'World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria' misses the mark with kung fu pandas

[Deleted]

The box arts, and the names, was always more fitting for the Western market. Pandas and the word Panda appearing on box art isn't that interesting for Westerners.

Oh I'm sorry as a westerner I must have missed that meeting where it was decided we'd all feel the same way...

[Deleted]

Oh I'm sorry as a westerner I must have missed that meeting where it was decided we'd all feel the same way...

In the future, keep track of any announcement regarding the westerner meeting so you don't miss it again.

[Darkhallows]

I'm happy with Pandaria on the whole. It's more of unfortunate circumstance that Kung-Fu Panda was around prior to the release of MoP, so that despite Pandaren existing BEFORE the movie, Blizzard gets flack because uneducated or uninformed people think they're just trying to rip off KFP.

Sigh. MoP was my second-favorite Xpac too.

[Deleted]

Kind of.

The box arts, and the names, was always more fitting for the Western market. Pandas and the word Panda appearing on box art isn't that interesting for Westerners.

Not only that but they were original and didn't just plagiarize real world cultures and mythology, at least not that much.

At launch we had night elves with original role, human nations that weren't directly borrowed from any existing culture, very original yet interesting approach to orcs etc. the only race like that was the taurens and I didn't really like it back then either. Still it was only one race and could easily be ignored especially as an alliance player.

And then all of a sudden we started getting all these childish fish headed taiwanese people, russian bear people, chinese panda people and so on. Sure it didn't start in MoP but I think MoP did cross the line with it and these things stopped being at the background and irrelevant to the lore and completely overshadowed everything else.

[Pejo]

gotta love how that number is constantly shifting anywhere from 20-50 million, just goes to show how little any of you actually know

YEs, that is quite the dramatic shift. We only know of the numbers released during Wrath where there has been a larger amount of people who have played WoW and left WoW than is currently playing, possibly closer to twice. This was when the subscription was 11M. This means that between 11M and 22M had quit by that time, look at my prior post of Math on this showing the amount of people leaving per day. They followed this by stating that the majority of people that were going to play WoW has already played WoW so the people coming in was going to be quite a bit lower. This was many years ago (2009) so the chances that not a single new person has joined since then is not possible, so that means that on top of the 4.3M that have quit since then (probably more since we gained 800K after this announcement), more than 4.3M have quit and been replaced.

It isn't 40M that have quit, that is too high of a number, but it isn't too far off. I wouldn't be surprised if we're around 35M atm, and there is only going to be more. People will always find a problem with an expansion and blame that on WoW's loss, but the loss has been there since the beginning. Blizzard even released an extremely low statistic of the amount of people who quit during leveling prior to Cata revamp. There's more, but going back to work.

[Stormspellz]

Not only that but they were original and didn't just plagiarize real world cultures and mythology, at least not that much.

At launch we had night elves with original role, human nations that weren't directly borrowed from any existing culture, very original yet interesting approach to orcs etc. the only race like that was the taurens and I didn't really like it back then either. Still it was only one race and could easily be ignored especially as an alliance player.

And then all of a sudden we started getting all these childish fish headed taiwanese people, russian bear people, chinese panda people and so on. Sure it didn't start in MoP but I think MoP did cross the line with it and these things stopped being at the background and irrelevant to the lore and completely overshadowed everything else.

what the "original" races are all highly influenced by history, let alone all the retcon in w3 long before wow.

[Deleted]

except deathwing was on a cover, and he was a fucking armored dragon with red eyes and magma coming out of his arse with and damn exploded world for the symbol.

And Cataclysm was the most successful expansion in terms of copies sold. It worked. They weren't catering the expansion initially to casuals though. In MoP, whereas they were catering to casuals more, they failed with the theme.

[Deleted]

what the "original" races are all highly influenced by history, let alone all the retcon in w3 long before wow.

No they weren't even "space goats" and blood elves were original and even if they had some minor connections to existing cultures they weren't stereotypical people from real earth cultures in animal suits.

[Sorenthaz]

Mists of Pandaria was super enjoyable for me, and this comes from someone who ridiculed the expansion for the first year or so because I only took it at face value - i.e. judged it based on the name and the fact that Pandarens and Monks were added in.

People who just judge a game by face value should simply gtfo since their opinions mean nothing then. Yes, there are some valid arguments against Mists of Pandaria, but IMO it was a massive improvement from Cataclysm and gives me hope that the next expansion will be spectacular and hopefully brings us back into the World of Warcraft that most of us loved during Vanilla through WotLK.

And by that I mean that they'll hopefully bring the story back to more serious areas (yes, Pandaria was serious, but there was a humorous overtone in most of the zones prior to focusing on the Sha and Horde/Alliance conflict) and possibly do more to bring people back into the game.

[Deleted]

And Cataclysm was the most successful expansion in terms of copies sold. It worked. They weren't catering the expansion initially to casuals though. In MoP, whereas they were catering to casuals more, they failed with the theme.

