I'll preface this by saying that I have not personally seen the Alpha or Beta. I don't even know who has been in either. All I've done is read up on notes, watched videos, and read up on things that I could find. It's not enough to really get a good feel for the the way it will play out, but it does give me a bit of an impression as to where it is going.
At this point Blizzard has done 2 expansions for World of Warcraft. While each was different in various ways, both were eerily similar structurally. Wrath of the Lich King was clearly build using the same design philosophy as Burning Crusade was the first time--only with a bit more polish and a better understanding of where the major pitfalls were.
There was, and still is, a very drastic move from levels 1-60 to Burning Crusade. It's not just in the massive gear shift (when outland greens could be better than t3). It's most obvious in the changes in how leveling is handled--the much tighter quest hubs, and the explosion in the number of quests. The structure of the five mans, which became much smaller to fit short runs (and despite being more scripted, also became less dynamic). Even the aquisition in new abilities changed slightly. Heroics were introduced. A new profession added a major new facet to the game's economy. And even raiding changed from large, single instances to multiple smaller instances.
Wrath simply built on this model. Another new 10 levels. A new land with a linear quest progression (though now there were effectively 2 starting paths to keep things seperated better). Another new group of 5 mans. A new profession. Class changes. No new races, but a new 'hero' class...which was anything but heroic yet still managed to be completely overpowered (how they pulled off that contradiction still amazes me). It was also much easier than BC, and not just at the start either.
So now Cataclysm approaches us and we're starting to get a good look at what Blizzard is up to. Though I certainly don't know what is going on in their minds at Blizzard, it is pretty obvious that there are certain design goals they are hoping to achieve with Cataclysm:
1. Re-introduce the old world and zones and revamp the leveling process from 1 to 60 to make it more in line with the BC and Wrath design philosphy.
This is a big one. Not only were the actual zones updated (to support flying), but Cataclysm's design certainly involves a great deal of updating of the origional content. It looks like they are trying to completely update the questlines and storyline of the origional game in order to provide an entirely new experience from 1-60. Though I'm sure some things will remain untouched, a lot has been updated and there will be a lot of new things to find for old players. From what I've heard a lot of the starting areas are very different. Zones like Westfall, Aszhara, Ashenvale, Darkshore, Red Ridge, all seem radically changed. I assume that this will hold true all the way through to mid levels as well. And of course, the zones for 78-85 are all taken from previously inaccessible places in the old world (like Hyjal, which was there but you couldn't actually go to it).
2. Give the old world a true make-over, and increase the graphics quality of the entire game to increase it's appeal in the market.
This isn't as big, but is certainly necessary. Not only do the zones look better, and the new zones much better (seriously, some of the new zones are beautiful), but overall graphics quality has been increased. I believe I heard that updated engine supports DX10 (or maybe 11?), so much of the new quality doesn't really affect graphics card performance for newer cards. It's not perfect...WOW's graphics weren't state of the art even 6 years ago; but the style works very well even today in masking just how primitive the engine really is.
Another part of this is the addition of two new races. I'm not entirely sure that new races = new content, but the new starting zones look very nice and quite interesting. It's a bit interesting how the new racial traits are completely overpowered, though, compared to the older races...I assume they'll update that as well.
Even with that, all of the races receive new class and race combos. Now I'm originally alliance. And now I'm horde. Malfaire is a Blood Elf female, and honestly I really like the way she looks (I'm a sucker for my character's appearance and always have been). I'm not really a fan of the brutish look of the horde races in general. Tauren is an exception (I like their look). And Goblin may not be that bad either, so I'm happy with that. But I kinda miss the old alliance races. And I have to admit that Worgen is pretty sweet looking (I especially like the fact that they can look human, or worgen). Blood Elf is getting Warrior. But too bad they are not getting either Shaman or Druid...and neither is goblin.
3. Change the way gear and gear itimization is handled. Many 'confusing' stats are being removed and/or simplified. This doesn't just affect the gear itself, but the idea is to have and require fewer types of gear--no more gear that caters just to one spec of one class (I'm looking at you, holy paladin). This is certainly a dumbing down of gear and stats, though that's not necessarily a bad thing. They also added a 'mastery' stat, which favors characters who go down 51 points in a single tree (i.e. virtually everyone).
Along with this change is a massive gear update. All gear is being altered to fit the new stats. And not only that, the switch in gear from Wrath to Cataclysm is as big as the one from vintage to BC. I've seen Cataclysm quest greens that are equal to or better than ICC 25 Heroic gear. And stamina changes are massive...stamina itself easily doubles in Cataclysm (and that's just at the start).
