Review: World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (PC)

I know what you’re thinking: “This game came out over a year ago. Why is it just getting reviewed now?” I can answer that for you in two parts. First, with the release of patch 4.3, all of the intended Cataclysm content and most of the gameplay balance adjustments have been made and the final version is now in the hands of the players. Second, like any MMO, the game that initially ships generally turns out to be completely different from the game that everyone ends up playing in the end. So without further ado, let’s jump in.

Cataclysm was a grand experiment from the folks over at Blizzard. They played around with reshaping the world and the gameplay experience. They changed many of the preconceived notions regarding their end game design philosophies and, in the end, they ended up almost where they started out and far from where I think they intended to be. To be honest and fair, Cataclysm didn’t live up to the expectations of most of their players. While the reshaping of the world was nice and the reworking of the 1-58 experience was desperately needed they left the max level players out in the cold. While the 80-85 levelling experience was different from any experience that came before it, more on this later, players were left without the breadth of content they had come to expect from the previous expansions. Couple that with Blizzard’s trademarked “When it’s done” release schedule and it’s not that surprising that they saw a large decline in active subscriptions.

That last paragraph sounded a bit negative, Cataclysm wasn’t a bad expansion pack for Warcraft. It just had the poor luck of being the worst of the three so far. In a way, I’m glad that Cataclysm started out where it did. The end game felt almost needlessly hard in contrast to the extremely easy early end game of Wrath of the Lich King and for some players, myself included, this was a breath of fresh air. The problem, in my eyes anyway, wasn’t that the game was too hard but that it was hard for the sake of being hard, not because the difficulty added anything. In many ways, Cataclysm felt like the original release of the game. Max level dungeons were hard and required coordination between all the members of the group, raiding was harder than it had been in Wrath because there wasn’t an easy to obtain tier of good gear to get people into raiding form, and there were only six new zones for max level characters to tinker around in when they weren’t running dungeons or raids or levelling their umpteenth alt.

That’s where Cataclysm started which was a whole different place than where it is now. Since launch, Cataclysm has seen three major content patches which have served to help ease people back into where they were at the end of Wrath of the Lich King. It wasn’t the best approach but at least they end with the bulk of the subscriber base being happy. In 4.1 Blizzard brought back two old troll raids, Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman, as heroic 5-man dungeons. They followed that up with patch 4.2 which took players to the elemental plane of fire to battle Ragnaros and his minions. Then, finally, in patch 4.3, Blizzard released three 5-man heroic dungeons and the final raid itself, The Dragon Soul. All in all this was a fair amount of content and having experienced it all, I rather enjoyed it.

The big problem with Cataclysm is that it felt small and it felt like a rehash. It was made clear that the reshaping of the original world was the main focus of the expansion but I couldn’t help but feel slighted by the lack of options for the players between 80 and 85. The levelling process itself even felt a bit haphazard. Mount Hyjal and Deepholm felt pretty good for the most part but zones like Uldum and Vashj’ir felt too disjointed by cut scenes and special questlines. Don’t get me wrong, I like cut scenes and they few that Blizzard implemented in Wrath were amazing. They felt epic and it was good to see these major characters interacting with each other in more believable and intimate ways than they could in the game itself. Cataclysm cut scenes felt cheap in comparison as they Blizzard really liked the idea of having them so much that they just made a bunch of cheap ones and hoped we wouldn’t notice. With the exception of the cut scenes in the Dragon Soul, none of the in game cut scenes lived up to the standard set by Wrath of the Lich King. This was made doubly disappointing in Uldum while working on the Harrison Jones questline, it seemed that you couldn’t go more than three quests without being forced into one of those damned things.

Player versus player saw its ups and downs as well. Tol Barad was added as the new battle zone like Lake Wintergrasp before it. Players would battle every few hours to control Baradin Hold, a magical prison that held demon raid bosses which would drop PvP and PvE gear. Like Lake Wintergrasp before it, Tol Barad also ended up usually being dominated by one faction. In earlier iterations, it was almost impossible for the defenders to lose control of the zone simply because of the way the mechanics worked. In Tol Barad, the attackers have to capture and hold three control points at the same time. Sounds easy enough but at the beginning there was no cap to the number of players that could contribute towards the capturing of a point. In other words the defending team could literally travel en masse and sit on one point and capture it from a small attacking force making it near impossible for the attackers to hold all three positions simultaneously. That is all, mostly, fixed now and things have settled back into a rhythm more in tune with the population of the server.

The classic world’s redesign was one that I was really looking forward but I ended up mostly skipping it in favor of the Dungeon Finder. The Dungeon Finder was an addition from Wrath of the Lich King that allowed players to queue up for a random dungeon with other people from their region. With the redesign of the classic game world came the redesign of many of the classic dungeons. Players no longer had to search through a given zone to get the quest associated with the local dungeon, instead the quest givers had taken up residence right inside the dungeon portal. These changes, coupled with heirloom gear which increased experience gain from quests and killing monsters, made it very easy and very quick to level until Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King content. Even without using heirloom gear or the Dungeon Finder, the levelling process was extremely streamlined by the new design. The streamlining process was nice and it made the grouping of quests make more sense but most, if not all, of the quests that required the player to travel all the way around the world for no apparent reason were now gone. That’s probably a change for the better but I really enjoyed those quests and I’m glad that I got to enjoy some of them before they were taken away. The problem with the current design of these zones is that the player out levels the zone before they finish the questlines. It’s disheartening to me that they put all this work into revitalizing the world to only have it ultimately ruined by their own revitalization.

It’s not all doom and gloom. Is everything bad? No, it’s really not. Even though players are likely to out level a zone before they finish the quests, the new quests are great fun and well written. Each zone has a story now which I encourage every Warcraft player to explore. The new, old, and revisited dungeons are interesting affairs. While I miss Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman in their old forms it warmed my heart to see them return to the relevant world and the story hook they implemented hasn’t been resolved as of yet and word is they’ll be playing a big part in the next expansion. PvP will always be a roller coaster ride. Some classes will always be powerful like rogues, mages, and warlocks but every now and then other classes will become viable that had previously been thought to be undesirable. This was made startlingly clear when a hunter was on the world champion arena team. Raiding was also a bit of a hit or miss affair. In the end, only a small portion of the subscriber base will fully experience everything that raiding has to offer but Blizzard deployed a new trick to get more people into the fold.  In 4.3 Blizzard added the Raid Finder. It functions much like the Dungeon Finder but it allows players to join a special version of the Dragon Soul raid. Sure it’s easier and the loot isn’t as good but it allows people who previously could not raid the opportunity to feel like they participated in the end of the expansion and the killing of Deathwing.

Ultimately I am mostly satisfied with World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. Did it get everything right? No, not by a long shot but it didn’t get as much wrong as everyone seems to think. Cataclysm served as a reminder of what Warcraft was when it launched all those years ago. It was a world of promise and opportunity, a world that just needed its players to believe that it could achieve great things. I can’t possibly think of a better place for Warcraft to be going into the next expansion.