Five hours

Posted on December 7, 2010 by SynCaine

For some, it will take longer to download an expansion than to reach it’s level cap.

That is most impressive for 25 months, hundreds of devs, and millions of dollars later.

Lowering the bar (of accessibility!) yet again.

About SynCaine

Former hardcore raider turned casual gamer.
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15 Responses to Five hours

  1. Wilhelm2451 says:
    December 7, 2010 at 1:58 pm

    Three years? You must be talking about some game other than WoW.

  2. Dril says:
    December 7, 2010 at 3:13 pm

    How’s DF2010 coming along anyway? I hear part of its title is misleading.

    • SynCaine says:
      December 7, 2010 at 3:18 pm

      Not yet it’s not :)

      I wonder if this weeks patch is going to take +-5 hours to finish though. AV does have that whole ‘tiny studio, small budget’ advantage going for them though, so it’s not a fair comparison.

      • Dril says:
        December 7, 2010 at 3:36 pm

        Oh no, I agree Blizzard’s content rate is fairly pathetic. Although, have you seen EQ2’s newest announcement? Their “expansions” manage to put even ActiBlizz to shame for lack of ambition and money-grabbing. TWO new zones! Golly, and a level cap increase of 10? Sounds EXACTLY like their last expansion.

        • SynCaine says:
          December 7, 2010 at 3:39 pm

          Hey now, zones are hard. It takes Blizzard a full year to revamp one city, can you imagine how difficult it must be to do a WHOLE ZONE?

          Plus, EQ2 is F2P now, so it’s in a different league. So long as they add one new dress per week, they are keeping pace with the other Korean games they compete with.

        • Dril says:
          December 7, 2010 at 3:45 pm

          And LOTRO! That’s not Korean (although the deed grinds are.)

        • Blunt Force says:
          December 7, 2010 at 4:43 pm

          Actually EQ2 isnt F2P 100% They are using two schemes which of course further separates the player base.

  3. Bhagpuss says:
    December 7, 2010 at 5:10 pm

    If the Velious zones are the size of any of the Kunark zones or Moors of Ykesha they will give me something like 20-30 hours gameplay. Obviously, that’s just the two overland zones for antisocial duoists like me and Mrs Bhagpuss. Everyone else also gets a slew of dungeons.

    SoE does do expansions that follow a format, but it’s a format the playerbase is generally happy with. It’s the execution of the format that’s the issue.

  4. Carson says:
    December 7, 2010 at 6:19 pm

    25 months, hundreds of devs, and millions of dollars later, all they managed to produce was a couple of camps of mobs to tag and AoE grind. What a waste.

    Oh.. actually, wait a minute. That’s not all they produced. It’s just SynCaine trolling.

    • Jezebeau says:
      December 7, 2010 at 9:42 pm

      Agreed. The few players having used the beta to practice the fastest possible way to level to cap don’t disqualify the content they circumvented.

    • Trix says:
      December 8, 2010 at 2:20 am

      All right, let’s remove mobtagging. Then it’s 10 hours instead of 5 hours. Pathetic.

      And if you want to do all new quests instead of just doing enough to hit level 85, that’s still just another 10 hours, if that.

      And please don’t say that there’s plenty of playtime in the “new” 10-60. At least 50% (I am being generous) of the quests in that “new” experience are the same old quests you did before, just with new rewards, organized into new chains.

      Pretty sad for two years of work, particularly after the amount of hype we’ve endured.

  5. Trix says:
    December 8, 2010 at 4:29 am

    Out of interest, I compared the number of quests in new zones of Cata (taken from achievements) to the number of quests in new zones of WOTLK.

    The result: ~600 quests for Cata vs ~850 quests for WOTLK.

    Judging by the time it takes to level, Cata is about half of WOTLK. Judging by the number of quests, it is more like two thirds. No matter how you slice it, however, Cata looks smaller than WOTLK. And people thought WOTLK was not large enough to begin with as they quickly ran out of things to do, remember?

    The only saving grace of Cata might be the new raids. We’ll see how this will play out…

    • Shadow says:
      December 8, 2010 at 11:18 am

      Is this where I should come into the conversation as a WAR player and make some comment about updates removing content?

      Nahh….

    • Jezebeau says:
      December 8, 2010 at 11:40 am

      Blizzard have stated that focus is on the endgame in this expansion. It stands to reason that the briefer leveling experience and the streamlining of the old world is to help get people there. Quality also counts for something.

      TBC had a really extended leveling period with three zones more questing than one needed to hit level cap, but a lot of it was an unpleasant slog. Pre-Cataclysm, though, its endgame was my favourite due the challenges posed by the heroic dungeons.

      At this point, I haven’t experienced too much of Cataclysm (a dozen quests in each of the starting zones and a few runs of the two starting dungeons) because I’ve been grinding archaeology, but I can already tell from healing through those dungeons that coordination and full awareness of one’s class is going to be necessary for the endgame content; it’ll be engaging, to say the least.

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