Midnight on Foot

Two years ago I recommended FaroraSF's excellent YouTube video on exploring the Dragon Isles without flying, to which she made sequels for War Within and Midnight as well. While the latter two videos didn't get many views, I think her idea of going against the grain and sticking to ground travel in an environment where Blizzard had finally given up on forcefully grounding players was very inspiring, and at the start of Midnight it was interesting to see a lot more people talking about the concept of levelling without flying. I don't know how many players actually tried it - probably not that many - but the idea at least gained enough traction to be discussed on more mainstream channels. Somebody also made an addon that allows you to disable flying for yourself until you've hit certain milestones.

I was never tempted to forsake flying at the very beginning of the expansion, but I did decide to devote an alt to it as a side project. I eventually landed on my human paladin, since paladin seemed like a class that would really benefit from the increased immersion this expansion. More importantly though, if I was going to ground myself, I needed a character that was fun to watch on a ground mount and I still adore the paladin charger, so the paladin was a natural match in that regard too.

The idea was to stick to my ground mount and flight paths while levelling from 80 to 90, though due to a mix of restedness, gathering XP and a maxed-out warband mentoring bonus, I ended up hitting 90 early on in Harandar, so I still continued all the way to the end of the levelling campaign on the ground after that.

My biggest "worries" going in were a) that I was going to randomly forget what I was doing and take off on a flying mount while on autopilot and b) that levelling my mining skill was going to be a pain. I ended up being completely wrong about the first point - while I enjoy skyriding, being ground-bound is also still completely natural to me, and my brain had no problems switching to "ground-bound" mode and staying there. In fact, I even started running around Silvermoon like that while I wasn't questing and would've technically been "allowed" to fly, e.g. to get to crafting stations more quickly, but I was just happy to remain on my horse.

The worry about mining wasn't completely unfounded, as my mining skill is still only 75 or so at this point, when I would've maxed out long ago on a flying character. The two main problems I'd anticipated were running into nodes that were inaccessible without flying and being too slow on my ground mount compared to flying players, so that ores would despawn before I could reach them. Now, on a general level this wasn't as bad as I had feared: being ground-bound limits your field of view, and once you're actually close enough to an ore node to see it, you can usually make it there in time as well. Accessibility did become more and more of an issue with each zone though, and I'll definitely want to do some mining on my flying mount now to catch up a bit.

Silvermoon and the Isle of Quel'Danas

The expansion storyline starts you on the Isle of Quel'Danas, and for a brief period, all characters there are unable to fly. Once you can take off, the distance to Silvermoon seems quite long even while flying... and boy, is it a ride when you stay on the ground. The bridge connecting the island to the city is sooo long! Passing over it on the ground certainly gives you time to rethink your life choices, but the city slowly looming ever closer along the way is a pretty impressive sight.

I was kind of curious how Silvermoon itself would feel to navigate on foot and it was mostly fine... though I was disappointed to find that there are a few instances where you're supposed to talk to an NPC on a terrace on top of a building and there literally isn't any way to get there without flying. It's not a big deal considering we're expected to fly nowadays, but from an immersion point of view it really bugged me that there wasn't an actual stairwell or ramp to get to these places.

There are a couple of points in the campaign where you have to return to Quel'Danas, and on those occasions I found the island kind of annoying to navigate because the road just takes you to the entrance to the March on Quel'Danas raid, and to get to anywhere behind that you need to loop around the island on the outside because there are no walkable paths to cross those first few plazas outside the instance. 

Eversong Forest

Unsurprisingly, Eversong Forest was the easiest and most pleasant zone to navigate on foot, because as I noted in my review of Midnight's zones, you can still tell that it's based on a zone that was originally designed without flying in mind. That means the environments are pretty flat with only minor elevations for the most part, which made getting around easy and straightforward and ore nodes very accessible. There were a few nice vistas to enjoy as well, such as the silhouette of Windrunner Spire appearing on the horizon as you ride towards it.

