As a long time World of Warcraft player, I am always interested when Blizzard makes major changes to the game I know and love. I started playing in 2006 and have had a love/hate relationship with WoW that I just can’t seem to walk away from. On October 21st, 2011 at Blizzcon, Blizzard announced the next big thing to it’s already popular world, a new playable species and class Pandaren Monks. The expansion also announced several other additions to include new zones, a level cap of 90, a new talent system and Pet Battles. The news was exciting and devastating at the same time. World of Warcraft is changing again.
Players reacted with excitement and criticism for Blizzard’s changes but one thing stuck in my mind. The Pandaren zone and character abilities resemble something familiar. In 2008, a movie was released starring Jack Black as a much loved Po. I may have to remind you that Po is a panda and the main character of Kung Fu Panda, by Dreamworks Animation. The first thing I did when I heard of the similarities was go to Blizzard’s official site to take a look. I had to admit that the impressive art looked familiar but the most disconcerting thing that I found were the Monk abilities that Blizzard allowed to be previewed. “Spinning Crane Kick”, “Roll” and “Statue of the Jade Serpent” immediately brought a sinking feeling to my stomach. The racial traits “Epicurean”, “Quaking Palm”, and mostly “Bouncy” brought the similarities even closer. In essence, if you were to create a Pandaren Monk, you might as well call him Po and I am sure that name will be taken on every server.
When I was writing this article, I decided to try to be as unbiased as possible, so I wanted to review the facts. Pandaria and it’s inhabitants, the Pandaren, were first released July 1, 2003 with the Warcraft III expansion, The Frozen Throne. Kung Fu Panda was released June 6, 2008, though according to Wikipedia (grain of salt), work was begun in 2004. Even so, this is still a year after the release of The Frozen Throne. The first Pandaren however, was a Brewmaster, not a Monk. Brewmasters were warrior-type classes with alcohol being a central feature. So the idea for Kung Fu Panda was originally Blizzard’s but with the Monk class and racial traits, it seems that Blizzard may be taking artistic advantage of what Dreamworks already expanded upon. In the end, I feel that while Blizzard could have worked a little harder to be original, it was their right to bring the Pandaren race back to Azeroth.
One of the other major changes will be talent points. Blizzard decided to take away the three 31 point trees for each class and replace it with six 3 point “talent sets”. Every 15 levels the player will pick one of the three talents. The good thing about this change is that talents will be easily changed. You won’t even have to visit a trainer to change them. The bad is that there are less options. My favorite version of the talent set was Burning Crusade when you were not forced into one tree or another and could make hybrid specs that were a viable combination of 2 or more talent trees. Although the idea seems to be getting back to that concept, the fact is there are less choices to make, for better or (in my opinion) for worse.
Some of the other changes have been met with little comment as of yet because most players haven’t gotten over the above mentioned changes. They include a Pet Battle system, a new set of zones, and dungeon challenges. The Pet Battle System will allow you to fight companion pets. Personally this is reminiscent of Pokemon and I’m left wondering how young a crowd Blizzard is aiming for. My other thought is that I’m very interested in how my Red Balloon will be able to fight. It’s ability should be to float away from competition, winning by forfeit. The new zones were obviously based on Chinese architecture and from the few picture available, they seem to be very nice but I’m holding back opinions here until I get more information. Dungeon challenges were the only other changes that were expanded on and Blizzard didn’t expand very much. The overall impression that I got was that whoever downed the boss the fastest on a certain battlegroup would be recognized. A nice addition but I consider it to be useless and one more thing that will help contribute to wipes as players rush to be the fastest through an instance.
I’ve already said that I’m deleting my account the day before release but I know that I will be called back to Blizzard so that I can hate and love World of Warcaft again. I only hope that Blizzard listens to it’s players, the critics and fans alike. Over the 6 years of World of Warcraft, major and minor changes have been made for the better and for the worse and inevitably it can still boast several million users. Whether or not Mists of Panderia will be a success remains to be seen. But Blizzard has several other much anticipated games such as the Starcraft II expansion Brood War and Diablo III in 2012 that are sure to keep long time Blizzard fans loyal.