I’m sure it’s part my fault for jumping right onto the Cata train, but I assumed after WOTLK’s success and level of polish Blizzard would nail it again, or at least the content would last long enough for them to crank out a nice patch. It didn’t. They didn’t.
When I’d quit WoW before, I always left… a little sad, really. In my mind, the game had run out of content, or worse, guild drama had made me throw up my hands and say “this really isn’t worth it anymore,” which is a depressing, not angry, feeling.
Cataclysm? I left feeling some combination of anger and relief. There was no guild drama. There was no running out of content. I never killed more than one raid boss. The problem was the content just… wasn’t well-designed.
Well there are several questions in there and it’s hard to answer each one individually since they’re all intertwined, but I’ll try:
Rift at its core design is closest to Burning Crusade (big quest hubs, lots of quests in the same area, lots of follow up quests) and its amount and quality of late/endgame content is at WoW Classic release level (unsurprising, it’s a new MMO – granted it DOES have heroic versions of all the dungeons like BC). In that regard, yeah, it’s closer to what I want in an MMO, so I’m enjoying it.
In terms of holding up for me, I’d say it’s too early to tell. You level pretty quickly if you try a smattering of everything the game has to offer (quests, PvP, dungeons, rifts) so I haven’t been putting an obsessive amount of time into it (there’s also the reason that my main is a Mage, which is currently in shambles balance-wise). 50 is the cap, which is probably too low, (I’ve skipped entire quest zones because I stopped to do dungeons/rifts/PvP and flat out-leveled the content), but they made their cap around their content and not the other way around. The newness and not-WoWness of it is absolutely a positive factor, but I don’t think it’s the only one.
In terms of legs in general, that’s entirely up to the direction Trion takes the game. There are essentially two warring camps – one that wants RvR, DAOC-style open-world PVP, and one that wants more raids and dungeons and stuff. So far Trion has talked about adding both of those things in some incarnation (the PVE obviously being much easier to add), but it’s hard to tell if that plan will hold up.
You’ll see the MMO tourists and rush-to-cap powergamers (PVE and PVP) cancel their subscriptions before the first billing cycle (about two weeks out). That’s a given.
Sidenote: I have to roll my eyes at the players who spend all their time rushing to the level cap, then all their time grinding heroic dungeons, then all their time raiding, wonder why the hell there’s no more content despite a /played of 100+ hours or something, come on the forums and cry about it, announce they’re quitting, and then lie about how easy it all is and how it takes no time and you better quit too.
