Alright, I can finally get to talk about the Pet Battles. On this blog I have talked about the parallels between the Pet Battles and the Pokemon games. (Be MOP #44 and #67)
Over the weekends I was able to update the beta client and jumped head first into the Pet Battles….only to find out that all of my pets were gone.
A quick trip to the crazy old cat lady and I’m ready for battle.
As I was playing the battles, I was not looking at the battles with new eyes, but with eyes of a long time and hardened Pokemon fan.
After playing a few matches against wild pets, I can definitely state, “Yup it’s a lesser version of a Pokemon game.”
The first Wild Pet I came across in the tall grass
I mentioned before that I was worried about the Pet Battles would be too complex, that it would force players to find the few best cookie-cutter combinations of pets and movesets.
From looking at all the gaming aspects (Pet type, their passives, and the primary and secondary effects of all the battle moves)I realizes that Blizzard designed the Pet Battles to hit that sweet spot where it’s a mindless time sink and having enough strategy that if you play the game smart enough to have an edge over the opponent.
Don’t get me wrong, me saying that the Pet Battle system does not enough complexity is not a bad thing. One of my fears of the Pet Battles was that it was going to have too much strategy that one lucky combination that would break the mini-game and then Blizzard would spend more time and resources to fix this problem resulting in major patch notes and overhaul of the Pet Battles.
Now the only question that remains is will I actually use this function of Mists of Pandaria? To that I reply, “ehhh?” I’m not looking forward to this service, as much as I am looking forward to the new quests, raids, rep and content.
The Pet battles will probably be the Transmog of this expansion for me. I won’t pay it too much of my mind, but I’ll use it if I ever get bored between lull times of game play.
If I do play the Pet Battles, it will be for the achievements.
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Be MOP focuses on the lead up to the next World of Warcraft expansion with my own reflections about the last dying moments of the Catalysm’s Twilight Hour as we look into the Mist of the new day. Updates Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays
