Lifetap Volume 1.0, Issue 052 - World of Warcraft Expansions from Best to Worst

While we count down the final hours to the official unveiling of the next major expansion for World of Warcraft, this seems like a good time to weigh in on past expansions. What follows are some general thoughts on each of the previous expansions, listed in order from my most to least favorite of the bunch.

Wrath of the Lich King

I would consider Wrath the absolute peak of Blizzard’s foray into MMOs. It improved on nearly every aspect of The Burning Crusade tenfold, and injected a proper storyline that both vanilla WoW and TBC were sorely lacking. I still can’t tell you what the point of TBC was, but Wrath made it clear from the outset that Arthas needed to be stopped, and every step along your journey through Northrend kept that goal in focus.

Perhaps the only misstep was how the death knight class was introduced. The introduction itself was solid, and perhaps one of the most influential slices of the expansion overall when it comes to lasting impact on the MMO genre. That part was done exceptionally well.

It was the fact that you had to suffer through 10 levels of TBC following that intro that has always rubbed me the wrong way. It made no logical sense to do so, and was just a shoddy design decision in an effort to help insure that the first weeks of Wrath weren’t dominated by a never ending sea of death knights.

This one decision also set in motion what I consider to be the biggest weakness of World of Warcraft overall: a horribly flawed timeline that makes zero sense, and comes across as being the result of one too many coke-fueled benders from the writing team leads.

Cataclysm

Cataclysm may have had its flaws, but was an otherwise solid expansion due to the sum of its individual parts. The revamped starting experiences were handled well, even if certain points only helped cement the horribly flawed timeline inconsistencies.

• New Forsaken characters experience a storyline in which Arthas has already been defeated
• Later on, you’re tasked with going to Northrend to help defeat Arthas

Wait, what?

Another memorable layer of the Cataclysm experience is that Blizzard took its tendency to inject pop culture references and cranked that aspect of things up to 11. This went so far that we even had quests featuring other games within the game.

Phasing was a bit borked from the word go, and did tend to create a rift between players rather than solidifying community, but I tend to chalk that one up to progress. Without the heavy investment in how to make phasing work in a virtual world, we wouldn’t have the mega-servers that are increasingly becoming a standard within the genre today.

Warlords of Draenor

The overall package of Warlords is very well done, but it also comes across as more of a very elaborate single player experience rather than building upon the game’s MMO foundations. Garrisons are cool, but feel more like a system that would have been better served as an offline activity that allows players to continue their WoW experience via mobile devices or web browsers when not able to launch and play the full game. See Neverwinter’s Gateway system for an example of what garrisons could and perhaps should have been.

To be fair, Blizzard has needed to address the rampaging elephant in the room since TBC – building an endgame experience that works for both casual and hardcore gamers. The main focus of previous expansions had been raid progression, but it was a system that the smallest percentage of players ever consumed. Most were content to play dungeons and battlegrounds, run dailies, and otherwise socialize with guild members.

Warlords finally attempts to balance things out so that there is plenty to do for casual gamers at the level cap, but at the cost of partially alienating the hardcore elite that are sharply focused on raid progression. At the same time, raids are also some of the most time consuming and expensive content to create in an MMO, and over time the investment simply isn’t worth it when those raids aren’t being consumed by the majority of active players.

Mists of Pandaria

My opinion of Mists is largely neutral overall. Then again, the expansion wasn’t necessarily created with North American players in mind. In the US and Canada we often forget that WoW is far more successful in other regions, and that we’ve always been one of the smaller segments of the game’s overall population. At the game’s peak of 12 million subscribers, North America was only somewhere around 2.6 million of that overall number.

While not an outright filler expansion by any means, Mists does tend to feel largely formulaic rather than being an MMO expansion with any lasting impact on the genre in any one direction. It gives players more of what they enjoy about WoW, and sometimes that’s all an expansion really needs to be.

The Burning Crusade

The birth of space goats and an attractive race option for Horde players also spelled the death of the original PvP system in WoW. The Honor system may have been horribly flawed, but back then battlegrounds carried far more weight, and it was a strong community building tool in the sense that players actively recruited other skilled players within a single server to create the best teams possible. PvP was also as viable an endgame pursuit as raid progression, and just as challenging to achieve the highest ranks.

TBC washed all of that away, but that’s only the backdrop for why the expansion ultimately became my least favorite. Hellfire Peninsula is perhaps one of my least favorite MMO zones of all time, and it’s the very first thing you’re confronted with when stepping through the portal into Outland. It also told me what Blizzard felt about the Horde (and its subscribers in general) at the time when one of the earliest quest lines in TBC involved digging around in piles of shit.

To this day I still have zero desire to revisit any aspect of the expansion, and honestly think it was only as well received as it was at the time because it was during the height of WoW’s pop culture explosion, and it gave gamers more of their favorite game. As things stand now, however, I have a massive swarm of alts stalled out at level 60 that I simply can’t bring myself to continue leveling if it means returning to that wretched expansion.