Haven’t posted for a long time … shock. Anyway, killed Arthas, sorry the Lich King on 10 man last week. It’s a nice fight, definitely the best encounter in Wrath. Have to say though it only took a couple of evenings of attempts to complete which when you think about it is a little disappointing. We’re still working on the 25 man encounter – should overcome that shortly.

This leads us into what’s next? Well we now know – thanks to Kalgan (Tom Chilton – who clearly let slip something he shouldn’t – he’s good at that it seems) – there will be a new Wyrmrest boss(es). After that we look forward to Cataclysm, well I say look forward … I’m not so sure we do!#

In the interview Chilton gave he mentioned that Ulduar was too long and too difficult. I don’t know what planet he’s on but it wasn’t in either case. It was a nice instance, tuned well (initially) with some fairly tough hard modes and one very tough one (Yogg + 0). To say it was too hard is frankly rediculous and makes me worry for the future of the game – a game that is being aimed at people that cannot play it …

This isn’t a rant about “casuals” – whatever they may actually be – it’s a rant about people who expect everything for no effort. The random dungeon tool has proven this for me over and over. People playing classes, decked out in relatively high end raiding gear (obtained from badges mostly …) who simply cannot play their class. Games are supposed to be challenging, that’s ultimately where the “fun” comes from. If a game isn’t a challenge, why play it? It becomes boring very quickly. Yet WoW is heading ever more down this road.

Mike Morhaime, Blizzard president recently said in an interview that Cataclysm was intended to reinvorgate the game, introduce the same game design that they’ve honed in TBC and Wrath in terms of progression, questing, itemisation, etc. He also hoped it would bring back players who quit. An argument the now predominant community and even Blizzard game dev voice use is “the game is bigger than ever and blizzard are catering to the majority of players now!” – wrong, so so wrong. If that’s true why has WoW, according to Mike himself only sustained (at best) it’s (huge) player base through Wrath? And remember Wrath is really the culmination of the recent (seven years or so) of Warcraft lore. If anything it should’ve increased it’s audience with peeps who played WC3 returning to see what happens. The fact is this game grew mostly through vanilla and TBC – this very fact should be telling the developers “hey, maybe we were doing some things right back then?” … instead they seem to be pushing down the wrath path of easy heroics, easy raids and access to everything as soon as possible.

I do hope Blizzard think very carefully what they’re doing. It’s not the hardcore raiders they’ll lose – they’ll stick around for the glory regardless. It’s not the people who can barely play that’ll leave. No, it’ll be guilds like mine that take the game seriously and have been around for a while – the “core” audience if you will.