Category: World of Warcraft

One of the novellas in Dragonblight is 95% great. There is even an achievement, so the game is pushing you towards quality content (as opposed to the achievement requiring The Green Hills of Stranglethorn). This is the 20-mission chain ending in The Battle For The Undercity from the eastern Alliance Keep. It is one of the central storyline quests for the expansion, and its backbone provides strength and structure.

This is exactly what you should have expected coming into the expansion pack: war with the Lich King. Entering Northrend through the Borean Tundra, this is what I saw coming, with Nerubians attacking right at the beach. The Tundra turned out to be a long digression, but the main thread picks up. You have a castle on the edge of doom, you have slavering undead hordes. Clear the crypt! Blast the mines! Save the citizens! There are a few misses along the way, but it features great heroics, you fight the undead just like you signed up for, and the NPCs praise you at every step for being the epic hero who is making a difference. You can pretend that it matters, and phasing tech helps the illusion.

It leads to the excellent cinematic that Blizzard used to promote the expansion. It really is a great video. We played it several times at the LAN party just after it was released, and we wondered when Blizzard was going into film-making. They really do make great trailers, and having played through the zone, it makes sense why dragons appear and burn everything at the end (a bit of a WTF moment in the original release). Phasing even brings the effects in-game.

The very end of the arc is horrible, absolutely terrible, just like the end of the Death Knight intro. It is a deconstruction of god mode, showing you that the game can become even more pointless if you crank all the dials to 11 and have immortal characters. Get healed for 10,000hp per second with similar DPS! Accompany your 12+ million hit points worth of allies into battle! You can join in the fight, pretending that your tiny contribution matters and that the outcome is not pre-determined, or you can go AFK and let the NPCs play with each other in a long, repetitive fight. Watch your raid boss allies fight the raid boss enemy for several minutes of pointless animations! Rather than sit through fifteen minutes with no gameplay value, I recommend reading the text on the wiki and alt-tabbing. The voice acting is the only value added by having it in-game, and that could have been done with a much shorter cut scene. Even the animation is shoddy, because Varian Wrynn resets to his default stance for a moment between each talking emote, making his swords flicker in and out of existence as he talks. It fares poorly coming directly after some of the best quests and visuals in the game.

I fear for the future of the industry when some players consider this last quest one of the “most epic.” No, the numbers and gameplay are meaningless, and the storyline advances only by wiping out the storyline advancement that happened in the previous cut scene. Hey, let’s have several speeches about how the Alliance and Horde must unify against a greater foe, show them doing so, finally cash out the implications of the Forsaken, and then hit the reset button immediately? And do the players who have not done the Frozen Throne bonus campaign have any idea what Jaina is about?

: Zubon

I submit that the quest line in games can range from “random crap” to “epic tale.” This continuum starts with quests that have few to no links with each other, ranges through short stories and novellas of interconnected quests, and ends with a central tale that goes through the entire game.

Continue reading Northrend Novellas

Glad ye could make it to Northrend, lad! I knew ye cut yer teeth on raptors and wee elephants in the last hunts, but now yer in the real game. We’re settin’ ye against the fiercest cats in these lands, but only to prepare ye for the greatest of them, a beast so fierce we only know it exists because of the people who ne’er came back! And how about a rhinoceros so singular that ye’ll need to invoke the spirits of the dead to find it? Of course, we could not let ye go without a bit of crocodile wrestling, although the crocodiles’ kneecaps will be higher than yer head. Does pulling the teeth from live, 30-foot long cobras sound exciting? And ye’ll get to kill some zebra-striped giraffes.

“Excuse me, what was that last one?”

Longneck grazers. Four-legged things with brown bodies, long necks, gazelle horns, and zebra-striped legs. Kill some.

“…”

Look, we’re hungry out here. Unless you brought some tacos from Dalaran, giraffe steak it is.

: Zubon

As has been stated, the tech is good. Phasing is interesting the first couple of times you see it, but you quickly notice exactly when they’re changing sets. Oh is that why they keep having me mini-zone? I am starting to get the hang of vehicles.

Most of the storyline is good. Betray your former allies, slaughter the innocent, corrupt the living, torture people for information: everything you should demand from a soulless monster under the will of the Lich King. Then you get to the ending, which is long and boring and lousy. Let’s dial up all the numbers for the big fight, then make it so none of them matter anyway! Let’s have a story of betrayal, which is exactly the Lich King’s right and what you expect from him, rather than a stunning revelation; the whole point of having undead minions is to send them on suicide missions for your fleeting tactical advantage, which he somehow fails to convert despite being the freaking Lich King. Way to have the Big Bad fail, lose, and be defeated trivially in his first appearance. Let’s have a story of redemption that no one cares about because we have no reason to care about any of these characters, to say nothing of wtf did that come from. And what, we piggyback on his redemption?

I’m parking the Death Knight just because I no longer care about it after that introduction. But it seems like a good first class whenever you go to a new server, because you can get Burning Crusade gold quickly and mail it to a character you are interested in.

: Zubon

Achievement awarded: Nobel Peace Prize. For the Horde!

: Zubon

WTF is this? This right here, in the red circle? “That is a female gnome’s navel.” Yes, but why is it there? Why on Azeroth is a female death knight’s outfit midriff-baring? This is a male tauren death knight, and his stomach is perfectly covered. Every other class manages to start with a shirt, so this is not a problem. Why did someone think it was proper to have bare midriff armor for female death knights? Rule 36 aside, is our need to make all women sexual objects so severe that it applies to gnome death knights?

: Zubon

Also, a gnome’s two-handed sword clips pretty badly. She should be leaving a furrow in the ground behind her when she runs.

Cooking and fishing dailies organize my life. I want those last recipes that The Rokk is hiding. His first quest gave me Delicious Chocolate Cake. Given repeats, it looks like it will take me a couple of weeks to earn the four daily cooking/fishing achievements, but I am in no rush since I want other toys from them.

Start in Dalaran, pick up those two, head to Shattrath, pick up those two, pick up any Outland dailies near my questing path. Fish and farm what I need, maybe explore a bit or do a random quest. That takes me back to Shattrath, which takes me to Stormwind, which takes me to Borean Tundra to get what I need for the Dalaran dailies. I notice that Vegetable Soup is half meat; these people learned to cook from hobbits. While I am there, hit a few !s and ?s, which could take a few minutes or a few hours depending on how much I get into it. Hearth back to Dalaran, all set.

One of my ! pursuits led me to the murloc quest chain in the Borean Tundra. That was fun. Continue reading What I’ve Been Doing Since 70