A Last Look Back at World of WarCraft: Cataclysm
Sean W. Gibson / May 1st, 2012 No Comments
World of WarCraft: Cataclysm was the third expansion for the most popular MMO of all time, created by Blizzard Entertainment. At the time of release the expansion was widely anticipated and early reviews lauded the new zones, features, dungeons and raids. Since that time and with the first two major updates, WoW took a noticeable dive with subs (subscribers) due to various reasons ranging with frustration to boredom. With the Hour of Twilight 4.3 release, Blizzard sought to right many of Cataclysm wrongs by making dungeons and heroic dungeons much more manageable and bringing in the Raid Finder feature which for the first time allowed Pug raids (pick up group). With this feature most players actually got to see end-game content and enjoy upper tier gear without being a slave to their guild’s schedule. In this article we’ll take a quick look back at WoW Cataclysm and look back at some of the things that worked and bombed.
WoW: Cataclysm Final Thoughts
Anyways, as someone that loved the lore of WoW and of WC3 I really wanted to see how the story played out with these two central characters. Now though, thanks to the raid finder I had the incentive to build up my 85, grind out the heroics (which I will talk to later) and finally qualify item-wise for the LFR (looking for raid). It made WoW playable again since I had some incentive to continue playing – I wanted to kill the guy on the box and see how this whole expansion’s story arc ended and now I had a means of doing so. After playing through for a while I’ve looted some incredible top-tier gear and got to kick some Deathwing butt. Kudos to Blizzard for finally allowing players of my lifestyle for opening up this content.
Taking a step backward, I can say the single most frustrating aspect of World of WarCraft for me used to be playing through heroic dungeons. Like many gamers I’d join a group, maybe play through the first boss or two and along the way lose one or two members of the party. The requeue would take much too long and before I knew it I would have invested 1-1.5 hours in one single heroic only to be the last idiot standing and everyone else having already rage quit in frustration since the dungeon was just too darn hard. That meant a time suck with nothing in the game to show for it – and that got old really quick. I get the fact that heroics at supposed to be hard but you also have to consider the holistic gaming experience. In the future I hope there are three levels of difficulty for heroics, much like we’ve been promised with future raids and that the first to tier allows you to get enough oomph to take on the final raids. You’d be able to back and play the dungeons on insane mode for whatever incentive someone could dream up. Fortunately for me, patch 4.3 remedied the frustration and made the heroics enjoyable once again.
Thrall and Dorilina Hanging Out in HoT
I almost feels like theres three major groups of people when it comes to Cataclysm. The first group felt the game was nerfed too much and that all the end game content and top tier gear should be reserved for the serious grinders. Others got so frustrated with the game and lack of longevity behind the new zones and getting up from 80 to 85 that they just left WoW behind for other games. A third group, which might actually be a minority actually one I belong to, thought that Cataclysm started out well, had a horrible middle where we left the game completely for months, but returned when all the things we wanted were introduced with the 4.3 patch.
Overall, World of WarCraft definitely remains alive and well, with the upcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion promising to offer much more to the casual folks which gets us excited about the future of the game. If you quit WoW when you dinged 85 and we’re frustrated beyond belief, it’s actually a great time to revisit the game, kill Deathwing and prep for the upcoming expansion. While Cataclysm was been widely panned, I look back and feel that Blizzard took some risks and learned a lot about what makes WoW great and how they can keep it on top for a few more years to come.
Sean W. Gibson
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tags: blizzard , cataclysm , world of warcraft , wow
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