This Is Planet Azeroth

World of Warcraft Forever goes live today. I'm curious to see how that goes, even if I don't have any immediate plans to play it myself. 

I'm a little vague on the exact point of WoWF, anyway. (We are all agreeing to call it WoWF, aren't we? Like a big dog gruffly greeting someone it knows, but not well, with an implied question mark at the end.) What is it for, exactly? And who? Sorry, whom?

About an hour ago, I checked on how the reviews were going. Or I tried to. I know it's not quite out yet but it was in beta for weeks so I don't imagine reviewers are going to wait for the servers to open before getting their opinions out there. There was no NDA, after all.

I looked at the Fantasy Critic League, where Wilhelm has picked WoWF, but so far it doesn't even have an Open Critic page. There is a link there to "GG", whatever that is, but it leads to a blank page. 

Browsing through the links on a Google search, though, I see all the big names have had their say on the beta: IGN, Polygon, PCGamer, GamesRadar... and they all seem to have loved their time in pseudo-old Azeroth.

Forever has nailed it

Pure magic

WoW: Forever has struck such a chord

Quotes pulled from the linked reviews, there. It looks like Wilhelm's picked a winner. As far as the League goes, it doesn't matter what the customers think, so long as the reviewers are happy.

But what is WoW Forever? I'm still not clear, even after reading those reviews. Is it a new game? A remaster? A Special Rules Server that got ideas above its station?

Fantasy Critic League tags every game with a specific label to indicate exactly what you're getting into when you pick one.

Cancelled Currently in Early Access Director's Cut Expansion Pack Free to Play New Game New Gaming Franchise Partial Remake Planned for Early Access Port Reimagining Released Internationally Remake Remaster Unannounced Game Virtual Reality Will Release Internationally First Yearly Installment 

WoWF has been tagged "Partial Remake". So what does that mean?

"There are several "remake" tags, and they go in this order, from "most remade" to "least remade":

Reimagining > Remake > Partial Remake > Remaster

There is also Director's Cut , which is somewhere around Partial Remake and Remaster  but it's hard to say for sure what order it goes in. "

So WoWF is on the less-extensively remodeled end of the scale, or so they think. Definitely not a new game. Not even a new version of an old one. Just a refurbishment. Same old house, just a new coat of paint and maybe a loft extension or a conservatory round the back.

It figures. From what I've heard from people who were in the beta, it's kind of like Classic but with some more modern, user-friendly adjustments. And, of course, some actual new content. There are those "Sky Elves", for a start, because every fantasy game needs more elves. Everyone loves elves, right?

There are four new zones, too: Zephras Isle, Riverglades, Shen’Dralas, and Mount Hyjal. One of those is the elf starting zone, two are mid-level and one is endgame. All fitting neatly into the map we already know.

It's a familiar phenomenon. A lot of aging MMORPGs somehow manage to find a few zones the cartographers missed. Usually around about when the thought of coming across yet another undiscovered continent is beginning to stretch credulity a little too far.

All of which cartographic conversation brings us neatly to the reason I thought of writing this post in the first place. It wasn't so much to commemorate WoWF's launch day as it was to express some surprise over Bill Bailey's career choices.

I have no idea how well-known Bill Bailey is outside the UK but evidently his profile was high enough to bring him to the attention of Blizzard's marketing dept. because he's been hired to present a series of spoof documentaries, lightly parodying David Attenborough's Planet Earth under the name Planet Azeroth.

I would have remained happily ignorant of these were it not for a news item at NME.

I guess it's not the most unlikely of sources. Bill Bailey, as well as being a comedian, is also kind of a musician. He's put himself forward to represent the UK at Eurovision at least twice, with no success, and he's made a heavy metal album. Alright, a parody heavy metal album but he did still play all the songs on it. 

He's a gamer, too, although I can't confirm whether he plays WoW.  He played No Man's Sky, for whose promotional round he was also booked, so it's not that unlikely. Plus he looks like he comes from either Azeroth or Middle Earth...

I'm not really up to speed on Bill's talents, mostly because a friend of mine used to hate him so much it was unwise even to mention the name "Bill Bailey" in his presence. It made him so angry, in fact, I was never able to ask him what the problem was. I can take Bill Bailey or leave him, myself, although for a while I got put off him by osmosis. 

I took him this morning. In three smallish doses. I watched the first two Planet Azeroth videos on the Official World Of Warcraft YouTube channel, which until today I didn't know existed, although obviously there had to be one. The third I watched on  IGN's channel, the only place it seems to be showing. Maybe they have an exclusive.

As entertainment, I found them inconsistent. Some bits were so funny I laughed out loud. Others bordered on the cringe-worthy. A lot of Bill's commentary felt very in-jokey indeed, which leads me to believe Bill is either extremely professional (He is, in fact.) or a long-time player himself. (He might be.)

My favorite part comes early in the first video, where the wolf is walking next to a fence and Bill casts aspersions on both its ferociousness and its height. The best thing about the whole series might be the way it offers a lengthy and relaxed opportunity to study the mobs in detail. That's something I always mean to do in games but rarely do. The artists' work on most of the creatures we end up killing largely goes unseen because it's hard to take in the finer details when you're fighting for your life.

Anyway, in case you're going to be playing WoWF later today and you'd missed these little vignettes of what life there could be like, I thought I'd share. I'm looking forward to hearing all the stories. Maybe I'll join in a little later, when all the fuss has died down...