Turtle WoW's Version of Gilneas

I said I had one more post about Turtle WoW's custom content coming up, and this is it - about the Turtle WoW version of Gilneas. I'm glad I still managed to make it to this zone before the shutdown (it was designed for levels 39-46) because it was uniquely interesting in the sense that it was the first custom zone I encountered that had a direct retail counterpart.

I mentioned in my post about Grim Reaches that in terms of location and vague themes it had connections to retail's Twilight Highlands, but they weren't exactly the same zone. Gilneas though, that's the same place at its core as in retail: the werewolf-infested kingdom beyond the wall, ruled by Genn Greymane. Somehow, that made the differences all the more fascinating.

As I hadn't come across a breadcrumb quest to lead me to the zone, I simply rode over to the Greymane Wall from Southshore and stepped through the now open gate, bursting with curiosity. Visually, it was very much a continuation of Silverpine with slightly fewer trees.

The first quest hub I encountered was a refugee/rebel camp whose residents needed help with fending off the local wildlife and gathering food - pretty standard fare, but it did make me wonder what these people were fleeing from/rebelling against. My eyebrows shot up some more when further down the road, I encountered hostile mobs with names like "Greymane Enforcer" - followers of Greymane are the bad guys here?! What the heck is going on?

Fortunately I didn't have to wait too long to find out what was happening, as the town of Ravenshire contained an NPC called Lord Darius Ravenwood that was more than happy to provide an exposition dump about what the zone was all about. In short, Gilneas' isolation led to famine and unrest, which was only exacerbated by Genn having outsiders that were stuck in his castle whispering in his ear and ultimately led to him seizing the nobility's lands to provide food. After his wife Mia was killed in a riot, Genn completely withdrew from the public, and the population is now in open rebellion.

Now, I hated the bit about Mia dying because it seemed pretty much like a copy and paste of Tiffin Wrynn getting a rock to the head, and I don't consider the fridging of female characters a classic trope to be preserved. However, other than that, I thought it was an interesting twist. Genn is no werewolf in this alternate history of Azeroth - in fact, most Gilneans aren't.

This got me thinking about how the worgen lore in Vanilla is a bit confusing - in Pyrewood Village in Silverpine they are basically classic werewolves, living like normal humans by day, but the Scythe of Elune quest chain, somewhat contradictory to this, describes them as these demonic beings from another dimension that were summoned onto Azeroth. I can see on Warcraft Wiki that this has since been recontextualised so that the first worgen were actually druids... but regardless, the point is that in Turtle WoW's Gilneas, the worgen are still more like these strange, demonic creatures that are to be avoided at all costs, not like in Cata where they were made more obviously werewolf-like and Worgen and Gilnean became largely synonymous.

Anyway, to get back to the point - I had a feeling that Lord Darius' quest would result in more story about all that Greymane business, but I made it a priority to explore and do basically every other quest first instead, which led to some interesting discoveries.

In a crypt I found a cult of worgen worshippers that did want to become werewolves, so that idea was also present in Turtle WoW after all. It wasn't quite clear to me from the quests whether they were already capable of turning or were still working towards that part, as they were all normal humanoids and friendly towards me.

It took me embarrassingly long to notice because I so rarely look up in MMOs, but the centre of the zone was a tall tree on top of a mountain, and in a cave under said mountain I encountered the Pellars, a word I had to look up. They're kind of... nature-aligned witches friendly to the populace, but also a bit weird. One of them spoke in rhymes for example.

There was also a ruined town where the Scourge had broken through once, and a naga incursion from the south. The beach with the naga was a bit wonky as there was an invisible border where you could suddenly phase, with the current mobs around you disappearing and different ones suddenly popping into existence. It also made me realise that for all the love and care the Turtle devs put into their zone design, I don't think they were very good at beaches, as those always seemed more dull than the ones designed by Blizzard.

