I don't even know where to start with my disappointment so excuse me if this post seems a bit scattered. I was really looking forward to this expansion. It looked great. Pandaria is a stunning, beautiful place. Visually this expansion is amazing but it seems like somewhere along the development process someone forgot to mention that no amount of aesthetic appeal can turn a boring experience into a fun one. Here's this brand new massive world to explore and go through, to discover and learn and experience but in order to do that you have to grind through the same mind numbing, tedious, and exhausting quests that no MMO can seem to break out of.
I logged in first thing on Tuesday and got going. One of the things that drove me insane about Cataclysm was the cutscenes. They were invasive, they were long, they were pointless. Upon starting the Mists quest chain I was greeted with not one, but two of these. At least you're able to skip these ones. I'm not sure where Blizzard's love of cutscenes came from, but it's at the point where in Diablo III your battle with the last boss of the whole game is interrupted 4 times by cutscenes. Nothing is worse than having the flow of your gaming session (let alone a boss fight) rudely broken by a cutscene.
I do maybe 5 quests after getting to Pandaland and I'm just so underwhelmed by it all. It's the exact same quests as always. Run over here and blow this up. Go over there and kill these guys. Bring me 5 piles of dog feces, moron. Wow, that's really fun. I can't wait to do this for 60+ hours until I get to max level and can finally do what I actually enjoy - PVP. The dungeons are aesthetically amazing yet unbelievably bland from a game play standpoint. Questing takes place in a gorgeous setting that you completely fail to notice because you're face down on your desk half asleep from how boring the quests are.
I know that in theory I could run battlegrounds until level 90 if PVP is what I enjoy. But let's be real here. The experience gain from battlegrounds after level 50 is fairly small and doesn't stack up to dungeon running, let alone questing. After level 70 it's a complete joke. The whole PVE experience is just so incredibly shallow that I can't bring myself to log on and plow through it. Unfortunately it's also the only viable option for leveling in a timely manner. I actually logged off day one and cleaned my apartment in favor of playing WoW.
These are just my feelings towards it, I'd love to play this expansion as it really does look great and there are a lot of changes that I like and want to see fully lived at max level. At some point I'll eventually suck it up and force myself to deal with it. I just wanted to get my personal experience with content that I found to be lackluster out there.
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