New expansion but the same old comments. The graphics look dated! The raids are too hard, easy, not good enough loot! Quests are on rail! Etc… etc… etc…
Seriously? Have you guys been paying attention at all these past years? If you just started playing WoW I forgive you but today I’m addressing the veterans who have already jumped on the WoW fail wagon mere hours after launch. You know who you are.
Today we’re going to have a critic 101 class. See, it’s fine to critique a game for whatever flaws it may have. Bugs, features not working as intended, bad tuning and any issue you really feel like discussing. It’s fine. It’s okay to want a product to improve and talk about it. Hell, it’s probably the number one reason why people blog.
But here’s the tricky part. You have to be able to differentiate between a flaw and between the actual game. To provide an easy example I’ll use cinema. Last year I was reading a movie critic being mad at The Avengers because it featured superheroes. Yes… someone was mad that a superhero movie featured superheroes… makes sense right?
So in the same vein of idea it boggles me a bit when I read people being mad at MoP for not reinventing WoW on the spot. Graphics look like they did in 2o04! Well yes, the game did come out in 2004? It’s still the same raids! They just changed the bosses and put in new skins! Of course they did, did you expect WoW raiding to suddenly not be WoW raiding?
Think about it for a moment. Would it make sense for WoW to suddenly have a completely new graphic engine? To adopt a 7 man raiding format with no tanks? To get rid of healers and give every heals suddenly? Or why not get rid of class completly? Change combat to now feature action combat with combos like God of War? Have a platforming dungeon for a change?
If the above sounded stupid it was meant to. WoW is WoW and it will remain WoW until they shut down the servers and that is fine. It’s a game made in 2004 that for the time was revolutionary and has become the template nearly all the other MMOs since. Around 9 millions people keep paying for the game and are telling Blizzard to not change a winning formula. They have also said through 3 previous expansions that they expect WoW to remain WoW at its core.
So, to all the critics out there bemoaning that MoP didn’t turn WoW into a completly new game I ask, what did you honestly expect to happen?
I would ask though, what is it that makes WoW WoW and what would be a change or concept which would be not-WoW? New graphics wouldn’t make it not-WoW, not that I’m saying that WoW should have new graphics or that we should expect them.
Obviously switching to 7-spot instances would be a dramatic change and might be not-WoW. What about 10 and 25 man raiding? Dual raiding tiers? The new talent system is a radical redesign. Again, I’m not saying that these things make it not-WoW, but clearly there is a lot that can change, in seemingly dramatic ways, that do not unmake the game.
In the end I am reduced to stroking my non-existent beard (bad day to shave) and pondering philosophically, “What is World of Warcraft?” In a broad sense I think that WoW is still WoW, but for me personally, WoW is no longer WoW, not because they made it a 7-man tankless platformer, but because the changes added up to something less than everything but more than nothing.
It might help to differentiate two types of criticism. One would be “should I buy this game?” And if so, the dated graphics might be an issue. The other is “how is this expansion/patch?” In that case, the graphics aren’t relevant because they are unchanged and cannot be expected to change. The result could be “WoW sucks, don’t play it! But buy Mists of Pandaria, it’s great!”