Even after all these years, Blizzard still manages to amaze its community with an expansion to remember.
It probably goes without saying that World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm is a good game. After all, 3.3 million units sold in 24 hours can’t be a sign of something bad coming out of Irvine right? In fact since the games release six years ago, Blizzard has managed to grow its gargantuan following into that of over 12 million subscribers. With a community this size, Blizzard has a lot of different expectations to live up to with this latest expansion, and yet somehow, they manage to do just that.
As most WoW fanatics like myself know, a new expansion from Blizzard brings about a lot of changes to the world of Azeroth. Cataclysm grabs this idea of “change” and turns it all the way up to eleven with the largest restructuring of class, race, spells, and the world that the game has ever seen. Gone are the old zones of the past and with it a new and improved Azeroth has emerged from the ashes of destruction left by the expansions primary antagonist, Deathwing.
For those of you in the Warcraft community that still don’t know what is in store for you in Cataclysm, you may be surprised to find a lot of “New” in the “Old World.” Cities like Stormwind and Orgrimmar have been completely revamped from the ground up. Major landmark additions have been added to both sites as well has a complete overhaul to the terrain and detail of each city. These locations now serve as the expansions main hub for all new questing zones, PvP, and Raid instances. This level of detail continues throughout the entire world as revamped areas gain new terrain, quests, and structure.
With this new design to Old World, Blizzard has made it even more enticing to start a new character within the game. Cataclysm really sets the stage for a whole new era of WoW players to level up in a fresh and modern MMO without feeling like they are walking into a game from the 2004. Old school players like myself also get the added bonus of exploring completely new quests and zone designs with the two new races of Goblin and Worgen. This keeps the game fresh and makes the idea of leveling yet another “alt” more than bearable.
In fact, the new starting zones for both the Goblin and Worgen races could be one of the biggest selling points to Catacysm thus far. Both follow the lead from the past expansion and receive the same in depth treatment that the Deathknight starting area saw in Wrath of the Lich King. Players can get a completely new experience in these starting zones while both offer a totally different style of gameplay from one another. The Goblin area borders on Saturday morning cartoon craziness with quests that are often whimsical and light hearted along with zone details of bright and over exaggerated set pieces. Worgens on the other hand tend to take a more serious approach to the lore and offer players a darker side of WoW. Personally, I fell in love with the Goblin side of things, but most community reaction remains split on which is “better.”
Big Game Play Changes
While all these changes to the world play into the marketing and selling of Cataclysm, the real change for the community comes into how each class fundamentally functions in the new expansion. Unlike Burning Crusade and Lich King, who saw the same formula of adding new spells and growing an already large talent tree, Cataclysm has instead revamped almost every stat, talent, and spell to create a more streamline play style. This “cataclysm” of talents has left a fairly large divide within the Warcraft community. A lot of people have found the changes a bit jarring because they are essentially playing totally new characters in a new game.
To me, this can be seen as a good thing. As a six year old game, Warcraft had already done almost all it could do with the current play style, and so instead of painting themselves further in a corner, the developers decided to throw out the painting and just make a new one. As such, gamers who were in love with their hunters, shamans, or warriors might have to take some time to get used to the new game play. Player versus Environment
It’s not all divided on Azeroth however. Most of the community can agree that each new expansion has made the game a little bit easier for casual gamers and aspiring raiders with real world time commitments. This type of “dumbed down” game play created a small backlash in Wrath of the Lich King as most dungeons and raids became far too easy for a community so long in the tooth. With Cataclysm, Blizzard has been able to find a happy medium between challenging content and the AOE zerg-fest that was Wrath of the Lich King.
For the most part, this balance has been achieved through Blizzards new philosophy of focusing less time on the “grind” to max level (only 5 levels!) and more about the content at max level. The community pulse seems to agree as most forum threads within the Warcraft populace praise Blizzard for their work on the new end game areas. Casual types are able to spend more time in an instance and because of this, the level of difficulty and thought has gone up for encounters and raid bosses.
