World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem

[Mar 08, 2012, 09:38 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

The World of Warcraft Website now offers a postmortem written by Greg 'Ghostcrawler' Street, who discusses the outcome of the Cataclysm expansion for Blizzard's MMORPG. He says they are pleased with how the 1-60 revamp turned out, but frankly answers "everything else" when asked what didn't work out as planned, adding: "Seriously though, we tend to be our own harshest critics, so it’s actually easy for us to point out things that didn’t work out as expected." He takes a constructive turn at the conclusion, outlining the lessons they will apply from this experience to the upcoming release of the Mists of Pandaria add-on.

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Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem

Mar 8, 2012, 10:37

Frijoles

Some good quotes: Players ended up teleporting to nearly every destination, and it gave Cataclysm a disjointed feeling, detracting from that feeling of exploration and discovery. I hated the zone layout for Cataclysm. In Wrath, you had this huge area to cover and the world felt huge. As a mage, Cataclysm was tiny. Want a new zone? Teleport back to Stormwind and take a portal. Hell even guild members can easily get back to their bind points now with the guild perks. The place felt tiny. Compared to Wrath that had a single portal for the whole continent (unless you used some of the toys). I'd also like to see them make a combined capitol city again, but I haven't seen anything about that. I miss seeing horde. And not being together makes the holiday achievements a pain in the ass. questing ended up being too linear. It didn’t feel like you could fly into a zone, find some quest givers, and explore. Couldn't agree more. I bitched about this to my guild mates. Want to do Deepholm? You get to do ALL of it! Ugg. What a fun zone the first time, but after that it was such a god dammed grind. Just like all the zones. At least the final two zones you could pick either one. But you pretty much had to go through Deepholm on every alt you had to get to 85. It’s a sad feeling, and a real failure on our part, whenever someone says “I want to play WoW this evening, but I just don’t have anything to do.” Amen to this. And this is the main reason I don't login and haven't for the last two months. There's nothing to do. There's nothing to explore. There's nothing new. When they do add shit, it's grind baby grind. The Fireland dailies are a good example. Pretty cool when they came out, until you realized how bad the grind was. I believe they're the main cause of my burnout. After reading the postmortem, I'm happy that they learned some lessons. I hope they can apply those lessons to Mists. I feel that expansion is going to be the make it or break it expansion for me. If it sucks as much as Cata, then WoW will really be dead to me. It's been what, 8 years now? Can't say I didn't enjoy a lot of it. It's about time to move on though.

		Date	Subject	Author
	1.	Mar 8, 09:50	Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem	Omni
>>	3.	Mar 8, 10:37	Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem	Frijoles
	17.	Mar 8, 19:26	Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem	DedEye
	2.	Mar 8, 10:33	Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem	Verno
	6.	Mar 8, 11:16	Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem	Mr. Tact
	7.	Mar 8, 11:52	Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem	Mashiki Amiketo
	8.	Mar 8, 12:58	Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem	SimplyMonk
	9.	Mar 8, 14:10	Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem	Agent.X7
	4.	Mar 8, 10:53	Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem	Verno
	5.	Mar 8, 11:10	Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem	Ozmodan
	10.	Mar 8, 15:32	Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem	Asmo
	13.	Mar 8, 16:41	Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem	MattyC
	11.	Mar 8, 15:41	Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem	Creston
	12.	Mar 8, 15:48	Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem	Cutter
	14.	Mar 8, 16:45	Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem	Hatyara
	15.	Mar 8, 16:55	Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem	eunichron
	16.	Mar 8, 16:56	Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem	Wallshadows
	18.	Mar 9, 02:24	Re: World of Warcraft Cataclysm Postmortem	ShakaUVM