Dear Malstrom,
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It sounds like your friends are younger than 25 years of age. One thing I am trying to grasp about WoW is that many players literally grew up with the game (meaning they started playing when they were 14 years of age or weren’t an adult). Many might have began playing the game during one of the expansions.Ask your friends, “What is Warcraft?” It’s a good question. What is Warcraft? I’ve been playing Warcraft since the first game came out in 1994. What is Warcraft? What does it do? What ought it to do?
The intro to Warcraft 1 gives us our answers. The beginning: “Two factions battled for dominance…” The end: “Welcome to the World of Warcraft.” Ten years after Warcraft 1 came out was World of Warcraft’s release.
Warcraft is about two factions battling for dominance. Only in Warcraft 3 (and this doesn’t include the expansion) did the factions band together to defeat an external threat (Burning Legion).
In Vanilla, there was no villain to fight. World of Warcraft was all about two factions battling for dominance. Look at the original intro:
“Four years after the mortal races banded together… the drums of war echo once again…” World of Warcraft was never designed around a ‘bad guy’ but about Alliance Vs. Horde.
The reason why I suspect your friends either didn’t experience Vanilla or were too young to be fully cognizant of it (younger than 18) is because everyone who experienced Vanilla knew there was no bad guy. There were bad guys in the sense of Oynxia (a dragon) or C’Thun (giant insect guy).
Don’t let the peaceful viewing of Pandaria in the trailer fool you: the expansion is all upping the war between Alliance and Horde. Metzen has stated this directly.
Metzen also stated something else: that WoW has become too dark. It needs to get lighter. What does he mean by this?
Vanilla was not a dark game but actually an extremely bright one. The only ‘dark’ things in the game was the Scourge in the Eastern Plaguelands. The vast majority of the content dealt with gnolls, bears, kobolds, and other critters. In Stranglethorn, you did nothing more than kill tigers and panthers. You killed a TON of raptors. The Vanilla raids varied on the location of that world. There would be a dragon in one raid. In another raid, there were evil giant insects.
In Burning Crusade, the game turned darker. Illidan was mad and you were constantly fighting demons. Almost every zone was filled with demons. Outland was more alien and different from the usual fantasy elements. Aside from Nagrand and Zangermarsh, Outland was nothing but demonic, shadowy, and dark.
One of the common complaints at this time was people missing attacking furlbogs, gnolls, and bears and stuff. Burning Crusade was more about killing demons all the time.
In Wrath of the Lich King, the game got much darker. Aside from Storm Peaks, every zone was about you battling the Scourge, an Undead army.
Cataclysm was, by far, the darkest WoW has gotten. Deathwing goes around, destroys the world, and much of the game revolves around elements going mad (return of Ragneros) and evil cults like the Twilight Hammer. In 4.3, I’ve seen on the PTR, is extremely bleak.
Above: This is extremely bleak.
The point is that all this darkness and ‘evil villain’ is not what made World of Warcraft popular in the first place. People were charmed with the colorful world, with the dwarves drinking and saying crazy phrases like “KEEP YOUR FEET ON THE GROUND!”, with the Night Elf female dance, with Ironforge, with Undercity, and enjoyed exploring the world. The context of the game was never about killing a villain. It was the world.
Mists of Pandaria appears as if Blizzard is trying to recapture the lightning in a bottle that Vanilla WoW had. Whether or not they are successful in that remains to be seen.
I honestly think MoP will be a bigger expansion than Cataclysm. Why? Much of Cataclysm’s content was tied into revamping the old world. Not everyone saw this. And once you leave an area like the Barrens, you rarely come back. In MoP, all the content seems to be in new content with nothing revamped except for a couple of dungeons.
I think MoP looks better than the previous three expansions. In the previous expansions, it seemed as if the game was expanding mostly vertically. More dungeons. More raids. More battlegrounds (with vehicles). While the game will expand vertically some more, it seems there is more emphasis on expanding the game horizontally.
Two years ago I asked someone in Blizzard about making instances where only a couple of people could do (someone with their friend). Why is every instance a five man one or a raid? There is a huge gap between playing solo and then you go into a five man group. There were elite quests back in Vanilla that somewhat bridged this gap but Blizzard took them out. Blizzard has been getting these requests for quite some time so they answered with PvE Scenarios. And what do people do if they do not raid or pvp? Another Blizzard answer were Dungeon Challenges. What about dead time while waiting for things? Pet battles.
Whether or not this stuff is good or not, I cannot say. But Blizzard is trying to address holes in their game.
You say I am in touch with the mass market, but I would say that Blizzard is in uncharted territory here. WoW should not be as popular as it still is. One day, the game will die. So it is difficult at this point to figure out if Blizzard’s response is the right one or not.
I consider MoP to be a good move for WoW. And I consider myself more along the ‘average consumer’. I find this direction far more exciting than placing another villain on the box and saying, “Villain does bad things. Alliance and Horde must band together to defeat villain.” Metzen said WoW is returning to Warcraft 2. If this is true, there will be lots of war. The villain will be the opposing faction.