Taking a Peek at the Forever Beta

Only a few days ago I responded to a commenter that I didn't care about the beta, but I did preorder and have access to it. So naturally, after spending the last few days hoovering up every possible tidbit of information about Forever that I could find, I was very tempted to at least take a look at it myself. Not to play "properly" mind you, I'll still leave the actual testing up to others... but just to have a bit of a look around, you know? Check out those graphics updates and new UI options, to see what those look like.

The first thing I heard was that there were queues, up to 40,000 people strong from what I've read, though the highest I saw myself was 20k. A few days ago I saw a conversation about Forever's launch on reddit where someone claimed that "modern WoW doesn't have launch queues anymore", which made me chuckle at the time. Maybe "modern" WoW doesn't, but that person has clearly never been part of a Classic launch. And this wasn't even the real launch, just a beta test!

There were some issues with lag and disconnects, which were worse for EU players and which eventually led to me learning that WoW betas always take place in the US region. This surprised me only because of how strict they have been about needing to maintain the regional divide everywhere else, which made me think that there were some legal or technical issues that were simply insurmountable. So you're saying all I needed to do to potentially play with American friends is play a beta? Weird.

Anyway, needless to say, things were busy in the starter zones. Night elf, human and tauren were all bustling. I decided to take my tauren up for a run first to see the lay of the land and was delighted to see the new Plainsrunning racial in action. Unlike the original plan for Plainsrunning that was then dropped for Vanilla, this is not meant to replace a mount but instead lets you slowly build up to 30% movement speed increase as long as you keep running, which I imagine will be great for lower-level characters without a mount wanting/needing to traverse the world.

I also came across this new functionality, which they explained was added to help out hardcore players in particular, because it sucks to die when everything around you resets unexpectedly and you're suddenly surrounded due to no fault of your own.

You could argue that it's a bit immersion-breaking, but I think this is an important enough feature that it's worth it, and I'm actually hoping they'll add this to retail as well. I've had so many rage-inducing moments in retail when I was working on some kind of event that needs build-up, or fighting a tough rare or something, and then just as you're about to finish, with the last mob at 10%, everything around you just disappears because you've been phased into a different version of the world. Always hate that.

Anyway, to get back to Forever, the view towards the north of Mulgore was genuinely stunning because you could see all the way up to Mount Hyjal. I imagine the world will feel kind of different with Nordrassil always looming in the distance wherever you go.

That said, in places the updated graphics looked a bit... weird to me, in a way that I found hard to describe. I ran around Elwynn Forest and Stormwind as well to take some shots there, and then took pictures of the exact same scenes in Classic era to compare them. Take this shot of northern Elwynn Forest, just out of Northshire:

Forever

Classic Era

The shadows in Forever are obviously so much more sophisticated, but it also makes everything look so much darker. And I don't know, is Elwynn Forest of all places meant to be this dark? I'm sure there'll be people who'll answer "yes, it was always a little bit ominous" or something like that, but I always remember it as pretty bright and sunlit, so this change just seems a bit strange to me.

Or take this shot of Stormwind Keep:

Classic Era

Forever

I put Classic era first for this one to show that the top of the keep always looked like ass in Vanilla, it just wasn't that big a deal because with the shorter view distances it was always meant to just kind of be this vague silhouette that blends into the background. 

In Forever, the updated lighting somehow manages to give everything more definition, which looks great in the foreground, but it also has the same effect on the towers in the back, basically putting a big highlight on just how terrible they look. Which is awkward! I wonder if they'll do any extra work on updating stuff like that. Either way, it'll take some time to get used to.

I've had similar struggles with the models. I did play around with the SD/HD toggle a bit and it honestly made me feel a bit confused. I love all the old models, but with so much of the environment managing to look more high res somehow (even if it's technically the same old assets), they look a bit out of place at times. But when I toggle HD on, I'm reminded of how much I dislike the new models for some races (hello there, tauren). It's almost like I'd need the toggle to be per character instead of account-wide, so I can see the world in SD when I need a specific character to be that way, and HD when I'm happy to see the newer models. I'm guessing that'd be too complicated to do though. It's just something that'll take a bit of getting used to I guess.

