Questing, Flying and Riding Dragons

I wasn't even playing WoW during Warlords of Draenor, but I still remember the big hubbub about the idea that Blizzard was considering not having flight in that expansion. It was just being talked about everywhere (as you can see from the "here's what other bloggers are saying" section in the linked post). At one point I considered reviving the blog purely to tell everyone that I thought they were being stupid, but fortunately I had enough sense not to do that. I don't think that lecturing devs or players of a game you're not actively playing about how they're doing it all wrong is a good way to spend one's time.

What I was thinking though was that I found both the complaints from players and the devs' attitude annoying in their own way. As someone who fell in love with WoW in Vanilla, back when there was obviously no flying, the wailing about how the game was literally unplayable without it made me roll my eyes every time. At the same time though, I didn't get why Blizzard were being so weird about it with these arguments about how flying supposedly trivialised the content. It's possible to design things like questing with flying in mind, and I had seen them do that in both Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King; why were they suddenly acting as if they couldn't do it?

In the end we got an awkward compromise in which Blizzard still designed the content for ground-bound play and then would let people fly over it by the end of the expansion after they'd "done their dues", as if questing was some sort of chore and AFK-flying through a whole lot of nothing while ignoring all the action on the ground was some sort of amazing reward. Because make no mistake - letting people fly in content that was designed around players being ground-bound does mess things up.

Playing Burning Crusade Classic was actually a good reminder of that, because while it did have content designed with flying in mind, the early levelling quests generally weren't, and if you went back to those with a flying mount later, they were kind of dumb: the stereotypical situations where you were supposed to fight your way through an enemy camp but would then just fly over it to pluck your objective straight out of the air.

Blizzard's decision to design Dragonflight with flight in mind from the very start has been a huge sea change after all those years, and to be honest it's been great. Aside from the first few intro quests, everything is meant to be done with a flying mount, and it really shows. There is more verticality than we've ever had in WoW before and it's very fun.

The fact that dragon riding functions differently from normal flying plays a huge part in this as well. In my opinion dragon riding is honestly so much better that it makes old flying kind of feel like a mistake in hindsight to be honest, with its slow and boring "swim through the air" mechanic. Dragon riding isn't difficult, but it does take a bit of practice to get used to, and it does require continued engagement, meaning that travelling is part of gameplay instead of "time to AFK" (though flight paths still exist if you do find yourself wanting to go for a bio break while flying from one end of the Dragon Isles to the other).

Actually engaging with the game while travelling in turn gives it meaning and opens up opportunities to get distracted and sucked into other activities. It's kind of like the travel in Vanilla, where crossing the landscape would give you a sense of scale, and while doing so you might find yourself discovering something interesting by the side of the road or running into other players. This isn't to claim that Dragonflight is totally like Vanilla (please don't @) me) - it's still a more modern game where everything is much more fast-paced and requires more key presses, but my point is that the vibe in the open world is similar.

Often when I log into retail and fly across the Dragon Isles with a certain goal in mind, I'll end up soaring over something interesting on the ground and landing to pick it up, then I spot a rare just a little bit away and go to that instead, and before you know it I've almost forgotten what I meant to do originally and been playing for much longer than I intended to. This is not something that happened to me in Shadowlands, but it's definitely something that has happened to me in Classic and I'm digging it in Dragonflight too... even if it means that I'm often spending more time playing it than I had planned.

Zereth Mortis at Last

It's hard to believe that Zereth Mortis was released in February, considering it took the husband and me this long to finally check it out, but that just seems to be how we roll. Part of his initial hesitation to jump into it was caused by the fact that we'd levelled as a warrior and monk duo until now, but he had come to enjoy the demon hunter play style more and wanted to make that his new main (yet at the same time didn't feel quite ready to do so yet).

In the end it was last week that we finally set out as monk and demon hunter duo to check out the last zone added for Shadowlands. It took us about two weeks of real time to get through all the story (and to do the weekly twice while we were there), with one particularly intense play session on a Saturday afternoon taking up something like six hours.

And it was enjoyable! I quite liked Korthia until we got dispirited by the grind, and Zereth Mortis functions in a similar way but in a prettier environment. Now that I've finally seen the basic workings of Warlords of Draenor, I can really see how Blizzard's approach to these zones evolved over time: Burning Crusade first added the concept of a faction offering daily quests, which remained their go-to way of keeping players busy with only relatively minor changes for the next three expansions, until Mists of Pandaria caused backlash with its "daily overload". This in turn then resulted in Blizzard trying something completely different with the Timeless Isle and just letting people look for treasures and rare mobs with little to no direction there.

As that got what I think could be called a mixed reception, they went back to dailies with WoD, but left in the treasures and rares, and also experimented with these things called "bonus objectives", which were basically story-less area quests that just magically deposit rewards in your bags if you killed enough mobs in an area to fill a bar on your quest tracker. As these proved pretty popular, they decided to merge dailies and area quests into world quests for Legion and BfA... though there seemed to be some demand for dailies to make a return, as they did so in the later half of BfA, meant to work with world quests in a synergetic way. And that's kind of where we are in Shadowlands, and I have to admit it works.

In Zereth Mortis, a small number of dailies and world quests provide a basic framework to answer the question of "What should I do today?" when you first enter the zone on any given day, and then the dynamically popping treasures and rares provide additional busywork to extend your time in the zone. As an example, today I arrived in Zereth Mortis with the intent to just do the puzzle world quest and nothing else, but just on the way there I found myself stopping multiple times to loot chests, then a big rare popped and I flew over there to kill it, so all in all just "doing that single puzzle quest" actually ended up taking up quite a bit of time, but in a fun way.

