Saturday, March 24, 2012

Mists Info

The big news this past week was the information coming out of the press tour Blizzard did for Mists, and then the start of the beta. I have to say, after being a little ho-hum about the expansion at first, I'm more cautiously optimistic now.

A few things jumped out to me when going over all the released information. The first was they seem to have added a lot to do at max level. The whole Night in Mists thing to me showed that they understood a big problem with Cata was the lack of things to do at 85. So now we have scenarios, challenge mode, pet battles, farming, and not to mention more zones with the design intent of doing some zones either at max level or on an alt. The questing zone model in particular worked for me in BC and Wrath so I'm happy about that.

Next up is the expansion being it's own continent. The developers talked about not liking how that worked in Cata and so again returned to the continent model much like BC and Wrath. While at first not really caring much about this change, the more I think about it, the more I like it. The sense of exploration, especially without being able to fly at first, is part of what makes an expansion fun. The fact that some of the new zones look absolutely gorgeous should help.

The raiding information seemed a little light. Then mentioned having 14 bosses to start (and two world bosses?) in I think three different zones, fairly similar to Tier 11. I actually think that's a little high, but after Firelands and Dragon Soul, I won't complain. In later interviews they mentioned still talking about the raiding philosophy and whether they wanted to change it, specifically referring to tier tokens, shared lockouts, and valor points. I was actually starting to think raiding mechanics would receive no changes at all so it's nice to see them talking about tweaking things, but it's hard to talk too much about without knowing more.

Finally, the feature that has me the most excited is challenge modes. I mentioned them briefly above, but to me it's not just the something-to-do-at-max-level aspect that has me excited. The idea of normalizing gear to make content that in theory never stops being relevant, that's intriguing. Gear won't help you do better, and gear isn't the reward, well not stat gear anyway. The gear rewards for transmog look pretty nice. I think this is a feature to watch. If it is successful, it could change future MMO designs a bit.

What's making me happy this week: This is sort of cheating since it happened last week but, I really enjoyed heading into BRC with a five man group on a failed raid night and tackling the achievements in there. Brought home to me that challenging content with other people is one of the main things I enjoy about gaming. We even made our own achievement, killing Beauty after she got stuck in Berserk mode.