There is no doubt that the World of Warcraft Cataclysm expansion was the beginning of the downward spiral for the Blizzard MMORPG juggernaut. I’ve always believed that the main reason for its poor reception is that they foolishly destroyed all of the iconic areas in Azeroth beloved by the players.
They ruined my beloved Westfall by including silly pop culture immersion-breaking quests that referenced CSI: Miami which was all the rage back then. You can tell that most Blizzard quests designers have never read a classic book in their life except for Jeff Kaplan who referenced Hemingway’s novel in the Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest line.
I recall one of the big talking points repeated by Blizzard at the time was the insistence that their quest technology had advanced and they felt they needed to update all those old quests. Well, those old quests had a lot of charm and they didn’t need to be updated. Blizzard’s hubris at the time was legendary. As a result, lots of iconic quests were completely removed as Azeroth was reimagined and disemboweled.
I always believed that Blizzard would have taken their WoW Classic experience to Northrend in Wrath of the Lich King and then avoided the stupidity of Cataclysm altogether and used the Cataclysm assets to continue with the Wrath design and expanded to other unexplored areas of the world.
Let’s be honest here: the idea of WoW Classic and Cataclysm does not jibe. Cataclysm is when WoW became extremely dumbed-down and unfun. It was the beginning of the Bobby Kotick Activision era where greedy investors were demanding that Blizz broaden the WoW demographic. But the players had other ideas and Cataclysm was the beginning of a downward spiral for the once insanely popular franchise.
Who was responsible for this debacle?
Chris Metzen was listed as the creative director at the time. Tom Chilton was the chief designer. Alex Afraisabi was the chief world builder. My money is on Chilton being the culprit.
With all that talent, how could this go wrong?
Yes, it’s okay to make mistakes and it’s okay to fail occasionally. But the real truth of the matter is after Cataclysm was released the WoW A team was transferred to Project Titan which was an incredibly ambitious new MMO. The developers that were left were the WoW B team. This left a massive gap in the talent pool and it shows. Garbage in, garbage out. In a recent stream, even former Blizzard employee Thor at Pirate Software mentioned how the Cataclysm team had no clue of what they were doing and the results speak for themselves.
At BlizzCon 2023, the announcement of Cataclysm Classic was met with zero enthusiasm. In my previous article about BlizzCon, I did not mention this because I was only concerned with the WoW Season of Discovery and the upcoming innovations to WoW live.
When An extremely annoying Hispanic woman made the announcement about Cataclysm I was immediately turned off by her strong accent and the fact that this ridiculous person was trotted solely for diversity reasons.
An extremely talented WoW YouTuber named Nixxion released a superb video that inspired this article. He’s 100% right:
Conclusion
The decision to release WoW Cataclysm Classic was a mistake because Cataclysm is in no way classic. Cataclysm ripped the heart and soul out of Azeroth. It may have looked good on paper but proved flawed in practice. The release of WoW Cataclysm Classic is a surefire sign that both Warcraft General Manager John Hight and WoW Classic Executive Producer Holly Longdale are not in touch with the player base as they claim to be. What’s next? Classic Mists of Pandaria?
Blizzard needs to pivot completely to the WoW Classic Seasons of Discovery and WoW Hardcore paradigm. Since WoW Live is a complete woke joke, that’s the only trajectory that can redeem the franchise.
–Wolfshead
I would argue that Wrath of the Lich King was certainly the beginning of the downward spiral, and Cataclysm was simply the nail in the proverbial coffin.
Incentives drive gameplay, and I would define a sandbox MMO as a game where all (or most) gameplay is driven by player-derived incentives. By this I mean that the value ascribed to any aspect of the game is created entirely within the mind of the player, or by the community of players. By contrast, when gameplay is driven by contrivances placed in the game by its developers that encourages, if not outright tells players what they should be doing, or what they should be valuing, then the game ceases to be a sandbox. In this sense, Vanilla World of Warcraft was a sandbox MMO. Sure, it was not as sandbox-y as earlier games, namely EverQuest, which lacked any direction whatsoever; WoW was revolutionary for its quest design (and accompanying quest log that told you what to kill and where to go). But in a macro sense, Vanilla WoW was a sandbox in the same ways EverQuest was.
