Robot Claw

I haven’t made a World of Warcraft post in ages since I stopped played about 2 years ago (Sep 10, 2013 to be precise). Blizzard have been relentless in trying to get me to return, offering me free game time several times over the years. Mostly I ignore the offers, but yesterday I redeemed a free week and logged on to see what has changed.

Here’s what I saw upon login:

Of course there has been a new expansion added as well. I found it interesting they don’t mention that.

A couple of UI buttons were highlit with big glowing help arrows. One was the  ‘collections’ button, that contains the pet, mount, toy and heirloom collections. Here’s a shot of the toy collection:

And here are the heirlooms:

There are so many mounts in the game now (>400 I think!) it’s just a bit crazy. The new ones added in the expansion are mostly boring reskinned wolves and pigs, but this guy caught my eye:

Look at the cost! Many of the new mounts seem excessively pricey. I guess Bliz wants to reduce player wealth.

Speaking of wealth, the other UI button they were directing me to was the in-game shop, where you can buy mounts and pets…

Or other things like game-time tokens ($20 each) that can be sold on the AH (~24k gold apiece) or even a $60 – sixty dollars! – level boost:

I wonder if they only priced it that high to make the additional cost of the expansion (which includes one boost) seem like a deal?

Anyway I had to see the new character models, which were billed as a big draw. For comparison, here’s a shot of Momomo (my main character) from back the days of the old models:

And here she was, all ready for some styling, immediately upon logging in today:

It’s not a massive difference is it? The short hair and weird face were not to my liking though, so I tried a few looks…

 

Before settling on this:

The fancy new character models are underwhelming. For starters the characters still look quite dated due to the limitations of the armor. And secondly the vast majority of characters have their faces covered by big bulky helmets (or shoulders) so you never see the new faces anyway. Not a selling point in my opinion.

Since I don’t have the expansion – and don’t intend to buy it now – playing the game stuck at level 90 is a bit like getting a free ticket to the movies but having to leave after the trailers. There wasn’t really anything to do that wasn’t available back when I quit, so I got bored very quickly.

I did have one quest I was always meaning to solve, so I went and beat up this dude:

They have added some sort of buff when it comes to fighting lower-level monsters (including raid bosses), which made Black Temple a faceroll. Which is good, since I’ve forgotten how to play and the class has changed so much I couldn’t really be bothered to relearn 🙂

Oh, and the game is dead. There wasn’t many people on at all (including in the capitals) and the guild seems to only have a dozen or so people that play:

So my free week didn’t keep my interest more than 24 hours. I parked Momo on her pretty sparkling horse (obtained from playing Hearthstone of all things) and said goodbye once again:

I’m sure one day I’ll buy the new expansion(s?) and return again. Just not today!

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 18th, 2015 at 10:35 am and is filed under Games, Otaku, Time. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.