I Am The Fox

 

Yesterday, sometime around eight in the evening, I finally got to make my World of Warcraft fox. Depending on how you count, it took me anything from a couple of minutes to a year and a half.

In the most practical sense I guess it took just under two days. I did a /played the moment my shaman completed the final access quest that unlocked Vulpera as an allied race for the Horde on my account. It read 

I'd guess you could reduce that by maybe ten per cent to account for the times I was afk doing something unrelated to playing the game. Mostly, though, when I was "Away" I was actually looking up how a quest worked or how to get to somewhere I couldn't find on the map. That definitely ought to count towards the time it took. 

However you tally it, I went at this thing pretty hard. Most of the time I was playing I really was playing. So, let's say about thirty hours to go from character creation to level cap and then a couple more hours to do the Vulpera unlock quests themselves. Pretty close to Shintar's one-to-fifty tally of twenty-six hours but quite a bit longer than Rohan's twenty. 

All of those times are a long way short of the Icy Veins estimate. They suggest "it should take average players 9-10 hours" to do the first fifty levels. They're assuming you'll be using several Add-Ons designed to make levelling smoother and faster as well as any and all available means of boosting xp gain, not that Blizzard seem to have left many of those in the game in the run-up to the new expansion.

For once, I didn't use any Add-Ons at all, which is somewhat unusual. I'm no fan of out-of-game tweaks and I always prefer to use the stock UI and systems in any MMORPG, but even I usually have three or four simple mods running when I play WoW. 

This time, for no particular reason that I can think of, nothing seemed to annoy me enough that I felt I needed to do something about it. The quest text, whose color and font choices usually irritate the heck out of me, seemed perfectly acceptable this time around. The mini-map worked just fine. No-one tried to duel me so I didn't have to go get an Add-On to auto-decline. 

I did toy briefly with the idea of re-installing the Add-On that modifies the UI to look as much as possible like Guild Wars 2, including re-doing every quest dialog to appear center screen with the NPCs talking in single lines like an actual conversation instead of presenting as a flat page of text, but I haven't been playing all that much GW2 of late and the idea didn't seem as appealing as it used to.

I also thought about switching on War Mode, which gives an xp boost that varies from ten to thirty per cent depending on how over- or under-represented your faction is. I'm very comfortable with PvPvE settings these days so the idea of the occasional run-in with an Alliance player or several didn't bother me but in the end it just felt like one more unfamiliar system I'd have to fiddle about with and get to know and I kind of had enough of those to deal with already.

The only xp boost I did have running was the 16%  sixteenth anniversary buff, which I think kicked in when my shaman was somewhere in the thirties. I felt the xp rates were pretty comfortable on the whole so I wasn't scratching around for ways to speed things up. 

It did slow down a little in the forties but really not by very much. Compared to levelling curves I've been used to from games like WoW Classic or even modern EverQuest, where you begin a very steep incline somewhere around the mid-game, there seems to be precious little rate-of-gain difference in each decile after the second. 

Of course, when I made my goblin shaman I was never intending her to go to the cap. She was created to test out Exile's Reach and knock out the unlock quests, after which, as I erroneously believed, I'd be able to park her and swap to my brand-new Vulpera. If I'd know I'd be doing fifty levels I would not have chosen to do it as a shaman, a class I've never played and which does not make Icy Veins' list of preferred classes (Demon Hunter, Druid, Hunter, Mage in case you're interested, although they do stress that what class you play is one of the minor factors in any speed-run up the levels).

You can probably put the real reason it took me three times as long to hit fifty as the ten-hour estimate for the "average player" down to the fact that I read just about every word of quest text, watched every cut scene and listened to every word of spoken dialog. That in itself probably added several hours.

Then there were all the times I didn't know what I was supposed to do or where I was meant to go. If I'd used the recommended Add-On Azeroth Auto Pilot I imagine that alone would have saved me several more hours, not including the story skips.

Yeah, but what would be the point of that, really? If I hated levelling, like Kaylriene , and just needed to get a character to end-game as fast as possible, for some reason, then yes, I could totally see the point of having the first fifty levels basically play themselves while I waited for it all to be over. It would be the equivalent of fast-forwarding through an extremely long and tedious cut scene before the actual game began. 

To me, however, the so-called end-game is more like an extremely long and tedious coda appended to the main game itself. Or maybe one of those annoying series of false endings you get with some movies that don't know when to stop.

