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429 of 472 people found the following review helpful.
Freed me from my WoW addiction
By MSB
I played WoW for six years and loved it. I downed most raid bosses while they were still relevant, achieved very high-rank PVP (and later Arena) titles, and was even satisfied as a casual player for over a year when my work schedule was rough. Then the Cata beta came along. Over the course of closely half a year, I dutifully tested each bit of content available and experienced more of Cata than most humans have on live, even now. And I hated it so much that I permanently left the game.
94 of 100 people found the following review helpful.
A streamlined experience and old world...that falls off a cliff towards the end
By VA Gamer
(+) The old lands of Azeroth were refined to great effect:
* Zone design and lore is more interesting
* Quest hubs are more plentiful and feel more organic, major cities and population centers were redesigned to be more practical and useful
* Phasing, cinematics, real time events, RTS segments, and guided messages that tells the particulars of an act or occurrence or course of events make it feel more like a modern RPG hybrid and less like a MMO
* The new game experience has been streamlined, flowing much more coherently levels 1 through 60
(+) The slight graphic updates and introduction of DirectX 11 effects make the game look far better than you might suppose - in particular for a distinctly aging engine with cartoonish art design and direction
(+) There is an foolish amount of quality solo and small-group content in the new post level 80 zones
(+/-) The class and mechanics changes, overall, were well thought out. They made the game even more accessible, early progress more fun and rewarding, and the popular gameplay more elegant. However, customization is fixed and stunted. The last leg of levels, 81-85, leave you sentiment like you're putting in time and benefitting levels without growing in power or versatility
(-) Too much homogenization amongst classes, specified by role, has occurred. Class and spec compoundings that once felt distinguishable have been altered in a ham fisted way, now functioning in an fundamentally identical manner to others
(-) Cataclysm is short on raiding content. What's present feels uninspired and rushed - numerous dungeon and raid bosses are copies from past expansions wrapped in new skins/assets
(-) Changes to healing mechanics have rendered the role formulaic and rote
(-) Despite the smorgasbord of content the "grind" (repetitive activenesses that will have to be performed ad naseum for reward or advancement) has been ramped up far beyond anything I ever thought I would see in a WoW expansion. This terrible design approach is pervasive, affecting everything from dungeon progression to tradeskill progression - in particular the new Archeology skill
(-) There is a gigantic gulf in difficultness among normal and "heroic", or modern difficulty, dungeons. Many tedious mechanics are introduced, errors are far less forgiving, there are too a good deal of enemy abilities that kill without any delay or closely instantly, and the time required to finish a single dungeon has been extended from a sensible 20-30 minutes to an hour or longer. It's not not common to invest hours in a dungeon only to have the other players give up out of feeling of annoyance at being hindered or criticized - leading to no one seeing any kind of reward or progression for their efforts
A symptom of the poor heroic dungeon design is an ugly social atmosphere. Players speedily grow short tempered and irate. The sense of gregariousness and community is abandoned, substituted by single minded greed as players squabble over any sensed reward their hours upon hours of grinding might, on galore off chance, grant them. It's a terrible and sudden shift that ruins the game and drives players away from a significant chunk of content.
Blizzard keeps introducing changes that exacerbate the issue, rather than extenuating it. And they apparently do so to spite their customers, as feedback has been overwhelmingly negative towards all of their recent developments. As a result the heroic and raiding community has sharply declined since the launch of Cataclysm. It has been distilled down to small, unsavory cliques of elitist and socially awkward players - the kind that, prior to WoW, could only have been found in the darkest corners of the grindiest and most unfun MMOs of 2000-2003.
--- Conclusion ---
Cataclysm is a lot of fun for new players and those looking to experience the rebuilt world of Azeroth. Blizzard has shown that innovative game design and proficiencies may work in MMORPGs. It's worth the cover price for the hours of quality gaming it provides to new and old players alike.
However, the wheels come off as you approach "the end game". The game transforms into a soul-sucking trial of banality and tediousness - seemingly designed with cold and uncaring calculation to make players unhappy and question their enjoyment of the genre as a whole.
World of Warcraft came along in 2004 and dragged this genre out of relative obscurity, leading to hundred million dollar MMO budgets and prime time promotion campaigns. So it's ironic that here, in it is twilight, Blizzard has abandoned the casual players that made it a success and transformed WoW into a ghoulish doppelganger of the MMOs it conquered long ago. Do they intend on courting the types of players that reigned over those archaic fossils of MMO past....and their unimportant subscription tallies? One may only wonder how Blizzard may do so much right in a game, just to turn around and fundamentally soil their own hard work.
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