n3farious wrote on Sep 27, 2012, 21:03:
Fuggin trolls. I'm sick of the kung fu panda references. The 'Pandas' have been part of the lore long before either movie came out.
Second, since the family and I all play, I purchased 5 copies of the digital version, and none of the physical. So, I contributed heavily to the 'poor retail performance'. The queue of 1200 players during prime times tells me that I'm not alone.
Finally, the expansion is very well executed. The artwork, engine upgrades and story lines are all phenomenal. Is the game dumbed-down for the masses from the old Molten Core 40 man raids? Sure. Are there a lot of usability enhancements which have been made to keep Blizzard's offering current with competition? Absolutely. Is the game worth playing? My monthly subscription says yes.
I bought it, because hey; I put in a TON of time in past years, and expansions were always a fun time to be around. My wife picked it back up again, so I figured I'd level a monk and call it a day when I got to level awesome and wasn't having fun anymore.
The things I've realized since getting back into it:
1) My server is dead. There really aren't that many people around. Even when there should have been tons of people around, when there was a queue when Cataclysm launched, when there was no mobs to kill... my server hit medium. Nobody excitedly dancing and emoting on new characters, not even a ton of people leveling new monks. It was really, really underwhelming.
2) Pandas are fucking stupid. The "they were always lore!" thing is BS, they were a joke. They've been around for quite a while, but never in any kind of major role, and that's because they're stupid and everyone seemed to know it and agree on that until Pandaria was announced and some fans decided they must be awesome then. The more I play the more Pandarians I encounter and the more I wonder why they chose them; the interviews Blue linked to here over the past week talked about how they were more serious than people realize, but no. No, they aren't.
Oh, and as for the Kung Fu panda references... at level 20 you get your spirit travel as a monk and go to Pandaria, and one of the first guys you have to talk to? Yup, Kung Fu Panda reference.
Hell, the female pandas look like Fiona from Shrek 2. It's hard to unsee once you notice it.
3) Leveling through the Cataclysm-redone areas I've hit on what I see as being the problem for the last two years. Pop culture overload. Everything is meant to be funny, or a pun, or whatever... where did the serious stuff go? Maybe Horde is different, but I'm so tired of lame pun quests already. The story was Warcraft was f'ing cool, and it's kind of been subverted by this tongue in cheek crap from the A-Team to Harrison Jones. I miss the old stuff, and Pandaland isn't like the old stuff.
I never cared about 40-man raids, don't have rose colored glasses that say this game sucked since Vanilla (which makes me laugh...Vanilla was rough), or any of that. It's not the quality of Pandaria that's the problem, but for me as a solo player it's the absolute shift in tone. This is not the Warcraft that people fell in love with.
It's still the best dungeon grouping or raiding game on the market, hands down. I wouldn't be surprised if digital sales make up for a lot more than they realize, and the expansion does ok. But, after playing a bit, the thematic change and the feel and the perception of the game is different; I'd be beyond surprised if the game stops bleeding players because of this and not surprised at all if it gets worse.