In my opinion, we saw the first significant contrived incentives arrive in the game with The Burning Crusade’s Arena system, and the introduction of daily quests. These two exceptions notwithstanding, I believe that The Burning Crusade maintained its overall sandbox feel. That changed in Wrath of the Lich King. The most glaring example, in my opinion, was the introduction of the achievement system. This is a system that was literally in the players’ faces every second they were logged into the game, telling them what they had not yet achieved (and *wink wink* what they should be trying to achieve). It drove players to defeat raid encounters in peculiar or silly ways that made the game harder, and for many completionist-minded players, turned the game into a time sink; a chore. No longer could players derive their own value from their achievements. Instead, the game dictated what should be valued by establishing an official list (which was frequently accompanied by glittering prizes like titles or limited-time mounts, creating a FOMO syndrome). Wrath of the Lich King also, at least among those who raided, completely devalued the previous raid tier’s itemization as soon as the newest raid was released. Finally, with the introduction of heroic-tier raiding in Icecrown Citadel, it turned the game from a casual-friendly game (and by casual, I mean normal, decently skilled players who like a challenge, but who don’t treat the game like a job) into a hardcore game.
While Wrath of the Lich King boasted WoW’s highest North American and European subscription numbers, it was also the first expansion in which subscription numbers took a quarterly loss, and from which they never rebounded. I think it was the expansion where Blizzard decided they no longer wanted to make an immersive world, but a game that was, in effect, phased raid content and nothing else.
I don’t think the “woke” stuff, while annoying, started until much later, by which point retail World of Warcraft was already a shell of what it once was. Most of the player base had long since fled because the game ceased to be a sandbox.
Thank you for this exceptional analysis!
You are 100% correct. While visually, Cataclysm was most certainly the end of the corporeal world of Azeroth, Wrath of the Lich King got the ball rolling by diminishing the intrinsic design ethos of WoW.
As you put it so well, everything became incentivized and on rails. This is pure Bartle achievement game design. I doubt anyone at Blizzard even knows who Bartle is. Blizzard copied and innovated on EverQuest and added copious amounts of polish. Originality has never been Blizzard’s strength.
Look at how Rob Pardo’s Bonfire Studios has still not announced their title after 7 years of development and $26 million in seed capital. The industry abounds with frauds and hucksters.
The LFG finder was introduced in Wrath as well as the ludicrous injection of achievements. This latter was all Jeff Kaplan’s doing. He admitted he ripped off achievements from XBox Live and essentially shoehorned it into WoW. By then Kaplan had checked out of WoW as he was mentally preparing to spearhead Project Titan which was later repurposed into Overwatch.
I do not think that Blizzard knew what they had in the original WoW. They messed with the je ne sais quoi magic sandbox formula that WoW classic was predicated on. As you know, quests were never intended to be such a dominant form of gameplay in WoW.
The sandbox formula along with class interdependence created the happy accident of strong social cohesion. That was magic in a bottle that EverQuest bequeathed to the MMORPG genre.
It’s a tricky balance of keeping what works but at the same time innovating enough so you are not stale. MMORPGs are like fine cuisine. The ingredients, the proportions and the execution are all very important and need to be flawless.
I think the inclusion of daily quests really helped to turn WoW into a chore and a job. I would log on just out of the fear of loss. Loss aversion is a kind of variant of FOMO.
I think Blizzard’s insane success with WoW up to Wrath got them high on their own supply. They thought that their shit didn’t stink and that no mater what they did, the public would buy it. Oh how they were so wrong. Project Titan was a much needed punch in the gut that all of them needed. It’s just too bad they adopted wokeness and the idiotic premise of Overwatch with its trite and glib storyline and moral undercurrents as one of their stages of grief for being exposed as frauds.
The biggest MMO studio has never been able to replicate a MMO that had the success of WoW. Why is that?
I would be interesting to see if ex-WoW developers will ever reveal who or what put the pressure on them to change the design of WoW. All I can speculate is that it was Activision.
At the time, I was writing articles about how WoW was become far too easy. So back in the day, it was no secret. They didn’t listen. They just did what they wanted back then. Look at some of those disgraceful BlizzCon Q&A panels and you can see the hubris oozing off all of them. Eventually reality caught up with all of them and most of them have retired from the games industry with all of their millions in WoW bonuses to keep them warm at night.
I think I was lucky to have started WoW in 2006 when it was still Vanilla and in my situation of being a poor tween/teenager who could only afford to play on a private server, this meant the server I played on got updated to TBC much later so I had plenty of time to enjoy Vanilla (as I was even clueless enough at that point to even know or care about expansions and when they even release).
