Project Lore

I admit that little of Blizzard's new raiding philosophy has sat well with me, so when details started trickling in about the next major content patch, you can imagine that I had a few beefs. Most notably, this little nugget:

Crusaders' Coliseum: In order to prepare for a siege on Icecrown Citadel, players will be called by the Argent Crusade to test their mettle in the Coliseum. 5-player, 10-player, and 25-player challenges await inside.

With the wealth of raiding content added in Burning Crusade, am I the only one that feels like Blizz has been sort of phoning it in? Sure, Ulduar's a fantastic instance, but Naxxramas really did feel like recycled content. Remarkably few people experienced its first iteration, and it was nice to smash Kel'Thuzad's face in, but the feel and design screamed "hand-me-down." Likewise, before Wrath hit the market, we knew Ulduar was on the horizon and were told that the doors to Icecrown Citadel would creak open with the release of 3.3, but Blizzard also hinted at a mystery raid that would appear sometime in-between. Now they're telling us it's the Argent Coliseum, a raid instance that Blue Zarhym describes as "Ring of Blood or Amphitheater of Anguish, but more epic" is the only bone being thrown? You call that a raid dungeon?! A raider's appetite is voracious (just ask Ensidia), and the meatier the content, the happier we're going to be! I hate to take a Blue's words at face value -- after all, they're just trying to help and don't necessarily represent the company as a whole -- but "another Ring of Blood" doesn't exactly inspire. You've already got three of those in various areas of Northrend! Coliseum-style quest lines are all fine and dandy for a few extra boxcars on the leveling train (as I sometimes describe my experience bar), but as a raid instance? I'm not so sure. Those raid designers are going to have to work some juju to convince me. Really, though, it just feels symptomatic of a greater malady. Hard modes? Who wouldn't want to see whole new encounters as opposed to a few over-charged bosses? It smacks of the same sort of lazy design most developers use to "enhance replayability" in their games by juicing the enemies and nerfing the player. A true Hard Mode works great with well-coded AI that becomes more and more devious as the difficulty scales higher, but the structure of WoW's PvE gameplay doesn't lend itself to those sorts of augmentations. Bosses are clockwork machines that work either on strict timers or random number generators. It's easy to strategize for them, and from there it's mere player execution. The path is not that hard to follow: a raid group encounters a boss for a first time, wipes and wipes to the point of frustration, finally kills that boss, then has it on farm. The "freshness" of any given in encounter doesn't last very long, and Hard modes, at least in my eyes, do very little to lengthen it. Despite my problems, I feel like i'm peeing on the wrong hydrant here. Blizzard's put a crazy amount of effort into this expansion and it shows in the cohesiveness of Northrend. I think it's great that the community can have differing opinions and honest debate about this topic with those that actually have to create the game. It shows a great amount of love and investment on all sides. Perhaps that's why their new raiding philosophy feels do damning to long-time players like myself. The focus has been on expanding the casual content, providing a wealth of quests to work through on the path to 80, dailies galore once you get there, and the opportunity to traverse content you never would have had a chance to in Burning Crusade. But in doing so, it seems to rob successive content (and the lore associated with it) of its impact.  Once terrible fiends in the WarCraft universe have had their rears thoroughly kicked in 5-mans, and as I've discussed here, the raid bosses haven't had it much better. This philosophy would've worked fine if it had been implemented from the ground up, but two expansions in, broadening the base of the content makes for an increasingly flat experience. Perhaps I'm belly-aching too much, though. I do find it weird to make a post like this on a night spent entirely having my face cratered by Mimiron, but it's also strange to know that by this time next week, yet another Titan will no doubt have been toppled. So you, dear readers, does WoW's new raid direction feel like a sweet deal to you, or does it leave a faint, sour taste in your mouth? Will 3.2 serve as a sufficient stop-gap between Ulduar and Icecrown, or is it just another bump in the road for the hardcore set?

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