Verdict finally in: MoP is substantially worse than previous expansions

[Omgakitty]

Sorry your looking at scores based off of a < month of gameplay at best and its just people not wanting to set them up to be attacked like they did in DIII

[Coronius]

Good thing we have these so-called professionals who can decide for us what games are good and what games are bad.

On a more serious note, who cares what they think? I can't say for sure if MoP is bad or good since we're only a few weeks in, but what I can say is that MoP is definitely looking brighter than Cataclysm at this point.

[draykorinee]

Your basing this on meta critic, cataclysm has 51 reviews mists has 21 it's hardly a good comparison yet. Silly title silly thread.

[Deleted]

I've levelled to 90, done (and stopped doing) dailies, done the dungeons and MV (not heroic).

The truth once you take the goggles off is that MOP shows that WoW, as a game, has lost its shine. This is not surprising, it is old, the gameplay is weaker than newer games that play better like GW2, and the graphics are obviously ugly compared to Tera, GW, well, most games. None of this is what makes MOP bad though, it's just the natural aging of an already old game.

What actually makes MOP worse than other expansions are these:

- Gone are the talent trees and variety, the tweaking of buff/debuffs in groups and class variety - now you spec one of 6 ways - and really everyone does it the same. It's too simplistic, it reduces choice and tweaks, and frankly, it's just boring. The theorycraft has become simpler and less interesting, and that makes for a weaker, less varied metagame.

- The dailies are not content, they are boring and repetitive and just painful, and I stopped doing them.

- I feel like the game is trying to con me into "lame" progression, that is repetitive boring tasks to gain 1 item level. The "hamster wheel" was always there - but now it feels more like a hamster wheel than ever before. The raid content feels very recycled and boring, and isn't even very challenging. Gear matters more than skill, and after playing newer games, that grind mechanic just feels outdated.

- The lore is bad, sorry to lore defenders but it's lame. Pandas, chineseey insect baddies and terracota soldiers - where is the burning legion, where are the demons, the rage of the elements, all the cool serious stuff we loved about WoW? They're in the past. Now we get derivative and - this is the main part - disconnected stories about some pandaland that really I don't care about, with pandas I don't care about. I want WoW, horde and alliance, burning legion and draenor, the rich history of azeroth - not some randomly invented, totally disconnected panda story pulled out of the boring hat.

- War between horde and alliance? I don't see it, sorry, world PVP is non-existent and game mechanics don't support it, at all. It's just an attempt to make things sound exciting, when really they are not, and I don't fall for marketing bull. There is no war between horde and alliance, there's just some random ganking, and that's it.

- PVP balance: this is the worst I've seen, and I was there for s5 - and here's why: in s5, they could just tweak the numbers and fix it, it was really just that the numbers were out of balance. Now the mechanics are very different, and they can't just tweak and fix numbers to make it better. To fix PVP in MOP would require a complete overhaul/removal of the game mechanics they introduced with MOP, which would of course be rather counter-productive.

Anyway, just my opinion, feel free to discuss openly.

[Deleted]

Okay, Dragonblight was a graveyard for Dragons with psuedo 15th century French and English architecture strewn about everywhere. Where's the Norse-ness there?

The Storm Peaks had psuedo Greco-Roman architecture crossed with a Marvel Comics esque interpretation of Norse Mythology. Barely Norse there.

And the Borean Tundra... Seriously? It had fucking Maoi statues. And it was full of Inuit walrus folk. Let's not even get into Icecrown and Wintergrasp.

The only place that could have been truly described as Nordic was the Howling Fjord. It had just about as much 'real life influence' as Mists of Kung-fu Pandas does. And further from that, I disagree with your assumption that Mists of Pandaria has 'little Asiatic influences'. It positively overflows with maddening Chinese faux wisdom and imagery. Thank Odin they put a Mongol stand in to distract from the faggotry, somewhat.

If we're saying that icy landscapes and glaciers are norse landscape then we can count dragonblight and borean tundra in.
Icecrown is one big glacier and the vrykul architecture in that zone is the same as in fjord.

[Coronius]

If we're saying that icy landscapes and glaciers are norse landscape then we can count dragonblight and borean tundra in.
Icecrown is one big glacier and the vrykul architecture in that zone is the same as in fjord.

The landscape, music and surroundings are definitely more "norse-like" in Howling Fjord however. Sure, there is snow in Scandinavia during the winter/fall but it can't really be compared to Icecrown.

That said however, I'm not sure Blizzard meant for the whole continent of Northrend to be inspired by Norse mythology/landscape/culture/whatever. I believe they wanted some variety.

[Deleted]

The landscape, music and surroundings are definitely more "norse-like" in Howling Fjord however. Sure, there is snow in Scandinavia during the winter/fall but it can't really be compared to Icecrown.

That said however, I'm not sure Blizzard meant for the whole continent of Northrend to be inspired by Norse mythology/landscape/culture/whatever. I believe they wanted some variety.

There's a subarea north of icecrown for dailyquests that has viking ships and vrykul. There are large vrykul villages in icecrown. Sure there's some variety.