Zul'Aman

I loved Zul'Aman while flying, but my perception of its elevation levels had kind of been limited to "west high, east lower". Exploring it on the ground really fleshed out the details of my mental map as it actually gave me a reason to become fully aware of minor cliffs and plateaus as well as the roads between the troll settlements.

I knew from Farora's video that the Temple of Akil'zon wasn't accessible on foot via normal means, so I did get out my flying mount just to get up there when the story required it. When it came to getting back down, I was delighted at the opportunity to bubble-jump, something I hadn't really had any reason to do for a long time (but continued to do many more times throughout my journey).

The loa temples were the thing that looked the most different to me on foot. I'd never realised how impressive the Temple of Jan'alai looms when you approach it from the ground, or the cool outer appearance of the Den of Nalorakk (while flying, I just point myself towards the dungeon entrance and zoom straight in like an arrow, with no pausing to look at the exterior). 

Harandar

I expected Harandar to be a bit of a pain to navigate on the ground as my impression while flying had been that it was all steep cliffs and deep ravines, but I was surprised by how much gentle sloping ground there actually was in the areas where the main campaign quests take place.

The Den of course has that big opening in the face of a cliff, which is great for taking off on a flying mount but does not have a corresponding footpath, which did make me wonder at the start how I was even going to get in or out of the place. I was surprised to find that the "ovaries" of the cave (if you know, you know) actually contained walkable ramps up to the top - I'd genuinely never had reason to go in there before. I just wish they were a bit more visible from the surface, as I had difficulties finding the entrances again from the outside more than once.

The only area I really struggled to navigate was the Rutaani village in the Lightbloom area in the south-west, which has all these looping ramps connecting to different platforms, and if you're on the wrong one you basically have to go down and find the right (different) ramp to climb back up. I felt like a spent a ridiculous amount of time on what was a fairly simple quest there.

The views were not as impressive(ly different) from the ground as they were in other zones in my opinion, maybe because the zone is designed to draw your eyes up to the Cradle, which works at any height. The giant mushrooms definitely have a different vibe though when you're riding underneath them instead of soaring above their caps all the time.

Voidstorm

I would say that in general, the annoyance levels of navigation increased with each zone, which made this one the biggest pain in the rear. Voidstorm really is all cliffs and ravines, and I don't think I've had to do this much running up and down narrow mountain paths since the first time I quested my way through Blade's Edge mountains in the original Burning Crusade. Every step in the story was another exercise in "where exactly is the path to lead me up/down to the next quest marker", which made this zone the first one to actually make me yearn for my flying mount at times.

Conclusion

All in all, I really enjoyed this experiment. The game is obviously no longer designed for this kind of questing, but nonetheless I felt that it really improved the pacing of the experience. I'm someone who does read all the quests (at least the first time around), but with how quickly you tend to hop from one location to the next, it's still easy to start skimming sometimes. The prolonged travel between quest objectives gives your brain time to breathe and digest both what just happened and what you're trying to do next, leaving you more ready to take in the next set of quest instructions - or at least that was my experience.

Not directly related to the ground-bound travel, but redoing the base campaign with the benefit of hindsight was also interesting. Since reinstalling retail WoW at the end of BfA I've never played through the main story of an expansion more than once during that expansion - until now that is - and there were definitely a few things that made me go "huh" on replaying. For example, there is one quest where Lothraxion talks about burning mana forges on a foggy swamp world - was he on Naigtal? Or the way Xal'atath talks about the dark Naaru trapped inside Alleria - on first playthrough that just seemed like more of her idle needling, but obviously after the events of the Voidspire you know that it was not!

My takeaway from all this is that I'll definitely want to do more of this kind of thing - maybe even go back to some previous expansions some time and do them on foot as well.

Waiting (For) Forever

I'm not sure it's really apparent from me making a post on here once or twice a week, but I'm still very excited about WoW Forever and have been consuming content about it ravenously. I'm trying to avoid direct spoilers/too much detail about things like quests and dungeons, but otherwise I've been game for almost anything: dev talks, first impression videos, reddit discussions, you name it.