Of course, loving the levelling process for itself does have one obvious disadvantage, as Wilhelm pointed out in his recent post about capping out in Pokemon Go

"But then there is the inevitable realization that once you’re at the top of the mountain, the climb is done... after all the time focused on one primary aspect of the game, you’re done with it and left feeling a bit empty as your goal is suddenly reached".

I get that a lot. Well, I do these days, when hitting the level cap in MMORPGs is something I expect to do when I make a character. Time was when the cap was a distant peak you could maybe just about make out, hazy and indistinct, looming far behind a seemingly-endless series of lesser peaks you'd have to scale just to get to it. What to do with your character when they reached the cap was never much of a problem when the cap itself always seemed to be receding into the distance faster than you could ever hope to catch up with it.

This time was different from most in that I was levelling for a specific reason: to get that Vulpera
unlock. That in itself made the final result somewhat unsettling. After I finished the surprisingly complicated and lengthy unlock questline, involving a number of trans-continental flights and many, many kills, I went straight to character create, made my fox and...

...and then what? When I began all of this a couple of weeks back I hadn't played WoW at all for over a year and Retail WoW, beyond the free trial, not for several years. It was all great fun, it felt fresh, there was a ton of new stuff going on. Plus, everyone was talking and writing about it. I was enjoying myself a lot.

By the time the shaman dinged fifty, though, I'd played more Retail WoW than I've played since the Legion pre-events. I'd levelled a new class all the way from creation to current max level, I'd taken a druid to the new free-to-play cap and I'd put several levels on my previously-highest character. All in a couple of weeks during which I played far more WoW than anything else.

Obviously I'm not burned out. I mean, come on! I'm scarcely even singed around the edges. But I'm not sure I want to jump immediately into levelling another character from character creation to end game. I might need a little bit of a breather before I do that.

Creating the fox wasn't quite as much fun as I'd expected, either. Not because I've lost any enthusiasm for the project, far from it. More because there aren't very many options. I don't know what I was expecting, exactly, but I thought there might be a few different tails, at least. I mean, it's a fox!

I was also surprised to get no option on where to start. I was expecting to get a choice between Exile's Reach and... well, I don't know where, now I come to think of it. I knew there was no Vulpera racial starting zone. I guess I thought maybe they could start in Orgrimmar or something.

And they can. They do. They have to. There's no choice at all. Exile's Reach is out because Vulpera begin at level ten. I guess the logic is that since you have to have a level fifty character before you can make one you really don't need a tutorial. 

Which is fine, except that I actually completed the entirety of the long introductory quest for BfA, the one where you break the troll princess out of the Stormwind Stockade while slaughtering hundreds of people and setting the city on fire (which, by the way, is one hell of a way to welcome a cute and cuddly, free-spirited, happy-go-lucky race to the Horde) with almost no spells or abilities on my hotbar. If you're going to start the character at level ten and remove the tutorial you could at least auto-populate the bars with the basics!

Once all that was out of the way I stopped and thought for a while about what I might want to do next. Chromie was keen to send me into the past and the Warchief or whatever it is the Horde call the boss had plans for me too but I wasn't sure I wanted to be organized. In the end I took the portal to Thunder Bluff and sat on the edge of a cliff, looking out over the green meadows far below.

I think I might just set out and wander, see where it takes me. I made my vulpera a Hunter, yet again, and hunters are made for wandering, although that's not why I went with the class this time. It was more that, after fifty levels with the shaman, the one thing I remembered hearing myself say most often was "This would be so much easier with a pet". 

Speaking of which, whose bright idea was it to give the Vulpera a cobra the size of an elephant as the default starter pet? I can see it being a snake. The Vulpera are desert foxes and the desert is stuffed with the slithering reptiles. There's even a quest in Vol'Dun where a vulpera lends you a flute so you can go and recover a bunch of lost cobras they were supposed to be training. 

So it's cultural, I get that. But why so huge? Honestly, every time I catch sight of it I think it's going to swallow me whole. I think the first order of business might be to go and tame some alternatives. What would go well with a fox? Do they have tameable badgers in Azeroth?

Before my subscription runs out I've also got plans for several other characters, too. I was enjoying the Alliance's BfA storylines in Kul Tiras on my Worgen druid. I'd like to get back to those. And my old dwarf hunter needs to get to forty-five so he can open the hundred or so Legion pre-event chests he has clogging up his bank - although now the cap is fifty (soon to be sixty) I'm not sure there's much point to that any more.