Midnight Pre-Patch Impressions

The Midnight pre-patch landed this week, and I feel like I approach this kind of update with more and more trepidation as time goes by. Where I used to be excited to see what's new, now I just sigh. Oh, all my alts' talents are reset again? Addons stopped working again? These changes always just seem to mean more and more chores.

That said, the addon situation actually wasn't that bad. For all the talk about the "addon apocalypse", I was pleasantly unaffected as someone who never used many combat addons to begin with, and the few utility addons I do have all had updated versions available for once (I think because Blizz disabled the "use out-of date addons" option for this patch from what I read, which forced all the addon creators to get a move on). It's rare that all my addons have been this up to date all at once!

The warband screen was simultaneously an amusing and horrifying surprise. I knew that part of the pre-patch was a revamp of the transmog system, but what I didn't anticipate was that this was going to strip all my characters of their current transmogs, which made the lot of them look like hideous clowns.

I kid you not, the random shaman alt that I last played through Burning Crusade Chromie Time and who hadn't mogged any of her gear actually looked the best of the lot. We used to make fun of the BC "clown suits" but at least everything you got back then still looked like armour, even if it was easy to end up with a lot of mismatched colours. In modern WoW, so many of the armour sets are these ridiculous fortresses of spires and wings and god knows what, they often look awkward enough when you wear the full set, never mind jumbling pieces from different ones together. Basically, this experience taught me that modern WoW needs trangsmog or we'd all look unbearably hideous.

My little BC-levelling shaman actually looking pretty good. 

So I logged into my warrior with the intent to get her good looks back and immediately hit a snag. Over the course of War Within, my six-year-old PC has increasingly started to struggle with retail WoW, with the most common symptom being the game freezing up and the screen temporarily going black for a second or two, before assets start to slowly load back in one by one. Most frequently this happened after hearthing to Dornogal or - you might have guessed it - when I opened the transmog window.

I was hoping that the revamp would result in a more streamlined UI that would perhaps be easier on my machine, but the opposite was the case: now the game actually crashed entirely whenever I tried to open the transmog interface. Fortunately I wasn't the only one who's been struggling with variations of this problem for a while, so Google led me to a variety of tips that were supposed to help: changing from DirectX 12 back to 11, adding an additional command line argument to my Battle.net launcher for whenever I start WoW, marking my WoW folder as "do not index" in Windows... in the end I'm not sure what eventually did the trick, or maybe each step helped a little, but I eventually got the game back into a playable state. It still chugs and struggles with the transmog window, but at least it no longer crashes and I was able to update some looks. Going through all my dozens of alts will be a lot of work though...

Wanting to distract myself from the impending chores, I decided to revisit the random neighbourhood where I had plopped down my house a few weeks ago. It was interesting to have a bit of a look around and see what my neighbours had been up to in their yards. One guy's house was floating high in the air, something I'd only read about previously.

Endeavours were also supposed to finally be live, one of the housing-related features that had initially intrigued me. So I visited the town square and two dracthyr gave me one daily quest each, one to help with smelting some ore via a short mini game, and one to pick up some vegetables from a nearby farm. That was it. I got two pieces of some new currency that I didn't know anything about but which I guess will probably be good for buying decorations. I honestly expected a lot more out of this feature. Something to make us actually leave the neighbourhood and then come back.

Anyway, Midnight is coming. I'd like to write up some thoughts about that in the next few weeks, as well as a little War Within retrospective.

More on Dracthyr and the Pre-Patch Event

I'm still playing Classic era primarily, however things are just kind of quietly chugging along there at the moment, so the new and (partially) time-limited stuff happening in retail is more interesting to talk about for now.

I've had opportunity to practice playing my evoker some more, and it's turned out to be pretty fun. I finally seem to be getting the hang of soaring, and it's fun to ride a flying mount up to the nearest elevation and then shoot like an arrow across multiple zones.

I also ended up healing the new Uldaman dungeon twice - both times we four-manned it with my husband and two friends. The first time around we went in without a tank as well, which was a bit chaotic and resulted in quite a few deaths, though we did successfully complete the instance anyway. It was certainly good healing practice! The second time around my husband played his demon hunter so that we would have a proper tank, and that just made it super easy.

The only times I really struggled with healing were when there was AoE damage going around and the group was spread all over the room, but I guess that situation is awkward for any healer. In general though I've been enjoying figuring out how to heal as an evoker, with lots of dashing about and trying to aim the different shapes of AoE heal correctly. It's a bit more "action-y" than I'd usually like and actually reminds me of some videos I saw of Wildstar back in the day - I could see that being quite stressful in harder content, but in the context of an easy dungeon it was certainly fun.

