Fun in Undermine

Whatever gaming time hasn't gone into SWTOR's Galactic Season 8 over the past month, I pretty much spent on WoW's Undermine patch. Somewhat to my own surprise, I've been very focused on delves... but that's a post for another day I guess.

First I wanted to jot down some thoughts on Undermine the zone. It's an unusual one in so far as Blizzard have never created a patch zone before that consists entirely of a single city. Regardless of how one might feel about the goblin aesthetic, the main thing that has stood out to me about that is that it really requires you to learn the lay of the land in a way that isn't usually the case in regular overland zones. Normally you can tell quite easily what's a friendly hub, where hostile encampments are likely to pose greater danger, and what counts as an "in-between space" with average mob density. Undermine on the other hand is all town, all the time, and while the majority of it is fairly safe to traverse, there are definitely "bad" parts of town, where you'll be attacked on sight, and it was a real learning experience figuring out where that happens. (I hate The Heaps so much.)

Aside from that, there is no flying, which I'm sure was controversial with some but I didn't really mind. I quite appreciate an opportunity to get out a good old ground mount to be honest - and that is in fact how I get around most of the time, as I don't care for the zone's D.R.I.V.E. system at all. I don't drive in real life and I always thought racing games were boring, so giving me a race car was never likely to excite me. I was willing to give it a go, and I can put up with it for the occasional speed boost if I really want to get from one end of town to the complete opposite side, or when I want to take part in the surge pricing event, but the rest of the time I'm happy to just ride along on my old four-legger. This also saves me from constantly having to get in and out of the car every time I see something shiny to loot.

And there is a lot of that. You'd think that Undermine would be a dream come true for me in that regard, but to be honest I've actually found it to be somewhat overwhelming. I quite enjoy just cruising around and seeing what treasures and rares I encounter along the way, but the sheer number of them in all corners of Undermine actually kind of gives me sensory overload. This is also where the general layout of the buildings comes in to be annoying, with every house having multiple floors with narrow staircases and some buildings having points of interest on the outside as well, so it's not unusual to spend an exasperating amount of time legging it up and down multiple flights of stairs just to find that the mini map icon you were looking for is actually in another castle. There was also this one world quest on a roof somewhere that I just couldn't find access to, and when I finally googled it, it turned out I had to talk to an unassuming NPC for a free jetpack or something? I think back to how often I got turned around inside Northshire Abbey alone as a noob learning to navigate in a virtual 3D space for the first time, and I feel like to past me, Undermine would've been the stuff of nightmares.

Navigational obstacles aside, the zone is... pretty good. As someone who wasn't the biggest fan of goblins, I was sceptical, but it's fun enough. The story lived up to its promise of taking the goblins more seriously again without losing the humour, and I enjoyed seeing Xal'atath get mad (one good thing about my dislike for her is that when things don't go her way in the story, it's extremely satisfying). The music is great and I'm always humming along to the different tunes playing in various sub zones.

That said, I still prefer to "hang out" in the launch zones, probably because a lot of my "hanging out" consists of flying around and gathering, and Undermine doesn't have much to offer in that regard aside from a few stray gathering nodes inside the sewers (which to be honest is just another nuisance in itself, always having to locate the right sewer entrance to climb down to where you saw the ore node). Still, I've spent enough time there to max out the main faction's renown track, so there's that.

I also did one round of the Liberation of Undermine raid in LFR. Like last tier, the devs added a solo mode of the last fight again, and this time it was actually a required step to progress the main storyline instead of a side quest that was added later and easy to overlook. I was just baffled that it was still time-gated behind the regular raid. For all the ways Blizzard have slowly chipped away at raiding's unique incentives over time, they just can't seem to let go of "raiders must be the first ones to see the end of the story" for some reason, which is weird because I'll be very surprised if lore is high up on many modern WoW raiders' priority list.

