As
promised last week, this week up I am going to attempt to look at patch 6.1
without being uber negative. Suffice to say there is a fair amount of negative
feedback floating around the net at the moment. In all honesty while some of it
is warranted, 6.1 is not as bad as people make out.
So to
jump in what is 6.1? Well the numbering denotes that this is the first major
patch of the WoD (6.0) era. Unfortunately compared to previous patches in the
prior expansions, 6.1 has no meaningful content. It does provide a lot of
features and quality of life changes, I like pretty much all of the features
except maybe the selfie camera. The heirloom tab is fantastic the mount u get
is rubbish though.... Twitter integration while a bit odd is still useful and
it may get me to post more screenshots so win there. A lot of the Garrison
changes are nice but not spectacular; being able to press one button to create
all work orders is a massive boost.
Yet
however I choose to talk up these features, I can't hide the elephant in the
room. The lack of any meaningful end game content, this is not helped when
certain Blizzard CMs happen to tweet about content that didn't make it in. This
only serves to irratate the community more, having a daily quest hub akin to
the isle of thunder would have been fantastic. It could have tied into the Raid
and provided a wealth of story based content. (More on raid tie ins at the end)
But alas no it got it got cut.
More
worryingly here though is that we have heard talk and rumours for a while since
Blizzconn about how there could only be two tiers of raids with this being a
"short" expansion. But if that is so far we have our first tier of
raids, we are still have no idea how Tannan Jungle, Faralon and the Iron Docks
zones/areas will fit into the equation. Or if there will be any room for them
all, if next content is Quest hub >> Raid Tier >> Quest hub can
they all fit into that pattern. Also with the defeat of Backhand, there are
only two warlords left of which one Guldan is hardly a threat, though if I am
being honest Grommash isn't really either. Why are we delaying surely the
next step is Tannan Jungle and the end of Expac.
Now this
next bit will be a bit cynical, so apologies in advance I just can't help
myself. So around Blizzconn we heard about how they had taken on board that we
did not enjoy the massive wait for content at the end of MoP. So they were
increasing teams' size and hiring more artists as art assets were a major hold
up. Here we are 4 months or so into the expansion and we aren't really seeing
the any benefit of this. To me it feels like they are feeding content in drips
and drabs and spreading it out over the span of the expac. For example of the
iron docks quest hub wasn't ready for 6.1, could they not have left 6.1 for a
month of so? To me there isn't any feature in the patch that waiting another
month or so would have mattered. (Obviously I have no idea how much work it would
take to complete the daily hub) If feels odd to release a patch with a major piece
of content being delayed, almost just to hit a regular release cycle for patches.
Ok so
summing up here and ending on positives because there are some, many somes in
fact. Colour-blind Mode amazing, it's a massive step up from the previous
iteration. As someone who is colour-blind being able to tweak the settings so I
can actually differentiate between different shades of colours is fantastic. It's
a huge win and something more games I wish would offer, though considering the
cost and time to create for a lot of single release triple a title don't have
the lifespan to warrant such efforts. Also the Jukebox is awesome, not just
because of Convert to raids sounders. But there is a lot of Wow music now most
of it awesome, it's nice to be able to pick and choose what we like. Though if I
am being honest I want this for the whole game not just in my garrison.
One thing
that occurs to me with patch 6.1, Blizz could have solved this entire issue if
they had just chucked Blackrock Foundry in with 6.1 and called it the Blackrock
foundry raid patch. Would we be complaining if this was the case? Well probably
not as much some other end game content would be nice but you can't have your
cake and eat it. Then we could have had a really cool raid patch trailer that
Blizz normally do, I miss those.
So next
week Friday again because for now it works, possible subject matters could be.
As gamers are we being ripped off, the lack of cohesion and continuity in Wods
Story compared to MoP, or something else maybe.
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