My Life as a Gamer: More Legion Hype

No, I'm not going to recount what's come out today at BlizzCon. Below are the links to folks who have the info. Go read that first, or mind their Twitch channels or YouTube channels for livestreams and videos, and come back. I'm presuming that you're familiar with what went down there.

• WOWhead.
• MMO-Champion.
• Blizzard Watch.
• /r/wow at Reddit.

Okay, time for some commentary.

• The dev team got the memo. They're trying to un-fuck the game.
  
• Dungeons and PVP are now fully co-equal with Raiding as an endgame progression path. About damned time.
  
• The devs want to push players to do overworld stuff to develop any part of their character's progression, directly associating interaction with the world as well as learning the associated lore with achieving character progression. About damned time.
  
• The devs figured out (a) that people want to play with pals and hate arbitrary barriers to doing so and (b) yanked many big barriers of that sort, albeit it only applicable in Legion content in most cases. About damned time.
  
• The devs figured out that people are in this to play very specific fantasy experiences, following Robin Laws' "Iconic Hero" idea. That's why it's "progression" and NOT "development". So they're changing classes and specs to conform accordingly, using "class fantasy" as the buzzword.
  
• The devs have no problem taking good ideas from other games and making them work for World of Warcraft. Some announced for Legion come from Diablo 3, some from Heroes of the Storm, some from older versions of the game itself, and some from another company's stuff (such as Guild Wars 2).
  
• The devs finally got the clue that players like to do lots of different stuff, and have varying levels of ability to throw time at playing, so they came up with a variety of things to do and explicitly said that players need to choose what to do according to their priorities. They're demanding personal responsibility from the players. About damned time.
  
• The devs so improved the Transmogrification system that, by itself, many lapsed players will buy into Legion just to access it. Fan-fucking-tastic.
  

So, what does this reduce down to: Legion is worth watching, and I hope to get selected for the Beta. I wouldn't say that pre-ordering is worth doing just yet, but I would say that this is worthy of hopeful attention at this time. Also, it shows one other thing, a thing that the tabletop RPG world still hasn't grokked after 40+ years.

It's about fulfilling an iconic fantasy, you cocksuckers. Deliver Or DIE!