. It was petty and annoying. Again, I understand that failure should not meet with success, but the game focuses too much on micromanaging instant-death abilities in mundane ways. I want my wipes to be based on dynamic decisions made by players, not failure to push this exact skill at this exact time.
Something else that bugs me is the homogenization of the classes. Warcraft designers are so obsessed with balance that they are giving every talent spec similar abilities. The balance is still not perfect, but the design philosophy seems to be moving towards making everyone more or less the same. Blizzard says, "Bring the player, not the class". No, Blizzard, bring the class. Bring the class! It's what makes us unique! People liked when classes were vastly different, despite some more serious balance issues at times.
For that matter, why should they make some classes able to tank, heal and DPS well, while others can still only DPS? What is that about? There are two ways we should do this in MMOs: make everyone able to fill any role, or make each class highly specialized for one role. The random mixing and matching of potential roles does not make sense. A class should be unique, but the number of roles that class can fill should be equal. Realize that originally, a druid was a jack of all trades, master of none. It wasn't intended as competition for any one class. Why can't a druid do half and half healing and DPS? Why is it a full-on healer, full-on DPS or full-on tank? It would be so much more unique if druids healed and attacked at the same time, but weaker in both. I believe that this was the original intent of the class. A hybrid class is supposed to work like that, not be good at everything. As far as I know, Warcraft was the original MMO to botch the idea of a hybrid class in this way. The designers claim that it was bad to have people using a class who was not good at any one thing. Yeah, but, with their combat resurrection, druids would still have been a desired class. Speaking of combat resurrection, it's almost been eliminated from the game. Only one person may be revived per battle now. If you have a warlock with a soulstone, forget about a druid's combat resurrection. The thing that made that class unique is often now useless. That's the way the design is going, and I don't like it at all!
Blizzard still never brought their user interface up to par; already other MMOs are surpassing it in this area. I have never played it, but I hear Rift launched with a superior interface; surely they had a lower budget than WoW has. In Cataclysm we admittedly do get a better interface again, which is great, but it's still not up to par with third-party add-ons. If you want to be the best, you still have to use add-ons and then argue elitism with people who think it's better to play without them. If Blizzard just put these totally legal add-ons into the game themselves, it would be so much better. I don't know if there is some reason why six years later we now have a default raid interface which almost matches what an unpaid gaming enthusiast put into the game himself years ago.
The final point is that the everyday tasks you do in WoW are so boring it's hard to find enough negative adjectives to do them justice. Daily quests are required for reputations to get items and gold, but they amount to killing X and collecting Y every day. Gone are the bombing quests introduced two expansions ago. The daily quests feel slapped-together. Want to make money collecting herbs and ore? Great, except you don't play a fun mini-game to get it. You click nodes on the ground. Fly around and click nodes. That's it. Fishing? Equip a pole, push the fishing button, and click the bobber when it splashes. Given how important the economy is in the game, it's pathetic that the way you get materials is so mind-numbingly boring. Why not a mine instance with a mini-game to collect ore? Why not a farm mini-game for herbs? Why not a mini-game for fishing? No, we click nodes on the ground. For the billions of dollars changing hands here, the innovation and fun-factor of everyday play in WoW is extremely pathetic. They added archaeology to Cataclysm. Guess how it works? Yep, you fly around, use an item, then click stuff. No challenge or fun involved. After countless hours of this, you may get a flavor item or an item to give to your alts. Wow.
Overall, WoW has turned into a sloppy mess lacking in content. On the surface it's still got what it had that makes it popular, but I can only mildly recommend this game to new players who haven't been there and done that. Even then, I think you should try a different MMO at this point. The only way this genre will grow is with competition. Blizzard isn't going to fix this monster on its own. They don't realize how bad it's gotten.
Description of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm
World of Warcraft: CataclysmAction Games
- Video Games > Categories > PC > Action
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