Our Druids saw a little Zul’Drak action last night.
We’re into the second cluster of quests there now, I’m level 80, the wife 79, and with instant flight the getting to and conducting the required fights are trivial. HOWEVER, I’ve planned to see as much of Zul’Drak with our Druids as possible, and it won’t be over until the fat lady sings. (Yes, the Valkyr are up in Storm Peaks, that’ll be our next stop. I guess that’ll be when she sings.)
So I’m in Cat Form DPSing and I noticed how clunky the current cat form really is, graphically.
Swift Flight Form is gorgeously detailed. The jewelery, the armor pieces, the wings and claws and everything. The Bear and Dire Bear (why can’t the bears get different looks??) are ugly to the point I’d rather not play them. (And I like my DPS fast and furious, cat style, and not slow and plodding, like bear style. So I rarely see my bear form.) Travel Form is cat-like, but smooth. It’s not adorned with a three-crested (or is it just two?) Mohawk like Cat Form, Night Elf version, is.
The new version of the Night Elf Cat Form (and otherwise all the cat and bear revamps for both Nelfs and Tauren) are finally up to speed with current level of “the best” in-game graphics. Some alternate ideas, like Scene Kid Cat, were happily passed over by the development team. However, they appear to have left the dangly glow-in-the-dark baubles intact.
I’m planning on the dark blues cat and bear, and the wife liked the look of the white ones.
I’m happy to see that development is continuing in WoW. Even if the development is being used to test-bed things for the next MMO out of Blizzard it’ll be worth it.
Oh, yeah. As we zipped quest to quest there in Zul’Drak, and I was marveling how fast it was to do quests so easily by flying place to place, it suddenly occured to me, reminded me, that flight will be available at level 60 come the next patch. And faster flight to boot. That means the Outlands will be a lot less painful than it has been. (And mounts earlier, and faster sooner, than ever before.)
Blizzard appears intent on keeping the 1-80 experience (DK and Super Druid experiences aside) for most everyone. “Vee haf content, you vill see it.”
On the otherhand, they’re accelerating folks through it in record time with changes like this.
Is it a good thing for new players? Yes, if the point is to race them to the end-game where all the cool kids are. And no, if you consider what they experience is nothing like we old codgers experienced.
Should rabbit ears, vacuum tubes, and round black and white screens be a pre-requistite to enjoying HDTV on a flat screen? The more you experience of the previous content, the more you appreciate the new content.
“How do you play WoW? I’m new to this.” “Join a guild and get a level 80 Death Knight to catch you up by running you through all the intervening content.” <— This can’t be anyone’s idea of a good thing.
I suppose speeding up travel is a middle-ground solution?
Some day there will be a fantasy game, without an “end-game” and without “PvP required.” More of a world, less of a goal.
Kinless Chronicles 
I’m trying to avoid the bitter “back in my day” approach to the mount changes and look at it from the positive side. While I only have one toon who will fully benefit from the change (everyone else is in northrend) I think that anything that will speed up the process of getting people to 80 is only a good thing. You could make the argument that this is bad because people will level too quickly and lead to a lot of clueless people at 80… but in reality they would be clueless even if it took them a year to get there.
New players learn the most from playing with experienced players. Most of the players are playing the endgame so getting the new players to the same level as experienced is important. This also promotes people playing alts so that hopefully they can play alongside a new player and teach them.
The flying mount at 60 i’m a little meh about. I think better implementation would be at 65 or something to that effect.
I’m also very excited about the druid skin changes. In fact I finally started to work on my druid again (he was my main during BC) and so far am really enjoying taking a truely overpowered toon through northrend 😛
It might not be so bad to level anew toon afterall whichmay seen abit less painless with the new lvl you now get mounts. I’ll be thinking about it…….
Getting to the best parts quicker is no doubt a good thing.
Blizzard has gotten better and better in how they present things to the player.
The quests are better, the environments are better. They’ve learned some neat tricks (like phasing) that really made things different.
Even gearing yourself decently is easy enough. Even if you never set foot in a raid or instance, or a battleground even, you can equip yourself in gear good enough to do what you need.
And in the end they’re now offering a multitude of things for the max-level characters to do. At 60 you had PvP or raiding. Reaching 80 now you’ve probably still have half the quests not yet done. (Our humans bypassed Shadowmoon Valley on their way to Northrend. Our DK’s have not set foot in Netherstorm on their way. All that is available for them to do and enjoy if they care to.)
I enjoyed your post though I have to disagree about your idea that Blizzard is still keeping the 1-80 experience fun for everyone. Other than a few tweeks on things such as the mount system and a bit of a difference in xp gain, I feel that they abandon their content whenever new expansions come out. Nothing new is ever added, only things that will make the old content less painful to play through. I think that’s a bad attitude for a developer to have when it comes to an MMORPG. It surprises me that having that attitude hasn’t caused their subscription numbers to falter.