Then there's pet battles. I've never done those but I have a dozen or more pets. You can't battle on a free account so maybe I ought to give it a try before the sub ends. And I really should see about transmogging a final look for my shaman now she's not getting new quest gear every five minutes. 

It's not as though I'm short of ideas or enthusiasm. It's just that I did kind of start all of this so I could play a fox. 

Oh, well. At least now I can.

Terms And Conditions Apply

Ever have one of those dreams where the faster you run the slower you go? No, me neither. I think that only happens in the movies.

Unlocking the Vulpera allied race in World of Warcraft is turning out a bit like it, though. Certainly not how I imagined it would go.

I thought I understood it. As I'd heard it, originally, you had to own the Battle for Azeroth expansion, complete a bunch of fox quests and get your reputation to Exalted with their faction, the Voldunai.

 

Then, with Shadowlands looming on the horizon, Blizzard rolled BfA into the base game along with every other discarded expansion. And, just to sweeten the deal, the rep requirement got dropped as well. 

Next, Shadowlands got pushed back, as we now know to November 23rd, but the pre-patch turned up a few weeks ahead of schedule anyway, bringing with it all the major changes to the game that supposedly came as part of the package. 

At that point I had a clear and simple vision. I'd subscribe for a month, knock out whatever quests you had to do to unlock the foxfolk, then I'd make a Vulpera to try out the new tutorial zone, Exile's Reach, and the subsequent squished levelling experience. I imagined ripping through the unlock quests on one of my higher-level characters in half an hour or so then settling down to pick fur and eye colors.

Yeah.That didn't happen.

 

First I found out that although the rep grind wasn't needed any more you still needed to have the achievement "Secrets in the Sand" complete and safely recorded on your permanent record. 

Okay, one achievement. That doesn't sound so bad, does it? In MMORPGs it's not unusual to get achievements for things you didn't even notice you'd done. Not this one.

To get the Secrets in the Sand achievement you need to complete the full zone storyline for Vol'Dun. That's a seven-part sequence where every quest but the final boss fight comes complete with several sub-quests of its own. The commentaries I read all said it would take a few hours to finish and they weren't kidding. In total, there are around eighty quests in Secrets of the Sands!

 

Still, a few hours is just one good session, isn't it? And with the new level anywhere you like system I could just pop over to Vol'Dun and knock the whole thing out in an evening, right? Yeah... no.

When Blizzard said you could level up in any expansion you liked they didn't mean any zone of any expansion you liked. Or maybe they did. It's hard to be sure. 

If you let Chromie, the Bronze Dragon that pretends to be a gnome, tailor you to fit an expansion of your choice then, yes, you pretty much can pick your zone, within that expansion. If you just wander around the world on your own recognizance, though, the previous rules still apply. 

 

Don't ask me which rules. I gave up trying to work it out ages ago. All I can say is that without Chromie time running, zones have level ranges. Or some of them do. 

Battle for Azeroth, which isn't included in Chromie's collection, is supposed to be the default now to go from ten to fifty. If you don't actively try to avoid it, the game funnels you there when you leave Exile's Reach and keeps you there until you're ready for Shadowlands.

Vol'Dun, the zone where the Vulpera live, is flagged for levels thirty-five to fifty. When i found that out it changed things but I thought I could still get right on it. I'd get my highest character, a dwarf hunter, squished to thirty-seven, to do it.

 

Except, of course, he's Alliance and the Vulpera are a Horde-only race. (For good reasons, as it turns out). But achievements are account-wide so maybe... 

Nope. Big, fat nope. Secrets of the Sands is a Horde-only achievement because the Alliance get their own Vol'dun storyline. Which just happens to involve some truly appalling colonial racism and near-genocide... against the Vulpera.

So, very much no dwarves welcome there. Which left me where I've been these last few posts, levelling a fresh goblin shaman to thirty-five so she could go to Vol'dun as a representative of the Horde, complete the zone storyline, get the achievement and - finally - unlock the vulpera race. 

Too easy! Way, way too easy!

 

I spent most of today on the questline. It's very good. I enjoyed it a lot. Which is just as well because if I was expecting to cap it off with a stint in character creation followed by a happy couple of hours running round as a fox, well, then I was going to be disappointed, wasn't I?

The moment I got the achievement I hearthed back to Orgrimmar to tick whatever final box I needed and...

... after about an hour of online research...

.... and a lot of running to and fro between the embassy and Grummash Hold....

... trying to talk to a whole bunch of people who didn't want to talk to me...

