I Only Asked For A Trim!

I said I'd consider playing World of Warcraft again once Blizzard had shifted over to Microsoft but that happened a while back and until today I'd never done anything about it. It's not surprising. I've always had the loosest of connections with WoW. It wasn't like I was desperate to get back to Azeroth. I'd go there when I was good and ready.

It seems I'm ready now, although I'd be lying if I said it was much more than a whim. Mostly it was the buzz building for Cataclysm Classic bumping up against a distinct lack of ideas for anything to post about today.

Whatever the reason, this morning I clicked on the desktop icon for WoW and waited to see what would happen. This being Blizzard, it all went very smoothly, at least in comparison with some other publishers I could mention.

Battlenet recognized my login details and updated itself very briefly before showing me a smorgasbord of titles I could be playing. I had no intention of playing any of them, of course. Neither did I wish to "upgrade" my WoW account, buy the last expansion or pre-order the next. I did not, in point of fact, wish to give Blizzard or Microsoft any money at all.

Luckily for me, you can still play WoW for nothing. There's a small notice somewhere on the Battlenet landing page offering you the opportunity to Play WoW for Free, by which they mean the so-called Endless Free Trial that lets you get to Level 20 before your character is listed as "Inactive". Orwell would be proud of the way language has been wrangled. Or maybe Lewis Carroll.

I'd been away long enough that some of my own characters appeaed as strangers to me. I gave the list of names a brief glance and one stood out: Snapperhead. 

Now that is a great name. I hasten to explain I didn't come up with it. I stole it, like I steal most of the names I use in most of the games I play. In the unlikely event that anyone's interested in its origins, "Snapperhead" is a mildish insult frequently tossed around by Flora, (Full name Flora Nemain Fydraaca ov Fydraaca.) the protagonist of Ysabeau S. Wilce's magnificent and barely describable trilogy, from which I draw many of my character names, in the absolute certainty no-one is ever going to recognize any of them. 

It's a perfect name for a Goblin, which is what my Snapperhead is. I had little-to-no memory of creating her but there she was, Level 12 and ready to go, so I woke her up and set her running.

At this point, coming back to an old MMORPG, I'd normally just log in to wherever the heck I was two or three years ago, take a moment to orient myself, look through my bags and find them full, look at my quests and have no idea what any of them were about, then set off in a random direction, looking for something to kill. After about an hour I'd probably find myself more confused than when I started and either swap to another character or log out altogether to go play something else.

WoW is generally an easy game to come back to, as these things go. I'm usually somewhere I've been before and I generally have bank space, at least, so I can clear a bag or two. As for quests, most of them just ask you to follow an arrow on the mini-map and click on someone with punctuation over their head, so it's not a lot to cope with as you ease yourself back in. 

This time, things went a little differently. I remembered Wilhelm saying something about a new option that had been added for returning players. You can now let the game reset a few things so as to make coming back less of a challenge. I thought I could see a button for that so I clicked it and up popped a "Gear Update" window.

I had another think. New gear and bags sounded good. Clearing my quest log I wasn't quite so sure about. As for my home city, I couldn't even remember which one it was. 

In the end I decided for the sake of science to say yes to everything. A second window popped to let me change my Specialization, if I felt so inclined, but I thought that might be pushing my luck. Also, Beast Mastery just sounds so much cooler than the other two.

The next thing I knew, the game had given me an extreme makeover and very much not in a good way. At the top of the post you can see a picture of the sassy, stylish young woman who stepped into the changing booth, followed by the grim, faceless cipher that stepped out the other side. I was, to put it very mildly, Not Impressed.

Still, helmets can be hidden and gear transmogrified. I mean, it's a pity I have to take the time doing it just to get back the look I was happy with in the first place but it's not like the wind changed and left me stuck like this. I hope...

I hate this city. I hate my clothes. I hate my life!

Leaving that for later, I logged in to see where I was. Oggrimar, apparently. Standing right next to Chromie, which I took to be a hint. Things did not go well for a while after that.

The best part was my inventory; filled with new bags, all huge and almost entirely empty. I'm sure I would have had plenty of clutter in the old ones, so what happened to all of my stuff I have no idea. Maybe it's in escrow somewhere or maybe the game just did me a mercy and binned it all. Either way, I don't want it back.

My quest journal was, as promised, entirely empty. Since I was standing next to Chromie and since I vaguely remembered hearing something about a special event involving Pandaria (I don't really read WoW news very closely.) I thought I might as well take that path. 

Here's where I diverge from the oft-touted idea that Blizzard somehow does these things more professionally than other developers. As has happened all too often before, I found myself confuddled and confused by quests auto-scribing themselves into my book the moment I entered certain areas, while cut scenes unrelated to the quest I thought I was on started to play. I found myself somehow engaged in the main storylines from three separate expansions within minutes of arriving in the game, despite having specifically asked to be given just the one.

It certainly didn't help that Ogrimmar is one of the least-nagivable of cities or that the quest markers on the mini map take absolutely no account of the z-axis. Also, sending someone who's just arrived in town on a quest whose very first step requires locating and using an unmarked elevator is not the friendliest piece of design, in my estimation.

I love my bags, though.