[yuca247]

from respected people like IGN...

ROFL should have started with that!

[Deleted]

The game is still not balanced enough(huntard in pvp ), the problem is still there in pve(Lock, sp and fire mage are way above the rest, especially locks). And there is way to much farming going on, especially cooking wise, getting your 300 stats takes a hell of a farm. Its just unreasonable. But I do like the general feel of the game, pet battle is a decent time filler, I really enjoy the new bgs(especially temple, really good).

[Kilpi]

It is around 83%. This is the worst score a WoW expansion has ever had, and way below the expectations of what people predicted.

I'm not trying to start a war of words here, I'm pointed out factual data we now have regarding the quality of the expansion.

It's not factual data. It's just a mediocre opinion of critics and I couldn't care less about any critics opinion. I like MoP more than WotLK and Cataclysm, so for me it's not even close to being "the worst expansion". There, that's as much "factual data" as the ones in Metacritic.

[Zylph]

Some other people I dont know from the internet decided for me that I should enjoy the game a bit less than I was.

[leviathonlx]

Verdict finally in. Metacritic shows how easy it is for haters of any game to give 0 scores for the lulz and how the gaming media is still too bedazzled by things like GW2 (or picks people, such as the case with Kotaku, who have a known hatred of the game doing the review).

[Powerogue]

It's not so much that they're getting worse, it's that they're getting less innovative. By settling into a mold with expansions, people are getting bored and leaving. Simple as that.

[Glorious Leader]

I won't say that I agree with metacritic, but the game is far from good. With some changes this expansion would be a lot better.

The content can be cleared in a few days thanks to the Raid Finder, how is this possible on an MMORPG? And if you want to do the exactly same content in a higher difficult you must pass through weeks of annoying farm to get some gear.

This grind system is something that they should had changed in previous expansions, now we have dungeons, tabards, raids and Scenarios, they could implement other ways to gain rep without doing thousands of daily quests every day. Since the entire game is based on grind, diversity is essential.

You wanna know why they keep stuck on this repetition system? It's because is very easy to develop and keeps the player busy giving the false feeling that there's a lot of things to do. they've done this with Diablo for god sake.

The company has very loyal customers, I believe we deserve something with a little more effort. For now and because of that, I think they deserve the low score.

They key about the system of repetition is that in MoP the greatest reward for that system of repetition is now currently tied to nonsense daily quests. It's a MASSIVE skinner box. It's an attempt to change the type of content that people like because daily quests are easy to produce and they do this by putting the greatest reward behind daily quests. If you don't feel that way I have to then ask how man people do you think would touch these daily quests if the reward wasn't behind them?

The biggest problem with this expansion is that is has removed any illusion that the game had of being anything other than a hamster cage.

[DechCJC]

Reviews mean nearly absolutely nothing. Most of the time. And as i'm sure Cataclysm got rated 90%+(I believe?), i'm pretty sure that's enough to back up my statement.

[Bluey111]

Metacritic is not a valid resource to use for critics

[Deleted]

And just for reference: Metacritic is the single best source of weighted opinion on games, movies, etc on the internet.

It is used widely by everyone from company directors to regular consumers as it is the current best source of unbiased reviews, since it covers a very wide spectrum and thus avoids overly negative or positive biases.

Simply put: fans are too gushing and forgiving of their own product (like WoW fans on this site), and too negative about competitors (like GW2 fans are about WoW on their site).

By sampling across fans, haters, non-fans, non-haters, and everyone else in the middle, metacritic alleviates the issue.

Metacritic is not perfect, but it is the best out there.

[Vongimi]

The biggest refute to this silly argument is to simply log in and play. You can clearly see that this expansion is FAR higher quality than any previous expansion. Pretty much the only thing any other expansion did better was BC had so much raid content at release.

[Kilpi]

... the current best source of unbiased reviews, since it covers a very wide spectrum and thus avoids overly negative or positive biases

There is no certainty of unbiased reviews in general media anymore. And don't even talk about user reviews, since mostly people just give 10 or 0 (plus all the trolling).

[Deleted]

A few months ago I posted a thread asking people to predict review scores for MoP:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...-review-scores

The results were indisputable, most people predicted MoP would score 90-94%.

Now look at the score on metacritic: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/wo...ts-of-pandaria

It is around 83%. This is the worst score a WoW expansion has ever had, and way below the expectations of what people predicted.

I'm not trying to start a war of words here, I'm pointed out factual data we now have regarding the quality of the expansion.

EDIT: We're not talking about the USER SUBMITTED REVIEWS on metacritic here (which can be ignored), we're talking about the actual CRITIC Reviews from respected people like IGN, eurogamer and gamespot.

Never have i lol'd so hard. Game critics are so biased its unreal. There is only 1 person that can deem whether a game is good/fun/hardcore (whatever else you want out of it) is you.

If you love it, play it. If you hate it don't.

But don't spend time reading into other peoples likes and dislikes because they are simply not yours. Make your own judgements. I for one love this xpac, its given me lots of things i have wanted for a long time. I know others don't like what i currently like and i could not give 2 FF's about them .

*edited for spelling errors