I'm also liking my dracthyr's look more over time - I particularly like how her visage form turned out, and dracthyr get this cool ability called "Chosen Idenity" which when activated, automatically puts you into your visage form whenever you're not in combat. Certainly feels a lot less weird to be riding a dragon mount as a humanoid than as a dragon person for example! They really should add that feature for worgen too - would make it a lot less awkward to shapeshift into humanoid form more often that way.

We've also been checking out the pre-patch Primalist invasion event. In the run-up to the pre-patch I'd heard people express hope that these would feel similar to the Legion invasions that preceded the Legion expansion, and which seemed to be quite popular at the time. I wasn't playing retail back then, but I do remember people talking about that event quite fondly. It always sounded like those invasions were quite ubiquitous too, though I just checked and in this post by Bhagpuss from back then he clarified that the Legion invasions also only happened in six zones - still, that's three more than the current event.

My own closest point of comparison are the elemental invasions that preceded Cataclysm, which I also remember with some fondness. The current invasions are okay, but nothing to write home about in my opinion. At first there's something fun to the zerg, but the longer it goes on, the more boring it gets. You basically just spam AoE onto endlessly respawning opponents until you get bored; there's no real ebb and flow to things other than the occasional boss event. Plus I guess it doesn't help that the three zones chosen for invasion are the Badlands, Northern Barrens and Un'goro. I mean, who gives a crap about the Badlands? Let the Primalists have them. Rewards aside, I can't say that I feel very inspired to defend the place, not like I was when elementals invaded the capitals pre-Cataclysm. I'll just keep going there a few more times to earn a few more of the rewards before the event goes away I guess.

Dragonflight Announcement

I got to watch the new expansion announcement stream live on Tuesday evening because it actually happened at a convenient time for me. Sadly, all the "live experience" added was a scrolling chat full of the WoW community's worst dregs being juvenile and bigoted every time there were female devs on screen, which was distracting and not in a good way. One star, cannot recommend.

The expansion cinematic was a bit of a weird one. It was of course beautifully rendered as always, and I liked how people got really invested in Stony Tony's fate (or however the golem dude ended up being called in your circles) and were instantly meme-ing about him ("already a better character than the Jailer" etc.), which was quite fun to see. As Rohan also observed yesterday, players who meme affectionately are happy players.

However in terms of content and hype, the trailer felt like a bit of a nothing sandwich to me. Looking back at previous expansion cinematics, they always tended to include at least one of three things:

• cool fight scenes
• depictions of one or more of the expansion's new features
• an iconic lore character

Dragonflight doesn't really deliver on any of those - we do see a bit of the Dragon Isles, but what we see is very barren and not really showing much other than the big beacon thing. And Alexstrasza is technically an important character in lore, but considering that we've been on a first-name basis with her since Wrath, never mind the commodification of dragons in WoW in general, just seeing her fly past and roar isn't really that awe-inspiring anymore, sorry.

The actual dev round-tables were interesting, though my first thought was simply: "God, does Ion look old and tired." The past few years clearly haven't been kind to him. The general presentation style was also somewhat stiff - not insincere, but like everything was heavily scripted, and even with that in mind the general vibe (as I perceived it anyway) was that of people who are a little timid and very aware that anything coming out the wrong way would lead to them being torn apart by the community later. I'm all too happy to acknowledge Blizzard's corporate failings, but it's also impossible for me to not feel compassion for the people who are still working there on the ground because they enjoy what they're doing and who've clearly been having a rough time.

Now for the actual expansion-related content reveals... like many, I was kind of surprised/impressed to see Ion actually admit that they'd heard the feedback about players being sick of all these temporary systems and that they want more long-lasting additions and improvements to the game. And to be fair, a lot of the feature bullet points seemed to indicate that Blizzard have listened!

First off, there's a new race and class, the "dracthyr evoker". This one was a big surprise to me because for all the speculation that had been going on about the dragon theme beforehand, the idea of playable dragons always seemed ludicrous to me. But no, Blizzard are actually doing it! Sorta.