Of course I say all this, having unlocked flying. The flying unlock for Zereth Mortis is pretty reasonable by the way: Just running around and doing the story we ended up ticking all but one of the boxes for it - the thing we were missing was an achievement to find a number of hidden scrolls (of which we had only found a few), but it was easy enough to look up a guide for where the remaining ones were hiding.

While we were still ground-bound it was a bit more of a mixed experience, not because I have any issues with ground-bound adventuring in general but mostly because of how many chests were only accessible by overcoming jumping puzzles of various difficulties - if you were a monk like me that is... my husband's demon hunter would just double jump and be done, which caused a fair amount of friction between us.

I got a pair of gloves early during our questing which had a special on-use teleportation effect that helped a little, but it also had a very limited range and a cooldown, so there was more than one occasion when I was waiting for that ability to come off cooldown to be able to make one final jump, just to have the chest I'd been working towards despawn. I have to admit this really made me miss the way SWTOR has a larger variety of tricks available to help other players overcome obstacles like that, as there my husband's character would've likely been able to pull me up in a similar situation.

There was also that one time where I died after a quest had teleported me to a location high up in the mountains, and since my ghost could neither fly nor use the teleporter, I was initially a bit lost as to whether it was even possible to revive without talking to the spirit healer. Fortunately a quick Google search revealed that I wasn't the only one to ever run into this problem, and I learned that my character's corpse had automatically been deposited in a different cave at ground level.

But anyway, that's all behind us now... here are a couple more things I really liked:

The overall zone story was surprisingly enjoyable. WoW rightly gets flak for the sometimes nonsensical nature of the plots for its big NPCs, but the more down-to-earth questing has always been at least okay in my opinion. I liked the concept of the Enlightened as these ultra-capitalists having found something close to religion, and I liked the little side story of that one Broker trying to get his friend to come back and slowly gaining insight into why she doesn't want to leave. Firim is a fabulous character too - great voice acting, and I liked the combination of a scientist character full of awe and love for the objects of his study.

Pocopoc, the little robo-dude that becomes your companion throughout the zone, is basically a Disney animal sidekick and I'm okay with it. He's cute and I love the little customisation options.

Have I mentioned yet that I also really like the zone as a zone? I appreciate the combination of pretty greenery with a bit of desert (which is attractive in its own way), and I also like that there are quite a few neutral mobs, meaning that there are areas where it's quite safe to roam without getting attacked every two meters. I still think the devs deserved to be memed on to some extent for hyping it up as being this alien and exotic place (e.g. water "unlike any water that we've seen before"), but it is a pretty zone.

Random Retail Ramblings

Last night I had a random idea for an alt in retail, so I started playing around with the character creator. A bit of fiddling was required until I found a suitable name that wasn't taken (the way WoW's character creator gives feedback on that while you're typing is very good by the way); then I hit finish... and was presented with the following error message:

You already have the maximum number of characters allowed on this account.

While I've been vaguley aware of this limit of fifty characters per account for a long time, I never expected to actually run up against it myself in a million years. My immediate reaction was to go back to the server selection screen and add up the numbers myself. Yes, I had ten characters on my old Horde server, ten characters on my old Alliance server, plus obviously a few characters on Azjol-Nerub, where I'm playing with my husband nowadays, but that's barely halfway there!

The numbers didn't lie though - apparently I'd amassed so many random low-levels across a number of different servers over the years (to say hi to friends there, take part in projects/events etc.) that I had indeed hit fifty. Interestingly, for all the interest in monetisation, additional character slots are not something Blizzard sells even to this day. Fortunately I had no particular qualms about deleting a random level three druid that I could barely even remember making to free up some space, so I could then go ahead and create the new worgen rogue I'd actually wanted to make.

This was my third time through the worgen starter zone, and it was shockingly lonely despite of cross-realm zones. This isn't some sort of "game is dead" dig - the worgen starter experience moves you around a lot and involves a lot of phasing, so this wasn't entirely unexpected, but still... I remember running into a total of three other players during the entire two play sessions I spent on this little adventure, and none of them stayed within my sights for long.

By the time I was finally ejected from Gilneas, I was level 17, which is about where you'd end up back in the day as well but which still feels mildly insane to me now that the level cap has been squished down to sixty. After a bit of musing about how much it must suck to roleplay a Gilnean in lore right now (you lose your home to the Forsaken, carve out a little niche among the night elves, and then their whole tree gets burned down by the Horde as well), I ran into my usual troubles figuring out how to travel cross-continent in retail.

It wasn't lost on me that it was quite ironic that my attempts to google advice on this mostly resulted in results for WoW Classic. I know my way around Classic, thanks; things make sense there! Say what you want about boats, there's a lot of logic in reaching a shoreline, seeing a port, and taking a boat from there to somewhere beyond the water. Portals may be convenient but they can be anywhere and lead to anywhere, so there's no natural rhyme or reason to where you can find a portal to go to any particular place in WoW (with the exception of the big portal room in the Stormwind mage tower). Fortunately I eventually found a portal to Stormwind regardless.

Every time I play an alt in retail it strikes me that there's still a lot of "world" in World of Warcraft but that the game just has zero interest in making you engage with it. The best way for things to make some semblance of sense for new players is to put them through a very curated experience that just ignores everything pre-BfA (which is what Blizzard has done with Shadowlands) and it just seems like such a shame when I suspect that it's precisely all this older stuff that keeps many people subscribed long term, even if that content doesn't reward relevant gear anymore. Or at least that's what I'm seeing with my husband, who spends hours going through old quests and grinding old reputations and achievements for completion's sake. And there are certainly only so many hours in the day that I want to spend exclusively on the newest expansion content myself.