Massivity: Looking Back at Cataclysm's Impact Crater

It's not supposed to be like this. I've spent the better part of half of year exploring the best parts of innovative MMORPGs like The Secret World, TERA, and the Guild Wars 2 beta. I've long known that World of Warcraft's subscription numbers have dropped significantly. But here I am at 3am the morning before my column is due, forcing myself to quit leveling the Hunter I started a week ago ("Screenshots," I told myself -- "I just need screenshots") and even going to the extremes of shutting off my laptop's wifi. Despite formidable competition, it seems World of Warcraft still retains something of its fabled power to enthrall -- but it's hard to escape the impression that Cataclysm probably wasn't the most auspicious name for Blizzard's third expansion.


You might say I'm just succumbing to the time-honored tendency to bash the old content on the eve of new expansion for an MMORPGs in honor of the good ol' days. But this time the critics have a point. Cataclysm, I fear, will always be known as World of Warcraft's most forgettable expansion. It witnessed World of Warcraft's first major drop in subscription numbers, probably due in part to chasing away some of the "old guard" it'd managed to retain over its entire seven-year lifespan. Even my current leveling rush springs from a desire to have a new main for my Mists of Pandaria review playthrough rather than some enduring love for the expansion itself. In fact, upon reinstalling WoW a week ago, I couldn't bring myself to log in and traipse about the new zones again with my existing characters, and I don't think I've set foot in Vashj'ir (one of Cataclysm's new zones) in over a year.

What Happened?

Cataclysm seemed like such a good idea at the time. It was supposed to be a return to form; an explosive rush of nostalgia that would at once destroy beloved but outdated settings while renewing the feelings of adventure we experienced when we explored Azeroth for the first time. It would also, we hoped, give newcomers a taste of what made us like WoW so much in the first place. The new zones, we heard, would rub shoulders with those we leveled through before we were weighed down with epic gear and fancy titles. The dungeons, Blizzard told us, would be tough again, and would require coordination benefiting the social nature of MMORPGs. Gone would be the bulk of the endless, uninspired kill-and-fetch quests; in their place, we'd ride vehicles, act out the stories of other characters, and watch as the world changed around us. Perhaps most importantly, we'd fight Azeroth's newest enemy in our own backyard instead of running off to another world or a continent on the far reaches of the map.


And Blizzard held true to some of that, too. I still believe the Worgen starting zone in Gilneas is WoW's single most enjoyable starting experience. Earthquakes pull increasingly large chunks of the peninsula beneath the waves; political upheaval ravages the kingdom; werewolves threaten to overrun the capital city; and on top of it all, the Forsaken take advantage of Gilneas' weakened state to launch an invasion. Later zones all the way to level 60 include that same dedication to reworking the world and pumping it full of somewhat-dynamic excitement. Indeed, this extensive reworking project made up most of Cataclysm's actual content (I consider it Cataclysm content you didn't need to buy Cataclysm to play it).

They Grow Up So Fast

The problem is that much of that work on the old content seems to have been for naught. Unless you make a determined effort to experience all the quests and savor the storylines, the speed at which World of Warcraft pushes us through each zone prevents us from experiencing the content to its fullest -- and often just as it's getting interesting. Take my recent leveling spree. I had every intention of taking my time to level from 1 to 85 (down to reading most of the quest text), but after gaining almost two levels from a single dungeon run at level 15, I realized that I'd already outleveled the content I'd started out playing though. To give you an idea of how fast it is, I'm now at level 65 (out of a cap of 85) after just over a week of gameplay. That's partially because I have two "heirloom" items that increase my experience gains by 20% together (along with a guild buff that increases it by an additional 10%), but even if I didn't that'd be a speedy climb.


Still, it's good to spend so much time in Azeroth's "old world" (instanced or not), but Cataclysm took this affection for nostalgia to tiring extremes. We said we wanted the old world back, and Blizzard forced it on us like those parents make their children smoke entire packs of cigarettes at once to derail the addiction before it starts. Aside from an initial burst of creative raids at launch, very little in Cataclysm smacked of that sense of novelty we cherished in the otherworldly vistas of The Burning Crusade's Outland or the snowy tundra of Wrath of the Lich King's Northrend.

We first saw it in the first content patch, which was a mere rehash of the Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman "troll" instances that had appeared in Classic and The Burning Crusade respectively. We later saw it in The Firelands raid instance, where Ragnaros (the original major raid boss) lorded over a burning realm that looked like an outdoor version of 2004's Molten Core. It even extended to the final raid, which started out on the plains before Wyrmrest Temple, one of the most visually stunning settings of the previous expansion. It was meant to be nostalgic, no doubt, but instead the recycling of existing visuals created perceptions of developer laziness.

Running Out of Steam

Deathwing, the big, bad villain of the expansion, appeared to suffer from the same developer ennui. Oh sure, he made a grand entrance when he rampaged in the cinematic trailer and in the weeks before Cataclysm launched. Stormwind's park, the former playground of roleplayers even on normal servers, became a smoldering pit that may never again be filled. The windswept sandstone formations of Thousand Needles, meant to channel Utah's Monument Valley, became a long, thin swimming pool. The problem is that he disappeared after that tantrum, save for gimmicky surprise appearances in which he'd bathe most of a a zone and the players within in a flood of fire. Players like to laugh at how often Arthas popped up like some mustache-twirling villain in Wrath of the Lich King (which I always rather enjoyed), but Cataclysm suffered from Deathwing's absence. I've always said that Cataclysm would have benefitted from Deathwing destroying even more beloved locations in future patches (along with some kind of combined server effort on the part of players to rebuild), but Blizzard's decision to keep him on the sidelines until the final raid robbed us of that anticipation of an impending battle. Instead, we were left feeling like Azeroth had suffered a natural disaster.


