Wait, only two of the six capital cities in Cata got significant attention? Oh Blizzard, how very Mythic of you.
No wonder you decided to just give away this partial, vanilla-area-only, mini-update for free.
And I feel bad for the two interns who obviously got fired for spending an entire year and only managing to revamping one city each. What happened to the C team working on WoW? Did they get promoted to making maps for SC2 or something?
(And because no, I’m not playing, what other zones have been largely ignored?)
Hardcore Casual 
Curious, SynCaine: what happened in the last month or so to flip you over from posting a whining post about Blizzard every now and then, to posting one every couple of days? Did they run over your dog or something? Half your DarkFall clan went back to WoW? Enquiring minds want to know.
For the first time in 3 years they are giving everyone new content, myself included.
(And come on, how funny is the 2/6 capitals in WoW, when WAR did a very similar 2/6 caps themselves?)
Well thats not technically true, undercity has some pretty big changes on the surface. Tut tut syncaine try research a bit more if your gonna hate ;)
If only cataclysm added some rafts and a badly animated squid instead……..
Careful now, they might sell you a raft for $25.
The squid you have to wait 3 years for though, but it’s going to be EPIC!
Dont give them any ideas please
You forgot to call the city updates “reskins”. I think you’re going soft on WoW. I bet in a week this blog will be nothing but screencaps of your new worgen mage.
It’s almost like listening to an american christian-right preacher working up to a spittle-flecked homophobic rant at sunday sermon, while a well-oiled “masseur” is chopping out the meth back at the motel.
Methinks he doth protest too much. My money’s on a goblin hunter.
If the only thing they had done for the non Cataclysm buyers were to revamp the two cities, there might be a beef there. They revamped the whole 1-60 experience, making it easier to get from quest hub to quest hub and more breadcrumbs taking you to the next zone when you are “old” enough for it. New class/race combos makes for happier players, like those who wouldn’t roll a blood elf pally because they were too pretty, now have Tauren to choose, and that is just one of several new combos. Adding quests inside dungeons for the dungeon finder crowd makes it easier than the search for instance quests used to be. Gear from quests kinda matches now, too, so you don’t look like a clown until you hit Outlands.
Some old dungeons got new content, not that I like all of it (big boo on the Shadowfang revamp!). Hogger as a Stockades boss is kinda cool. Being able to pop a tabard over your ragged armor and earn rep at any level is also a big plus.
I’m leveling up a new troll druid, like every other alt-a-holic, going through the new leveling experience and absorbing all the instances at their right times, so I haven’t seen everything yet. At level 29, it feels pretty good so far. I might not need to buy Cataclysm for months with all this new “free” content.
So, yeah, I’m a fan girl right now. Just let me find the right place to go afk so I can be killed instantly by Deathwing, and my day will be perfect :D
How could they make it any easier to get from quest area to quest area? The game is practically checker boarded with flight paths and designed around the premise that the average intelligence level of the player is 4th grade. Maybe they will put a warning on the box to let the window-lickers know they shouldn’t eat the DVD.
From what I understand (since I’m not playing and not planning too), players no longer need to run to a flight path if they’ve never used it before. As soon as a quest directs you to an area, the flight path opens up.
Did they revamp the whole 1-60 level experience? On the day of Cataclysm, I hopped on my level 20 blood elf hunter, wandered around and didn’t notice any changes. Then I did a quest that took me to Undercity and didn’t see anything big there. Then again, I’d never been there before, so I might have missed something. But it was a yawn, so I went back to Eve.
More WoW posts… I guess I’ll keep waiting for the Blood Bowl post. Hehe
On the topic of revamp of 1-60 – yes, there is a sizable amount of new quests, and, yes, a number of the old quests have been given new rewards or organized into chains, but a lot of the quests are essentially unchanged.
I am a loremaster, which means I am redoing quests now (long story, just read the thread below, Blizzard didn’t kept their promise of retaining credit for completing quests that didn’t change). I kept written notes for three zones, all of which were reported to be revamped significantly, and by my count the number of new quests is 32%. Zones like Silverpine Forest (most if not all quests are new, wasn’t in the three zones I counted) are far and few between, and zones like Dustwallow Marsh (most if not all quests are old, wasn’t in the three zones I counted either) prevail.
More on quests and quest counts:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1118392925
@Noizy:
They did revamp 1-60, but left starting areas for Draenei and Blood Elves more or less untouched. The logic seems to be that these areas, added in TBC, were already good enough in terms of quest flow and rewards.
Arathi Highlands. Bugger all happened; which is a pity, because Stromgarde is a great story and they persist in not doing ANYTHING AT ALL with it.
To be honest I was underwhelmed by the changes. Sure, there’s some nice gimmicks and phasing here and there, but after all the reports of ZOMGAWESOME it was just a bit meh. I even played with the music on to try and get into it, to no avail.
I must just be too tired of the formula…but still not enough to find EVE fun.
Oooooooooooh….topical!
“…what other zones have been largely ignored?”
Mulgore… fucking Mulgore.
“Careful now, they might sell you a raft for $25.”
I laughed out loud. In a silent room. At my workplace.
Thank you.
And there is a raft — apparently the thousand needles zone is flooded and players are given a raft to get around with when they get there. Can’t be used in any other zone though.
If you like your MMO’s the brainless equivalent of a Facebook browser game then more power to you. However people need to look for something more and something that does not draw them in because they are now considered casual and Blizzard spends a lot of money on advertising.
Look I like Blizzard as a company and I do applaud the ONE innovation they added to MMO’s which is the Look for Group Finder, but WoW is not the pinnacle of the genre. It is the “cutest” and easiest” of the genre and therefore it succeeds because 4 year olds can play it. If you like that then fine. But I need more of a challenge.
Every MMO is easy, don’t kid yourself. If you want to test your “skill” play a twitchy FPS or an RTS.
I play DF, so…