remember how SWG failed? redoing everything, changing combat system etc. I can see WOW heading that direction. once something a bit better comes along everyone will hop on.

 

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That doesn't sound great, but hopefully at least the quests are good?

 

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I was a bit surprise to barely see any noticeable change in the amount of players in lotro. I really expected the game to "crash and burn" with the cataclysm expansion release. In the end i guess people are easily fooled by the "f2p" trick. Lotro has one thing WoW does not have, a good community of players. The game sadly lacks and feels very unpolished and buggy. As for WoW, now that game is very polished and is great, however the community in WoW... just terrible.

 

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I think what is happening is that the game is much more spread out again.

 

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Lol, I have been saying this for a year. And just now some people are realizing. The entire game is being developed this way. Play our way, or don't play, period. Spec the way we want you to spec, kill things the way we want you to kill things, follow the quest progression the way we want you to...basically, play our game for us the way we would play it.

Oh and pay us.

 

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There is no doubt WoW is becoming linear, there is very little thinking involved any more, everyone following the exact same quest lines, each class obtaining the same armors, weapons, using the same gems, enchants, specs, and builds like mindless zombies.


It is the complete opposite of Pre-BC WoW, and what made the game such a phenomenal hit is being slowly and systematically gutted which lends a lot of credence to the future consolzation of the game as that is the direction it seems to be headed in.


People keep saying the next big game will be the "WoW killer", I say no other game will do it, it will be Blizzard's greed, arrogance and ignorance in dumbing down this game so much that it can be played on a console that will kill it.

I kinda of like it myself and the one reason that I do is some of the zones like Hyjal if heavily phased, sometimes you don't even notice the little things that change when a quest will send you off a little and then back, things change, people disappear and such. They couldn't really do that if things were set up like the original game.

All and all it feels like I'm actually make a difference in the world. One other thing I noticed it seems some quests are actually phased. My wife and I were doing some escort quests we could see each other but not the guy we were escorting, or when you make the offering to the bird god person and she talks to you, even though we were in the same group we each had to do it but couldn't see the other actually doing it. To me it's all better like this, no more waiting in line to turn in a quest where the NPC wonders off to do something or other.

Can't please everyone. People used to complain that quests sent you running all over the place, and that you had no impact in the world...

I actually prefer the streamline questing. In the old world I couldn't do multiple zones at once I had to had to start deleting quests when my log was full which was very annoying. I really like the story driven quest lines, it feels a lot less like I am just the zones B---- running around delivering this note, doing groceries for this npc, picking up poop over here.


The quests I am doing advance a story line and with all the phasing it is as close to a dynamic world is I think we are going to get.


The exploration and discovering things like Mithan mentioned I do miss. However for me that feeling was short lived in WoW. Even in Vanilla compared to AC I felt the world was small and pretty rail roaded as it was. There was no deep dark cave to explore that I had to fight my way tooth and nail down for an hour to get to the bottom of, then call on my guildies to help me get back out of. You found a cave, reconized which cookie cutter cave lay out it was and instantly new where to go for the objectives.


So since I wasn't getting that aspect out of WoW anyway, I really like this type of quest chain. Since vanilla still contains zones with the old style questing format you can now expirience both ways as you level through the game from 1 to 85. I think this will really word as well.


As you start out you still get the 'chore' type quests, do this for that person and so on which is fitting for a new adventerer. However once you get into Northrend and then Cata your quests start to be more important in nature. I mean when I started the quest chain in Stormwind I was address as a Hero of Azeroth. I would have been insulted if he then asked me to do his laundry.

 

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To think that people used to be derisive of the ant trail addons that guided from one quest to anouther. Now Blizz has come to that also.

I am liking it.