Mechanically, everything about the new class sounds very sound and appealing. It's going to be another hero class with its own starting zone, and it will be a ranged dps/healer that wears mail, which seems like a sensible decision in terms of balance. (Did you know that until now, every single class that has been added to the game since launch has been melee?) The fact that the new race and class are a package deal, meaning that you can't have one without the other, is unusual by WoW standards but again, pretty reasonable under the circumstances and certainly not a novelty in the MMO space as a whole. (The most frequent parallel I've seen people draw here is to the Beorning in LOTRO.)

I have yet to see anyone comment that they really love the aesthetic of these new dragon people though. What's been shown of their animations reminded me of the Worgen (whose animations I used to loathe, though I got used to them over time) and overall the closest thing to these dracthyr that we've seen in WoW before is probably Maloriak, the raid boss from Cataclysm, who was created by Nefarian fusing the body of a young human with the corpse (!) of a dragonspawn. There's even a parallel in the origin story here as the dracthyr were apparently created by Neltharion wanting to combine the best humanoid and draconic traits. It's not a good look, is what I'm saying!

Then there is dragonriding, a new form of flying exclusive to the Dragon Isles, and the mechanics of which appear to be a wholesale copy and paste job from Guild Wars 2's Skyscale mount - honestly, I recognised that even as someone who's never played GW2. I see no shame in copying good features from other MMOs though - it's what WoW used to be good at, after all. I personally can't judge how fun this will be, but it does seem like a potentially neat idea and like it would offer a different kind of non-combat gameplay. The dragon mounts are also supposed to be super customisable. If this takes off (pun intended), we can only hope that it or something similar at least will also become an option for other mounts/in other expansions eventually.

There will be a long overdue revamp for professions, with crafting supposedly becoming more involved - I guess we'll see how that pans out in practice, because WoW's crafting has never been great even at the best of times, so I'm a bit sceptical of whether the team has the design chops to get this right... but I do appreciate them making the effort at least. There'll also be a new "work order" system where you can advertise that you want people to craft stuff for you, and they can even turn your soulbound materials into gear for you. This sounds great! Makes me wish we could have buy or sell orders for general goods as well though, instead of being stuck with an auction house where everything needs to be relisted every two days.

Talents are making a comeback! Now, having lived through times when Blizzard changed the way talents work every expansion, I can't fault people for being a bit wary of this, but the system introduced in MoP never grew on me, so personally I'm happy for them to revisit this. From my point of view almost anything they can do in that area can only be an improvement.

And finally, while I'm sure that a lot of addon lovers won't care about this, as someone who's been playing with the default UI for most of my time in WoW and who generally wants to avoid dealing with addons as much as possible, I was very pleased to hear that they're planning to upgrade the default UI. While they've made some tweaks to things like raid frames over the years, I've generally been quite astounded by how little they seemed to care about the UI, seemingly because they assumed that if you didn't like it, you could always download an addon. Which is an approach that's fine for some things in my opinion, but not so much for the basic window through which the player interacts with your game.

I've been trying to get an idea of how to characterise the community response to Dragonflight, and it's been somewhat difficult, because the reactions have honestly been all over the place, with most of the ones I've seen sitting somewhere in the middle. I guess in a way that's telling in itself, seeing how I used to joke that it was typical of the WoW player base in general to always be hyped for every expansion when it's announced and then hate it two weeks after launch. So things have definitely changed... then again, maybe that will give Dragonflight a chance to prove itself on its own merits instead of having to live up to made-up hype. I don't think it's a coincidence that Mists of Pandaria is now remembered so fondly by many while also having been the expansion that probably had the coolest reception at the start.

I'm also in a strange position myself since I have little interest in classic Wrath of the Lich King at this point (which was also confirmed during the announcement by the way), and it's the first time since Cataclysm that I'm actually an active (if casual) retail player at the time of an expansion announcement and could potentially see myself playing it when it comes out. From that point of view I've got to say that I like what I've seen, even if I'm not "hyped". Things like a new race/class, updating the UI, re-thinking talents and revamping professions are long-term investments in the game - and dragonriding could potentially be developed beyond this expansion (though I'll be honest and admit that I kind of doubt it will be), which to me is a better way of managing the game than the modus operandi of recent years where stuff gets added and then trashed again pretty much on a schedule.

World of Watercraft

My love for fishing aside, I've found that I have a rather unusual fascination with water in general in Classic.

