With the latest expansion for Blizzard’s behmoth MMORPG beginning the long rumble towards release, Zero1gaming recently caught up with a long-serving World of Warcraft player who’s been in the BETA testing and asked him what he thought.

(Please be aware; the views contained below are those of one player and not necessarily those of Zero1gaming as a whole – so please consider that before flaming us if his views on WOW do not co-incide with yours!)

What’s the Score with Warlords?

First a bit of background: I’m a long-term WoW player. I’ve been part of the management team of a successful raid guild, for whom I main tank as a Blood Elf Paladin, since the early days of Burning Crusade. Before that I played (and raided on) a Hunter. I’d love to say that if you are into the scene you’d have heard of us, but you won’t have. We’re on an obscure European RP server and we’ve never had a meaningful world ranking. I’m including this simply so you have an understanding of how I play the game and what my expectations of an expansion are. So, to Warlords. My expectations for the expansion started out low. With the departure of Ghost Crawler Blizzard seem to have lost a lot of their sense of direction. That said they do have a history of putting out exactly what they need at the time they need it, so never count them out. This time however I am not so sure they’ll manage it.

What are they giving us?

Ten new levels, new questing content & zones, spaceships garrisons, companionsfollowers, a smattering of 5-man instances that promise to be nearly interesting in terms of their difficulty (your mileage may vary), new models for older races (well, apart from the Blood Elves, which doesn’t seem like the best choice as they are the most played Horde race, but… ) and about a hundred gazillion Orcs.

Yes Orcs.

Again.

Now let’s be fair, there may be other antagonists in later content patches. At launch, however you are going to see a huge amount of Orcs.

The basic storyline it that both the Horde and Alliance trying to stop an alternate universe version of the Horde invading main universe Azeroth. To do so you will travel through the Dark Portal to the alternate universe’s Draenor and set up a beachhead, gain allies among the locals (more Orcs for the Horde and Draenei for the Alliance) before building a base (the aforementioned spaceship garrison) and setting out to stop the Iron Horde’s nefarious plots. This will take you through the various new(ish) zones until you reach Nagrand where the levelling story concludes and the real game gets started again. So how does this experience pan out?

Firstly, I have to remind everyone that this is a Beta. That means a lot of unfinished guff to deal with. That said, the fundamentals are all now in place for the finished product. What we have is beautiful. The zones all have their own themes and these are very well realised. Each zone also has a story that ties into the overall story and some sub-stories that flesh things out for those who like their lore. These are not bad, if a touch predictable. Sadly these stories are still being delivered to us in the same way that quests have been delivered to us since vanilla. Dumb plain text from a static NPC. The quest types are also unchanged, kill X, collect Y or transport Z. Sure, there are a few quests that are now delivered by a spot on the map rather than an NPC, but in the end it’s the same disengaging experience. In a post SW:tOR world this is completely unacceptable, especially from a company with the resources of Blizzard. In addition, you can’t fly, not even when you get to level 100. Yes, even those mounts that people spent real money on are now gimped in relevant content. Way to smack your customers in the mouth, Blizzard.

So, that’s the worst of the bad stuff out of the way, and frankly other than the flying it’s not a big thing. Let’s face it; levelling content is disposable no matter how appalling it is. Once you are though it there’s the real game to play. That’s not to say that there are not niggles. Spaceships Garrisons and companions followers (I’ll get bored of that joke soon I promise) are fun, but while you can have all the buildings to gather resources you cannot have all the ones to assist with professions at once. The same applies to all the fun stuff. This is a blatant money grab, as you have to get everything you want from a building then knock it down to build the next one, thus extending the time you need to keep forking over your sub fee if you want to get everything done. On the subject of crafting the log-on-every-day model is back as you can only make a very small amount of relevant resources each day and all the worthwhile crafted stuff takes huge quantities of materials (again, this may be tuned before launch but they are only making it take longer as beta progresses). The instances and raids are decent, even if the 5-mans are easier than I’d like and they’ve still not fixed the how-to-make-more-than-one-tank-have-fun problem. Overall, the things you will be doing are pretty much as they have always been.

There has been a considerable amount of fiddling about under the hood. Most of this is for the good, especially the stat squish. I would have preferred everything to come down to late Burning Crusade levels but I understand the need to boost Stamina to Wrath levels in order to improve the PvP experience. Ability pruning has helped simplify the game without completely annihilating the ability of the truly skilled player to shine and many of the perverse incentives are no more. The top-level talents I’ve had the chance to play with are nice, with some involving engaging new styles of gameplay. That said if you are a fan of tank self-sufficiency prepare to be disappointed. While active mitigation is still important there is nothing like the current level of self-healing and ability to mitigate damage.

In the end your interest in Warlords will come down to two things; do you like Orcs and do you find the current WoW style fun. If so I suspect you are the target audience. If not? Not so much…

© 2014, zero1gaming.com. All rights reserved. On republishing this article your must provide a link to this original post