My early-ish impressions of the Worgen content: fairly disappointing. I’ve played my new Worgen to level 13 (with no heirloom gear, so 13 means I am I think just about done with the storyline). The areas look great, and there is at least one pretty cool cutscene (when you wake up as a Worgen) and one fun quest (lobbing yourself onto the boats). Everything else is actually a little bit worse than stuff was in the original game. The quests themselves are basically the same: go kill 4 of these, go collect this, and so on. There really isn’t much interesting or unique quest design. There’s one semi-interesting one where you go collect horses while dodging an Ettin, but it’s ripped off from the identical quest that you do when bringing up a Death Knight so it doesn’t really count. There’s another one where you throw bombs from a computer-controlled horseback that is a bit fun, but again it’s very similar to the bombing runs in Outland. Other than those, it’s really just the same old stuff: kill ten forsaken invaders, collect six stag shanks, etc.
The big problem with it all, though, is that the whole experience is basically on rails. I understand why they’re doing that – they want an actual story, and this is the easiest way to do their new phasing thing – but in my opinion you end up with the worst of both worlds. You’re still doing very basic stuff in terms of gameplay and story, so it’s not as good as an actual RPG. But you completely lose the open world and self-determination that you had in the old game, which is what made the uninspired and basic gameplay worthwhile. You have essentially zero choice about where to go or what quests to do. I often would have only one active quest, and even when I had more than one it was usually 2 or 3 quests all given out in Place A, which were all completed right next to each other in Place B, and then all turned in back in Place A. It’s like riding a Disneyland ride instead of exploring a forest: slickly produced and visually stimulating, but not nearly as fun because it’s all so clearly contrived and there’s no sense of exploration or ownership of the experience. And it leads to problems during launch time, because when there are 10 people all waiting to kill Executor Doomhat, it really sucks when that is the ONLY QUEST YOU HAVE and nothing else can possibly be done until you complete it.
On top of that, there are some serious potential bugs. For example, with my Worgen I somehow broke the final quest to retake Gilneas City. You’re supposed to fight with the Gilnean army to retake the place from the Forsaken, but if you walk in the wrong gate by mistake the whole battle happens without you there, and then for Step 2 you’re supposed to follow some guy who leaves without you and the whole thing breaks. I’m stuck wandering around the town not able to finish the final goal, but apparently not able to just say “Screw it” and go do something else because this is the Disneyland ride, and you don’t get off until it’s finished. It causes all sorts of bizarre effects, like if I walk outside the city I apparently go into a new phase and can look back and see the city populated by Gilneans, but if I walk into the city again they vanish and there are Forsaken to fight. I can stand near the border and watch people appear and disappear and appear again as I step forward and back.
It’s a shame, really. I had high hopes for this expansion, but they’ve taken a radical new tack in design philosophy (away from open worlds that encourage exploration and more towards a directed experience) that I really don’t like in an MMO. I don’t know whether the redesigned original-game lowbie areas are the same or not, but the Worgen area was a fairly big disappointment for me.
