Massively OP’s Mike Foster said something that resonated with me earlier this week when during a debate about World of Warcraft, he uttered, “I think WoW truly lost me when Blizzard got rid of Shaman totems.” I wanted to cheer, but I’m sad about it too. I’ve never fully quit WoW over its now many years of slowly watering down the flavor of my main class, and I won’t say I’ll never go back because I always do and I always have fun. But when totems became shells of their former selves, it sort of sank in that the gameplay I liked was gone, that this was the new reality, that the game’s philosophy had really shifted almost too much for me — as Mike put it, “It was the moment for me that said, ‘We want every class playing basically the same.'”
I wonder whether this is something that a lot of folks realize at some point in their gaming careers, especially those who’ve been playing “old” MMOs long enough to see them change over first-hand, sometimes into dramatically different versions of themselves. I certainly feel that way when I log into Ultima Online in 2015 — aside from the graphics, it’s so different from its 1997 version that a lot of folks wouldn’t even recognize it. There was never a jump-the-shark moment or anything; just a slow realization that oh, it’s over… oh, it’s something else now — damn.
Do you ever have MMO epiphanies like this? When do you know that the game is just too far gone, that you’re never going back to an MMO?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