Cataclysm was also advertised as the expansion that will take WoW back to it's roots and does away with excessive catering to casuals. Everything was supposed to be 5 times harder and take 10 times longer than before and they sort of kept their promise before they nerfed everything again.

- - - Updated - - -

And by that I mean that they'll hopefully bring the story back to more serious areas (yes, Pandaria was serious, but there was a humorous overtone in most of the zones prior to focusing on the Sha and Horde/Alliance conflict) and possibly do more to bring people back into the game.

But obviously it backfired and they lost a lot of players instead.

[Polybius]

This has been the best expansion in all aspects by far since TBC in my opinion. Speak for your fucking self. I'm so tired of people like this.

Speak for yourself. I enjoyed Wrath of the Lich King. The theme is what kept people going.

[Iseeyou]

Mop was a terrible xpax for me. All those pandas and casualisation and 0 improvement to pvp.

Tbh i think they learned the lesson and im confident we ll see some real World of Warcraft soon.

[Daggyz]

Blizzards marketing team really messed up. I mean on the Xbox Dashboard they had pandas all over the WoW ads, the TV ad was not any better. Just everywhere they busted a wow advert, they had pandas on it. Nobody thinks that shits cool.

100% this. The theme and marketing team are what gave MoP a bad rep. Hands down MoP is better than Cata and even WotLK in most aspects. But let's face it, most young people these days aren't squares, so kung-fu pandas doesn't appeal to them, and looks lame and childish as shit.

[Deleted]

Lets however, not fall into the trap of saying Cata suffered due to the (temporary) difficulty increase, Cata was bad just due to its overall design, not because it was slightly less faceroll.

Yea it didn't feel like a real expansion at all.. I think most of the effort went into redesigning the old areas and since most players were already at level cap and werent very interested in leveling new alts, it felt like they were charging money for something that should have been free since the new low level content was aimed mostly at new players.

[Deleted]

Lets however, not fall into the trap of saying Cata suffered due to the (temporary) difficulty increase, Cata was bad just due to its overall design, not because it was slightly less faceroll.

The design of the launch of Cataclysm was actually rather great. What didn't work was the difficulty of the dungeons being almost antipathetic to the LFD feature and Blizzard's eventual giving in to the whinings of the people devoid of time. 4.0 in itself though, was actually amazing as far as the difficulty, immersion and positive surprises went. But by 4.1 they were already in the middle of two worlds, and from there on it started to pale heavily in comparison to whatever they had done before and the expansion become an ignominy and lost a lot of identity in many people's eyes.

It had a LOT of potential, judging from 4.0 and if they had not lost their nerve, I believe the outcome would be seen up until now - fewer sub losses over the years.

By virtue of this, I think it is pivotal that if their mind continues to fluctuate with regard to the direction of the game during the next expansion, they implement their plan B with as much care as possible.

[Deleted]

The design of the launch of Cataclysm was actually rather great. What didn't work was the difficulty of the dungeons being almost antipathetic to the LFD feature and Blizzard's eventual giving in to the whinings of the people devoid of time. 4.0 in itself though, was actually amazing as far as the difficulty, immersion and positive surprises went. But by 4.1 they were already in the middle of two worlds, and from there on it started to pale heavily in comparison to whatever they had done before and the expansion become an ignominy and lost a lot of identity in many people's eyes.

It had a LOT of potential, judging from 4.0 and if they had not lost their nerve, I believe the outcome would be seen up until now - fewer sub losses over the years.

Agreed. They might have lost more subs initially but I think they would have gained more back and the decline would have at least been slower.

WoW is an old game already so I have no idea why they want to draw in casuals so much. It's the loyal more serious players that make or break the game at this point and if they keep driving them again, what kind of casual new player would spend $60+ on this game as well as $15 monthly if they have so many free alternatives with better graphics and even better mechanics.

[Stormspellz]

No they weren't even "space goats" and blood elves were original and even if they had some minor connections to existing cultures they weren't stereotypical people from real earth cultures in animal suits.

orcs tribal nature took a lot from historical references and the human alliance's inner politics was mapped after medieval europe

after all I mean a nomadic talking cow screams WC, but the beer loving talking pandas, now that isn't WC

[Frozenbeef]

Instead of trying to place a particular reason why millions left maybe you should consider there was millions of different reasons?

[Raven]

One thing that is promising is that alot of the devs that worked on vanilla Wow and Tbc and then moved to titan, was moved back to work on this expansion.

[Deleted]

orcs tribal nature took a lot from historical references and the human alliance's inner politics was mapped after medieval europe

after all I mean a nomadic talking cow screams WC, but the beer loving talking pandas, now that isn't WC

I think the tauren were just as bad as the pandas but they got maybe 3 zones at most, no tauren specific instances no special treatment and not many players wanted to play them either. I think players would have complained just as much if we would have got an entire expansion with a silly name like "the pastures of cowland" or something focused on tauren.