In the end I decided to manually reset myself back to where I'd begun. I abandoned every quest in my Journal and re-traced my steps to Chromie, who greeted me as though she'd never seen me before. This time, after I'd asked for a ticket for the Pandaria bus, I scrupulously avoided going in any buildings or speaking to anyone until I found my way to the airship.

Once on board, everything happened on rails. I did just as I was told, spoke to who I was supposed to speak to, fired my cannon in the direction it was already facing, rapelled down the ropes in front of me and basically acted like a good little soldier until about half an hour in I dinged 14 and decided I'd had enough.

I like Pandaria but it is one of the expansions I've done a fair bit of before. Even though it was a while ago, I could remember much of the opening sequence quite clearly. Also, there wasn't any special event going on, which is hardly surprising since, as I found when I looked it up later, it hasn't started yet.

It's due in update 10,2.7, whenever that is. Soon, I imagine, but not now.

The good news is that, according to the press release, WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria is open to players on the Endless Free Trial so, when it finally arrives, I can join if I want to. The less good news is that I'll probably be able to play the new event for about five minutes before the game locks me out.

It took me no more than half an hour to do two levels and I wasn't even trying to go fast. You need to be at least Level 10 to start the remix, one of the key selling points of which is that it offers "Accelerated Leveling". Since Free Trial characters have to go into involuntary hibernation at the end of Level 20, I reckon that should give me a maximum of an hour's play and very probably a lot less.

If I choose to do it anyway, it won't be Snapperhead who has the problem of trying to go slow in the fast lane. I found the details in the FAQ a little fuzzy but I think you have to create a dedicated character for the event:  "a new WoW Remix character, beginning at level 10, which will only be able to play with characters taking part in the event."

It sounds like a lark. I'll almost certainly give it a try. If it's fun, I might even sub for a month or two, which would also lead nicely into Cataclysm Classic. I did say I'd like to take a look at that one, too.

I'm not promising anything but it's possible this might not be the last post about WoW for another couple of years.

I Found A Fox

 

From character creation to level thirty-five in World of Warcraft Retail took me a fraction over twenty hours. Thirty-five is the new ninety. It puts my shaman just two levels behind my highest level character, the dwarf hunter I played during the Wrath of the Lich King era. He took something like three or four months to get to seventy. 

So, levelling certainly is fast. It's also surprsingly fun, although it's a very different kind of fun to the deep, immersive, compelling experience many of us in this corner of the blogosphere (Can spheres have corners?) were celebrating when Classic was fresh and new, around this time last year.

 

It doesn't quite feel like playing the same game. Leveling in Classic is very much about building your character while meeting people and making acquaintances. Retail is more about following a series of stories. The surprise for me was that some of those stories are not at all bad.

Much has been said about the trivialization of the leveling process in WoW. It's frequently derided as being challenge-free. It's supposed to be next to impossible for your character to die or run out of mana. That's certainly true at the beginning but by the mid-twenties my shaman found herself out of mana once or twice and in the thirties she began to have to make tactical decisions on what to fight and what to leave alone. It would be an exaggeration to say that leveling has become difficult in any way but it does start to require some thought and attention after a while. 

 

The idea that the game is any way prescriptive or on-rails for the solo player also fails to hold up to close examination. When I started I had every intention of leveling via Exile's Reach and a single expansion but that hasn't happened. 

Instead I've found myself following my inevitable pattern of dotting about the map here, there and anywhere. My shaman's path to thirty-five went roughly as follows: Exile's Reach - Zuldazar - Terrokar Forest - Valley of the Four Winds - Vale of Eternal Blossoms - Jade Forest - Kun'Lai Summit - Townlong Steppes - Vol'Dun. 

 

Not one of those zones has she completed. Instead she's left a trail of half-finished - or barely-started - quests behind her everywhere she's been. The game has a structure involving breadcrumb trails to quest hubs, it's true, but it doesn't seem to give much of a damn whether you follow them or not. I've stayed as long as the local story interested me or until another narrative crossed my path and drew me away. 

My journal has filled up and quests have been deleted on an almost hourly basis. I've had no compunction in dropping storylines that didn't seem to be going anywhere or to which I couldn't imagine myself returning but to the writers' credit, there haven't been many that outstayed their welcome or that I didn't find at least moderately entertaining for as long as I stuck with them.

 

Pandaria, as several people have suggested, is particularly good. The narrative is coherent, cohesive and, perhaps most surprising of all, convincing. It moves with logic and concision at a comprehensible pace. Characters make statements that seem sensible, then act on them accordingly. 

There's a minimum of clowning and a modicum of bathos. Humorous characters are gently amusing, serious characters are controlled and disciplined. All in all it's an impressive achievement.

Visually, it's a feast. The art team has done a magnicicent job of rendering a variety of biomes while holding to a convincing and (within the terms of fantasy gaming) naturalistic geography. I took a vast number of screenshots and did a great deal of gawping.

 

After thirty-five levels I'm coming round to the shaman class. Combat could not be described as thrilling but as the spellbook and the talent tree slowly fill out at least a few options for variety begin to present themselves. 

Out of combat is better. I love the spirit wolf form, especially with the specialization that adds to the speed buff. Being able to heal up after combat (or a fall) with a couple of casts is a massive improvement on drinking potions or sitting down to eat and drink. 

