The face of WAR has changed anew, and like most additions to an existing game structure, the change has rocked the boat. How these additions and changes affect us is dependant on what we like, how we play and towards what ends the two converge.
For quite a few of us, the main allure of WAR has always been the campaign. Fighting with a purpose to your actions, where every goal is a subset of the big goal, the enemy city. Yes, it's buggy and flawed in a myriad of ways, but to many players, it is still the rules of the game that make WAR appealing.
Fighting the campaign means that you're fighting by very specific and agreed upon rules. Success means grabbing objectives, locking zones, taking forts. Failure is letting the enemy do these things to you. If you can achieve an objective, like holding a battle objective to prevent a zone lock, death is irrelevant. It's like chess, you don't win by taking the enemies pieces, taking enemy pieces is simply a means to an end. There is a purpose for a severely outnumbered side to attempt an attack, as your death can achieve a larger goal. In Land of the Dead, there is no such goal -- death is all there is as a reward.
And this is a problem with Land of the Dead. Killing the enemy in this zone actually negatively contributes to any goals of the game -- outside of the possibility of farming public quests or the instances in the zone. You push the enemy back into the tier four campaign, while you aren't in a position to provide defense.
Doing mass RvR is fun, there is no doubt most people reading this will agree to this. But the fun will for a lot of people stem from the chess analogy of playing the game, not removing pieces from the board. You can be fascinated by a play that ends up giving you a numerical advantage on the board, but in the end, it's even more fascinating that the game as a whole is won or lost as a series of such events, not the events themselves. If the objective was to play a death match style game, there are first person shooter games like Call of Duty 4 that do it much better. In the MMORPG scene, arenas in World of Warcraft offers a perfect environment to do these fights in the small scale.
One can wonder why the new zone mechanics work the way they do. It is almost like Mythic asks people to specifically not play the campaign, offering items in the PvE environment of the zone that are massively more powerful than anything else you can earn, while at the same time giving these items a life span that'll require you to come back to farm them anew in just a few nights of playtime. It might be the hook to keep gear-oriented players playing, but it's also the sinker that leaves the fans of the campaign idea at the bottom of the sea.
Land of the Dead has its sides. It's visibly neat, it's got some good feel to it, and some well-done design. It's itemization is way over the top though, and its impact on the campaign is very unfortunate. And, as a game where gear was of lesser interest relative to other, similar, games, and the killing aspect was a byproduct of the grander scheme, you can't help but wonder if Mythic is confused about what game they're actually selling. Is it a Call of Duty 4 with a global cool down? Is it World of Warcrafts PvP environment without objectives but in a larger scale? Or is it what WAR has that no one else offers? A grand plan, a campaign that requires you to do all this while at the same time thinking about bigger pictures?
Some of us have left the other games to come and play WAR -- and we left those games for a reason. Land of the Dead sadly isn't an expansion, it's a contraction.
