Back in October, I already complained about the forthcoming expansion “Mists of Pandaria”, and that it lacked “epic-ness”.
More disturbing, though, has been my experience with patch 4.3 (“Hour of Twilight”)… Finally, we’ll get the opportunity to go face-to-face with Deathwing (which seems to be one of the last really epic bosses from Blizzard’s stables), and I was looking forward for the challenge (even wondering how I would fit enough time to play WoW and SW:TOR at the same time)… But then, LFR hit…
For those that don’t know, LFR stands for Looking For Raid, and is the system Blizzard came up with to allow for people that don’t have progression-oriented guilds to see all the content. You just “queue” in it, and you’ll be placed in a 25-man raid group for (currently) the Dragon Soul raid instance. So far, so good… the problem is that the way they found to deal with the difficulties in communication in “out-of-guild” raid was to make the encounters retard-proof…
So, now we have 3 difficulty levels for the Dragon Soul raid instance: LFR, Normal and Heroic, each of it with slightly different loot (which is better the more difficult the instance is). Conceptually, it seems like a good idea, but the tweaking of the difficulty levels made it almost impossible to fail in LFR, which means that most people has already faced and defeated Deathwing!
So, two weeks after 4.3 hit, me and most people have already defeated the most end boss for this expansion! So, why am I playing?
I understand the rational, and in the most part I agree with it: not everyone can put the amount of hours into this game that will allow them to kill the end boss of the expansions, but in my view, the way they went around that in “Wrath of the Lich King” was better: just give a buff to players a couple of months before a new expansion hits, so they can see the end content…
I know I could have skipped LFR and retain my game experience, but that way I’d have people in better gear than me that don’t play as well, and that know more of the game than me (a convicted lore-whore)… Even if we allow for that possibility, it feels to me (and a MMORPG is about perception most of the time) that I got “cheated” out of an achievement; killing the end-boss of an expansion should be an epic experience that takes a lot of time, so we actually feel that it was a powerful foe and that we were fighting insurmountable odds.
I can go normal mode (which is MUCH harder, and it feels like it is geared to people that already have gear from LFR Dragon Soul… Yes, I’m looking at you, Ultraxion), but even that seems a tad too easy (my guild, which is almost a casual raiding guild) got the first four bosses down in the first week! Heroic mode is usually for people that can put a large amount of hours into the game (don’t know if this is the case with Dragon Soul, but it was definitely true with Firelands)… And even if I do all of these, I won’t have the real achievement… I’m already feeling the experience has been cut down somewhat, because I killed Deathwing on a random group in one afternoon, in about 2 hours of playing!
This, combined with the upcoming “Mists of Pandaria” feels like Blizzard is going for the more “casual” MMORPG crowd, and less for the hardcore… This is all well in theory but, for me, a MMORPG has part of its storytelling rooted not only in the lore and design that the developer created, but in the user experience… For me, it’s impossible to have an epic story if I can beat the main boss in 20 minutes after I get to him, without prior experience… It doesn’t matter how many layers of story you have behind that boss, the size of him, the scope of what you achieved… If it wasn’t hard, he wasn’t all that he was toted up to be!
So, user experience is important for the storytelling itself, especially in a MMORPG… And I feel that Blizzard is walking away from that, to give way to accessibility and hand-holding…
That might be great from a commercial perspective, I admit, but for me it just removes something important from the game… And I’m not sure if it is that good even in that limited perspective, considering WoW is hemorrhaging players for some time now (that roughly matches with the new “easy” attitude from Blizzard).
Thankfully, there’s a new MMORPG coming out soon that might keep my cravings for hard bosses in check: Star Wars: The Old Republic… At least, I hope it is any good…
I’ve made a guild to act as a kind of “sister guild” to our World of Warcraft “Crits’n’Giggles”: you can check it’s website here: http://www.swtor.com/guilds/264573/critsngiggles .
At the moment we can’t add players to it, but after the game launches, feel free to apply… 
I really hope SWTOR will give me the epic I crave, ‘cos pandas aren’t doing it for me! 