Last week Blizzard went on a media frenzy and released a whole load of information about the next expansion for World of Warcraft. As you all know, I recently quit WoW for various reasons - most notably that there was nothing new coming down the pipeline. Of the information released last week, most of it still doesn't change my mind.
However, a couple items hold promise. One is the "vehicle combat" that is mentioned. While it might not be new, per se, it is new to WoW and actually sounds quite interesting. Near the end of the new 10-minute Lich King preview video that was released, aerial combat is also shown. While this is most likely a PVP-related improvement, I actually hold out hope that aerial and vehicle combat will be integrated in new and interesting ways into PVE content, as well.
Imagine an instance of nothing but vehicle content, or a quest where you have to perform aerial combat with opposing forces (more than just the static bombing quests they introduced with Burning Crusade). It does hold all form of possibility.
I'm slightly interested in the death knight class that is also being introduced, but that's probably because the mechanics behind it are different than anything WoW has done before.
Its pretty likely that I will come back to WoW around expansion time, if for nothing else than to take a couple characters to 80 and get a feel for the "new" end-game. However, I see nothing in this information that will greatly affect my decision to quit playing WoW. With the introduction of two sizes for every raid (10-man and 25-man), it seems like they still want to force you to "raid or die". While they are making it easier for the more casual player to see this content, it still requires time set aside for that purpose, and not everyone can make set plans in-game for these events.
It almost seems as if less and less people are raiding, so they're attempting to salvage that aspect of the game by allowing smaller raid sizes for all raids in the game. I wonder what direction they will go if that doesn't work?
Monday, May 12, 2008
New WoW Expansion Info
Blogged at 7:43 AM
Topics: gaming, world of warcraft
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2 comments:
Blizzard agrees with you about one bit :P There will be vechicle combat in PvE...or at least something very close. Here's the discription -
A raid encounter in the Nexus will let players free drakes and then fight on their back, allowing them to use their abilities. Bronze, Green, and Red drakes will be available and each one of them will have his own set of abilities. The boss fight is tuned around the abilities of the drakes and players will be able to pick any combination (e.g. 3 Green, 1 Bronze, and 4 Red). There's a boss fight that has lots of adds in it, and one of [the drakes] can apply this buff to a bunch of adds while another one can basically consume the buff and get health back from all of it and also assume a tanking role. So your tank is then healing himself based off of this debuff that another one is applying to everyone.
- Dragons, vehicles, close enough right?
As for the "Raid or Die" deal (I might be biased, but I still think WoW is heaven compared to FFXI) Here's a few more quotes for ya-
Heroic dungeons weren't rewarding enough in BC, Wrath of the Lich King will change that and make player feel that Heroic instances have their own tier of loot instead of a few additions to the normal loot table. Expanding the Heroic Badge system will be a major step to achieve this.
-So you can make big groups to get gear (25 man raids), smaller groups (10 man raids and heroic instances), and solo stuff (Questing, crafting, PvP). Seems to me that all the bases are covered :P
Here's some more news for ya. You mentioned that WoW was feeling like the same old same old (and I kind of agree) so here's some good news for ya :P These are descriptions of some quest chains in WotLK.
There's this whole quest chain in Howling Fjord where you learn how to train falcons. You do a number of quests where you get a falcon pet and you send it out and it has to kill things and then come back to you; you learn the basic controls of the falcon. Then it has this great climax where you get to go to the edge of the cliff and actually control the falcon from his point of view and then you have to steal these eggs that are down on a cliff that are heavily protected.
There's another quest where you get to assume the form of an iron golem and there are these huge jump pad runes all over a very vertical... it's in Howling Fjord, that zone with the huge cliff walls... there are these runes all over the cliff wall and you get to control this iron golem as he's doing these giant jumps up and down the cliff walls to give you a more visceral, gamey, platformey feel to it.
The Dalaran wizards here play a major role that ties into one of the early dungeons called the Nexus. First you have to do a few chores for them, like a quest to capture an enemy magic user and drag him back to the Dalaran camp. There's then a torture sequence where you repeatedly zap the prisoner with lightning bolts from a special quest item until he cracks and divulges information necessary for the quest to continue.
Blizzard also mentioned you'll able to fly around in planes and have you pick up passengers or pick them off, as well as fly around in helicopters, pick up and deliver cargo, and parachute out.
This sounds great to me! :O TBC really only introduced a few new types of quests, but if there are multiple ones like these mentioned above it'll really spice things up.
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