Cataclysmic

BlizzCon 2009 has come and gone, and in its wake, left us with details on the next WOW expansion Cataclysm. Now I have to say, this expansion even perked my ears. I was completely ready to hear the usual level cap increase and new races. Which to be fair, Blizzard is including in this expansion. However, the whole theme behind Cataclysm is that some catastrophic event occurs that reshapes the world.

What this means is that the "old" world of Azeroth will essentially be no more. Instead of doing a sequel to World of Warcraft, Blizzard is just redesigning the world from the ground up. All new quests and a completely new world. This will also allow Blizzard to improve the details and graphics from the original game that was released back in 2004. The old quests and world are supposed to be accessible through the caverns of time, in case players are feeling nostalgic.

Even though I'm not much of a WOW fan I have to say that Blizzard has really come up with a great idea here. Games like EVE have been able to evolve because of the nature of the engine but games like Ever Quest and Lineage have done sequels. The problems with MMO sequels has been that fans of the original games don't want to give up their characters that they put some much time and effort into. Thus the sequels are literally competing against the original game for subscribers.

Blizzard's Cataclysm expansion is the first time an MMO developer, has literally reworked the entire canvass of a game with this type of world. It's dangerous, it's impressive, and I think it's going to revitalize WOW in a way that I didn't believe possible.