... with much reading and re-reading of my quest journal...

I finally discovered you have to have a level fifty character before you can get the actual quest that starts the Vulpera unlock questline!

Seriously, could someone not have mentioned that right at the start? Really?

Not to go into a rant (and I know longtime WoW players will find this at best an exaggeration and at worst heresy) but the out-of-game resources for the game are some of the most confusing, misleading, incomplete and often just plain wrong that I've ever had to try to use anywhere. 

There are so many assumptions made, so often. So much is taken as read or just not thought worth mentioning at all. I've learned the hard way that the best information is hidden in the comments, where other players, who've already learned the hard way that the headline "facts" are half-baked and incomplete, exercise some social responsibility by explaining what you really need to do.

 

It would be rash to say I now know exactly what's left to do before I get this blasted fox. I think I know but I wouldn't be all that surprised to find you can only do the quests after midnight or during a full moon.

I have to be getting close, though, surely. My Shaman dinged forty on the Vol'Dun storyline. She's got another ten levels to go. I can do that. The ironic thing is, I plan on staying in Vol'Dun for a while, which means she'll most likely end up Exalted with the Voldunai anyway! 

It'll be nice to have a max level character, I guess. For the couple of weeks before Shadowlands raises the cap to sixty, anyway. I wasn't planning on it but I'm not unhappy. 

You have to take your pleasures where you can, these days.

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.

Out-Foxed

 

When I read Dara's comment on yesterday's post, it occured to me that some of the assumptions I'd been making about unlocking the Vulpera race for my World of Warcraft probably didn't make a whole lot of sense. I've been following the story of the addition of the foxlike "allied race" to WoW since I first heard about it back in June of last year but only by way of sporadic mentions on Massively OP and the occasional blog.

I knew the Vulpera came as part of Battle for Azeroth, albeit as a late addition, arriving with Patch 8.3 at the start of this year. At the time, that meant you'd need to own BfA, which I didn't, and to have a near-max level character capable of killing stuff there, which I hadn't. You would also, of course, have to be subscribed, which I wasn't.

In addition, as I thought I understood it, there was a hefty reputation requirement and a quest chain to complete. That was about as much as I knew, and since I had no intention of buying the expansion at the time, that was where I left things, until more information began to filter out in the run-up to the launch of this year's expansion, Shadowlands.

Again I was picking up the pieces as I happened upon them in articles about the level squish and the upcoming pre-patch. By a few weeks ago I'd gathered that the reputation requirement was going to go away and access to all Battle for Azeroth content was going to be rolled into the regular subscription. Better yet, with the squish and the new leveling regime, a good portion of BfA would drop into the laps of players using the endless free trial.

Until this morning that was about as far as I'd taken it. In my mind I'd already decided I would subscribe, sooner rather than later, probably just for one month, so I could level up high enough to complete the questline and unlock the fox. I knew the Vulpera were a Horde-only race so I also assumed I'd need to level a Horde character, although if you'd asked me why an Alliance character wouldn't be able to do it I wouldn't have been able to give you much of an answer.

With Dara's comment the penny finally dropped. My idea that you needed to be the equivalent of a pre-squish 110 to start anything in Battle for Azeroth zones had to be pure tosh, didn't it? You can level in any expansion, including BfA, from ten to fifty now, can't you? 

The fearsome werewolf hunter with her narcoleptic pony and trained attack sheep.

I ought to know. I've been writing post after post about it for a week or more. You'd have thought it might have dawned on me sooner.  I even leveled my worgen hunter to the free cap of twenty last night in BfA zone Tirargarde Sound and still never made the connection.

Slapping myself for being so stupidly slow on the uptake I decided it was past time to go read up on the actual process of unlocking the allied races rather than working on hearsay and supposition. Dara mentioned that what I'd been thinking of as a questline was in fact an achievement (albeit one consisting of having completed a string of quests) so I started by reading up on "Secrets in the Sands".

From there I went via Reddit and the offical WoW Forums bfore ending up on Icy Veins. As usual, none of them was wholly to be trusted. Most sources still claim you need to be Exalted with the Voldunai, for example, and I didn't see any mention of the actual new level requirement for adventuring in the zone, Vol'dun. 

As Dara explains in a follow-up comment,  during most of the BfA era it was possible to address the zones in the expansion in any order because the content was designed to scale apropriately. It still does, to a degree, but as Wilhem makes clear in his post about leveling in the squished Wrath of the Lich King, "while the expansion now scales from 10 to 50, the individual zones are not all equally accessible.  There are different ranges for the zones."

