Thursday, September 27, 2012

Missed Of Pandaria

For reasons that are relatively independent of the merits of the product in question, Mists of Pandaria is the first WoW expansion that I have not picked up on launch day.  Real life has been busy, as has my queue of online efforts.  Blizzard products tend to do better than most in staying at full MSRP, but the price won't go up. Perhaps this is a statement, but I think it could also be over-stated. 

Missing Expansion
In the short term, I am faced with several deadlines, hard and soft.  LOTRO's expansion arrives in just over two weeks, bringing with it a level cap increase that I'd rather pass on until I finish the current content.  I have about two more months of paid time in EQ2 remaining from the insane discounts back in May.  We don't have a firm re-launch for SWTOR, but they had previously suggested November. 

I have every reason to believe I will eventually get around to Pandaria, and no reason to believe it will be disappointing - if anything, it will be interesting to see whether Blizzard succeeded in returning the game more to its original roots.  In the interim, if I do have time there's actually a relatively large amount of stuff that I can pursue without owning the expansion - pet battles, low level panda alts, and trying to catch up on archeology without having the gathering exp affect my leveling experience all come to mind. 

The reality is less of a no vote and more of a not-now vote.  Not the message Blizzard wants to hear, I'm sure, but it certainly could be worse - somehow, I think they'll survive.  

4 comments:

  1. If I had written this blog post, it would have been virtually identical.

    First WoW expansion that I have not picked up on launch day - check!

    For reasons that are relatively independent of the merits of the product in question - check!

    Real life has been busy - check!

    As has my queue of online efforts - check!

    I have every reason to believe I will eventually get around to Pandaria, and no reason to believe it will be disappointing - check!

    Only difference is that I'm playing Diablo 3 and Guild Wars 2 at the moment, not LOTRO and EQ2. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. The plain fact that a WoW expansion has moved from "of course I'm buying it" to "I'll get round to it" is in itself a significant development, I'd say.

    ReplyDelete
  3. @Bhagpuss: But what does it signify? I'd suggest that this is by far the toughest competitive environment that a WoW expansion has launched into. I guess this proves that WoW is not INVINCIBLE bwahahah but I'm pretty sure we already knew that from the Cata era.

    ReplyDelete
  4. It's an ironic post, because this is seriously the best wow questing experience I've had. I would put it up there with WOTLK. It's amazing what no flying mounts and connected zones/story lines will do.

    ReplyDelete

Comments on posts older than 14 days are moderated and will not appear until manually approved because the overwhelming majority of such comments are spam. Anonymous commenting has unfortunately been disabled due to the sheer volume of comments that are defeating Google's spam filter.