Blizzard has finally angered me.

[nitnit]

Anyone who has been here for a while and reads the majority of the threads in the main forum probably knows that Blizzard is one of my all time favorite developers.

Well. They finally made a move that's fully irked me. Or, rather, their World of Warcraft development team has.

Arthas, the final boss of the expansion Wrath of the Lich king is going to be released along with his icecrown citadel soon. Fair enough, it's a fitting conclusion to the expansion to finally be able to take down The Lich King, you know, the defining moment of the entire game that we've all been waiting for since it was in early beta stages.

Unfortunately the encounter is going to be offered on more or less 4 different difficulties. 10 or 25 man "normal" and 10 or 25 man "heroic" (25 man raids are almost always harder to complete due to needing all 25 people to work well as opposed to all 10). This has been blizzard's latest model for making raids... but come on, you're going to allow almost anyone with enough gear to plow through ******** Arthas on normal difficulty?

God dammit Blizzard. Not to mention they're giving the encounter achievements. I have no problem with one for triumphing, but this battle should be a struggle. Any achievement for making the encounter look like child's play is just stupid and belittles what should be the epic scale of the fight. I'm positive that Heroic 25 man Arthas will be a struggle, but, honestly, I'm also positive that 10/25 man normal Arthas will be on "farm" for most decent guilds after the encounter is available for 5 months.


tl;dr - The final boss of Wrath of the Lich King, Arthas, who's kind of a big god damn deal, is going to ultimately be easier to beat, at least on normal difficulty, than past endbosses of WoW (Like Illidan, Kiljaden, original Naxxramus, C'thurn, possibly even the not so end ones like Lady Vashj, Onyxia, and Kaelthas)

This proves the hardcore players' fears of Blizzard yielding to the more casual crowd. Everyone I know who gives a damn about Warcraft's story wanted Arthas to only go down in the most epic of fashions. Make him nearly unbeatable if needed. I guess Blizzard would rather just let the Warcraft IP be raped for money.



Let's hope a different philosophy is in place for Starcraft 2. (We all already know that Diablo 3 is going to be just as easy a level up hack and slasher as D2, lol)  

[darkslasherX]

It seems increasingly apparent to me that video game companies think "casual" is the new "hardcore". As in, the largest buyer and player of video games. I'm not one to argue, but I think in the long run the video game companies are either going to dig their own graves, or finally beat the anti-video game mentality (lol jack thompson). It's a toss-up.

More directly on-topic, I heard they kinda ruined WoW recently by rebalancing the classes to make the game "more player-friendly" or whatever they say nowadays. I guess this new content caps off the recent trend.  

[Jonnnn]

Good God, you mean I don't have to have 20000000000 hours in the game to get all the gear to beat a boss? This is asinine.  

[nitnit]

No, it's asinine to completely trivialize the ultimate enemy of the game.  

[darkslasherX]

"Oh hey, let's make it so everyone can beat the final boss on their first try. That'll make everyone happy."


The mentality of the above statement is what angers nitnit.  

[nitnit]

Yes. What people like Jon truly don't understand is how the game wasn't always like that. Back in Burning Crusade when the ultimate enemy was Illidan, less than 1% of people ever saw him, let alone beat him.

Why?

Was raiding that hard? No. You could start off in karazhan, which was easy, and work your way up.

But back then Blizzard cared that Illidan, and later Kil'jaden should be a total badasses who very few people ever kill.

And this was a dumbing down of the difficulty earlier. Raids required 40 people originally, assembling 40 people is a feat in itself. On top of that, Deathwing Layer, the raid with C'thulu, and original Naxxramus required perfect precision from all 40 players. But I digress, BC's difficulty was in between original WoW and Burning Crusade.

Now we're in the Wrath of the Lich King raid. Arthas, The Lich King, is the final boss. His power is considered to be of "godlike proportions". He enslaved an old god earlier. I have no doubt that it'll be a tough fight, and I'm sure that the "heroic" difficulty will be quite the achievement, but the simple fact that there is both a normal and heroic difficulty says that it's going to be relatively much easier to beat him than it was to beat past "final" bosses.

Not to mention guilds are going to be "farming" normal difficulty Arthas weekly for, what I'm assuming will be, great loot, which will make fighting him on heroic even less of an achievement.

What's so bad about this is that it's Arthas. If you make a reader poll almost anywhere, Arthas is everyone's villain in the series. He represents the pinnacle. After this, Blizzard is going to have to do more s**t involving Deathwing, and the simple fact is no one cares about Deathwing. All of the good villains are dead. Arthwas was the last hurrah, and he should have been treated as so.


To try to put this into context for the WoW lore retarded, imagine if I made a Super Mario MMO using WoW's game style. It'd be like if the end boss of the first expansion was, say, Birdo, and he was a total b***h to kill. Understandable, Birdo should be hard to kill. However, in the sequel expansion, I make Bowser himself the endboss, and he's relatively easier to beat than Birdo... relatively much easier.  

[The Ginger Dude]

When hasen't Blizzard ticked off players before.  

[nitnit]

They usually don't. You know, considering they have a pretty superb reputation. Now that I'm more even minded it's really more of the developers of WoW who messed this up. Totally different teams are making SC2 and Diablo 3.  

[Wade640]

I really have no beef with Blizzard but that's probably because I only play WC3 on battle.net But in WC3 the only thing they did wrong was Patch 1.34 but all it did was make a few maps unplayable (mostly DotA but most of us rejoiced because of less DotA games) which made DotA players unhappy and made spambots to protest. It was the funniest thing I had seen in months  

[nitnit]

So, blizzard's patch messed up the custom map that's more popular than the actual game itself? Well no wonder people are upset...  

[Cybylt]

Blizzard was bought out by Activision, the biggest whore in the industry. Upsets are bound to happen.

Want a tough game? Get Demon's Souls, an Atlus rep once said "We get off on your tears," when asked about the difficulty of the game.  

[nitnit]

No, they merged. Not to mention Activision has very little if any control over Blizzard (and vice versa). Activision understands that there's no need to control Blizzard.  

[Cybylt]

Ehh... I don't like anything Kotick can potentially be involved in  

[nitnit]

Really? Because I happen to know about how a lot of gamers try to act political and bash on Robert Kotick, and they all have very little reason to. He runs one of the most successful game publishing companies, and has continued to lead it to success.  

[Cybylt]

My reasons aren't so complex or anything, I just don't like the guy. He's a d**k and continually talks trash with other execs defending him with "that's just how he jokes" or "it was funnier in context."

Though I'm pretty sure being a douche is out of context for corporate executives since being one is a given for them.

The guy talks like he's the sole reason there's a gaming industry these days. He's strictly business and will be happy with bland s**t as long as it makes money with the whole "we'll keep it if it can be exploited annually" business plan.