 

Best of all is the water-striding spell that lets the shaman run across lakes and seas as if they were dry land. I only wish that had turned up a few levels earlier. The impact was muted by the fact she could already ride flying mounts by then. Still, it'll come into its own in Battle for Azeroth zones. She won't be doing any flying there.

One sign of the immensely increased speed of levelling is that I didn't run into any inventory problems until she was already past thirty. She was going too fast to bother with any professions so she wasn't wighed down by crafting materials and everything she got seemed to be either meant for selling to vendors or for using there and then.

 

When her bags did finally fill up, mostly with cast-off armor and weaponry, she simply portalled back to Orgrimmar and threw it all in the vault. That's the only time she's visited a bank since she started. I doubt that's ever happened in any MMORPG I've ever played before.

Thirty-five was, of course, my target for starting the Vulpera access quests. Or, I should say, for completing the Vol'Dun zone storyline, since that seems to amount to the same thing. I'll have more to say about that another day but for now I'll just mention that she's currently camped next to the fox that starts it all off. I'm hoping to get it done tomorrow. 

 

After that, I had imagined making a Vulpera (a hunter, most likely) and leaving the shaman in semi-retirement, her job done. I've rather taken to her, though, and there are several unfiished storylines back in pandaland I'd like to see through to their conclusion. I think I might let her have a few days off and then come back to take her all the way to fifty before my month's subscription runs out.

Whether I renew it probably rests on the slight shoulders of that Vulpera, as yet unborn. It would be a bit silly to go to all this effort to get her and then not play her for a good while, though, wouldn't it? And I am having fun. More than I expected.

When You Close The Door... : World of Warcraft

As the alert reader will have noticed, I haven't posted about World of Warcraft Classic for quite a while. The last time it got a post all to itself was back in mid-November, when I explained why I'd stopped playing.

I ended that post by saying "I am still going to get to 60. And I will certainly be back when Battlegrounds appear." Well, I haven't and I wasn't. And it doesn't look like I will be.

It took me a couple more months before I decided to pull the plug. I have a habit of letting subscriptions run on even though i'm not using whatever it is that I'm paying for. Then one day I found myself looking at a £5.00 sub for an Amazon Prime channel and wondering whether it was worth it...

So last week I cancelled my WoW sub. It seems a little ironic, after all the angst over Blitzchung and the boycott. Actually, in light of the lukewarm reaction to Patch 8.3 and the savaging of the Warcraft III reforge, it seems Blizzard need no outside help in dragging their stock price down.

In the end it was a fairly easy decision to make. There really hasn't been a moment since I stopped playing when I thought to myself "I miss Classic" or "I really should get back to leveling my Hunter". On the odd occasion when the game crossed my mind it was with something of a mental shudder.

The reasons for that are... strange. While it's certainly true to say the thought of grinding out those last half dozen levels in the fifties held very little appeal, what put me off the most was thinking about what the game looked like.

Which makes very little sense. I always thought WoW was a pretty good-looking game, even on the "Classic" settings I was using. I've taken a phenomenal number of screenshots as I roamed around Azeroth, most of them because I very much liked what I was seeing.

And yet, after a couple of months of EverQuest II, my eyes seem to have adjusted. It's not the greatest-looking game in the world; lots of people think it's downright ugly and in places it can be. But I'm attuned to its beauty. The very thought of staring at the different textures and surfaces of Classic for any prolonged period of time oddly set my teeth on edge.

That's just stupid and I know it is. I also know that if I logged in the feeling would dissipate and vanish in nano-seconds. But when you already don't especially want to do something, even an irrational reason adds considerable weight to your determination not to do it. Well, it does to mine...

I was more tempted to log in some of my characters in the Live game (are we still calling it "Retail"?). The graphics there are different. They wouldn't be a hindrance.

No, the bouncer on the door of Retail is the gameplay. Last time I tried to level my Hunter in the 90s it wasn't the graphics that stopped me. It was the boredom. He was trying to make some progress in the Legion expansion, which I hear is reckoned to be one of the good ones, but the quests were beyond tedious. I couldn't make myself care about any of it so I stopped.

I had a bit more luck with my Warlock in his forties or fifties (I forget which) but if I'm going to level a Warlock in that bracket I might as well go back and work on the one I left in Classic.

And then there's that superginormous elephant taking up the entire room: the Level Squish. What on earth is the point of leveling any character in Retail right now, when you know that in a few months you can do it on fast-forward, and in an expansion of your choosing? I have a vague idea I might re-sub then and level my Panda monk up in Mists of Pandaria, which everyone seems to agree is one of the best of all the expansions.

There's very little chance of me buying the Shadowlands expansion, of course. Just look at how much play I got out of Legion. It took me two years after I was given it to even log in and then I didn't like it.

I did very much like the Legion pre-events, though. They were  great. I re-subbed just to do them. If Shadowlands can come up with something as good I might do the same - and then carry on long enough to do the Pandaria thing.

I'm assuming the Level Squish will be available for everyone, whether they buy Shadowlands or not. It would be a bit weird if it wasn't, although I think I remember someone confirming that you would still be able to level the old way if you wanted to. Although presumably not at the old speed...

