I consider myself a very average WoW player over the last 10 years. I have had a subscription for almost the entire decade. I now sub on and off as the content pulls me in. I have never been turned off by the humor or cartoony-ness of the graphics...
That said, I have never NOT purchased an expansion for WoW the day it came out. The last one was the closest I came to not purchasing, as many of the new features did not appeal to me (Battle pets being at the top of that, even above pandas!). But I wanted to play a monk and the landscape looked awesome...
Now that the dust has settled on Blizzcon, I see that the new X-pac will not contain any new races. Or classes. But it will contain a story that heavily involves time travel.
Not good.
Time travel is a concept that in every TV, game or movie I have seen it in means your product has jumped the shark and run out of ideas. The only thing worse in storytelling is the "It was all just a dream!" device. Not sure how they are going to implement it, but I would assume instance-style ala Caverns of Time or phasing. Fine for a patch. But didn't Blizzard just say in Cataclysm that creating a disjointed world was part of the reason it failed? Same with the Garrison concept. It's almost player housing...with phasing...which nobody likes and will be exploited in PVP...
I don't know. I hate bashing a game I have enjoyed for so long. Maybe this is the first expansion that we see the effect of hemorrhaging of thousand (millions?)of subscriptions. I don't know.
What I do know is that this the first time I have ever leaned heavily towards not buying the Xpack. As an average player, that makes me feel like I am not alone, and that there needs to be more of the things I would expect in a patch. What I see right now does NOT make me want for fork over $50. (New character models!!! Really?)
Cmon Blizzard, give me a better reason to stay! What is missing that you need to see from this Xpack? For me, the minimum needs to be a new race/new zone. Otherwise, what am I paying for?
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