So for me the Vanilla experience is the best version of WoW. TBC and WoTLK were definitely exciting for me, although I never got to play end game content. For some reason during that period, my attention span was so short, I could only play a character up to level 20-30-40. I never managed, in all these years to level a character to 60, until February 2023 when on Turtle WoW I finally leveled my first character to 60 and now am leveling a 2nd one.
So spending 99% of my time in the low level ranges, mostly by myself, I had plenty of chance to determine that the altered experience of TBC and WoTLK, while initially fun for a clueless kid with a short attention span, as I got older, I could no longer enjoy it. TBC/WoTLK leveling for me just felt too easy, therefore too boring. And since leveling was what I was doing the most, Vanilla was the only version where leveling felt right. This is why since around 2013, I’ve stuck to Vanilla private servers and not much else.
I remember being excited about Cataclym in 2010, but when it released, I was very disappointed about absolutely everything. The changes to Azeroth they made weren’t better – they were WORSE! The leveling experience was completely ruined. My favorite zones – Elwynn Forest, Westfall, The Barrens and others were completely ruined by the “changes” and quests were completely different and no longer fun. And leveling was so easy that I never felt any struggle, I was just rushing through the content and quests, I felt like I was playing a version of Need For Speed in the World of Warcraft – how when you’re at high speeds – the buildings on the side just look like blurred lights, this is how CATA content felt to me. This was the first days when CATA released, I think they made it possible to try the game for free at that time on the official servers, and this is when I tried it for the first time and went from being excited about it to hating it in less than an hour.
If I’m to be objective, I can imagine why TBC and WoTLK Classic would exist, but I can’t imagine why CATA Classic would exist. At this point it just feels like a joke and a very lazy attempt. I’ve seen discussions where people ask where the line should be drawn – when WoW stops being Classic and when it becomes Modern.
As much as I dislike TBC and WoTLK (mostly due to flying mounts and other dumbed-down aspects), WoTLK for me is the last version of the game that is Classic, even though compared to pure Vanilla, the leveling is so much easier that I find it hard to consider it “classic”.
I remember recently trying Retail WoW again not to try and get into it, but to get a feel of what the game is like right now and I played through a new starting zone called Exile’s Reach (mind you, I don’t have a REAL account or invest money in the game except in 2019 for Classic, which I played officially for 2 months and then deleted my account with running subscription), and this new zone didn’t feel like WoW at all. Yeah the graphics look like Disney Pixar. Is that a good thing? I don’t know, for me it isn’t. But the zone doesn’t have a feel at all. The music is forgettable, the scenery and story are also forgettable. For me nothing beats the original starting zones, especially Elwynn Forest, Teldrassil, Durotar, Dun Morgh, Mulgore. You could walk around and explore, because the map felt more open. But in Exile’s Reach, the map feels like those cheap F2P P2W Asian MMORPGs where due to some engine or other technical or budget limitations, the world feels like a series of pipes with invisible walls, that’s how Exile’s Reach felt for me. You can’t jump anywhere, you can’t wall-jump and get out-of-bounds (something I enjoy doing to this day in any MMORPG I try), the storyline with all these “forced cutscenes” and dialogue rushes you through the zone ASAP just to get you to the next one. What’s worse is since in CATA they eliminated the purpose of class trainers, now you learn skills on your own so leveling up, new skills appear on your action bar and if you don’t notice, you suddenly find yourself with 5-6 new skills and you don’t even know how they work. In comparison, in Vanilla (and TBC and WoTLK), leveling up is a major achievement – you get to invest new talent points, on every even level you have to go to the capital city and train new abilities so you have a better mental preparation for what changes you are about to experience and it’s easier to adapt. But CATA (and up) just throws information at you.
So this experience from Exile’s Reach left me feeling disgusted, dirty and tainted with what Retail WoW stands for nowadays. It only solidified my previous opinion of the same… Well, except it felt somehow worse now.
That’s what I’ve heard from players who still play Retail and Classic – they say that the Retail version is extremely convoluted with a lot of complicated systems that are overwhelming for everyone and there is no reason for it to be this way.
For me Vanilla and Vanilla Plus are the best versions of WoW and in some cases one of the few MMORPGs that are still worth playing. I’ve been playing for a few years on the Turtle WoW private server and I really appreciate all the landscape changes they’ve added – additions to existing zones, new zones, new quests in old zones, new quests in new zones, the horizonal progression is so expanded and keeps expanding – now you have a chance to level up in a lot of completely new zones for different level brackets. Now as Alliance player, you have so much more quests in The Barrens and in Stonetalon Muntains, like never before.