Anyway, I'm still subbed into early March so I could pop in for a run around before the doors swing shut. And after that I can play my under-twenties on Retail if the mood takes me. Maybe just writing this post will put me in a WoW mood. It's happened before.

For now, though, it's goodbye to Azeroth. It was fun until it wasn't, which is about as much as I expect from any game.

Twenty Something

I had been planning for my panda Monk to finish her trip to the free trial cap of Level 20 in Dun Morogh but somehow she ended up in Goldshire instead. Thinking ahead to Classic, where my Dwarf Hunter will most definitely be starting in the snows around Ironforge, I figured it might be better to avoid doing the same content twice in such a short time so I stayed where I was.

Wilhelm has been talking about how very much he just wants to get on with Classic already. I'm not quite that gung ho but I am looking forward to it. So, it appears, are lots of people, if what I saw in Goldshire and Westfall are any indication.

I wasn't too surprised to find the area around the Goldshire Inn teeming with ne'er-do-wells talking trash, riding their culturally inappropriate mounts and dueling. That's how it mostly is in the armpit of the WoW universe.

What set me aback was the sheer number of players out questing and levelling up. Everywhere I went, every quest I took on, I was shoulder to shoulder with two or three other characters, sometimes more. There were crowds at every quest hub and player characters travelling in all directions.

I know this is one of the most popular starter areas in the game but I've played through it a couple of times in recent years on trial characters and I can't recall seeing it like this. I wonder if people are giving themselves a little pre-Classic reminder of what things are like now so they can better appreciate the change. Or maybe the general buzz has just raised all boats and even non-Classic fans are out for a little nostalgia. Then again, maybe it's always this busy now Blizzard has tweaked servers so they come in clusters.

Whatever the reason I was able to appreciate some of the changes that have come to the game unnoticed by me. I hadn't realised that WoW now has open kill-and quest-sharing  like Guild Wars 2, for a start.

So long as I put in a hit or two on a mob someone else was fighting I got full credit and loot, including any quest items. That made a huge difference to the community feel, turning much of what I was doing into co-operation not competition.

Then there were the quest rewards. I had two green rewards upgrade themselves to blue when I selected them. I don't remember that feature but it's very welcome.

I also ran into several wandering vendors. I do remember these but there seemed to be a lot more of them. One was a boy selling kittens. I bought myself one. A very nice little addition to my pet collection.

As for the supposed heart of the game, combat, it was really quite challenging at times back in the Pandaren starting area but it has become very much easier. Mostly, I think, as a function of the hugely improved gear I'm now wearing. For a game like modern WoW, so famously unchallenging at low levels, the design of racial starter areas seems out of step.

My monk went fifteen levels with virtually no quest rewards above Common. Her weapons hit like wet noodles and her armor didn't seem to do a lot to protect her. She had hardly any fighting abilities and the mobs were in most cases as powerful or more so than her plus they came in packs.

How that makes for a suitable introduction to the game for new players beats me. It seems almost intended to put them off.

It's going to be interesting to see how hard the first few levels seem in Classic compared to that. I definitely don't remember dying as much when I levelled up to fifteen in Wrath of the Lich King.

From the moment of arrival in Goldshire, however, the famous casual-friendly pace has been very much the norm, apart from a couple of oddities. One such occurred when I was working my way, yet again, through the mystery of the Furlbrow murders.

I was sent to get clues from Murlocs and Gnolls. The gnolls gave their clue up in a handful of kills but I was the best part of half an hour prying one out of the dead claws of a murloc. I had to wait on several full respawns of the little village, which took what seemed like five minutes each time.

Other people were also trying for the clues. Things got very competetive for a while, at least for me, because kill-sharing is quite hard to achieve when you have no ranged attack whatsoever. All in all it felt like an oddly nostalgic episode but not in a particularly good way.

After an hour or two, hoovering up every quest I saw, which was many, I finally dinged twenty on the hand-in for a mission for SI:7. That puts a full stop to the Monk's journey for now. I can still play her, make money, get drops, complete quests and so on but her experience bar will stay firmly closed.

It's been a very nice run. Now I have to think about subbing. With clear pressure on the announced servers as signified by the rush to reserve names I might get my credit card out a little earlier than I planned. That way, I could make a character for Classic and also carry on with my Monk until it starts.

Going to have to give that some thought.

Leaving Here: WoW

This afternoon I completed the Pandaren starter questline. It took me a couple of hours or so, almost half of which was the very poorly designed finale. I'll come back to that.

I was quite surprised that when the option to leave Wandering Isle appeared my monk was only Level 14. I was expecting to go pretty much all the way to 20 before the quest ended, although checking the Wowpedia entry it describes it as "The Pandaren level 1-10 starting experience". That must have changed. I can't see how you could do all the quests and still only be level 10.

Then again, I did kill a lot of mobs. One thing that really shocked me about Wandering Isle was the combination of mob density and aggro range. I don't recall any of the other starting areas being anything like as full-on.

There are large areas with few mobs but in areas where you're sent to quest the mobs are packed like sardines. I was frequently mobbed and almost as frequently died. It was far from unusual to find myself fighting first two, then four, then six mobs as adds appeared seemingly out of nowhere. I wasn't moving around to aggro them - they were coming in from distance like homing missiles.

