Blizzard brings back the wow

Its been awhile since I've updated and by the title I'm sure you can take a guess at what has been stealing all of my time lately. I managed to pick the game up on launch day and I have to say so far I'm very impressed with what Blizzard has done.

So far I've leveled my pally to 80 and have tried most of the 5 man instances and have done two of them on heroic difficulty. Now the new instances are really great looking and each one has a unique feel to them. They deviate from the one hallway to another especially in the nexus where your given multiple paths so you can easily go through the instance in any fashion you'd like.

The 5man instances are fairly short compared to earlier ones, which isn't a bad thing mind you. Its nice to get a group together and go knock out an instance and then try two more. Whereas in the past, especially if its a pug, you were lucky to get through one instance without people dropping out.

I do think however that the difficulty of these new instances is to easy. I know Blizzard wanted to make the content in this expansion more accessible to a broader audience. But when your able to walk into an instance for the first time and one-shot all the bosses by mostly just zerging them, its a problem. Half the fun of running a new instance is learning the strategy for the bosses and having everyone do their part. There are some unique boss fights in those 5mans but you don't have to pay much attention to them and I think they lose something from that.

I had the chance to try two of the instances on heroic though, one of those was fairly difficulty and we did have to learn exactly what the boss does and what we needed to do to beat them. It made the fights alot more fun, although frustrating sometimes. But it was alot more rewarding when we finally finished the instance, and was rewarded the achievement for it.

Until you get to level 80 your going to be spending most of your time doing quests and this is an area that Blizzard has stepped up and made some major improvements. The flow of quests is nice, you'll get a couple in the starting area and they will lead you to the next area and so on. There are ALOT of quests in Northrend so there are still the usual go here kill X amount of mobs for this shitty green quests. But they have added alot of really fun quests, from controlling giants to harpooning a dragon and fighting it in the air.

One thing that I've always personally missed from mmo's was the story involvement that you get in a traditional rpg. In the previous expansion, and classic wow, it was only in the end game instances that you started to feel like you were more a part of the story and even then it was limited. In Wrath there are a number of quest lines that put you right into the story and make you really feel like your existence in that world actually makes a difference. I especially loved a particular quest line, which I won't go into detail about but you are treated to an awesome cut scene, which is one thing I hope to see more of in the future.

It really looks like Blizzard is on the right track with this expansion, and they have already said that they have a few content patches already done for it. Now if they can do this good of a job on a game that's four years old, I can't wait to see how Diablo III turns out.

No Mario for you

So with the coming of Little Big Planet it seemed to me that this may be the start of a new era of user made content actually being important on the console scene. I mean its no secret that there's already a huge amount of people creating user made content on the pc front. Alas first Guitar Hero 4 deleted some user made songs because they were Mario and Zelda tunes. Also there has been many levels deleted in LBP because they were copies of Mario or whichever game. Now, obviously this is for legal protection but I think limiting user made content so freely is going to make growing a community on the console side just that much more difficult.

I don't know if there's anything these companies can do to avoid deleting any content that may be a knock off, like having these sort of things hosted on user hosted servers or something. I've never seen any user made content deleting on pc's like the old dbz mod for half-life and the like. I would really like to see titles in the future to put more effort into providing console players the tools to make unique content, like Valve does for their pc games. If they can do that and somehow avoid banning anything that resembles Mario I think user made content can be successful and popular on consoles. Especially considering the amount of people playing on consoles these days, and the growing online communities on the 360 and ps3 (ok mostly just 360).

Deluge of Games

Well, we knew it was coming but now we're in the midst of a huge deluge of games being dumped on us. How are we, the lowly gamer, with our (if your anything like me at least) already empty wallets supposed to choose which ones to pick up? Especially when we have highly anticipated titles such as Fable 2, Fallout 3, and WoTLK to pick from. It seems like every year I find myself saying something to the effect of, "This has to be one of the best years for gaming in some time."

I think most of us have already asked the question of why all of these developers are pushing their games out at the same time. I mean we all know that they like to push products out in that holiday season window, and its obvious that games sell like crazy during that time. But does it hurt them more then it helps? Does the extra holiday sales make up for all the sales that they lose because gamers which would otherwise pick up the game in a heartbeat, pass it over just because they already spent their money on other games?

I think it would be smarter to launch in a dryer time, like in august when gamers are usually clamoring for an at least half decent game to come out just to play something new. Especially if a similar game is coming out. How much sense does it make to spend years developing a game like Resistance 2, and then release it alongside Gears of War 2. In any case let me know what you guys think. I threw up a poll for this post also.