Dungeons and raids could have made up for that lack of interaction in the outside world, but for the most part they too faltered after an initial show of force. That's a shame, because some of you might remember that I was positively in love with them after playing them in the beta. The carefree steamrolls that characterized the supposedly difficult heroic dungeons had been my single greatest dislike of the latter days of Wrath of the Lich King, so I cheered to learn that Cataclysm would have me fight bosses such as Corla in the new Blackrock Caverns dungeon. Fights like Corla weren't impossible by any means, but in learning the perfect coordination demanded by the fight, I rediscovered some of the cooperative magic that made me a dungeon junkie in the first place. Unfortunately, though, I was also disappointed to learn that such "thinking fights" had no place in WoW's new world of random group finders that encouraged dropping whenever something went wrong or players didn't understand a mechanic because it was their first playthrough. The random camaraderie of Classic, it seems, was largely lost forever outside of guilds.

Finding Raids, Losing Fun

Eventually we outgeared those instances, and Blizzard shuffled them out of sight by rerouting properly geared players to the recycled troll instances to avoid complaints that they were "too hard" for players used to Wrath's dungeons. Quietly, Blizzard's returned to the short, accessible model of Wrath of the Lich King's dungeons in what I presume was an effort to retain subscribers, reaching its pinnacle in the three quick, unchallenging Hour of Twilight dungeons released last November. If that weren't enough, Blizzard soon introduced the controversial Raid Finder tool, which allowed random players to experience significantly easier versions of the current endgame raids with inferior loot. Admittedly, my guild enjoyed using the raid finder dungeons as a "tutorial" of sorts for the harder fights in the 10- and 25-man raids, but it was hard to escape the impression that they took out much of the excitement of figuring out the content for ourselves. Even learning the strategy from a YouTube video instead seemed somehow more fulfilling.



But Cataclysm's legacy won't rest on some renewed sense of accessibility; instead, we'll always remember it as the expansion that reminded us how old World of Warcraft itself had become. Instead of inspiring a fresh love of the old world, it highlighted how inferior the wavy mountains of the Twilight Highlands looked compared to the windswept Storm Peaks of Wrath of the Lich King. Similarly, flying above the Eastern Kingdoms reminded us how small and outdated zones like the Burning Steppes and the Searing Gorge looked in comparison to zones in which a lack of physical connection with the surrounding world allowed Blizzard to go wild, as in the watery expanses of Vashj'ir or the underground wonderworld of Deepholm. It's a little pathetic, but I think the only feature introduced in Cataclysm that still makes me happy is the ability to redesign the look of my gear with Transmogrification. Indeed, there were many times over the years when I didn't want to play my mage because of how silly he looked in Blizzard's flamboyant robe designs.

Still in Love

So where does that leave us? Were I not so invested in the game on account of friends who still still log in at least once a week to play, I'd be tempted to say that World of Warcraft could never recover from Blizzard's poor decisions throughout Cataclysm's lifespan. I'd also feel free to proclaim that World of Warcraft has a lot to fear from Guild Wars 2. But that's just not true, and it's those same friends who make me realize this. Time and time again I've tried to convince some of them to join me for games like Star Wars: The Old Republic, TERA, The Secret World, or even the Guild Wars 2 beta in the hopes that they'll find a new passion and share it with me, and none of them have taken the bait. To this day, they play the auction house, run outdated raids for transmog gear, and level alts, and they show no interest in other MMORPGs. World of Warcraft is their world away from our own, and it's partly a desire for their company that pulls me back in my free time.


Importantly, none of them can wait for Mists of Pandaria, despite the disgusted complaints I read on WoW's official forums and other sites from former players. Even as I write this, my server's Stormwind is bustling with players auctioning items to build up gold for the coming expansion, and dungeon queues for damage-dealing players last no more than seven minutes because of the rush of players making alts. World of Warcraft, it seems, is doing just fine despite the pronouncements of gloom from the disaffected. But what of that supposedly strategic launch date for Mists of Pandaria, one month after the release of Guild Wars 2? For once, I don't think ArenaNet has to worry about World of Warcraft players drifting back; in fact, many will likely end up playing both because of Guild Wars 2's buy-to-play plan. Even for those who make this shift, Guild Wars 2 provides enough appeal to keep players wanting a change happy, and Mists of Pandaria should recapture something of that feeling of exploring new lands and fighting new enemies so many of us missed on Cataclysm. Cataclysm didn't destroy WoW by any means, but it ensured that its future may be one of uneasy stasis. Even with its problems, it still offers a fantastic experience compared to most of its competitors, but its days of exponential subscription increases seem to be over.

Now call me crazy, but I really want to get back to leveling my Hunter.


Spy Guy says: Before anybody starts dancing on WoW's grave over the recent loss of 1.1 million subscribers, keep in mind that there are still more people playing WoW than there are residents of New York City. Blizzard could lose a million players a year for five years and still be the biggest kid on the MMORPG block.