Anyway, eventually the solo mode unlocked too. It was still a bit silly how the game didn't trust me to actually tank and slotted me into the NPC group as sucky dps, but it was a good opportunity to watch the ending cut scene in peace. Then I once again still wanted to do LFR to see the rest of the raid, and to be honest it was largely the same as usual, which is to say, not as bad as people sometimes say it is and well worth my while to see the story once, but I can't see myself investing the time in running it multiple times, even with the new raid renown track they added in this time. I'll just give an honorary shout-out to Stix Bunkjunker, who was probably the funniest raid boss I've ever seen in WoW, and my husband was quite amused while listening to my gleeful giggling and cackling throughout the entire fight.

All in all, Undermine delivered on its promise to give WoW players lots of new things to do, and apparently the next minor patch is already lined up to add a whole bunch of other new activities. There's no time to be bored in modern WoW.

Jason Schreier's "Play Nice"

Jason Schreier is a big name in gaming journalism, and when I first heard that he was going to publish a book about the history of Blizzard, I got quite excited. I would've even bought it on launch day, but then I found out that for some reason physical publication in the UK was delayed by something like two months, which kind of made me lose interest. I just watched/read some coverage of the book around the time of its release in the US and then mostly forgot about it again.

Until the other day that is, when it suddenly reappeared on my radar for some reason and I decided to finally pick it up. It was an enjoyable read, and I gave it four stars on Goodreads.

I especially appreciated the earlier chapters, because as someone who knew nothing about Blizzard before I started playing World of Warcraft, I always had very limited knowledge of the company's early years. I'd sometimes see people make comments about Blizzard North or Vivendi and have no real idea what they were talking about. Now I do, so in that regard, the book was very enlightening. The chapters about more recent developments were admittedly a lot less interesting, as they mostly covered events that I'd basically seen play out live on social media/in the news as they happened, and in greater detail than was covered in the book.

What really kind of disappointed me though was how little coverage there was about World of Warcraft. To be honest, the main reason I bought the book was that I was hoping for some juicy behind-the-scenes information about just why the devs made certain decisions in regards to the game's development over the years. What were they thinking when subscriptions stagnated during Wrath of the Lich King? What insights did they gain from players' responses to Cataclysm? Just why did Warlords of Draenor turn out the way it did? That sort of thing.

However, for some reason the game and its development got what I felt was very little coverage for something that's presumably been keeping the lights on at Blizzard for the last two decades. There's a chapter about its development and launch, and later there are a few pages dedicated to the release of Classic, but that's kind of it. Occasionally there'll be a reminder that WoW was still releasing expansions but that's as far as it goes, which really struck me as a big oversight.

One of the major themes of the book is the struggle between devs wanting to prioritise player enjoyment and corporate wanting to focus more on monetisation, and I figured WoW in particular would offer a lot of ground to cover on that topic. Talk about the release of the sparkle pony! The introduction of character boosts! The WoW Token! But nope, not a word about any of these things.

Considering the amount of random developers that get name-dropped throughout the book, it was also surprising that there wasn't even a mention of Ion Hazzikostas, considering how many years he's been at the helm of WoW by this point. Maybe he intentionally didn't want to be part of this book, but considering Jason's seeming lack of interest in WoW-related goings-on, I also wouldn't be surprised if he simply didn't consider talking to him.

In summary, "Play Nice" is a well-researched history of Blizzard and definitely relevant to anyone with an interest in Blizzard and/or the PC gaming industry, but for WoW players in specific, it's not as insightful as I would've expected.

I used to hope that Jason would write a similar book about Bioware one day so I could learn more about what happened behind the scenes of SWTOR's post-launch development, but at this rate it doesn't look like that subject would get much coverage even if such a book were to happen.

All Classes at 80!

This morning my mage hit level 80 from completing a delve, causing the achievement "Class Connoisseur" to pop up - for getting one of every class to max level. This is hardly an amazing feat nowadays, considering how fast and easy it is to level in retail, but I still felt quite a sense of accomplishment.

Back in my early days of WoWing, when I was at my most invested in the game, it wouldn't have been feasible for me to level up so many characters, as levelling was still quite time-consuming and you had to be really devoted to alting to have multiple max-level toons. When I reinstalled the game for Shadowlands, levelling was quick and I did ultimately level a few alts, but there wasn't much incentive for me to do this with a lot of different characters. It was only during Dragonflight that I got more invested again and started to bring more characters up in levels, which laid the foundation for me ultimately getting one of each class to 80 this expansion.

