See Games Differently
Now you can get the top stories from Kotaku delivered to your inbox. Enter your email below.
By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
This shot of World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria was snapped by Dutch Twitter user Nederob just two minutes after the game was unlocked in Europe.
He says there’s been no server troubles. But Blizzard has also sent this out (26 minutes after the expansion went live), so… good luck!
We’ll have impressions tomorrow.
indeed
I tried it and it feels like just another MMO to me. Got to l lvl0 and cbf.
40
I don’t really think that’s fair. WoW’s brought some pretty interesting things to the genre over the years. Phasing, group finder and most recently cross realm zones. Whether you like those things or not you have to admit it’s some interesting stuff. Also, MoP’s an expansion to a game that’s over seven years old, you can’t expect them to do a complete overhaul to the games core systems with it. The reason people are still playing is because they like how the game plays. It would be super risky for Blizzard to try and change that too much.
Another thing, there actually have been some pretty interesting MMOs that have come out the last few years that have mixed things up a bit. Most noticeable for this year would be TOR (I know TOR came out last year but we’ll count it anyway because of how late in the year the release was), The Secret World and Guild Wars 2. They’ve all got aspects similar to other MMOs, because there all part of the same genre, but they’ve also got cool things that set them apart. TOR’s got it’s story, voice acting and ME style dialogue wheel. TSW has story and voice acting as well as the cool way you build your character with the ability wheel and it takes place in a setting that’s rarely explored with MMOs. GW2 has the more actiony combat, abilities tied to weapons rather than just class, dynamic events and the way questing works.
If you want to look further back or look at smaller MMOs than there’re games like Darkfall, Mortal Online and Fallen Earth. Darkfall and Mortal Online are super sandbox MMOs with action combat (Darkfall plays like a clunkier version of an Elder Scrolls game) and Fallen Earth is an FPS. You’ve also got Global Agenda as a shooter MMO, though honestly, when I played it I had a hard time thinking of it as an MMO. DCUO brought action combat to MMOs. The pvp in that is a lot of fun, though a bit laggy as there are no Oceanic servers.
Going further back you have the directional weapon swings and combos in AoC and the public quests in Warhammer online, which were sort of a prelude to GW2’s questing system.
I guess what I’m saying is, everyone always claims MMOs are dead but there are a lot of MMOs out there that do a lot of things differently from each other. Sometimes those difference are minor, sometimes they’re pretty large. Either way, there’s at least as much diversity between them as any other video game genre.
I wonder which April Fools joke Blizzard will roll in next. Will the next race be “Pimps”?
Blizzard have loudly declared here that they have run out of ideas.
meh, I have to admit I’ve never been that keen on MMOs. The trouble with WOW is that the trailers look really good, whereas the gameplay pics (as shown above) look pretty boring.
Also, agree with Bazz. The only thing more ridiculous than ‘Kung Fu Pandas’ would be ‘Ninja Wombats’ – note to Blizzard, if I see an expansion in 2 yrs time called ‘Fog of Wombatria’ I’ll be calling my lawyer.
Ultima Online, before its downfall, was still the best of the lot. Seeing things like this makes me remember why I stopped playing big title MMORPGs.
^ This. UO was so damn awesome, If private servers weren’t so bastardised and far from the original game, I’d go back to it in a heartbeat :
^This. i don’t think i have had so much fun with an mmo in a long time, i want to like other mmo’s but deep down their was something about UO that has scared me for life.
So much hate on here. Is this game really so bad that it personally offends you that people play it?
Because if so, you probably have bigger issues to deal with.
I think the success of WoW was the worst thing to ever happen to the PC gaming industry. Studios saw they could charge people twice for the one game Once to buy it and once again to play it and people did it en masse. It’s a mindset that is slowly dissipating with the increase in free-to-plays and decline in WoW’s popularity but maybe Diablo III wouldn’t have been an auction house with a game attached if Blizzard hadn’t gotten so used to wringing every last penny out of gamers with WoW. A game should either have an upfront cost and be free to play or have no upfront cost but a fee to play but not both.
WoW suffers from Call of Duty syndrome. That is, its a market leader, millions love it and it makes a lot of money. Its not enough for some people to simply not play, they need to put down anyone who does. Dont like the games? Cool. But dont hate just because its popular, that leads down the dark path of hipster gamer syndrome.
“Cool. But dont hate just because its popular, that leads down the dark path of hipster gamer syndrome.”
^ This.
In Blizzard’s defence, they seem to be attempting new things with WoW (even if I haven’t played it in years). The problem is that the community and the genre have already plateaued. Blizz seems to operate with some degree of autonomy unlike CoD which is turning into Bobby Kotick’s new cash cow with paid map packs.
I’m not terribly surprised that everyone has created a Panda.
During the Cataclysm launch in 2010, servers were overloaded with Worgen, while Goblins on the other hand kinda got the short end of the stick at launch.
*Yawn* Recycled Content again…You can only reuse the same sprites for monsters so many times….
Glad I’ve hooked into GW2
Leave a Reply