In addition, raiding changes are designed to slow down gear stat bloat. Wrath's 2 to 3 level tiered gear caused major gear changes. TOC and ICC had three effective levels of gear: 10 man, 10-man heroic/25 man, and 25 man heroic. This caused an larger increase in gear levels between new raiding tiers. By making tier gear the same across 10 and 25 man, they reduce this problem to 2 predictable levels every tier (normal, and heroic). Of course they might destroy 25 man raiding in the process...but...
4. Increase difficulty from 80 to 85. By updating the old world and all of its content, Blizzard seems to be returning to the concept that the highest level content should be harder. Maybe not too hard at first, but definitely harder than Wrath at the start. They are also returning to the concept of smaller raids, but more of them. Across the tier it will have about the same level of bosses; but they will be spread across multiple instances. No one has seen the actual raids yet (that I know of) but the expected difficulty is supposed to be higher. And heroics are supposed to be much harder as well. Fewer AOE pulls. Required CC. The return of kiting, etc.
This makes sense to me. Especially since they are effectively re-introducing the game. And especially with the LFG tool, there is no reason why someone hitting 80 shouldn't already be familiar with the core mechanics of the game. I've leveled several alts since the LFG tool has been released, and it works very well for older level content (even as a mere DPS). We'll see though.
5. Do yet another major class revision. In some ways this makes sense. In a very real way, WoW's current class mechanics are broken, both for PVP and PVE. Things are so tightly tuned now that twitch gaming has really taken over the game. When I die in WOW nowadays it's virtually instant--from full health to dead in a few seconds. Now I'm a mage, and I know I'm a glass cannon, but that's not very fun. But it's damned annoying when a warrior charges me and in his initial barrage brings me to 1/3 health in about the same time I can get off an instant like a fire blast or blink...there is something wrong here and it's not just me being bad at pvp.
In BC there were a lot of class changes. But those seemed to make more sense to me. The entire game was changing back then. BC was a more radical break from the old world than Wrath was from BC. The addition of 10 more levels certainly changes things. But Wrath's changes seemed more for the sake of change. And Cataclysm in some regards seems the same. Though in other ways, I also see the need to address the twitching and fast nature of the game to something more realistic. The changes to healing makes sense to me. As is trying to reduce the impact of front-loaded burst damage. The concept of slowing down fights and slowing down the game won't just help PVP, but it will also help with designing new PVE encounters. Hopefully that will lead to more interesting encounters not based around artificial enrage timers or twitchy insta-death mechanics where if you lag for 1 second, or don't instantly react to something, your dead before you even have the chance to compensate.
7. Increase the story telling. This isn't so obvious at first blush. But having watched some videos of the new content it is clear that Blizzard is taking the next logical step from Wrath's 'story' progression and making the story take center stage. Probably not to the degree of, say, FFXI, or the first twenty levels of AOC, but it's obviously there. With flashbacks. Cutscenes in dungeons. And more inherent conflict not only between the horde and alliance, but also from within each faction.
This is a great thing IMO. FFXI, especially with its expansions, did a GREAT job in making the game feel like a FF game within a MMO. Though it did suffer from long cut scenes at times, they were almost always better than anything wow has today. A typical FFXI cutscene had the quality of, say, the wrathgate FMV...but there were hundreds of these throughout the story, and many of them were on a much grander scale than anything in WOW. Today most of WOW's 'RP' comes from annoying scripted conversations in raids that you have to sit through each and every time (horde saurofang, Kael, LK himself, etc). They are not dynamic. They are not interesting even the first time. And it's inexcusable that you can't skip them through repeated wipes.
This will bring a great deal of improvement to the game as a whole. And might help to offset the 'naxx effect'--where simply updating something old doesn't really work as well as something really new. Of course, part of the problem with Naxx was that...while many people didn't see it when it was 'new content'...a lot of people HAD seen it at 70 just by running through old encounters. New Naxx would have worked much better if the bosses had been not just updated, but radically altered. Cataclysm seems to be doing just that.
8. Alter Raiding to prevent gear bloat and people being forced to feel required to raid both 10s and 25s each week. This is the most controversial, and the most likely to fail. However, I do like the idea of 10 mans dropping the same gear (and I am an avid 25 man raider who would prefer 40 mans honestly). This does solve the gear creep problem that Wrath introduced. And it will make 10 man raiding more of an option to me if for some reason I can't keep a 25 man schedule.