I wrote two previous posts about this process, which you can find here (in which I talked about playing evoker, warrior, priest and death knight) and here (for notes on hunter, druid, paladin, monk and rogue). This left warlock, demon hunter, mage and shaman for me to work on, which I'll talk about in this post.

Destruction Warlock

I've repeatedly stated in past posts that warlock is among my least favourite classes in WoW, and that the retail version of the class seems particularly confusing to me. The only reason I got this one levelled up was Mists of Pandaria Remix, and in a way it's no surprise that I left levelling her to 80 close to the end of my list. The class kit remained confusing to me the entire time, and a lot of my XP came just from flying around and picking flowers. More than once I died to regular mobs while doing this because I couldn't figure out what the heck I was doing.

And then I hit 80 and it was as if a switch had been flipped. I did the Awakening the Machine event and everything seemingly just exploded, regardless of which buttons I pressed. I one-shot normal mode Zek'vir with ease and even gave ?? a try as a warlock for a while. It was weird.

Of course, before I could get too invested, patch 11.1 came out, and even though officially only a single one of my talent points had been reset, I quickly noticed that several of my key abilities had disappeared, and I haven't felt motivated enough to do a deep dive to figure out whether that's due to more talent changes, intentional ability removal or what. I just know that warlock remains a bit of a weird one to me.

Havoc Demon Hunter

My demon hunter was actually my first max-level alt back in Shadowlands, but at some point my interest in playing her kind of dropped off. I do remember that there was a period during Dragonflight when the class felt annoyingly squishy out in the open world, but that was later remedied, and now every time I do play her I think "This is actually kind of fun; I don't know why I don't play this character more often" but then I immediately forget about her again. Maybe that's just an inevitable side effect of having so many alts, especially since I'm not too keen on melee dps. I've been playing my monk a lot more and I guess that covers all my melee needs for the time being.

Restoration Shaman

Considering that this was my "Remix main" and that resto shaman was super flavour of the month during War Within season one, I was kind of surprised by how much I did not feel like playing this character. I've levelled her now, but I still don't enjoy playing her a great deal for some reason. My best guess is that it's because in the (very) distant past I used to enjoy playing resto as melee while soloing, but that doesn't really seem possible anymore in the current game, so all you're left with is shooting a lot of lightning bolts and lava bursts, a play style I never enjoyed. But even while actually healing, the spell selection feels weirdly limited and clunky to me somehow; I don't know. There's probably something I'm missing here but I'm not sure I can be bothered to find out what it is.

Arcane Mage

Mage is one of the few classes where I've actually played as all three specs at some point in the past. I still tend to think of frost as my favourite spec, but when I revived this old character it turned out she was still specced arcane from around Wrath of the Lich King and I decided to just roll with it. The optimised arcane rotation is supposedly extremely complicated, but in everyday play I mostly press one button over and over, with the occasional addition of two others if they light up with a proc. I'm sure it would give some people hives to watch, but it's fun enough for me. I was actually kind of surprised that I ended up leaving this character until last but that's just how things panned out. We'll see whether she can earn herself a better spot in my roster this tier.

Musings on Goblins

War Within's latest patch, Undermine(d), is all about goblins. I like it well enough so far, but we'll see how it holds up in the long term. Either way, it's made me think about goblins a lot and how my perception of them has changed over time.

Looking at how goblins were presented in Vanilla, I always pictured them as natives of tropical islands. We originally encounter them in four different settlements, and aside from Everlook, they are all located on or near the beach of a zone with a warm climate. They seemingly like to cook with fish and clams a lot (the original artisan cooking quest is given by a goblin and rewards you with a stack of "Clamlette Surprise", plus there's that recipe for "Undermine Clam Chowder").

There are quite a few mentions of Undermine in the classic quests, but I've got to admit that despite the name, it never would've occurred to me that the place was underground. At the end of the quest chain from Booty Bay that has you collecting hides from increasingly dangerous crocolisks, the quest giver mentions that his creations will be on "the next boat to Undermine", so I always thought it was just an island.