I can't help but wonder whether that isn't at least partially due to the fact that I've spent the last seven years focusing on Star Wars: The Old Republic, in which water isn't more than an environmental effect and a bit of an illusion: While planets have lakes and rivers, they are never more than knee-deep, which makes the bridges and dams built around them all the more bizarre.

While some have (understandably) mocked this design choice, I can't say that I ever minded it much myself. I don't have any particularly fond memories of what you could call water-related gameplay in WoW. If anything, it's the opposite! I'm sure many an old-school WoW player has traumatic memories of a quest or two that required them to dive underwater among hostile mobs and caused them to suffer many a death while trying to juggle fighting with not drowning.

For me it was mostly the underwater troll ruin off the coast of Stranglethorn Vale that's filled with elite murlocs. You have to dive so deep that you can barely hold your breath for long enough to grab your quest items as it is, and then you're supposed to fight elite murlocs on top of it at all? Come on! I still have that quest in my hunter's log as well and am unsure when I'll actually dare to brave it this time around.

More generally speaking though, I've actually been kind of enjoying my time underwater this time around. Having to swim, dive and fight mobs underwater is simultaneously annoying and an interesting obstacle. On my hunter I at least have the advantage of my pets all seemingly coming equipped with a set of gills, so I can send them to fight underwater while I stay near the surface most of the time, just firing at things from a distance.

While swimming around, I also found myself strangely enchanted by watching my pets' swimming animations. I love how the wind serpent turns into a proper snake for example, folds its wings and wiggles along just like real snakes do. I seem to recall that not all pets originally had swimming animations, which included my hyena back in the day, so having my current set of pets move in an appropriate way has been a pleasant surprise.

On my shaman I've been able to enjoy a different kind of water-related perk, as her command over the elements includes Water Breathing and Water Walking. Both spells require reagents that can't be bought from a vendor (though they are cheap and easy to come by in the world), so that many shamans don't always carry them around... which of course gives me the opportunity to distinguish myself as the kind of shaman who is always prepared.

Underwater breathing makes the aforementioned quests that require diving a real breeze, and water walking allows you to cross bodies of water in a nice straight line, whether it's a lake or an easy way to travel along an uneven coast line without having to take detours or worry about mobs. Nothing quite like gracefully leaping over the head of a gnome submerged in the water while chuckling to yourself about the small advantages of being Horde.

Who knew that something as simple as water could be this much fun?

More Classic Moments

My shaman had already made it into the low twenties when my husband suddenly decided that he was going to play too. He used to play WoW back in Wrath of the Lich King, but his history with the game isn't as long and sordid as my own, and he had previously told me that he had no particular interest in Classic and that my giggling fits brought on by how bad some things used to be weren't exactly selling it to him either.

However, he is very much an MMO player, and I think he could only take so many days of me going bananas over Classic until curiosity won out. Me complaining about being unable to keep up with my tank levelling buddy one evening just served as the perfect excuse for him to graciously suggest that he could roll up a character and come tank for me.

So I parked the shaman for now and made a druid to level with him instead. Once they're about the same level, I plan to switch back to the shammy, though to be honest the druid has been great fun as well.

 

It's amazing to me just how intensely I'm loving the whole Classic experience, even though I've been here before. Even though I've been here before only a couple of years ago on a private server! It just feels magical all over again anyway, and I find myself taking screenshots of all kinds of silly things, like the first time my shaman rode the elevator up to Thunder Bluff.

Or the first time she rode the zeppelin from Orgrimmar. (Reminder: The Thunder Bluff zeppelin connection wasn't actually added until Wrath of the Lich King.)

Or the first time she met Sylvanas Wildrunner in the Undercity. Remember when good old Sylvanas was basically just a nelf in a black dress? In hindsight, I kinda liked her more that way. "Sad goth" somehow seemed like a more appropriate look for a forsaken banshee than "Xena, warrior princess".

Sometimes I take a look around and simply go: "What the hell?" You bet that I didn't remember that the Horde used to make rugs out of centaurs. Talk about savage!

I said in my launch night post that competition for mobs didn't seem too bad in the tauren starter zone, but I gotta say, once basically all four Horde races end up getting funnelled into the Barrens, things became pretty hellish at times. Worst so far has been the quest to kill quillboar leader Kreenig Snarlsnout, who for some reason has a ridiculously long respawn timer.

