Cybercraft NYC Tournament 3.0 (2 days!) - Page 19

Where to start. Well let's start where I started. Got on the boat to Vashjir confused as to why i'm getting on a boat to start with. Then damnz. The first major shift in style from everything that has come before reared it's head. WoTLK had some usage of in game cutscenes but it seems like blizzard is really trying to drive home the cinematic nature of the story now. The first 5 minutes gave me a scene where a captain is rallying his forces on a boat in order to fight the horde. Then promptly a cutscene ensures where we are attacked by the god damn kracken. At that point control of the camera is taken from the player and we are shown a scene very much like the scene from Pirates of the Caribian where we are given a very very wide shot of the beast. It was overwhelming how well the shots were made. This scene itself made me anticipate the wonders that would come on a visual standpoint for Vashjir.

Throughout the zone there are a shitton more of these smaller cutscenes. These can be as small as a zoom in on the Jaws parody while he is exploding. Or as large as the scene in Throne of Tides, where it shows the kraken reappearing to attack. But even outside the great cinematic value of the scenes the actual visual aspects of cataclysm are breathtaking.

Vashjir is unbelievable in it's depiction of underwater life. It is very much like leveling in the world of a Little Mermaid if the fish were much much more dangerous. Also you get a seahorse mount. Come the fuck on who the hell doesn't want to ride a mother fucken seahorse.

Now onto what i think of the gameplay changes. Outside of class changes and the occasional bugged quest i have to say it's extremely streamlined. The quests are of the norm, Kill, Gather, Other. But the way they try to implement as little "kill x then return" quests is apperent. They try to make it so that it's more then just killing things. It's killing things to do X. It does add a lot to how you see the story as a whole.

Dungeons. It's what breaths life into the monotony that is questing. Now on this note i've only done Thrones and Stonecore. One notable change tho is that you actually cannot queue for a dungeon you havn't entered normally at least once. So it's a good idea to head to the entrances at the earliest convenience in order to queue while leveling.

ToT is a rather boring instance however. Very Very few pulls, i think around 6 trash pulls in total for the whole dungeon. And the bosses are rather boring as well. Altho it's not fair to compare them difficulty wise to raids, there are just to few mechanics in a fight and to many of them can just be ignored. Overall if it wasn't for the cinematic showing the kraken and the rather amusing mind control squid fight i would say this dungeon is really really lackluster.

Stonecore on the other hand is fun. Just fun.Strikes a nice balance of difficulty as far as gear checking and perception checking. And is always fun to chase down a old friend turned enemy.

Now as far as if it was worth it. Yes. Yes it was. If you are comming straight from BC to Cata then it might not be as big a deal, but the cinematic changes are nice. But comming from the regretably lackluster WoTLK to Cata is just an unbelievable change. Everything, EVERYTHING was improved. Also if you are leveling a new character even better. Some areaes got more changes then others but the changes in geography are still a joy to see if you are from the vanilla days.