I don't like this sort of design even in high-level areas. It's the number one reason I strongly dislike Guild Wars 2's Path of Fire expansion, which has nightmarish mob density and aggro almost everywhere. In a starter zone, in a game famous for its easy gameplay, particularly at low levels, it seems completely insane.

Just the two of you? Come on, you don't fool me!

The penultimate stage, a boss fight, was also very tough. I died right before the boss was about to die because I mistakenly hit my new taunt abilty and pulled him off Aysa, the NPC who was supposed to be tanking. That reset the entire encounter and I had to do it again from scratch.

The final set piece was a super-annoying "keep the healers alive" marathon. As you can see from the lengthy thread following the walkthrough on Wowhead, it's a deeply unpopular event and rightly so.  I died more than once trying to work out how to do it and each death set progress back to zero.

On the third death I googled to see what I was doing wrong, which turned out to be not much. In the end I followed the advice to just concentrate on keeping one or two healers alive and ignoring the rest. That worked. Slowly. And irritatingly. Not fun at all.

Eventually it ended. I got in a cart and let the ox pull me back to the Sensei, who told me I should leave Wandering Isle to go help our new friends in the wider world. He offered me the choice of going with The Horde or The Alliance although up until that point i had only met and talked to The Horde.

Despite that, I took the option to join The Alliance, because Pandas seem to fit much better on the "good" team and also I don't really get on with The Horde. I'm not sure I should have left right away. I have the distinct feeling there was quite a lot I hadn't seen or done. The main quest is very on rails and I doubt it would have omitted any hubs or quests but there seemed to be a lot of map I don't remember visiting.

Tauren always seem as though they should be in The Alliance to me. Never mind that, though. Just look at my gorgeous split cloak and crossed maces. Can't remember when I had a low-level WoW character that looked so good.

Wowpedia says that "Once characters leave the Wandering Isle, they are ineligible for a return journey" so if i want to explore it any further I'll have to make another panda. On the other hand, Wowpedia also says "Non-Pandaren are prevented from ever entering the Island" but I swear I saw several Dwarf PCs running around. It's possible they were NPCs but since I saw at least two of them in the stages long before the Alliance and the Horde entered the plotline I don't think so.

With a huge, successful, popular game like World of Warcraft I do expect the main information sources to be up to date, but thinking back to when I first played, during Wrath of the Lich King, when the game was far more popular and successful than it is now, I remember running into many examples of old, outdated and obsolete information, even on the main support sites of the day.

A hot air balloon transported me to Stormwind. I'd have preferred Ironforge and I'll probably take the underground to the snowlands to complete my last five-and-a-half levels. First, though, I had to see King Anduin to formally join The Alliance.

I liked the way many NPCs pointed me out and commented, favorably and unfavorably, as I jogged through the streets. My panda posse commented on the comments and it made for a very atmospheric entry into the new world.

The King could at least have given me an armband or something. I had to get this Alliance Balloon off some random child!

Unfortunately, the meeting with the King was a total anticlimax. He had one short paragraph which boiled down to "Hi! Welcome to The Alliance. Now bugger off." Joining The Alliance also immediately removed any novelty value I might have had. All NPCs went back to ignoring me. Also, my posse vanished without explanation or farewell. It was a bit of a let-down to be honest.

I consoled myself by wandering around the streets of Stormwind finding stray balloons for some little girl who asked me to help. I had nothing better to do although I doubt it was what my Monk Master had in my mind when he sent me to fix the broken world outside.

Don't care. I got a balloon!

At that point I took a break to write this. I'll definitely get to 20. I have a feeling I may have an unused Level 100 Boost left from Legion. I don't think I used it on my Hunter, who probably levelled up far enough in the excellent pre-expansion events. If so I could use it on the Monk. Level-scaling would, presumably, allow me to go back down to do the 80-90 Pandaren zones, and if not they would just be very easy, which suits me.

Something to think about, at least. I do like the setting and the questing so far and I'm very fond of my Monk, who looks fantastic in all the quest and dropped armor she's found. Chances are this will go further, if not now then at some future time when I'm at a loose end.

Out Of The Mists : World of Warcraft

Writing about World of Warcraft and reading other bloggers anticipating and speculating about WoW Classic put me in the mood to visit Azeroth again. As I said, though, it makes little sense to subscribe this far out from Classic's launch date.

Then it occured to me that I don't need to pay money to scratch my WoW itch. Blizzard's generous endless free trial gives me access to every character up to Level 20 on my old account, not to mention the option to create new characters on different servers.

I have a Level 13 druid I was dithering about with a year or so ago but I also have an unplayed Panda Monk I made long ago and never did anything with. I've noticed of late that Mists of Pandaria, the expansion that turned SynCaine into a WoW-hater for a while and which was widely reviled and ridiculed by many, has undergone some very heavy rehabilitation over the ensuing years.

Wilhelm from TAGN called Pandaria "the most underrated of expansions" in a post about Classic just a week or so ago It occured to me that I'd never seen any of it. Time to fix that.

Well, after BattleNet installed 6GB of files. That seems like a lot just for the various post-BfA updates. I wonder if there are pre-launch Classic files in there? If not I'm going to have to remember to factor in the download when launch rolls around.

I bet this where they take the wedding photos.