Of course there is a down side to this way of doing things as well. The ability to form of group of complete strangers and get them to work together in a challenging dungeon setting is almost impossible in Cataclysm. Many have voiced their concerns over this new layer of challenges as even the most skilled group of random players will have some difficulty gelling with one another. A quick glance over any of Blizzards fan sites will probably yield you one or two comments with titles like to, “This heroic is WAY TO HARD!!!!!” I’d be lying if I didn’t partially agree, but this level of difficulty has also allowed for a much more fulfilling sense of accomplishment that was severely lacking in previous expansions.
As for the community as a whole, this type of solid group requirement only builds more on the need for great guilds and guild leaders. Gamers who like to spend their time solo in Warcraft have expressed how large a disadvantage Cataclysm end game is for them, while stable guilds and friends can blow through the first set of instances in a night’s time. Personally I was in a regular guild for almost 3 years before my Lich King exodus and, while we are by no means hardcore, we found it well within our ability to complete every instance Cataclysm had to offer; at least on regular mode.
Player versus Player
The final piece of the Cataclysm puzzle is that of PvP or player versus player. The history of PvP in Warcraft is one of insurmountable depth. The community of battle ground gamers, grinding twenty four hours a day for months on end has long since passed. In the Burning Crusade we saw the rise of Arena as Battle Ground culture was sidelined and mocked by the hard core in order to make way for a much simplistic 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5 style of play. Wrath of the Lich King only added to Arena more by pushing it into the e-sport realm with cash and reputations on the line. Near the end of Lich King we even saw a decent sized following on the Major League Gaming circuit as it toured the country. However, Cataclysm lives up to its name and once again turned the community on its head. As if to come full circle, Cataclysm PvP has been redesigned to focus more on the Battle Ground style of old with a de-emphasis on Arena. The reaction has been fairly mixed as most hard core PvP gamers do not take the Battle Ground style of player versus player very seriously. Most tend to site the difficulty of getting a group of 15 people together on a regular basis as a reason for their lack of enthusiasm for BGs. Throw in the fact that battle ground success tends to depend a lot on class make up and you can start to see where the community might have a point. It is one thing to set up a raid against a scripted boss with a large group of people, but a completely different animal when that group is fighting another set of gamers on the other end of the battle field.
As much as this change has upset the hardcore crowd, the new battle ground focus does lend a helping hand to those of us without unlimited time or lighting reflexes. Because of the larger group requirement, singular player mistakes don’t add up to an instant loss like they do in high end arena play. Casual gamers are finding it more rewarding to join up with their guild or server mates and have a lot easier time with a simple concept like capture the flag. On the other hand, top end arena teams require constant practice with one mistake often spelling disaster for the losing team.
The Community
If you can see a consistent theme here you wouldn’t be the first. Cataclysm seems to have been able to mix both the casual world of PvE and PvP with the hard core world at the same time. Arena players can still play their matches, but the more casual types can get the same gear through battle grounds. To the same extent, heroic dungeons and raids have seen their difficult move way up while regular versions remain mostly untouched from previous expansions difficulties.
So far the community seems to be fairly optimistic with a vocal minority of mostly the misinformed gamers. Complaints tend to range from extremely under geared players complaining about heroics or hard core PvP players feeling “forced” to play in battle grounds when they simply don’t have to. As whole however it is much more likely that you will be able to find your own place within World of Warcraft. You now have a lot of choices on how the game can be played and so even a weekend warrior has the chance to see everything the expansion has to offer. Given how a lot of the community is aging along with the game, I don’t think this is really a bad thing. As someone who has been to the top of the raiding world and logged far too many hours in arena as well, I welcome the ability to take a slower pace in the game.
Thoughts
Overall I’m quite impressed with how well Cataclysm turned out for Blizzard. As a member of the community who quit Wrath of the Lich King for the simple sounds of an Xbox 360 I can proudly (or not) say that I’m back under the comfortable wing of Cataclysm. That is until Deathwing decides to set us all a blaze. See you at the auction house.