Regardless, I did decide to follow what I'd call the "main story chain" eventually, which tasked me with freeing Liam and Tess Greymane - yes, Liam is alive in this one! I already knew that Tess had escaped as I found her hanging out with the Pellars before I actually got sent there, but Liam was chained up at the back of a cave. Rescuing him was pretty tedious as I had to fight my way in, back out to get the key to his shackles, and then back in again - this was probably less annoying when there were more other players around than there were towards the end of my play time. I was half expecting that I'd have to escort him out as well, but escort quests are one thing I didn't see the Turtle WoW devs port over from Vanilla actually, and there wasn't one here either. Liam just finds his way to Ravenshire on his own once you've freed him.

In a nutshell, you then go on to fight some more Greymane soldiers, as well as recruiting the werewolf worshippers and the Pellars to your cause. Then you get given a quest to do the local dungeon, Gilneas City, to "save" Genn Greymane. Yes, it's in quotes in the quest text as well, which gives the game away a bit.

Unfortunately I didn't get to run the dungeon before the shutdown, but I did pop my head in the door and used my hunter's Eagle Eye to look around a bit. I could tell from the map at least that this one wasn't another mega dungeon like Dragonmaw Retreat or Stormwrought Ruins, but much smaller, so I don't feel I missed as much. I also watched a YouTube video that someone recorded of the place and it's basically a few streets full of Worgen and then a tower in which you kill Genn, who I presume has gone mad with grief or something (still not a werewolf though).

So I ultimately didn't get to see everything the zone had to offer - there were also a couple of elite quests I wasn't able to complete, and in a small house I found a guy that taunted me with a grey exclamation mark over his head, but at 45 I was apparently still too low to see what he wanted people to do.

However, I do think I got the gist of the zone, and I really enjoyed it. I might even go so far as to call it my favourite of all the Turtle WoW custom zones I played through, possibly outdoing even Northwind and Balor (and I did like both of those a lot as well). The people who designed it really seemed to get what makes a Vanilla WoW zone great, with lots of little stories woven together to form rich tapestry of everything that's going on in the zone, culminating in a big finale in the zone's dungeon, similar to how the lawlessness of Westfall makes you wonder just who these Defias guys are, until you eventually take the battle to the Deadmines. That's pretty much the highest praise I can give I think!

Casual Seeds of Renewal

Dragonflight's Seeds of Renewal patch has been out for a few weeks now, but with my casual involvement in retail, I don't always get to see all the new stuff right away. In general I've really enjoyed the way Blizzard has been releasing these "minor" patches between the major ones though, adding new gameplay and story every so often even when there isn't a new zone or raid to be explored just yet. Seeds of Renewal is another interesting example of that.

First of all, Dragonriding is now enabled everywhere where you're able to fly, and it's great. Characters don't even need to have been to the Dragon Isles to be able to mount one of the special mounts, though you might still need to have the Dragonflight expansion at least, I'm guessing. Normal/old flying still has its place, but if you're just trying to quickly get from A to B, hopping on your dragon and going super fast definitely feels great.

They also retooled the dracthyr racial Soar to work like normal Dragonriding instead of an extremely limited version of it, which means that I can now be my own mount and just fly around using my own wings. Again, this feels great! It's not quite as smooth as a druid's flight form, as you get thrown out of "flight mode" the moment you touch ground, so it's happened to me that I kind of clip the edge of a cliff and then fall off because I'm no longer flying... but at least dracythyr always have Glide to save themselves. As there's been talk of giving druids a "Dragonriding mode" for their flight form, I wonder whether that'll also mean that dracthyr will eventually be able to fly the old-fashioned way as well.

There's also a new temporary Dragonriding race event, the Outland Cup. With my love of the Burning Crusade, you'd think I would have loved that too, but... eh. I think now that we can just use Dragonriding everywhere, the novelty of being able to do so in the races isn't quite there anymore. Plus each course is quite predictable at this point in that I'll be able to get gold on the normal race easily, but both reverse and advanced are so tightly tuned that it doesn't feel worth re-doing them over and over again just to eke out something better than bronze. I thought it was interesting that they changed the quest related to the event to actually require you to do all courses now instead of just three, while also significantly buffing the reward. This meant that for the first time, I was able to afford all the prizes after completing everything once instead of having to get on alts to earn more currency.

There's this new thing called the Azerothian Archives, which is a quest chain with some mini games vaguely related to archaeology - the concept that is, not the in-game profession, before anyone gets their hopes up. The quest line was enjoyable enough and I thought it was clever that it included visits to the Forbidden Reach and Zaralek Cavern, presumably in an effort to bring some life back into those mostly abandoned patch zones. As far as I can tell it seemed to work, because I could see that people were actually bumping off rares and picking up chests while they were there.

The mini games themselves all felt a bit weird though, like they were trying to put a new spin on archaeology by making it more complicated. As someone who quite likes archaeology as it is, I wasn't entirely convinced. I guess the proof will be in the pudding as to whether I'll spend any time on the world quests this unlocks. (So far it's just made me miss normal archaeology enough that I went on a bit of a surveying binge the next day.) There's also a new world event tied to all this, where everyone runs in circles as a giant crowd trying to tap mounds of dirt. Again, a bit weird.

In terms of story content, there are some epilogue quests, such as Vyranoth showing you a cinematic that shows Iridikron being up to no good. The night elves get to build a new home under Amirdrassil called Bel'ameth, and Malfurion comes back from Ardenweald. While I'm happy for him and Tyrande to have some quality time together, it does kind of make it look weird in hindsight that there was such a hubbub around him staying in Ardenweald to balance out Ysera returning to the land of the living, considering that it was only a temporary arrangement for a few patches.

There's also a quest chain to reclaim Gilneas, and while it's a nice enough quest by itself, the contrast between everything the night elves got to make up for the loss of Teldrassil (which only happened two expansions ago) and the way the worgen get Gilenas back after more than thirteen years is pretty stark. Basically, Gilneas has just kind of been taken over by the Scarlet Crusade somewhat randomly - so they could kick the Forsaken out, but we couldn't? Yet in turn the Scarlets are really easy to defeat as well, and it's basically all over before you've killed fifty mobs. And while Bel'ameth is clearly being built up to become a proper city with portals etc., the reclaimed Gilneas is just big and empty except for an innkeeper and a repair guy. A bit of a letdown, comparatively.

Story-wise, I thought it was kind of funny that my husband commented while we were doing this together that we'd never really seen much of Tess Greymane outside of worgen-specific quests, and then the cut scene had her telling Genn that while it's understandable that he's still mourning Liam and wanted to take Anduin under his wing, he does also have a daughter, you know... burn!

Also, is it me or did they change Genn's voice actor? I saw others bring this question up online but couldn't find confirmation either way. He definitely sounds very different at least.

Finally, this was also the patch that introduced follower dungeons, something I mentioned only briefly in my post about retail dungeoneering the other day. I've given at least one of them a try since then, which resulted in my husband getting regaled with a lot of live commentary mixed with delightful squealing and giggling. Honestly, I'd take these NPCs over a pug of real people any day. They're so polite, even waiting for me when I want to hang back to skin. The devs apparently tried to give some of them little quirks too, as I noticed that the resto druid NPC was bouncing around like a maniac throughout my entire run. That and the AI is just generally pretty good - I think I even saw Captain Garrick do a corner pull or two? Though she's not perfect, mind you, as was evidenced by her going off to day-dream during the last boss fight, just kind of standing around for a bit doing nothing while I tanked the boss as dps, until being hit by an AoE effect seemed to spur her back into action. Either way, I can highly recommend this mode. It doesn't give a ton of XP, but for pretty much every other purpose - seeing the dungeon, doing quests, getting loot - it seems far superior to doing normal dungeons with random people. And that's coming from me as someone who's not generally averse to pugs, but as I said previously, the normal dungeon experience in WoW is just too unattractive at this point.

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.

Dogs chasing squirrels and vice versa

So after I made my last post, I thought that would be it for a while. I had expressed some interest in Warlords of Draenor, but it's going to be many months until the new expansion actually goes live, and I still don't care for pandas.

However, a certain someone took my post as a cue that we should return to WoW right now, and promptly gifted me a month of game time. Sigh, can't very well let that go to waste, can I?

Since he had never played Alliance before, we rolled up a couple of worgen, a druid and a warrior. I've never been particularly keen on their looks and animations, but the older character models bug me even more now. Plus I'd only done the worgen starter area once.

It's funny how much you forget, being away from the game for more than one and a half years. The names of zones, of NPCs. Just how beautiful parts of the in-game world are. Yet at the same time it's funny how much you remember instantly, as if you'd never been away. That there's a quest over there. Where all the trainers in Darnassus are. As soon as I spotted the profession trainer in the worgen starter zone, I was reminded of the issues I had with finding him during my first playthrough, and instantly pounced on him to learn everything I could this time around.

A lot of things have changed too. In fact, my very first reaction upon logging in on my new druid involved some confused squealing about what they'd done to Wrath. "What is this? That doesn't look like a nature spell! It's all... yellow! Makes me look like I'm shooting fire or something, that's just wrong! I'm a druid, not a mage!"

The act of levelling up, the actual "ding", is depressingly boring now. No training needed, ever. It feels particularly striking in the worgen starter area, where they made sure to have trainers for all classes travel with you through the continuous phasing, who are nothing but useless remnants of a forgotten age now. I miss the act of actually choosing to train my new abilities. It gives you time to acknowledge their acquisition and what they do. If they just appear on my bar on their own, I tend to miss them. I'm not even sure when I got bear form now, it was just there all of a sudden and I went: "Huh, where did that come from?"

I also miss the old talents already. There's just no reward for levelling up. You can moan all you want about how choosing "+1% spell damage" or whatever was meaningless to you, but at least it was something. Right now I feel like I have zero agency in growing my character. And when you do finally hit one of the milestones where you get to pick one of the new talents, it's something like a slight increase to your run speed. Wow, that sure feels so much more meaningful and is totally worth not getting any other talents for fifteen levels... [/sarcasm]

One of the more pleasant surprises for me was the new druid travel form. I vaguely recalled reading about it somewhere ages ago, but I thought it required a glyph or something. But nope, gorgeous stags are the default now. Really can't complain about that one, though I'll miss ye olde cheetah a little bit.

I feel pretty, oh so pretty...

We finished off the worgen starter area without any issues and then loitered around Darnassus for a bit. It was fun to watch my partner in crime, new to the Alliance and having been away from the game for even longer than me, approach many things with almost newbie-like innocence and delight. We even spent some time fishing in Rut'theran Village together, just because we could. No rush.

After we'd decided to continue to Darkshore and had been bumming around Lor'danel for a little while, we discovered pet battles. They were one of those features of Mists of Pandaria that sounded interesting in principle, but that I simply felt completely indifferent about on a personal level, not being a massive pet collector and never having played Pokemon or anything like it. I have to admit that I'd heard nothing but good things about this mini-game from people who actually tried it though.

In this particular instance, things played out like this between me and my partner in crime:

Him: Ooh, there's a pet battling trainer here.
Me: [only vaguely interested] Oh? Where?
Him: Over here.
[Pause.]
Him: I'm picking a fight with a squirrel.
Me: Er, what?
Him: And... apparently I'm being killed by a squirrel.
Me: What? You're being killed by a squirrel? [giggles maniacally]

After that introduction we were both hooked and actually struggled to get any "proper" quests done for a while as we were just chasing green paws on the mini-map to get into epic battles with squirrels, rabbits and snails. It felt utterly ridiculous ("World of Sparring-with-fuzzy-critters-craft!") but it sure was fun. It's just a shame that it doesn't really make for a good group activity, because while you can kind of watch the other person battle, it's not amazingly interesting to spectate, plus you kind of compete against each other for the best pets to fight and capture.

We'll see how things go from here.

Some thoughts on the worgen starter zone and phasing

Due to unexpected circumstances, one of the first things that I ended up doing after installing the expansion was roll a worgen to check out their starting zone. And I do have to say, I had a blast. The levels just flew by as I pressed on again and again because I was eager to find out what would happen next. Also, even if the Twilight hype has tainted the image of werewolves for you, there's just something extremely cool about getting to play an intelligent wolf(wo)man.

That said, the worgen themselves kind of bugged me. I had heard a comment here or there that the English accents of the NPCs weren't particularly good, but I couldn't really appreciate what they meant until I had to listen to lines like "get gabbin' or get goin'" over and over again myself. I mean, English is not my first language so I'm not as sensitive to accents as a native speaker, but even I wanted to slap these guys and yell at them to stop trying to do a bad English accent and start speaking like a normal person. It's enough to drive you batty.

The worgen running animation also looked really funny to me. Maybe it's because their lack of a tail unbalances them or something, but to me their movement looked as if they were perpetually running around in very uncomfortable shoes or running across hot coals. Try saying "ow" every time your worgen takes a step and it seems strangely appropriate. I wonder if I'll get used to it through exposure over time, but at the moment I find that hard to imagine.

The thing that bugged me the most however, was how incredibly, and I do mean incredibly, linear a worgen's first ten levels or so are. I mean, WoW has had a reputation for being the "theme park" of MMOs for a while now, and some bloggers frequently deride it for having too much of an on-rails experience, but to be honest I never thought that it was that bad before. The quests certainly guided you along, but you didn't have to follow them. You could completely ignore the quest givers in your starting zone and go on to do something else, and a fair few people did.

With the worgen however, I don't think that's even possible. I reckon that you could get a warlock and two other friends to summon you out of the starter zone, but on your own I'm not sure whether it would even be possible to "escape", due to the phasing. I mean, for the first couple of levels you're not even officially a worgen yet, just a human citizen of Gilneas.

Still, that by itself wouldn't even bother me that much yet, but personally I couldn't shake the feeling that the story progression was almost being shoved down my throat. Maybe I was just unlucky with my experience gains or something, but every time I levelled and gained access to a new ability I was stuck in a phase with no class trainers. What, you want your new abilities? Never mind, you'll be just fine without them, just keep working on that story and maybe we'll let you train later.

It was even worse with professions. There was a generic profession trainer in a village where you quest around level five, and I foolishly forgot to learn both of my planned primary professions. By the time I realised that however, he had already been phased out. I then spent a fair amount of time searching every new phase I entered for another profession trainer, but never found one and was forced to continue profession-less until I was allowed to leave Gilneas at level twelve. I felt as if Blizzard was slapping me on the wrist, chiding me for wanting to "waste time" with something as silly as professions when they were trying to tell a story here, damn it! Focus on the story, girl!

From what I've seen of the new level eighty-one and up zones, they seem to be following a similar pattern, ushering you from one phased quest hub to the next. Sometimes it's cool to see the world change around you, but other times I'd just like to muck about a bit and enjoy the fantastic world around me. Unfortunately there isn't much to do there apart from talking to the NPCs that give me the breadcrumb quest to enter the next phase.

Okay, that sounds incredibly whiny and I don't mean for it to sound like that. Don't get me wrong, I'm really enjoying the new zones right now. There's a lot of interesting stuff to discover. The problem is that I'd really like this content to last and be fun the second time around as well. I ended Wrath of the Lich King with eight level eighties, and with the low-level quest areas having been redesigned, I might want to level more!

In the past I enjoyed questing in a variety of zones, picking and choosing my quests, working on professions and doing things in a different order to spice things up. But how interesting is it going to be to the follow the exact same sequence of quests a second and third time, with little to no room for deviation? Being amazed at the phasing isn't really something that you can repeat ad infinitum. But Tam already covered this subject much better than I ever could.