In terms of their nature, vanilla goblins are portrayed as curious, enterprising and uninterested in the faction rivalries between Alliance and Horde. It's not surprising to find a random goblin out in the middle of nowhere, and if he's a vendor, you know he'll have something rare or interesting for sale. Their quests tend to be pretty straightforward fetch/kill quests, which may sound boring, but by the time you encounter most of these you'll be in higher-level territory where quests start to get more sparse and you're just grateful for something to do. Goblin NPCs often come across as a bit single-minded and greedy, but in a "good-natured scoundrel" sort of way, and they still care about other things too. Alchemist Pestlezugg warns both the Horde and the Alliance about the looming threat posed by the silithids for example, and Umi Rumplesnicker makes you travel all over Kalimdor just to play a prank on her friends.

And then Cataclysm came out and everything was different. I went through the blog's archives to find what I had to say about the goblin starter zone when it first came out and only found this post from 2011, in which I stated: "Those zones seem to be the kind of content that people either love or hate, and unfortunately my reaction fell on the negative side of the spectrum. Kezan and the Lost Isles just felt nothing like the Azeroth I used to know, and while I can generally appreciate pop culture references and the like, the goblins went overboard with it in my opinion."

I actually never rolled another goblin after that, so I thought I'd use the occasion of patch 11.1 to revisit Kezan and the Lost Isles just to see how I'd feel about them one and a half decades later. Now, I didn't hate the experience at first, but it still felt very weird. I just told you how I perceived the goblins in Vanilla, right? Well, come Cataclysm they are suddenly polluting hyper-capitalists whose every sentence is some sort of anachronistic joke. The very first quest has you going around applying electric shocks to some slaves for fun, and I mean, I don't want to look at this stuff too seriously, but still... yikes.

At least I got to look cute. I say that as someone who's not usually a fan of short races.

I also forgot that you start the experience with a temporary car and a lot of the intended fun seems to be in running people over. I guess Grand Theft Auto 4 must have just come out while they were working on this? Then you play this parody of American football and the implied joke is that you kicking a specially modified ball/bomb up the mountain is what unleashes Deathwing upon the world. It's just one bizarre scenario after another.

(Now, it was extra funny when I hit level 10 and got a call (?) from Ebyssian calling me a hero of the Horde and that I should go to the Dragon Isles while I was just fighting my way through a cave after having been shipwrecked. However, I'm more willing to be forgiving of content that is more than a decade apart not meshing well than of how weird the goblin starter zone was by itself.)

By the Lost Isles things started to feel like a real drag once again. You're locked into this hyper-linear plot that makes no sense and just has you endlessly running back and forth completing one joke task after another. Fetch an egg from a giant mechanical chicken! Blow up a shark with a laser! Mow down hordes of faceless pygmies with a mounted cannon! Wait, I thought we were shipwrecked and struggling to survive a moment ago? Oh look, the volcano is blowing up, get on this plane that we now have for some reason, time to dog-fight with some gnomes!

It's not that I didn't find any of it amusing (it had been so long I'd genuinely forgotten most of the story and I did at least crack a smile at the quest where a goblin captive in a cage barely has time to point out that their captors have keys before you start blowing things up with rockets instead), but it was just nothing but a succession of nonsense and I was definitely reminded of why Cata made me lose all interest in goblins and why I never had the urge to repeat this starter zone, ever.

In the run-up to patch 11.1, I saw multiple dev interviews where they felt the need to emphasise that they wanted the goblins to be more than joke characters in Undermine(d), and I'm glad to say that that's been true so far at least (the story is time-gated so I've only seen the first three chapters or so at this point). The same old stereotypes are still there, but we do see goblins caring about a variety of things and while there are still plenty of humorous NPCs and encounters, it's a lot more coherent and not just a bunch of random nonsense.

And yet, as I open yet another trash can filled with grey items that was marked as "treasure" on my Undermine mini map for some reason, I still can't help but wonder how we ended up here, with goblins speaking in New York accents and living underground among neon-lit filth. I mean, were they always meant to be like this and it just wasn't conveyed that well in the environmental storytelling in Vanilla WoW? Or if not, how and why did we get here? And did literally nobody but me find the way the goblin lore developed in Cata strange?