Mists of Pandaria release date announce and what it means to me
The date has been announced, Sept 25/2012, for the release date to Blizzard’s latest World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria. With the release date, they also announced the different versions of the game that will be a available.
For $39.99 you will get the game, either as a digital download or a physical boxed copy.
For $59.99 you can get the Digital Deluxe Edition (DDE) which is the game, an exclusive in-game mount and pet, a banner to use in Diablo 3 and portraits to use in Starcraft II.
For $79.99, you get the limited edition Collector’s Edition, you get the game, mount and pet, banner, portraits and the extra goodies which include the Soundtrack, art book, mouse pad and behind the scene DVD.
I am a mount and pet collector in game. I am not sure the extra $20 for the DDE is worth it to me for just a mount and pet, as I am not playing Diablo 3 or Starcraft II.
I have been playing World of Warcraft since January 2006. I started with a rogue who was my main until the midway through Burning Crusade when I switched to my mage. I still have my rogue and he is the 2nd toon to hit level cap each expansion.
With each expansion I have looked forward to the new content and leveling up again. That changed with the release of Cataclysm. Interest waned in the game for may people very quickly after they raced through the content. The story lines didn’t seem to hold our interest and I saw people logging in less and less after only a few months. I started logging in less myself.
It seems to me that with the latest expansion, Blizzard streamlined the content to allow people to reach level cap much sooner to be able to play with friends. I think they went way too far with this as it made the content lack interest and the mechanics of the game itself too easy. For example, in Vanilla Wow, you got your first mount at level 40 and it was a struggle on your first character to gather up enough gold to purchase the riding skill and your mount. With Burning Crusade, you could not get your flying mount until level 70, it cost a fortune and if you wanted the epic flying skill, it took an even bigger fortune and you had to do a very long quest chain. Paladins, Warlocks and Druid has class quests to earn themselves a class specific mounts and druids their travel and flight forms.
Blizzard, in their effort to streamline things and make sure everyone got to see the content, decided dropped the price of mounts and riding skill and removed the class quests. Some of my favorite times from that early time are when helping someone on one of the quest to get their mount/form. All around Azeroth are flight points where you can purchase a flight to another area for fast travel. It used to be there were one or maybe 2 flight points for each zone and you had to find them first before you could use them. Early WoW players are very familiar with the famous corpse run from Stormwind to Booty Bay to get the flight point.Now there are multiple flight points in each zone and you start getting them when you get to the neighboring zone.
In my opinion, Blizzard has gone way too far in making the game accessible to everyone and most of the things that made the game enjoyable for me have been removed. Things like Crowd Control (everyone remember The Shattered Halls), threat mechanics that mattered, weapons skills and actually finding new areas and flight paths.
Usually when a new expansion is release, I book off work the next day. As I live on the east coast, the servers go live at 4AM my time so I usually get up early to start playing to miss the initial rush but still get into the game early. I think this time around I won’t bother. I plan on spending time in game for all the pre-release events but for the actual expansion, I am just going to log in as usual and not rush into the game. After interest was lost in Cataclysm, I still logged in but not very often. I spent my time in the Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effects games. I dabbled in STO and Aion. I spent time in SWTOR. I always returned to WoW though. I am now playing The Secret World and have to say that is MoP doesn’t hold my interest long, I may be cancelling my sub for the first time since’06 and heading into The Secret World permanently.
Sunset in Azeroth
- Dawn in the Secret World
