Doom, doom, doom, doom. (and tinfoil hats)

Sadly, WoW will probably still be the most successful MMO even fifteen years from now. You're not going to lose too many customers because the new armors don't look super cool. Unless some radical new non-graphics oriented technology comes out that the WoW can't add on with a patch, they'll continue to monopolize the MMO market.

I could'nt stand to play that game anywhere past, I think it was, level 22 even when I had about three months left to go in my subscription. Diablo II wasn't that great compared to the original and a lot of promises were never implemented. After the release of WarCraft 3 it was obvious they had lost that Blizzard sparkle. WC3 will be remembered for a third party custom game, Defenders of the Ancients. After WoW i'll probably never buy another Blizzard game.

I think he referred to the zone art. The equipment art wasn't done considering that these guys moving to NCSoft left Blizzard nearly a year ago.

I also believe that those quotes weren't absolutely correct. But that's not the point anyway.

People move around this industry all the time. It's more exciting to be part of a Creation than it is to be part of a game in maintenance/growth for some. I think the FoH guy nailed parts of that.

It does hurt Blizzard though, but they've been there before. I, too, find it so very interesting that we've known about Blood Elves for months and still know nothing about the Alliance race. I imagine they'll now just hold it off for E3, to justify the huge spend they'll make to rent that godawful huge booth again, with dozens of canned lyric spouters.

And on the "life beyond 60" post from Blizzard, heh. One of the reason I never finished my own series of "what to do at 60". I had a high goal, but by the time I got into detailing part 2 of 4, I realized there's only three things to do: Raid (including PvP), prep for Raiding, or Alt. And at the end of the day, if you can't or don't want to Raid, then what's the point of making an Alt? You know where you'll end up anyway. The path of character creation can be fun, but only if it's unique. After level 20, you'll probably land in the same zones you already saw anyway.

Nah. Alting to me has always been a means to an end: a means to get another character up to the end game so you have two ways to play there. If you don't like the endgame, eventually Alting isn't going to keep you interested.

New content could help, but not unless it includes core new systems and ways to exist in the game. More quests and mobs in new zones is just doing the same stuff with new textures.

And at the end of the day, if you can't or don't want to Raid, then what's the point of making an Alt? You know where you'll end up anyway.

That's the same I feel all the time.

I have not many problems with replayability, I'm even able to replay some very old and linear single player RPGs. But this happens rarely. I only decide to do this if there's an actual purpose. In that case I can enjoy the repetition.

In WoW the purpose is missing completely and an alt is a huge commitment. I'm already not able to keep up with one character. I get excluded from raids pretty much regularly because my equipment is not minmaxed enough (like fire resist). And if you start to get excluded this means that you won't get anymore loot, so making the gap increase exponentially. Levelling an alt would just make things worse and make me hate the game even more.

This burden to have to "catch up" or be left out is killing the little fun and interest I had left in the game. I keep playing here and there but I lost a true passion and interest LONG AGO. The game has just the worst design I've ever seen.

What's the point of the "doomcasting" thing I wrote above? It's simple:
1- The current success of the game depends on ideas that were at the basis of the game. On a scheme that was already defined years ago and by a team that is now shattered between many different companies that spawned from Blizzard.
2- The new WoW team just doesn't have solids answers to the problems that the game is presenting.

In short we could say that they lack the "Vision". They were only able to stretch to the limit the catass raid endgame that those, previously catass guild leaders, designers get to know.

What's the expansion about?

Tobold defined it perfectly: "adds another 10 levels to the fun part of WoW, and pushes the unfun part further back." That's all they can do, repeat the same patterns they copied from previous games.

They just have no answers or ideas. They can only stretch the game to the limit and exploit those good ideas that were there already from the beginning thanks to other talented devs that have left the building since then.

Blizzard and Vivendi are cashing on a success that doesn't belong to them. This is what truly upsets me.

What I am wondering: was there ever a "real vision" behind WoW, apart from a specific cartoony art style, the time and place (Azeroth after the WCIII expansions), and the concept of the game as a more streamlined, more fun EQ ("EQ-lite", some critics have called it) with a fantasy version of counterstrike thrown in as an effectively separate minigame ("consensual PvP")?

I mean, one of the strengths of Blizzard, so people say, is that they are hardly original but fine-tune and polish pre-existing concepts from earlier games (whether their own or somebody else's). Aren't WoW's weaknesses then the result of those earlier games' fundamental weaknesses (static world, ultimately meaningless PvP done for the heck of it).
After all, I have the impression they did not really look at and study, let alone copy and fine-tune the more unique elements of games like DAoC or Shadowbane or even some single-player RPG's.

Long ago, I played Warcraft II for quite some time. I smelled at Starcraft and Warcraft III, but never bought them. They were simply too much, including their fundamental weaknesses, like Warcraft II; they felt very, very similar, only more polished and prettified. Diablo I en II never made it either, because I had played Crusader, the game Diablo I borrowed heavily from. I am increasingly certain that if I had played Everquest (WoW is my first "real" mmorpg after sniffing at Saga of Ryzom and EQII), I would probably never have fallen for WoW. Too much the same, if smoother and nicer. I am a sucker for games that offer at least some innovations that improve the overall experience; it does not have to be much, but in my experience Blizzard does not even do that. They are slick, they are good at it, but frankly, looking hard at my past experiences with their games, they don't innovate on any scale.
And with such a background, how could they ever come up with a vision that deals with the real fundamental flaws of a game like Everquest? The time sinks, the boredom, the crappy presentation...all these things can be overcome with sufficient polish, tweaking etc. That is something where Blizzard's strength lie. But overcoming the problems of level cap and endgame? That would have required real creative thinking, a good look at various games, both mmo's and single player games, stealing the best ideas and combine them into something new. Heck, they could have looked at the entire fantasy / strategy game scene; for instance, long ago AD&D experimented with the combination of roleplaying and strategy/kingdom management. A few years ago, German company Phenomic created a real CRPG/RTS hybrid, Spellforce, that was fairly successful. Looking at smaller innovations, Ascaron's Sacred actually introduced mounted combat. And great fun that it was too!

I don't have much knowledge of the MMO market, save what I have been reading these last couple of months, after the first addiction to WoW faded. But I can't help feeling that WoW will remain caught in the "EQ-rut", and that this would have been the case even if nobody at Blizzard had left. They strike me as a company that is institutionally incapable of the innovations needed to really evolve the genre (fantasy mmorpg's), or for that matter, any genre. All those people who have left Blizzard (or forced to leave)? I suspect they may be the lucky ones, for now they are in the position to do things that, ultimately, may be more satisfying from the creative point of view.

In the meantime, WoW is and will remain for some time the "best" generic fantasy mmorpg, certainly for total newbies. Until a new contender comes along, or better still, several, who will share WoW's current market among themselves. That will happen sooner or later, but given the length of production cycles that will be a long way off - 2008 or something, which may roughly coincide with an acceleration of the inevitable decline of the game's popularity.