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Tonight is the launch night for the 7th expansion to World of Warcraft! Who else is hyped for Battle for Azeroth?
There's been a bit of drama regarding the direction of the general story, but I reckon they know what they're doing - I'm mostly excited for the new zones anyway. And quests, storylines in new zones, etc.
WoW has been on a slow and steady downward trend in terms of popularity, and it's not very talked about in gaming communities - but hey, it's now 14 years later and it's still going strong with millions of subscribers! Although mildly annoying that we can no longer see exactly how many there are, it's understandable - if nothing else for the beauty of an updated version of this graph!
So who's excited for BfA?
I haven't played since our guild cleared Cataclysm - we uprooted and went over to Rift for something new. The guild is still 'together' (we have been since Everquest) but right now we're not active on any MMOs. A couple of them will be playing this expansion, and they might try (and succeed) at getting the rest of us back in to beat one more expansion if it's good. I doubt we'll stick around very long after that, though, if we come back at all. Frankly, the feeling's there that we're 'done' with Blizzard and their silly theme parks.
Right now we're much more hyped for Pantheon since it's promising to get back to the brutal unforgiving roots of the MMO genre we all love from the Everquest days. I expect not just our guild, but likely at least a dozen of our original EQ guilds will come back to play that game on launch. There's a facebook group with over 800 of the people from our old EQ server, so that's my 'mmo community'. I don't see much point in playing an MMO without them. ;)
Whoa, this thing seems quite interesting.
I'm a little concerned about the plethora of races/classes. It's not easy to balance these things unless you make ability being just copies of other classes with a slightly different visual effect.
I'll keep an eye on it anyway, thanks for sharing :)
I'm looking forward to naked corpse runs and non-instanced competitive content again. Keys, flags, content tiers, gating. If you'd told me I'd be looking forward to that back then I'd have claimed you were crazy. Now I miss the difficulty, all the modern mmo games are just too damn easy.
Balance is overrated and unattainable, though it's something to keep in mind. More important is making sure everyone has a role and a purpose in the groups/raids, and I hope they take a lesson from Rift's 'soul' system and give everyone multiple roles.
I guess you and @crius are the kinds of people really looking forward to Classic WoW? :)
I am indeed but I'm not a fool, I know that more than the classic wow is the bond I've made while playing classic wow. Also unless they improve the game mechanics with some modern QoL things, it's not like magically i'll have more free time with two kids, a full time job and other interest beside WoW :)
Yes, sorry. That was what I meant. I don't want to feel like the paladins/druid in vanilla WoW again thanks :P
I'm of middling excitement.
I finally logged in again after months of not doing so this past weekend and did all the pre-patch content. I felt like that was pretty good, and I was happy with it, but I understand that parcelled out over weeks it may have been a bit underwhelming.
I am not sure if I'm going to play as much this expansion; I haven't been playing many video games for the past couple of months, and that's actually been a pretty enjoyable thing, so I might do even less than I did before. Who knows, though, maybe I'll get sucked back in.
Edit: I played a bit of the alpha, and the beta, but all on the horde side for both. I play alliance on my "main" and haven't experienced any of this.
It's pretty fucking good.
I only resubscribed again this week after unsubscribing in January, and I was certainly underwhelmed by the pre-patch content too. The two questlines were pretty cool, but it wasn't even close enough to being enough to do - especially when you look at the kinds of pre-patches we've gotten in the past.
As for not playing much games, I think that's sort of a natural thing right? I don't know how old you are but I definitely feel periods of being tired of gaming in general, whereas when I was a teen I would play games 24/7 if I could. Maybe it's about being unable to really get excited about it - unless it's something brand new, we've kind of seen everything already which a child hasn't. And that childlike wonder of vanilla WoW, for example, is not going to ever happen again for anyone unless it's some groundbreaking game that brings it along, and those are really rare.
How long do you reckon you'll play this expansion? I think I'll only stick around for a month or two after launch. I like WoW a lot, but I feel like in Legion (in which I stayed subscribed from launch until January, 15-16 months) I just played it to play it, if that make sense. It became sort of a habit to play it, even though I wasn't doing much in it.
I'm approximately 40, but I've been pretty into gaming for my whole life. There's usually something that I feel like I want to play, but lately that has taken a back seat to other things - board games, Magic, 3d printing, other hobbies. Video games just hasn't made it to the top of "me time" in a while.
I think how much I play this expansion will depend on how much pressure my sister puts on me to continue playing. We've played every expansion together, and it's one of the main ways that we spend time together. We have a great guild, and I really enjoy spending time with all my friends that play. I'm also somewhat involved in the community (I run a subreddit devoted to WoW, and a relatively big discord) so there's that to consider as well.
I'll probably get more fired up about it when the raids come out. I do enjoy casual beer-raiding quite a bit.
