I'll admit, I'm inordinately excited about this game, and I've had my copy pre-ordered since it was first available on Amazon.com. No matter what George Lucas does to his once-beloved franchise, there's still a little part of me that remembers being a boy and watching the original versions of the first three films on VHS.

That said, I've played a LOT of other MMORPGs and none of them have managed to unseat WoW in my heart or in my regular play-schedule. Age of Conan couldn't do it (largely because at the time the graphics requirements were impossible, and after level 20 it just sort of fell flat), Aion couldn't do it, City of Heroes (which was my first MMORPG and to which I came back once or twice) couldn't do it, Warhammer Online couldn't do it, Pirates of the Burning Sea couldn't do it, LotRO couldn't do it... Rift just looked like a tiresome retread, as did EQ2; and Wizard 101 and Puzzle Pirates, while fun, are more like an appetizer than a main-course. The only things that have even come close have been Dragon Age: Origins/Awakening (DA2 was pure crap) and getting my degrees, and even those couldn't keep me away from WoW for longer than a year.

Did Cataclysm include a lot of mis-steps and wasted opportunities? Absolutely, and I'm worried about Blizzard's increasingly slapdash approach to its most popular franchise. But Cataclysm also included a lot of features that have managed to keep me playing. I honestly don't think anything is going to take WoW's place for me, at least not for a good long while.

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