With that out of the way I woke my panda up and started on the quests Blizzard had prepared for me. Just like the Goblin and Worgen starting area, there's absolutely no flexibility at all. Nor escape. I guess you could just run off and start killing things but you're on an island (on the back of a turtle - where have I heard that before?) so you won't be going far.

Fortunately, also like the Goblin and Worgen starter areas, the story is quite interesting. Or perhaps it's not the story, whiich is generic in the extreme, but the NPCs, who are characterful and amusing and also fairly well voiced, when they speak, which isn't all the time but often enough.

I got into a very interesting discussion about questing and quest writing with XyzzySqrl in the comments to one of my posts on Kingdoms of Amalur. I really should do a whole post on the topic some time. Maybe more than one. Suffice it to say that WoW's quest dialog is competent and effective if not particularly thrilling.

I guess an Ancient Panda Sensei
can get away with a degree of formality.

It was instructive to compare it in my mind to the dialog in Kingdoms of Amalur, which I find to be above average. The main difference, I think, is in colloquiality. WoW quest dialog is relatively informal when it comes to speech but the detail text tends towards the formal, verging ocasionally on the portentous. KoA, at least as far as I have seen so far, manages to stay firmly on the side of normal conversation, even when the topic at hand is imminent doom and destruction.

I also still strongly dislike WoW's quasi-gothic font, rendered in black against a bronze faux-parchment background. I get why they do it but it's unecessarily hard to read.

A recent patch broke the Add-On I was using that replaced most of the default UI with a replica of Guild Wars 2's and I wasn't in the mood for fiddling with add-ons. Also I'm guessing Add-Ons will be severely restricted for Classic so I thought I should get used to the default again.

It wasn't too bad. I was fairly invested in the storyline and enjoying the scenery so I wasn't obsessing about the font too much. And Pandaria really is beautiful. The days when WoW was ridiculed for it's low-end graphics seem like a half-forgotten dream. It's as gorgeous as any MMORPG out there now.

I took a lot of screenshots but few of them capture the luminous quality of the in-game image. I might have to take a look at my screenshot settings, assuming WoW has any.

My panda changed appearance constantly as quest after quest replaced gear she'd just put on. I'm really not sure what the point of handing out non-stat gear every few minutes is supposed to be. I just equipped each piece as I got it and didn't look at anything too closely. No point getting attached to how a piece looks when it'll be back in the bag in fifteen minutes.

Have you seen Nayland Smith around?

The name of the main questgiver amused me. He's called Shang Xi, which I immediately took to be a sly reference to Marvel's Master of Kung Fu, Shang-Chi. On googling it, however, I found there was a 15th century Imperial Court painter called Shang Xi. Maybe they meant him. There's an MCU movie starring Shang-Chi scheduled for 2021 so perhaps they should sort out the provenance before then. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it all.

XyzzySqrl and I also had a minor disagreement over leveling speeds. I thought 2-3 hours per level in Kingdoms of Amalur was slow while Sqrl thought it was fast. I was comparing it with the pace of modern MMORPGs rather than other single-player games.

My Panda started at flat level 1 with no xp and I played for about two hours, maybe three. I wasn't paying attention because I was enjoying myself. When I logged out she was Level 11. That seemed about right in terms of pacing. Compare it to KoA, where my character is halfway through Level 8 after about 16 hours play. Quite a difference. I'm very interested to see what leveling speed in Classic is going to be.

By the time I stopped I'd awoken and befriended all four Elemental spirits (all of which look weirdly like cats), installed them in a temple, defeated several named opponents, including a really annoying fight with a flying snake that required me to shoot it with fireworks. I'd also travelled in a wagon and a hot air balloon, been turned into a skunk and a frog and been shot into the air on waterspouts. Never a dull moment.

The fights started out very easy but by Level Eight or so they required some tactics. I got to Level Nine without dying once but then I died several times in quick succession, first when I was overwhelmed by monkeys, then by some other annoying swarmers, and a couple of times when I was standing in the wrong place for a special event and got one-shotted.

Traveling in style!

Curiously I was able to complete one of the more difficult quests while dead. I just ran back from the graveyard, past my corpse and on to the location I'd died trying to reach and the quest NPC happily updated my quest with me in ghost form. I wonder how often that works?

There were a surprising number of other players around the entire time I was playing. Surprising, that is, considering I was doing starter-level content from an expansion that's seven years old. It was quite annoying at times, with several of us getting in each other's way as we spawned mobs on top of one another. Of course no-one spoke, let alone suggested grouping up. Me included. That better not happen in Classic or we're all screwed.

All in all it was a fun couple of hours. I will definitely carry on and finish the introductory storyline, which, if the Goblin and Worgen equivalents are anything to go by, should take me close the free trial cap of Level 20. Then, while I'm subbed for Classic, I might carry on and see where my panda goes next.

She looks so jolly and good-spirited it's mood-lifting just to watch her running around. Can't say that about every character I play. Score one for the pandas!

Musings On Returning To WoW

The Blizzcon buzz had its intended effect on me. All the talk of Classic servers, a new expansion, fresh adventures in worlds old, new, both and neither, led me to patch up and log in to World of Warcraft for the first time in maybe a year.