Our guild motto was 'Powered by Alcohol and Insomnia' after all...
I miss being hyped for WoW expansions! WoW is one of the few games I've ever felt genuinely invested in. But I haven't even bought BfA, and I'm not sure I will.
I sunk a ton of hours into the game from Cata to WoD. My guild fell apart during Hellfire Citadel, and while I bought Legion, I didn't play it much. Heroic/mythic raiding was what really made the game hold my attention, but I can't see myself committing 3-4 nights a week to a game again. I used to really enjoy gold making as well, but that got much less fun for me after the WoD enhancement changes and garrisons.
Me! The buzz wasn't great during the summer about the upcoming expansion. However, as I finally took the time to catch up on the lore, which seemed to be taking an interesting route, I'm all in! Sure, there are some silly plotholes and questionable character motivations, but maybe it's the better ingame presentation of important events that got me hooked.
That along the slower pace of combat (which I love!) and walking back a bit on my number one complaint about Legion – the RNGdaries promise very good things for the game in general. I also happened to finally find a nice, adult guild that suits me and fits perfectly on the casual-hardcore spectrum for my life nowadays! Can't wait to get home today.
No. WoW is not free to play. You have to buy the current expansion, which comes with all previous expansions, and a monthly subscription to play. When you buy the expansion and create a new account, you'll get a free month of playtime.
That said, once you get into the game, you CAN pay for your subscription with ingame currency by buying a WoW token and redeeming it for a month of playtime. But, for a new player, it'll take some time before you can afford the WoW Token, currently around 170k gold.
I started playing about a year ago after trying out a boatload of MMOs thinking the state of the art had surely moved on after WoW. Finally gave in and started playing Legion (after years of only making fun of WoW and assuming it should have died long ago), and very quickly understood why it was still as popular as it is. I ended up working my way up through a guild, completing the heroic raids, thoroughly enjoying the storyline of the patches (holy shit, Argus--that music), and then hanging out a couple times a week with my group waiting for the next expansion.
Definitely excited, and after a few evenings of playing it, it's looking like that excitement is warranted. I don't know if it will be quite Legion good, but I'm entertained so far.
There's not actually a lot of time investment. Last expansion, I played about 4 or 5 hours per week and I finished every raid on "Heroic" mode, and did a lot of relatively competitive Mythic+ dungeons, and experienced all the story that I care to. I have millions of gold. I could use that to play for free. I have several max level characters, and I participated as much (or as little) as I wanted to.
It's not as big a time sink as it used to be, but the thing is that there's enough to do in the game that if you decide you want to spend 30 hours per week (or double that) playing the game, then you probably can. But if you don't want to spend that much time, that's fine too.
The problem is that returning player would have to farm quite a bit, and without a guild, before reaching a point in which they can live easily like that.
I don't mean this as a bad thing. Just that if you never stopped playing, your experience is kinda a very niche one.
I take 3 - 4 month breaks at times. Coming back is never onerous.
Acquiring gold is not particularly difficult if you have a basic understanding of economics (this my be an unfair statement based on the fact that I did take several economics courses in University). Basically with a bit of analysis or with TSM, you can make boatloads of gold really easily, and it's not even time consuming. It mostly boils down to "buy low, sell high" or "buy raw materials, transform them, sell finished materials".
If you opt to just pay for your subscription with money, then you don't even have to play the gold making game if you don't want to. You can focus on doing whatever content you want to do. That could be raiding, M+ dungeons, world quests, exploration... there's so much to do in WoW. The basic caveat is that you get out what you put in; the more time you spend, the better you'll be. If you can accept not even trying to be at peak performance, then it's a pretty low-key game that's a ton of fun.
Unfortunately I agree with you. The actual reason for me stopping playing after the beginning of cataclysm is because all the people I played with had stopped already and my time availability wasn't allowing me to insert myself into another group.
I'd be honest though and it was already since the end of the burning crusade that I was playing only for the people I made friend with, more than the game itself.
The fact that I loved so much the classic lore and they changed it so much didn't help me finding the will to stick around.
Right now I only come back when i receive a free weeks once in a while, usually level up a character to the new cap through dungeons (the dungeon play and how the players interact in the party is another big disappointment I have found lately) and then leave it there.
It's a good memory but nothing more than that as today.
If the game became free to play with the latest expansion being paid once, maybe at an higher price to compensate a little, I would probably be more of a frequent player. They could go for the skin market as other games have done in the past and are faring quite decently. With the huge player base of WoW, they could easily survive without problem imho.
In my opinion you don't need to invest any particular amount of time in it. You of course can't play certain things unless you put n hours into it, but you can do quests ten minutes per day if that's your thing. Or a dungeon which takes anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes.
You're right though, it's nowhere close to being culturally relevant which makes sense... I think it's sad though, having played it for as long as I have (12 years on and off)!