Personally I've continued to not play the beta other than to log in once or twice to play around with the character creator. Hot tip for fellow SD model enjoyers: make sure to also check your character's look in HD. While it's unfortunate if the cute or heroic face you chose in SD looks derpy in HD, HD does sometimes have extra options like eye colour or eyebrow shape that aren't tied to any of the SD drop-downs and which are simply randomised if you don't make a selection. So you can adjust those to make your HD appearance look a bit more palatable without affecting the way your character looks in SD.

I did think about playing properly a couple of times when the yearning got a bit too much, but I always remembered quickly that the beta is only temporary and that was always enough to stop me. I want to save my energy for the real thing.

Also, my physical collector's edition arrived yesterday. I wasn't home but my husband was, and when it arrived he texted me that the box was massive. As I'd never bought a physical collector's edition for an MMO before, I wasn't sure what to expect.

When I got home he urged me to open it immediately as he'd gotten quite curious after hours of waiting and wanted to see the contents. It was quite a Russian doll affair of boxes within boxes, but eventually we had everything unwrapped. My husband immediately got annoyed with the dwarf statue, thinking I'd been ripped off because the dwarf wasn't holding his rifle properly, but fortunately it only took a small push to pop it back into its proper place. I think it looks pretty cool actually.

Otherwise my favourite physical item was probably the mouse pad, mostly because I've actually been in desperate need of a new one for a while and just couldn't be bothered to replace it. This gave me an excuse to finally bin the remains of the old pad and clean up the rubbery residue for a fresh start.

I'm also happy that I'll now be able to log in for the early name reservation. I was always doubtful of that as for Midnight I'd heard some horror stories on social media about physical collector's editions being delayed in the mail and people missing out on early access perks. 

The digital bundle also includes a copy of Warcraft 3 Reforged and the new Forsaken Kingdom campaign - I've never played any of the RTS games, but maybe I'll give this one a go while waiting since I've heard people rave so much about the new campaign...

Otherwise, I'll keep enjoying myself in retail for now. It's weird but in some way the announcement of Forever has also made me look at the modern game a bit differently and I've been enjoying it more recently. Funny how that works.

Three Worlds of Warcraft

I continue to be fascinated by the community dynamics around WoW Forever.

Were players of modern WoW worried about the future of their game when Classic first came out? I don't really know because I was paying little attention to it at the time, but whenever I did hear people talk about what was going on in retail during those years, Final Fantasy XIV seemed to be considered the more dangerous competition.

If there ever was any worry about Classic taking away interest and development resources from modern WoW, it seemed to dissipate fast. For several years, my experience moving through different WoW spaces was that players of modern WoW usually cared so little about Classic that they tended to forget it even exists, while Classic players didn't really care about what was going on in the modern game either. (Though if prompted to have an opinion, the latter were much more likely to be hostile towards the other game than the former.) Modern and Classic WoW were very obviously two very different MMOs with different audiences.

With WoW Forever appearing as a third pillar in the middle, things look very different though.

At least the fact that Blizzard has been updating the WoW website and the Battle.net launcher to split WoW into Midnight, Forever and Classic indicates that Classic is meant to stick around, even if players are understandably frustrated about the complete lack of communication about the future of the MoP Classic and anniversary servers. Classic will persist in some form, but the details are fuzzy.

The reason that there isn't more outrage about the lack of news right now is that the vast majority of Classic players are currently too busy being excited about Forever. They have a lot of criticisms about how this or that isn't "classic enough" (some reasonable, some less so), and I suspect that a certain percentage of them will be happy to turn their attention back to regular Classic in a few months time, but for the time being, Classic+ is here and the new hotness. This was to be expected.

What surprised me more was the level of interest from retail players. I mean, I never thought that Classic+ would be completely uninteresting to all retail players - not everyone playing modern WoW raids or runs Mythic+; there's still also a casual player base that just likes to putter about, quest and explore the world, and why would those players not also want to explore WoW Forever? Makes perfect sense.