On my shaman we stuck it out and camped him with a full group of five, competing with several other such groups for the tag. Doing the quest again on my druid and with my husband, we didn't have the patience for the competition at the camp and eventually got it done by logging in briefly in the morning before work, when even (at least our layer of) the Barrens was blissfully quiet.

I'm oddly fond of seeing player skeletons around. In the below screenshot we came back after a wipe in Wailing Caverns and the pile of skeletons was basically like a mark of shame to remind us of how we'd messed up here. When we're out questing, my husband also loves to point out the skeletons everywhere. When they suddenly multiply it's like a warning that you're entering dangerous territory.

While waiting for the rest of my party to arrive at the Wailing Caverns, I went outside to fish. A couple of Alliance players ran circles around the area, presumably also waiting for the rest of their team to show up, one of them a druid in bear form. After they ran past for the umpteenth time, I decided to turn into ghost wolf form and initiated a /dance with the bear, who promptly reciprocated.

It made me think of how little I use fun emotes like that in MMOs these days, even though they are plentiful. I think it's because the most natural situation in which to use them is during downtime in the company of other people, which is something that's consistently been shaved away as "tedious" and "boring". I'm glad Classic is reminding me of how these little moments can still make me smile.

As I play on the server called Pyrewood Village, I of course had to take a screenshot of the first time I discovered Pyrewood Village. I'd totally forgotten that this was the place with the worgen! For some reason I'd thought that it was one of the Furbolg villages in Felwood...

Another noteworthy first: The first warlock summon I participated in. At low levels I've run into quite a few people who didn't remember that meeting stones didn't gain summoning functionality until 2.0 (to be fair, I'd forgotten too until the private servers reminded me) and asked to be summoned places until they were reminded that this was a no-go and they'd have to hoof it themselves. Unless you've got a warlock of course, which does feel like a proper treat when it happens (and also serves to immediately encourage extreme laziness in some people).

While my druid was in Silverpine Forest for her seal form quest, she got assaulted by a Son of Arugal but fortunately got away. Putting a wandering level 25 elite amidst a bunch of level ten mobs is one of those things that no modern MMO would dare to do for fear of frustrating people, but personally I find it quite entertaining.

A bit later I saw a level 24 undead mage fight (possibly even the same) Son of Arugal and he had nearly got him down but only had a tiny sliver of health left himself! So I ran up and spammed all the little heals I had on him to keep him up, and it was enough to buy him enough time to achieve victory. He may have been grateful for the save, but to me he was the hero for successfully ridding the land (at least temporarily) of this bane of many a low-level player. I just love little moments like that.

How Does This Work Again?

I said that I probably wouldn't have anything else to post before Classic launch, but I resubscribed today and thought that the whole experience was kind of amusing.

First my initial credit card payment refused to go through, only yielding an extremely vague error message. I was already halfway through writing a ticket to Blizzard support when I happened to check my phone and saw that my bank had texted me about "potential fraudulent activity" on my card - basically they'd blocked the transaction because they thought it too unlikely that I actually wanted to give Blizzard money! Once I actually confirmed to them that yes, I did want to subscribe to WoW, the payment went through just fine.

First order of the day was to log into Pyrewood Village on Classic and create my tauren shaman there. I'd forgotten that female tauren only had literally four face options back in the day. For me, less is probably more in that regard though, as I tend to spend a significant amount of time at character creation anyway, even with such a limited number of options.

I got my first choice of name but was a bit concerned to see the server already marked as full. With Classic launching at 11pm local time tomorrow, I won't really have the time to sit in queues for three hours before playing. So I made a night elf hunter on the RP-PvE server as a backup, since that one was still flagged as having only a medium population. If Pyrewood Village is too full tomorrow night, I should be able to at least log into Hydraxian Waterlords to spend some time in the night elf starter zone, before braving Pyrewood queues again on Tuesday morning (I took the day off work).

After that, curiosity won out and I also logged into the live game to remind myself of where I'd left off there. I was immediately taken aback by the sheer amount of servers on which I had one or two characters each. Since the first character I selected also had a name with lots of numbers attached to it, I actually worried for a moment that a gold seller had gotten into my account somehow since I last played, but then I remembered that Blizzard did free up some names from inactive accounts at some point in the last seven years, so I guess those alts' names fell victim to that. In the end I only found two that were afflicted in such a way anyway.

