Corporatespeak
Mind you, Cataclysm still sounds great - especially Goblins and Archaeology. And here’s hoping the Epic Moose Mount makes it in for the Winter Olympics.
Blackrock Depths
The scale and size of the dungeon is amazing – epic Dwarven architecture, of even greater ambition than Ironforge. You start in rough hewn tunnels before emerging out into majestic amphitheatres, arenas, and lava-strewn forgeworks. The Dark Highway in particular is enough to make you stop and take copious screenshots. It feels like a living, breathing, working underground city.
Some of the mechanics are beautiful too – opening a wall cabinet reveals the portrait of a fallen Dwarf Lord, whose obituary message reveals the location to the Shadowforge Key. And there are many moments where you look down on somewhere you’ve been, or somewhere you’re working toward.
It’s also very complicated, and easy to get utterly lost. We did, several times, despite having copious guides, screenshots, maps, handwritten notes, and a old-skool veteran in the party. We stumbled into the Grim Guzzler at around midnight, sunk a long cool Thunderbrew, and called it a night.
There are a million bosses, many which you run into before realising, and all of who seem to drop cloth blues, despite this being the only place in Warcraft where you can forge Dark Iron. BRD is also full of truckloads of mobs, everywhere you turn. We must have killed an entire Dwarvish nation just getting to some of the bosses, so much so that we felt some kind of penance might be due.
The sheer numbers are what makes it seem like a real place - spectators cheering the arena, forgesmiths at work, miners, technicians and engineers working on weapons and great siege engines. I can see why Blizzard reduced the trash on modern dungeons, and am glad they did for everyone’s sanity, but less NPC activity does take some of the life out of the newer instances.
It would have been an incredible challenge to play on level back in the day, with 6+ pulls being common. We were all hovering around 55 last night, but despite my Bear tanking being pretty rusty, all the dungeon nerfs & player buffs meant we dominated most everything, even when our healer was annihilated by 800 angry wrench throwers.
Weekly Marmot
(In)fidelity
More likely he’s just really good at playing mmo’s the way you’re meant to - that is, making in game friends quickly, finding a guild, jumping into pugs, etc. Not relying heavily on playing with people you already know. And certainly not playing just to compete for end game status, which pretty much requires commitment to a single game.
I can only keep up with my WoW guild because they are (mostly) as casual as me. So there’s no progression raiding (other than Blackrock Depths this week!), and hence no pressure. Even so I can’t imagine dropping WoW for a month or two to try Fallen Earth, then hopping over for some quick STO, back to WoW, then a taste of SW:TOR. Even finding the time for single player games is challenging when you’re hooked into the MMO feed.
Penny-Arcade nailed it, as they often do. I WoW mostly with people I know IRL, which makes MMO fidelity more compelling.
If I wanted to make and play with virtual friends, I guess hopping around would be easier. I did play Warhammer for about 30 minutes, and dipped into LotRO too, for 90. On both occasions I was pretty quickly overwhelmed with the task of re-establishing ties to friends in game. Or should I say, selling them on the idea of moving to something new, and retiring or abandoning a game we had all invested a lot of time in – and still enjoyed. It seemed that it was either/or in terms of other MMOs. Either play LotRO, or play WoW, but not both.
Having said that…TOR is going to require some careful consideration. A sci-fi setting is less appealing than high fantasy (despite my reading preference being totally the other way around - other than A Song of Ice & Fire, great Fantasy fiction is pretty rare), but the Bioware polish and depth of Star Wars lore could – should – be a killer combo.
Wowkindy
They are great because they start from the assumption that you know nothing about being a Hunter. Nowt. Zip. He introduces each skill or talent that you get, explains what it does, and shows you how to use it. Even skills you don’t actually ‘get’ – like kiting, jump shooting, etc. There’s a video every two levels or so, each one adding a little more to The Knowledge.
It’s great content, and it’s surprising that there’s so little of it about. There’s plenty of “how to nail boss x” strategy videos, and places like Tankspot are invaluable sources of end game strategies. But there’s very little in the way of video guides to starting out, class basics, and how-tos.
One reason is videos are painful to produce, take hours longer than you expect, and (at least here in 64k-if-you’re-lucky upload country) days to upload to YouTube etc. Another is you have to really know your stuff to make it worthwhile, and be a good teacher at the same time. But there’s 8 quintillion WoW players out there, there’s people doing incredible machinima, and there’s plenty of great teachers.
Imagine a site with video guides for each class, taking it slowly and teaching people how to play by showing rather than telling. Introducing each skill, demonstrating it, building up to rotations, glyphs, talent builds, the works. It would be an invaluable resource, a Wowhead/Wowwiki for how to play from the ground up. A WoW Kindergarten. Wowkindy. Make it so!