But I've also seen a fair amount of outright jealousy and seeming fear that WoW Forever is meant to replace original WoW as the "main" game. I do kind of get the gut reaction behind that, not least because WoW has never had to take a backseat to another game the way it did at this BlizzCon. While I haven't watched most of them myself, I also heard that the panels about modern WoW were kind of underwhelming this time around. (I did see a clip where people were booing the dungeon selection announced for Midnight Season 3 - yikes.) So from that angle, a certain degree of sour grapes is understandable.

Some of the more extreme takes have been kind of funny though, like when people think Forever is going to mean certain doom for retail WoW. I say this as a SWTOR player, someone who's seen an MMO suffer actual public failure, as well as having people predict its death at least once a year for the past one and a half decades. Meanwhile WoW is printing so much money that they are actively branching out, but somehow that's supposed to be a bad sign? Come on.

Still, it's going to be interesting to see how the dynamics between the different modes will play out in the long run. For now, all eyes are on Forever, and its launch in a little over a month is bound to be huge. While I think its main target audience is lapsed players, both Classic and retail audiences will want to dip their toes in as well. After a few weeks to months, I expect things to fall off as players return to their usual haunts or just get bored. I suspect that this will be when Blizzard suddenly announces Wrath of the Lich King Classic for the anniversary servers and shines a spotlight on what's coming next for Midnight again. As long as some version of WoW keeps enough people's attention to bolster the overall sub count, it's probably all good.

But it'll certainly be interesting to see whether WoW Forever turns into an unexpected juggernaut or just an uncomfortable middle ground between different game modes that doesn't quite appeal to mass audiences. There are certainly risks there, but I'm extremely curious to find out.

First and Last Names in WoW Forever

One of the things that's going to differentiate WoW Forever from other versions of World of Warcraft is that every character in it will be required to have both a first and a last name. I don't think the devs did this to appeal to roleplayers - I don't think it was even meant to be a major feature, really. I suspect it was more or less a necessary side effect of their new "realmless" structure, because asking millions of people to come up with one-word character names that must be unique across the entire region was always going to be a nightmare.

I initially had two different reactions to this piece of news that are actually slightly at odds with each other. The first one was major relief. No longer do I have to be the first one to type "Shintar" (or any other name) into the character creation screen; I just need to have a different last name than whoever else chose the same first name, which should be extremely easy to achieve if you're going for an actual made-up name. This is particularly welcome as I don't know whether I'll get access to the early name reservations while waiting for my physical collector's edition. The only ones for which I expect there to be any real competition would be real world references, names stolen from fictional works, or names based on memes. 

However, that initial relief was almost immediately followed by a different thought: I've got to come up with last names for all my characters now? Dang! Pretty much since the dawn of time, all my characters only ever had first names, with the exception of the first character I ever created on a WoW roleplaying server. I was rolling there for a friend's sake and had no real intent to RP myself, but I had no idea what the experience was going to be like and was worried that some stranger might quiz me on my character's background and reveal me as a fraud. Once I realised how ridiculous that whole notion was, I quickly forgot about my hunter's last name again.

But now all my characters will need last names... and while it's nice that I have no set expectations to fulfil on that front, since I'm someone who also cares quite a lot about her characters' names, it's also going to be a bit of work.

I basically identified four different approaches to the matter that I could potentially take:

The first one is what you could call an attempt to cheat the system a bit - if your name of choice has multiple syllables, you can simply split it in two. So I could be Shin Tar for example. That feels very clever to me, and might work particularly well for something like a troll, who canonically don't have last names anyway, but it's obviously not going to be suitable for every situation.

Then there's the option of treating the last name field like a legacy name in Star Wars: The Old Republic, which is to say giving all my characters the same last name and using it as an easy way for people encountering me in the world to recognise the same person behind several alts. I do like that as a concept, and I do display my legacy name in SWTOR most of the time, but I don't think many people actually pay attention to it. As far as I can tell, most other players tend to hide theirs. And of course, it just wouldn't really work very well from an immersion point of view. Elves and dwarves wouldn't have the same kind of last name for example.