As you can see from his list, though, some of those ranges are pretty generous. Two-thirds of them stretch from twenty to fifty. I was still hopeful that Vol'Dun might fall within the range of my new goblin shaman, at least by the time she caught the worgen hunter up and dinged twenty.

Can't help feeling there's a bit of "give with one hand, take with the other" going on here.

 

Not really trusting much that I read about WoW right now, I figured the best way to find out would be to log in and see for myself. Fortunately Blizzard have seen fit to include the new level ranges on the in-game map, so I was quickly able to confirm that Vol'dun is intended for characters between thirty-five and fifty.

Clearly my goblin wasn't going to be helping any foxfolk without doing a good deal more busy work for the trolls. Since I had her there anyway I knocked out a couple more levels, taking her to fifteen, but it didn't seem nearly as much fun as what the worgen had been doing. 

That was when I began to wonder whether, with the faction requirement gone, it might be possible for an Alliance character to swoop in, grab the necessary quests and knock out the achievement, which would presumably be account-wide, thereby unlocking the option to create a Vulpera character on the other side of the barricades.

I did a bit of checking on that. I found someone who said they'd done it. There's always one, isn't there?

You can't, in fact. As Dara clarifies in the second comment, the Secrets in the Sands achievement is Horde-only. Each of the two factions get separate zone storylines in BfA (probably in all expansions, I imagine) and this one is exclusively the property of the Horde.

Didn't stop me checking for myself, even so. The way things are in Azeroth at the moment it would be a brave player who took anything for granted without checking for themselves. I re-subbed my account and dusted off my highest character, a now-thirty-seven dwarf hunter. Perfect for the zone's required level range.

I think you mean "stay out of the way and don't touch anything" don't you?

 

After re-taking all his talents and sorting out his bags I watched a You Tube video to show me how to get him to Vol'dun. First he needed to get to Kul Tiras so I ran him through the meeting with the King in Stormwind. When he met Jaina on the docks he got the option to skip the Kul Tiras opening quests altogether but I figured he could use the xp so I took them anyway.

With that done, the trip to Vol'dun was simple enough. Just a boat trip from Kul Tiras. I was interested to see that the Admiral still offered him the choice of all four zones. At thirty-seven my hunter would be above the lower limit for all of them so it makes sense but I wonder if the game filters the options for lower-level characters? I ought to test that with my level twenty-five warlock, sometime.

In Vol'dun there was some business with a landing craft and a flare gun and then we were free to explore. I tried to google the exact location of the questgiver I wanted but I couldn't find anything much more specific than that it was in the North East of the zone near somewhere called the Abandoned Burrows.

As it happens, the Alliance foothold is also in the North East. I set out to look for fox prints. It wasn't long before I found a clutch of Vulperas being held captive by the indigenous snake people. They wouldn't speak to me even after I killed their captors. Neither would some freed foxes I ran into, nor the Vulpera flight master. At least they didn't attack me on sight like the snakes.

Don't give me the silent treatment. I know you can hear me!

 

A short while later I came across a couple of named Vulpera with a caravan. I thought I recognized their names as the ones who began the questline although now I think back on it I'm not sure. They were clearly supposed to be there to offer some kind of quest to someone. Just not to me.

Satisfied that there'd be no Alliance shortcut I decided to return to a modified version of the original plan. I'll need a Horde character of around level thirty-five, which is considerably better than having to get one to fifty or even forty-five. I don't think I can face another twenty levels with the trolls so I'll probably shift to another expansion then come back.

Given that the worgen hunter did five levels in an evening yesterday and the dwarf hunter went from thirty-seven to thirty-nine in a couple of hours, it shouldn't take too long. Shintar timed her journey from nought to fifty at around twenty-six hours and I imagine it slows up at least a little towards the end.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to it. It's strange how, after lionizing Classic this time last year for being in almost every respect the antithesis, I find myself having a fine time leveling in Retail. I guess I just like levelling, period.

Still a lot of hoops to jump through just to be able to play a cute fox, though, isn't it?

I Am The Fox : WoW, New World

Massively OP may have struggled to come up with half a dozen topics I cared about over the ten days I was away but they made up for it this morning with a 33% hit rate on the overnights. I woke up to two items of interest: Amazon Games is apparently retrenching already, despite not even having a single game in production, while World of Warcraft might be adding foxes to the roster of playable races.