In fact, I can't remember when I last played. I know I asked for and was given Legion for my birthday a year ago but all I did with it was register the purchase against my account.

I clearly remember playing for a couple of months during the exciting Legion pre-release Invasion event, at which point I presumably must have re-subscribed because I had access to my higher level characters when I was doing it. After that I seem to remember doing something in Warlords of Draenor and rapidly losing the will to live log in. After that, nothing.

Looking at character select it seems my Dwarf Hunter, who topped out in the low 70s back when I played WoW the first time, is now Level 95. I can only assume that happened during the invasions unless I used some kind of boost on him but I don't believe I've ever acquired a level boost for WoW.

I could fact-check all this by flipping through my back pages of course. No doubt I posted about most of it. It's telling, though, that I can't remember. I like WoW but it doesn't make that much of a lasting impression on me.

There are two reasons for that. Two that I can think of, anyway. One is the Lore and the other the graphics.

In the Oxford Visual Dictionary this is the entry for "Depressing"

WoW lore is opaque to me at best. Mostly it doesn't even manage obscurity. It's simply invisible. I didn't grow up with franchise. I didn't play Warcraft. Until WoW appeared in 2004 I had never even heard of Blizzard and even after the WoW juggernaut began to roll it was years before I'd have been able to name another Blizzard title.

When I did start playing none of the overarching story meant anything to me whatsoever. Plot twists and revelations must have soared over my head, not that I noticed. I did the Death Knight introduction for example, which people seem to rate very highly in terms of both lore and story, and all I remember about it was how long, tedious and claustrophobic it was.

Consequently, the only level on which the narrative connects with me is the local. I can empathize with the problems of farmers being menaced by scarecrows. I can immerse myself in the investigation of a murder or the search for a missing child but the machinations of racial leaders, tyrants, demon-kings and dragons might as well be so much static.

That's the problem with the writing but there's an even greater issue with the illustration. I'm not someone who has to have state-of-the-art graphics and I like WoW's semi-cartoon stylization - in theory.

In practice, though, as I've mentioned before, the textures are problematic. Worse, the palette has a tendency towards the morose that can be - and often is - depressing. I think my memory chooses to protect me against remembering much about all that. I guess it must do or else I'd probably never come back.

I think I saw this scene on black velvet at a craft fair once...

I think it's not insignificant that, in my first and only lengthy, successfully enjoyable run in WoW, I began in Ironforge and spent my formative first days in the snowfields. Partly it's that snowy zones are by some margin my favorite terrain, climate and geography in MMOs but more than that it's that pure blue-white snow doesn't suffer so badly from either the textural or tonal difficulties I find in almost all of Azeroth's other landscapes.

When I do take another pass at playing, Blizzard's famous polish never seems to extend to the patching process. Every time I come back after a break it's a struggle to get the game to run, even though I'm using the same installation on the same machine.

This time I had to uninstall and reinstall the Batlenet app and do a few more tweaks before the game would update. Once the patcher started to co-operate there turned out to be over 5GB of new files to install.

With that out of the way I logged into one of my under-20s, the Worgen Druid. It transpired I'd left off playing her exactly one quest short of the very end of her racial introduction, so as soon I'd sunk a battleship (or, more accurately, vaguely wandered about behind some NPCs who sunk a battleship for me) I was free to leave the dismal, dark, foreboding rainfields of wherever the heck it is that Worgen come from for the dismal, dark, brooding rainfields of that hideous Night Elf place I loathe.

I was not best pleased to find myself back in Teldrassil but I felt momentarily happy when the first quest I took suggested I leave: less so when I fell off a cliff and died on a tree a hundred meters below. Then ran back, revived, fell off the branch and died on another tree branch another hundred meters below. Then ran back, revived, fell off the branch and died on a third tree branch another hundred meters below the last one.

Just the footsteps in the snow feel somehow joyous.

Fourth fall I survived. Just. I made my way to the marker on the map. Aiming straight for it was what got me killed in the first place but I'm nothing if not stubborn. All of this in the dark and the rain of Azeroth's real-time night cycle, a peculiar design feature that means that historically most of my WoW playtime has taken place in poor lighting except at the weekends. Another reason I like the area around Don Morogh the best - the snow reflects what limited light there is.

The next quest marker pointed to the other side of the bay. I could see the town there from the dock where I was standing. Naturally I jumped in and began to swim only to be hit with Exhaustion half way across.

I understand the purpose of this notional barrier when it's employed to prevent players leaving the playable area or bypassing obstacles intended to be impassable but in this instance it seemed perverse. I was compelled to swim back to shore and go speak to some NPC who put me on a griffin, whereupon the griff flew me back along exactly the line I'd just swum to exactly the place I would have climbed out of the water had I been allowed to continue under my own steam.

By the time I finally spoke to the next questgiver I was so irritated that just the sight of the execrable font Blizzard insists on using, almost unreadable as it is against the equally awful mudded texture and color of the background, that I logged out to search for and reinstall the excellent Add On that replaces WoW's clunky, ugly front end with GW2's smooth and familiar UI.

It's behind you!

Come to think of it, I already had that Add On active last time I was playing so where did it go? Wherever it went I wish it hadn't because getting it back was another fiddly exercise that resulted in the Battlenet patcher demanding to re-download the exact same 5GB it had already installed not an hour earlier.

