World of WarCraft: Cataclysm

The Good
- World of Warcraft is still a pretty enjoyable and well designed game.

• You can still have a great time here if you find the right people.
  
  The Bad
  - The redesign of Azeroth is a failure.

• Barely any effort had been made to update the old quests.

• Blizzard is still a terrible company.

• Game is now too easy.

• I still don't get why the Alliance and Horde are at war.

• Role-playing is dead
  
  The Bottom Line
  For this tragic case I decided to take on a much different reviewing style then I normally do, when talking about World of Warcraft: Cataclysm I just have to tell my story and not simply list what I liked and didn't like.

First of all: the only reason why I played this is because hackers took over my account and left me with six months of subscription, a nice little gift that Blizzard removed after two days because that seemed like too nice a thing to do after making me go through hours of backtracking through my deleted e-mails to find all the information they needed. After those two days I claimed a seven days free subscription that I hadn't activated before, but I only continued playing for three days before ditching the game entirely.

First thing I did was creating a human priest on the role-playing server, who I only leveled up till level thirty or so because role-playing was practically non-existing on the server I was on, so I didn't see any point in having a character there. What I did find out is that some of the starter quests had a massive redesign and used new mechanics that Blizzard used in expansions that came after the original game (like using interactive items and the world changing as you progress).

After hearing a friend constantly asking me to play on his server I switched to a PvP server that I had played on before, my friend gave me a hundred gold and I started working on the new gnome warlock I had created. This time I didn't get past level twenty, solely because there were no quests that used the new technology and they were just largely the same with only a few changes (most of them were changed because of the world redesign). I spend at least three days walking around doing the same quests I did roughly four years ago and they were still incredibly brainless tasks.

Another problem I couldn't stop noticing was that the redesign everybody kept pushing in my face and praising consisted almost entirely out of blowing up stuff. It's like large parts of the world had been bombed silly for a few weeks (like Belgium in the first world war) and other pieces look like the local prison just released a whole lot of pyromaniacs. If it isn't on fire or spewing lava, it's either going to soon or it's just a dead field. There are still some untainted places, but it still creates the problem that the old balance between peaceful areas and chaotic areas is now somewhere in the sewer, so veteran players will be annoyed when they see their old world is now gone while new players will be thrown right into the war without any pacing whatsoever.

The war is still pretty dumb if you ask me. What the hell is the point of having a huge war? The Horde and Alliance had peace at the end of the Warcraft franchise, did Magni Bronzebeard call Thrall's clothes gay or something?, why do we need to fight each other when there is one hell of a dragon flying around and destroying a lot of our stuff? I know Blizzard can't just change it now, seeing as we have been going along with it for six or so years, but it was just a stupid idea and you shouldn't support stupid ideas. If an employer came up with the suggestion to change every character in the game into a sock-puppet, you have a good laugh, you don't devote hours of work and a millions of dollars to change all the character sprites.

Like I said before: This is a very tragic case, I simply don't want to play it and didn't even feel like sticking around until the subscription ran out. I didn't interact with other players, so I am not sure if the community has changed anything, but I hardly doubt it. World of Warcraft is now just a big pile of problems with, at the core, a pretty decent game that is now practically unreachable (like the lever in the Temple of Doom movie that Willie has to pull). There are just too many bugs inside that pile and it smells weirdly of piss.