Thirdly, one could turn the above on its head, and simply use the same first name for all characters, and just give them different last names. That also works for recognition, and as long as your first name is something relatively neutral, it could be somewhat more immersive than option two. I have a couple of guildies in SWTOR who like to give all their characters the same name with just one letter changed - there's never any confusion about whose alt that is. However, I can't quite picture this approach working for me. I can see myself reusing a name once or twice, sure, but the same thing every time? No, I imagine my characters as different people, not just as masks I put on, so they should have their own names too.

Which leaves me with the last and hardest option.. to come up with actually lore appropriate surnames for every character I create, and I think I'll just have to bite the bullet on that one. At least it's an excuse to spend a bit of extra time thinking about each race's lore. Also, based on the beta, Blizzard actually put a bit of effort into the random name generator so that it actually spits out last names that fit each race, so if I get completely stuck, I can always use that randomiser for inspiration.

One More for Sausages!

Let's take a momentary break from all the excitement about WoW Forever to talk about... Brewfest. I've repeatedly said on this blog that I often forget about WoW's in-game holidays nowadays, but sometimes when I do remember them, I end up being positively surprised.

So when I noticed the other day that Brewfest had come around again, I went "hmm..." - Brewfest has never been among my favourites as I don't drink in real life, but at the same time it had been so long since I last checked it out, I figured a lot must have changed since then and that it would surely be worth at least a quick look.

And indeed it was! Good old ram racing was still a thing (though I needed a bit of a refresher on the best way to do it) but there were quite a few quests that were new to me as well, such as two that mentioned dracthyr, which made me think they must've been from Dragonflight, but apparently they were only added in War Within last year.

At the full hour all hell suddenly broke loose and an event reminiscent of the Earthen theatre "broke out", with players signing up to gather ingredients, prepare food and drink, or serve the former to revellers in the area. It was delightful! The only slight disappointment I had on later revisits was that the "optimal" strategy to maximise the score seems to be to sign up to just gather lots of cooking ingredients without actually cooking and serving them... not that this stopped me from still doing the latter for fun.

However, the best thing to me was the "Brewfest Chowdown" sausage eating contest, apparently added in BfA. I had actually seen references to this before but had thought that it was just a joke, not a real thing. It's basically a little mini game that requires a total of four people to chomp down plates of sausages as quickly as possible. There are no achievements for this or even a daily quest; the only possible reward to earn is a toy that you can acquire after winning first place five times.

At first I was honestly a bit confused. So this is... a group thing? And there's no automated group finding for it? How do you get other people to join you? However, I found one guy in the manual group finder eventually and got my first go at the game this way, which ended up being just too funny to me. Later I just sat down in one of the chairs by myself and /yelled at people in the vicinity to come eat sausages with me. I haven't talked this much to randoms in the open world in modern WoW in ages. When my character was too full and had to sit out, I'd happily watch other people go as well and spectate while whooping and cheering for them. What a silly little activity to add just for fun. Once again, I'm positively surprised by a modern holiday event.

 

My Forever Social Conundrum

As part of being excited for WoW Forever, it was natural for me to start thinking about questions such as what I'll want to play and how... which quickly made me realise that I'm actually facing something of a conundrum in terms of what I want out of this game.

What originally enchanted me about World of Warcraft back in the day - and also worked its magic in Classic to some extent - was the vastness of the world and the social interactions: seeing the same people repeatedly and making new friends, but also just sharing funny moments with random strangers and silly pugs. Pretty much all my best and most memorable moments in WoW have involved other people in some fashion.

So naturally, I'll want to lean into that in Forever too, right?! Well, yes, but... then I think back to Classic Burning Crusade and remember that my worst moments in WoW also involved other people. I don't want to keep harping on about this because it feels stupid to act as if I was "traumatised" by something as frivolous as a video game, but the events of Burning Crusade Classic really left a mark on me. It wasn't all bad, but the bits that were bad, felt very bad.