As I said, my regular experience playing WoW suggests the famous Blizzard "polish" is something that happens to other people. I've never known the game operate any more smoothly than any other MMO and less so than some.

Anyway, it's done now and I have the thing looking a lot like GW2, which is a big improvement. I'm considering whether I want to resub for a while and get some Legion done before it's quite literally last year's thing.

Legion aside, I would like to play my Gnome Hunter some more. She's still playable for free at level 20 but I daren't do anything with her lest she level up and become "Inactive". I'd be playing a Hunter in Legion, too, with my aforementioned level 95 Dwarf, although I suppose I could take the free Level 100 Demon Hunter and roll with that instead.

At the very least the colors are upbeat...

Chances are that I won't do either. I'll probably just footle around with the Worgen Druid - if I can move her to somewhere less utterly depressing - and maybe roll someone new as well. I'm not sure I can justify subbing if I can't find the time to play - but then I've been saying that for a year now.

I suspect the real drag anchor stopping me is strongly connected to the aforementioned issues with Lore and Look. Other than in the big, social events like Invasions, I mostly enjoy WoW in the low-to-mid levels. The higher up you get the more portentous the narrative becomes and, as Syp has often pointed out, in all MMOs, end-game zones tend to be ugly, so the game doubles down on the things I already most dislike about it.

Maybe I'll play my Panda. Wilhelm says the Pandaria zones are "excellent" and I trust his judgment on these things.

International Day Of The Panda : WoW, EQ2

Pandas! Get yer pandas! Pandas! We got 'em!

What's that?

The wrong pandas?

What's wrong with 'em?

Not cute enough!?

Hey, buddy, these are all the pandas we got. If you don't like 'em, go back to WoW!

This Is What I Think Of When I Think Of Wow: WoW

 This.

I started replying to Brian over at Psychochild's Blog and my reply grew so long I thought I'd move it over here. He's mulling over the various reveals from Blizzcon and it got me thinking about my own non-relationship with Blizzard.

I find the whole Blizzard cult a bit strange. I'd been playing MMOs for several years before I ever even heard the name and when I did it was in the context of people in Everquest chat channels talking very disparagingly about Diablo, which seemed to be some game that thought it was an MMO but really wasn't.

Ski Lift Other Side

I picked up the impression that it was very much a second-rate entertainment compared to EQ or DAOC and largely forgot about it. I have only the vaguest memories of hearing about WoW before it was released. Again, I'd never even heard of Warcraft, let alone played it. Only a couple of people in my then quite extensive circle of EQ guildmates and channel buddies had any interest in it. It barely got mentioned. All the talk was about EQ2.

I did the EQ2 beta, played there from launch for six months and pretty much didn't notice WoW was even happening. It was only when EQ2 was in freefall and almost everyone I knew had given up on it that I began to hear that some of the people who'd left had gone to try this new MMO, World of Warcraft. I didn't, though. I went back to Everquest for another year.

Never leave a goblin in charge of your boat

After a while it became impossible not to be aware of WoW, even if you didn't play MMOs. I picked up a lot of background information on Blizzard and the games they'd made because now all of that was constantly referenced whenever people discussed MMOs. I began to understand the significance of their move into the genre in a way I hadn't done at the time. But I still had no desire to play any of their games.

It wasn't until 2009 that Mrs Bhagpuss and I finally downloaded the trial and stepped out into Azeroth. We'd run through just about every other MMO we could think of and were in a lull. WoW was pretty much the last AAA MMO we hadn't tried at that point and frankly we weren't expecting much.

So was a very pleasant surprise to discover that we liked WoW a lot. Great art direction, a big, interesting explorable world, amusing characters, smooth, enjoyable gameplay. We had fun for three or four months, and then we were done. Neither of us ever reached the level cap. Burning Crusade and WotLK content wasn't a patch on Vanilla content and the prospect of end-game was utterly unappealing. Still, a very nice MMO while it lasted.

Took me the best part of a week to get this shot!

I guess I still don't really know much about the Blizzard Universe even now. I'm quite surprised by the fuss these pandas have caused. Panda monks are hardly a new concept, after all. You don't even have to go outside the genre to find them; EQ2's had pandas for a couple of years now, although not as a playable race. I don't like pandas much. Not the real ones in their evolutionary dead-end nor imaginary ones in Chinese hats. They are pretty dull animals and the fictional versions are generally dull too, but I can't see why they'd send anyone into such a lather he'd delete all his characters and put the video on YouTube.

Why Pandas should be any more a jump the shark moment than space goats mystifies me. When I first played WoW the single weirdest part were the Tauren. Bipedal dairy cows as a playable race? Really? But I didn't grow up with the lore. I guess it's like boiling a frog except this time someone at Blizard turned the heat up just that bit too fast and some of the frogs jumped out of the pot.

Even now that I've played WoW and have a clearer idea how deeply enmeshed in PC gaming culture Blizzard's worlds are, I still don't have that vital emotional connection. I'm curious to see Titan, of course. Anyone interested in MMOs would have to be. But I'm more interested in the ripples in the pond after Blizzard tosses in a boulder than I am in the boulder itself.

And I won't be playing Diablo III.