Still, clicking my way through those character selection screens was a real workout for my memory as I tried to recall just why I had a level 6 tauren shaman on Aggramar or a level 6 draenei priest on Nagrand. Most of it did come back to me eventually (oh yeah, I even made a blog post about how I accidentally kicked someone from a Halls of Stone run and then made an alt on his server purely to apologise) but some did remain a bit of a mystery to be honest.

This is why blogging is important to me: In the moment it might seem silly to worry about ever forgetting what you're doing right now and why, but give or take five to ten years and it's quite a different picture. This is also why I greatly admire historians for trying to make sense of people's actions from centuries ago, because I can barely remember what motivated me less than a decade ago.

The next thing that struck me was that I'd forgotten just how bad the female tauren models came out of the big character model revamp of 2014. Just... yikes. So many of my characters were female tauren and I can barely even look at them now.

Eventually I decided to actually take the plunge and log into the character that I played the last time I was subscribed for a short while during Mists of Pandaria, my level 90 Worgen druid. I was pleasantly surprised to see that I had given her what I thought was actually a pretty cool transmog. The little mail icon next to my mini map kept telling me that I had mail from several NPCs but nothing actually showed in my mailbox, and generally getting to grips with all the UI changes that Blizzard made since the last time I played was pretty overwhelming.

Even the quest log looked totally different, making it so that you can't just look at your quests anymore without also having a giant map take up two third of your screen. Personally I thought that the general theme was that everything was too busy visually, with illustrations and icons and pop-ups for everything. I don't remember it being that bad last time I played. I chose some talents and killed a couple of mobs in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms (which is where my druid was parked) but the oppressive feeling of too much input didn't want to go away.

While flying around a bit, I accidentally went right into the local Horde base, where I quickly died to the guards and found myself flagged for PvP. I thought that wasn't a thing anymore with war mode?

Anyway, at that point I logged off again, to come back for Classic tomorrow I guess. I know coming back to an MMO after several years of absence is always going to be tough, but I honestly didn't expect things to feel that bad to me. It's an odd thing that the six years since Mists of Pandaria seem to have only widened the chasm between me and the game further, while slipping back into a gaming mode from almost fifteen years ago feels entirely comfortable. Maybe this is what it's like to get older, when you can remember things from twenty years ago as if they happened yesterday, but events from five years ago are barely more than a fuzzy memory.

Bags, the AH, Weather, Graphics

Today, a post about a couple of things that aren't really connected but also aren't worth talking about in separate posts of their own.

Bag space (or lack thereof) is driving me a bit nuts. My character currently has a mix of eight and ten-slot bags, all of which she found out in the world, and which seems about right for her current level from what I remember... but it's just not enough. Since I'm willing to play the healer role in dungeons, I've put together a healing set which has intellect and spirit on it instead of strength and stamina and which takes up a whole bag all by itself. I'm also a miner, and I forgot that ores only stacked to ten in Vanilla. Ack! Add to that my desire to avoid throwing away white quality items (someone could use that Crisp Spider Meat and Murloc Eye I'm sure - in Vanilla they had uses) and I have no doubt that you can see my dilemma. Back in Wrath I wrote a post bemoaning the uninspiredness of its loot tables, and I do still enjoy sorting through my bags, but at the moment it sometimes feels like too much, mostly because vendors and especially banks can be hard to come by when you're on a quest in the middle of nowhere. It gets a bit annoying when you're at the back of a cave, knowing full well that you need another ten spiders to complete your quest (who all drop about five different varieties of spider parts) and pretty much after every pull you have to stop to consider whether to discard something or leave the last corpse unlooted. The only alternative would be to hearth out, sell stuff, and then come all the way back.

One way of getting rid of bag overflow is to sell things on the auction house. I've found Kronos' economy to be a strange beast. Initially it felt a bit dead at the low levels, but it seems that the server has been growing and the low-level economy has picked up as a result. I'm having to re-learn what actually sells and what doesn't. Rogue or feral druid leather? Yes please. Caster leather? You'd have to be pretty insane to level a druid as balance or resto in Vanilla, so not much luck. Things like cooking ingredients can be very hit or miss depending on whether anyone is working on levelling their cooking or not. Also, I miss jewelcrafting - it's obvious that there aren't enough uses for stone and gems at this point so their value is pretty low. Actually, a lot of things seem very cheap in general - but that's simply a sign of a young economy, where most players are new and (relatively) poor. I keep thinking of how many of these low-level items used to sell for multiple pieces of gold when I last played on live, but on this server the majority of the potential buyers simply doesn't have that kind of money to spare. Even coppers matter.

