World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria

Mists of Pandaria looks and sounds simply beautiful. And it knows it, providing ample opportunity to ride massive kites or giant jade dragons and ogle sculpted monuments and tiered pagodas all while listening to an epic orchestral soundtrack or a nearly flawless monologue delivered by talented voice actors.

Mists of Pandaria is a really good expansion for World of Warcraft that offers plenty to all players, regardless of the play style they prefer. Let's hope that the promise of frequent updates will be kept and no one will get bored with existing content. Everyone should be able to answer this question: What is Mists of Pandaria? For me it's a WoW adventure I have been waiting for since 2010. Remember though, that grading Mists of Pandaria right now is simply an attempt to foresee where Blizzard's game is headed.

The virtual lands of World of Warcraft is getting a little long in the teeth but Mists of Pandaria with its lush forests, Asian inspired settings and new race will create this unique and entertaining gaming experience. And besides... pets vs pets... it doesn't get any better than this and best of all, it even promotes new players to the lands of World of Warcraft.

For me, Mists is an excellent World of Warcraft expansion. However, in terms of MMOs in general it does not bring the thunder that a WoW expansion used too. If you are a veteran WoW player than Mists has a lot to offer in terms of game play and especially content. If you are a hardened MMO vet looking for something new this is not the game for you any more.

Mists of Pandaria is in no way a revolution and brings no radical changes to World of Warcraft. But tickles in all the right places, and does so with an energy that's hard to ignore. Forget the Kung Fu Panda jokes. This is at least the second best World of Warcraft expansion yet.

Pandaria could have been the best expansion of WoW. Unfortunately, the casual approach and the daily quests spoil the mood and the fun.

Four expansions in, it finally feels like World of Warcraft is slowing down. Unless you're currently sitting at 85, even pandas aren't going to bring you back into this one.

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Retrospective Review: Oh Mists of Pandaria…how I do not miss grinding in this expansion. This expansion really was the end of grinding for me. It was the first time since playing in the beta of the original game that I had fallen off before the last patch. I played casually from time to time, but the grinding requirements got too unruly here to justify playing. The raids were also weaker, so the incentive to grind to gear up for them didn’t feel like something I wanted to do at the time. This expansion ruined daily quests, as it was just hours of the same thing every day, it was the breaking point for me. There were some good things though. The land itself was beautiful. I think it has some of the best scenery of any of the expansions still to this day in some zones. We also got the Monk class which was really fun and of course both factions could be Pandaren now as well. While a lot of people dismissed this expansion early, making fun of the Pandaren and doing the “Kung Fu Panda” comparisons, it did add some cool stuff. You had your own farm that you could grow crops and tend to them everyday. That stuff was cool. But add that on top of all the other daily quests you had to do and it just got to be too much and the raid content wasn’t quite good enough, especially the early 2-3 raids that were just not up to the WoW standard. We also got pet battles and that was a great mini-game that added even more stuff to do that wasn't just grinding daily quests. I had a lot of fun initially with their “Pokémon” in game equivalent and it added even more depth to a deep game. But, the daily grind was still so prevalent in this expansion it really killed a lot of joy for people. It was starting to get out of hand in Cataclysm, but Mists really went overboard and took it too far.

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria was surprisingly comfy and light-hearted. I genuinely think this was vastly superior to the preceding expansion and the subsequent one. The game was already unrecognisable compared to the classic/tbc/wotlk days, and in the context of what the game was becoming, this was pretty decent in my opinion.

This is where I started to lose interest in WoW ... too bad they went into this direction and started to continuously double down on the things that I, and from what I've felt, the community, didn't like.

This is by far the worst expansion. The story was not very interesting. The game was way too simple and I could barely play the game because of a lack of interest in the topic of the expansion. I like the Asian theme and the Pandaren, but an entire expansion devoted to the topic felt very unnecessary and a bit much. I felt as though it was all nonsense except for the parts regarding the Celestials and the Siege of Orgrimmar raid. SoO was the only good part of the story in the entire expansion and it was exciting to take down Garrosh for the first time after almost tearing apart the Horde. I wish Thrall would have played a bigger role in this expansion. Hopefully, Blizzard can fix all their mistakes in Warlords of Draenor.