I don't ever want to relive the experience of an MMO making me feel like I'm in a race that I can never win. I don't want to try and keep up with people who selectively no-life the game until they've ticked all their boxes and then log off, not to be seen again until the next raid. That's why I gave the anniversary servers a wide berth from the beginning, because I knew they were going to be full of exactly that kind of experience.

WoW Forever promises to be different of course, but will it? One can certainly hope that the way Blizzard has been promoting it will attract the right kind of audience, but I have no doubt that the usual suspects will also be there on day one, racing through Forever as if their life depended on it, whether it's streamers for whom it literally is their job to play all day or merely their followers. Ironically for me, this means that at least in the beginning, I'll be better off playing the game in a more guarded way, just doing my own thing and not paying too much attention to what anyone else is doing.

Real life should help with that, as I happened to already have a holiday booked from which I'll return only the day before Forever's launch, which means that I have to be back to work the following day and will likely be too busy and too knackered to spend too much time thinking about WoW. November is also a busy month at my job in general, so I don't expect it to be the ideal time to binge on any form of entertainment. Which is to say that while I do expect to be playing from launch, it'll probably be in limited bursts.

With all the new content present from the very early levels, I'm also kind of tempted to go for my own horizontal progression right from the beginning, rolling up lots of different alts to see the changes to all the starter zones, and then levelling them up via different paths to see what new things there are to explore in different levelling zones as well as the new low-level dungeons that have been added. That would also naturally make it harder to keep grouping with the same people repeatedly.

That said, I can't deny that I'm feeling quite excited by the prospect of seeing some of my old guildies from Classic again. (I'm aware that at least a few of them have expressed an interest in giving Forever a spin.) I'll just have to make sure to remain steadfast and not let anyone rush me at the beginning. After all, that level cap isn't going anywhere.

Meme Monday: WoW Forever Memes

I'm going to steal Redbeard's Meme Monday format for a day, since he seems unlikely to be using it for this particular subject. I've been browsing a lot of reddit and social media for more WoW Forever reactions and while there's a lot of utter insanity out there, there've also been some pretty funny memes, a few of which I wanted to share here.

This was basically me for most of last week. I don't remember the last time I was this happily excited for such a long period of time that it interfered with my normal day-to-day operations. Fortunately I've managed to calm down a bit since then! Originally seen on the Classic WoW subreddit but it was deleted for some reason.

Fortunately I don't need to have this conversation with my husband. When I did share my excitement about WoW Forever with him, his reaction was just a slightly resigned "I'm not going to see you for a while when that comes out, right?" Also from the Classic WoW subreddit. Of course, not everyone is this resigned about being sucked back in:

Posted on r/wow under the title "My friend's reaction when I ask her to resubscribe". 

Meanwhile, the following was posted under the title "Meanwhile in Ironforge" (again in r/wow):

  

As much as I loved the trailer, that made me chuckle. You've got to be careful with altering the timeline! (In the original World of Warcraft trailer, the dwarf hunter went on to fight a tauren instead of wandering off.)

Speaking of changes, I was amused by this take on what's probably going to be the most popular new race/class combo:

FaroraSF posted this on the WoW subreddit but also on her Bluesky. This is the same creator by the way who made the excellent video about exploring Dragonflight on foot, which I recommended back here. She's gone on to do the same in War Within and Midnight since then.

Finally, not an image meme, but a humorous post that tries to answer the question "Why the Skyborne don't appear in Retail WoW [Most Plausible Theory]". That is 100% going to be my head-canon now until/unless they get added to modern WoW after all (which wouldn't surprise me in the long run, though I guess for now they are meant to be one of Forever's unique selling points).

Actually, let's throw in one last thing if we're already deviating from the format anyway, because this video just popped up on my YouTube feed and made me laugh - a reaction to WoW Forever from someone who loved WoW back in the day and bounced off Classic: