Posted by Spooner | 9 Comments

No Sanctuary Towns in Cataclysm

A while ago the topic of some buzz on this site was my ranting that the visceral warfare in WoW had become really bland if not completely extinct and the majority of the game was being centered around carebear PvE content with little to no support for themed PvP in battlegrounds or messy and fun world PvP.

The advent of the arena has single handedly caused a world of problems for this game and if anything, has proven to be the black mark that will last forever on the permanent flawless record of WoW. Between that and the FUBAR Wintergrasp, the hopes of actual PvP outside of a pretty little playpen were all but broken.

Here is some good news coming out of CM Zarhym:

No sanctuary city in Cataclysm
We don’t have plans for a sanctuary city in the likes of Shattrath or Dalaran for Cataclysm. For the most part players will be working out of their current faction capitals to keep in the spirit of bringing life back to the old world Azeroth.

That bodes well for a return to faction pride where you’ll just about never interact with the enemy players unless you’re laying them out on the field of battle. That seems to fit very well with the direction Warcraft is heading which is back towards its roots of the Horde locked in very brutal combat against the Alliance and both sides trying to conquer territory and snuff the other out.

Cataclysm Dungeons
We’ve learned a lot from our Wrath of the Lich King dungeons. I think you can expect us to approach Cataclysm dungeons with some new ideas, especially taking into consideration the Dungeon Finder. This system has drastically changed the way dungeons are run and we want to make sure future dungeons are designed with this in consideration.

This is another change I’m excited for since it seems that the new dungeon finder (which is awesome) is making running a 5man instance into more of a game than some drawn out epic adventure. There’s plenty adventuring to go around, you don’t need to make every instance into a massively deep lore hole with heavy dramatic overtones. Deep and rich lore can be found all over Azeroth in many different places and after a while it becomes too saturated and get boring just like a lot of other RPG games out there that seem to be extremely full of themselves.

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