I'd like to avoid MOP-bashing at this point. The site is what it is.As with late-period capitalism, which it uncannily resembles, there's little point in wailing and whining. It's what we have so we're just going to have to make the best of it. Even so, the way positives so routinely turn into negatives, if not in the headlines or the body of the pieces, then in the comments is depressing.

When we hear about game studios dropping staff, closing departments and shuttering games it almost always reflects difficulties with the finances. In the case of Amazon I would think we could safely discard any such concerns. If the press release states

"These moves are the result of regular business planning cycles where we align resources to match evolving, long-range priorities"

then I think we can take it at face value. When they go on to say the moves will

"...allow us to prioritize development of New World, Crucible, and new unannounced projects"

 we should probably feel re-assured, optimistic, even excited, rather than piling on the doom and gloom.

So far, Amazon seem to have been following an exemplary path in their foray into game development. They aren't rushing unfinished games to market. They aren't asking anyone to pay to test their experiments. They would appear to be running a professional operation, adequately funded for the medium and long term, operating under solid project management.

If they have slipped at all, I would say it might be in the tightness of New World's NDA. My feeling is that, had alpha testers been allowed to express an opinion of the lengthy alpha process and share some of their experiences - and screenshots - the general level of anticipation for the game would be very high indeed.

I'm still by no means sure that New World will be a game I, personally, want to play long-term but I feel fairly confident that, when it finally comes to market, it will be polished, professional and coherent in a way few other major releases have been in the last few years. That it has been taken back behind closed doors for more intense work by a re-focused team seems to me to make that outcome even more likely.

Blizzard used to be a byword for the same level of well-funded professionalism in the gaming industry. That crown has slipped a little in recent times following a number of mis-steps and muddled decisions.  

WoW isn't the be-all and end-all of the Blizzard empire, of course, but even diminished as it is, it remains a behemoth, both in the genre and in the company's portfolio. The late-summer launch of Classic will see WoW back at the very top of the news cycle and, most likely, the sales charts. Meanwhile, over in the Live game, something is stirring.

There was a leak yesterday concerning the rumored "Level Squish". A poll went out by email to some subscribers. It included the question

“Are you aware that the maximum level of 120 will be reduced in the future (ie Level Squish)?”

Wilhelm, considering the possibility well before the recent leak, judged that "we won’t see a level squish" because "it just changes too much for too little benefit". He also included the eternal issue of Levels in general in in his shortlist of "problems MMORPGs are never going to solve".

Kaylriene, however, discussing a possibility that now seems more like a probability, concluded that, while polls do not indicate something definitely will happen, "...Blizzard has committed to a decision one way or the other by now, as the expansion development for 9.0 has to be well underway". He also pointed out that  "Blizzard inherently sells expansions on the value of the leveling experience and has always made a bullet-point in their expansion presentations about the new levels to achieve".

Still, they seem determined to go ahead with it, just as they went ahead with removing flying from the game going forward, a decision that was received extremely poorly by large sections of the audience and which has been subject to considerable refinement and re-evaluation ever since. Since I love both leveling and flying, these would seem to be strong disincentives to my chances of re-subscribing to the Live game in the future.

Not, however, strong enough to suppress the thrill of excitement that swept over me on reading the news that Azeroth may become the next virtual world to fall under the thrall of the mighty fox!

I have to confess I had no idea WoW even had fox-people NPCs.  I don't believe I've ever heard of the Vulpera, who seem first to have appeared only as recently as the latest expansion, Battle for Azeroth. I've read a lot of blog posts about BoA but if anyone mentioned foxes I must have missed it.

Since Vanguard introduced me to the joys of  the fox life with the incomparable Raki, my favorite MMORPG playable race of all time, I have had the strongest of joneses for the race. It's not impossible that, had I known there were talking foxes in BOA I might have bought the blasted thing just to see them.

If Blizzard does go ahead and add the Vulpera as a playable race, complete with their own starting area, concomitant quests and lore, I will pretty much have to re-subscribe to try them out. Even if it also means buying the current expansion, though I have yet to set foot in Legion, which I already own. And I don't think I'd be the only one.

Of course, since a subscription is required to access Classic, which I almost certainly won't want to miss, at least for the opening frenzy, all may come together in a harmonious synchronicity towards the end of the summer. It's something to look forward to, at least. It's going to be a much longer wait before we see the fruits of Amazon's labor, I fear.



Some images borrowed from the Interwebs. As always, if one is yours and you'd rather it wasn't here, let me know and I'll remove it.