gaming simplified

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” ["The more things change, the more they stay the same."] – Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

World of Warcraft, for the past six years, has been the MMO to beat. Several companies have tried to beat World of Warcraft with none of them coming remotely close – many of which utterly fail in the first couple of months after release. In order to keep things interesting, and to keep their subscribers subscribing, an MMO can never be finished and must release new content continuously. World of Warcraft gets its new content via patches and expansions, with World of Warcraft: Cataclysm being the third expansion for World of Warcraft.

In order to make the experience fresh for its 12 million subscribers, Blizzard has made several changes to World of Warcraft. From top to bottom, nearly everything about World of Warcraft has been changed in some way. The biggest change is the lore; all of the races have brand new starting areas and story lines to keep up to date with the events that happened in World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King and in the World of Warcraft novel The Shattering: Prelude to Cataclysm. If you’re big on Warcraft lore, then checking out the new areas and story lines is pretty neat.

The problem is that, even with all the changes, World of Warcraft still plays the same. It’s the same grind to the max level resulting in the same grind to get epic quality gear. I can understand that the game is six years old now and that anything significantly drastic to the game play would require a massive redesign to the game engine, but doing ‘hey go over here and kill X-number of [insert bad guy]‘ quests at levels 80-85 is fundamentally redundant. Blizzard can do better than this.

If you haven’t played World of Warcraft yet, you’re not likely to start now and if you’ve been playing since day one, you bought Cataclysm at one of the midnight launches. So this review is for the those that used to play World of Warcraft but quit somewhere along the way. Is it worth it for you to buy Cataclysm and resubscribe? If you’re big on experiencing Azeroth after the death of the Lich King and after The Shattering, then I would say it’s worth resubscribing for a month. Though, you’ll save a lot of money by just doing the 10-day trial that Blizzard offers. You’ll be able to check out most of the starting areas for free. For every other gamer out there, Cataclysm isn’t worth your time or money. It’s the same continuous grind with Blizzard holding a carrot on a stick just out of reach.

So, when’s Diablo III coming out?