But, I do fear that the change will severely wreck 25 man raiding guilds. I'm sure some will survive, but I'm afraid that they'll be hampered by being trapped in a more precarious position. But I also see most arguments against it being self-serving. The biggest problem with a 25 man guild is the fact that there are greater scheduling issues. And it's harder to find a voice there. Meeting people online can be hard, and becoming friends with 25 people almost impossible. 25 man guilds, and 40 mans guilds, are less personal. There is a larger barrier of entry. And you as an individual are less important (unless, perhaps, you are the main tank).
At the same time, 25 man raids are inherently more complex even within the encounters. ICC is a great example of this. A lot of fights require spacing between players--something trivial in a 10 man, but a damned pain in the ass in 25s (say, Deathbringer, or Princes, or Blood Queen, or Sindragosa, or Lich King, i'm mean fuck it). 25 mans may be less dependant on an individual (though this is not true in hard modes IME), but they are harder to execute in many situations. 10 mans put a larger burden on the individual player, but are mechanically simpler because they have to be.
With the gear change Blizzard promises to make 10 mans as hard as 25s. And I just don't see that. Though certainly there are fights where these can be accomplished, they will mostly be in tank-and-spank like encounters which are relatively straight forward. The more complex the mechanics of the fight, the more the 10 man's advantage will become.
Certainly Blizzard sees the need to provide some incentive to run a 25 man. They have talked about...more gold (yah?), and more tokens (double yay?). Both of these incentives are completely, utterly worthless. Money means nothing in this game anyway (and btw, I have no problem with this). And tokens are normally useful only for the first few months of a new tier (at most), or for heirloom items. But the real slap in the face is...token earning per week is capped! A 10 man raider can still earn the same number of tokens per week...he'll just have to run more dailies. A 25 man raider won't need to do that...and also will have no incentive to do so. Fucking brilliant.
Increasing item rates won't help much either. Considering the disparity today between 10s and 25s, the rate difference of today is annoying. But I guess since the gear is better we should expect that. I mean, a 10 man gives 2 items per boss. A 25 man 3 (1 item to split between 15 additional people). Equal split indicates that 25s should expect 5 drops minimum per raid boss...maybe even 6 (but that might be pushing it, they aren't sure.) I certainly don't see the reverse happening...i.e. making 10 man bosses drop only 1 item each. A guild would never get geared that way.
This, of course, means a 25 man raider will take theoretically less time to gear (and with drop patterns and 6 drops I'd say that the time taken would actually be less than the increased drop rate would indicate. It means that a 25 man raider will gear faster. Be required to do less out-of-raid activities (an because lock outs are shared, raiders cannot do as many raids per week anyway). And a 25 man raider will spend more time waiting for the next tier because they'll get through the cycle faster than a 10 man raider.
In some regards, this means that a 25 man raider will actually benefit from having the option of spending LESS time in the game than the 'casual' 10 man bracket. Not that I have a problem with this, come to think of it :) I certainly won't miss the annoying huge badge requirements for ICC stuff.
9. Reduce level creep. I should have touched on this earlier, but whatever. Another major change with cataclysm is a change in the amount of new levels earned. Now, other MMOs have limited level growth in an expansion, but WOW increased the level cap by 10 in both BC and WOTLK. In cataclysm the level range goes from 80 to 85. This isn't a content loss--reports indicate that it's going to require the same general level of effort and questing to get from 80 to 85 as it took to get from 70-80. We'll just have to do the same amount of effort for half the levels. But this does reduce the amount of new talent points (and we aren't getting a new level of talents either, which is interesting). This is probably a non-issue, honestly. The class revamp will have a bigger change to the game than the 3 new abilities we can expect to get by the time we hit 85. And the actual leveling experience won't change much (though you can expect me, and probably a lot of others, to spend MUCH more time doing 5-mans).
Obviously this also means a complete talent re-write, as now talent trees have to be designed around the idea that players will have 5 extra points to spend without having a taller tree. Hopefully they will design this in such a way as to increase options in trees, but with Mastery a major new feature I'm doubtful. I've peeked at some of the previews, but honestly they seem way to early to really evaluate in any meaningful way.
Anyway, I've gone on long enough with this post as it is. I find my interest in the expansion is quite high, higher than I was expecting. I mean, the main draw of the game has always been the ability to play with friends--something that just doesn't happen anymore. And my interest has definitely waned even as I've managed to re-establish myself in a new guild in a new faction, on a new server. And other MMOs are taking my interest too--FFXIV, and TOR are both in my target sights. But those are still a ways off, and Cataclysm seems to be looming. I would expect pre-events for Cataclysm will start within the next 3 months, with the expansion coming around October or November. Certainly I've heard that the Alpha was VERY rough, and the beta not much better. Certainly not nearly as polished as Wrath was at this point. So it's possible things will slip. But at this point its only a matter of time.
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