Pandamonium

So the latest WarCraft expansion has arrived, and with it comes the expectations of 10 million players (they say) who are mostly reserving judgment until later to determine if this is a good expansion (BC) or a bad one (Cataclysm).  I've tapped into the new content for a couple of days now, and my reservations are slipping away.  I'm just plain having fun.

There's gobs of new content on a new continent, and so many things to do and see and I've barely scratched the surface of what's out there.  But what I've seen so far is beautiful and fun, if not challenging.  Not that I really want leveling from 85 to 90 to be a challenge, or to wipe on bosses because I don't know the strategies in the first dungeons, but so far even in a heavily mixed pvp environment (there is no attempt to separate out the factions in leveling areas like they did in Wrath) I've only died once, and it was due to testing out my secondary spec and having several mobs bug out on me when I used Killing Spree.

The art is awesome.  The theme is solid, and the stories mesh wonderfully.  It's apparent that Blizz developers are capable of a lot more than they were in the past, when pieces of lore were thrown at them to accommodate, or great gameplay had to be sacrificed to fit an old storyline.  Everything is new.  Only Chen is an inherited character, and he's more legend than fact anyway, and there was nothing defining him aside from being a world traveler. 

So far I've cleansed a brewery of evil "spirits", squished oversized bookworms, sunk ships in a gyrocoptor, and ridden across the landscape on the back of a flying jade serpent.  I don't have the graphics settings up very high, and its still impressive.  The detail is there, the mood is there, and of all things, the fun is back.

If you didn't like Wrath, I understand.  If you skipped Cata, you weren't alone.  But I think you'll be hard-pressed to find someone who really doesn't enjoy Mists of Pandaria, because there's more than just something for everyone, there's a lot of new stuff for everyone.  Yes, the shine is still on the packaging, but so far it's two thumbs up.