I left the guild that I joined back in Loch Modan. No big drama, I just hadn't got to know anyone really and guild chat repeatedly caught my eye in a negative way because of multiple people making jokes about rape, abortion etc. It was obvious that this was not the kind of company I wanted to hang out with and that just seeing them talk detracted from my experience instead of adding to it. If someone else asks me to join their guild, I'll have to be a bit choosier in the future.

Why does it always rain on me...?

I don't know if Kronos is slightly wonky in some way or if this is a case of me misremembering the way things were in Vanilla, but I don't remember it raining quite so much. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining - I'm really enjoying the day/night cycles and weather changes, especially as they are something that I sometimes miss in SWTOR. Still, there are certain zones (Elwynn Forest, Loch Modan, the Wetlands) where it seems to be raining ninety percent of the time whenever I get there. I just don't remember those areas being quite that wet.

When Blizzard announced that they were revamping the old character models for Warlords of Draenor, I was excited because I had to admit that their outdatedness had started to bother me. (Though I have very mixed feelings about the results.) Funnily enough, the Vanilla graphics on Kronos do not bother me at all. I've been thinking about why that is and I think the secret is consistency. As Blizzard continued to add better and better looking zones, mounts, pets and gear, our characters increasingly stood out in a bad way. It was hard to miss when your entire character model consisted of fewer polygons than your shoulderpads; they just didn't match. But on Kronos, everything looks equally blocky and I've found that I'm actually okay with that. It's a crude style, but it works.

New Character Models

A friend pointed out to me that Blizzard was offering seven free days of playtime for lapsed players right now, and even though I hadn't received any kind of notification about it, the promotion was sitting in my Battle.net account as well. I wasn't willing to re-sub purely to check out the new character models, but for free? Sure, let me see how my "old friends" are faring in this brave new world of higher polygon counts.

First off, let me say that the new WoD loading screen instantly made me feel a pang of nostalgia, considering how similar it looks to the BC loading screen I grew up with (just with a different colour swirly in the middle.)

First I checked on my old main and her brethren, the female trolls. It seems to me that they look a little edgier and grumpier than before, but this feels fitting considering that they are, well... trolls. Overall they seem to have fared well in regards to the revamp.

Sadly my second favourite Horde race, the female tauren, have not been so lucky. Their new models are a pretty big departure from what they used to look like. In fact I would say that the dog-like noses they were given cause them to not even look like cows anymore. In a race based on minotaurs I consider that a pretty big failure. I physically started when I took my hunter's (on the left) helmet off and saw her new face. It's sad because this problem was very evident from the very first preview Blizzard gave of these models and people gave plenty of good feedback on how the worst issues could be fixed. Sadly Blizzard chose to ignore it.

I've seen some complaints about the updated models for the Forsaken, but personally I was pleasantly surprised by them. My own undead ladies at least looked pretty close to their original versions - just a little more badass than before maybe, but that's hardly a bad thing.

In all my years of playing WoW I never made an orc because I don't like their pug faces, but I did make a male troll once. His model, too, looks like a substantial upgrade that's very true to the original. I like how the tusks feel a lot more substantial now.

On Alliance side, I logged into the very first character I ever created, a human paladin, and miscellaneous other human ladies. They looked pretty good, though like the female trolls I feel that they look a little... edgier, older now. I suspect that this is a side effect of the more detailed textures, which took away that soft smoothness that many of the faces used to have. Their facial expressions also seem a bit odd, like someone spent a lot of time tugging at the mouths and eyebrows in an attempt to recreate the facial expressions of the original models, but the results look a bit unnatural. Still, overall I feel that this is a good update that I could get used to.

My old Alliance main and her brethren, the night elves, seem to have come out of this update pretty well too. My priest (on the left) felt like an extremely faithful update. My druid (on the right) looked a little off - and not just because I caught her mid-blink - but it seemed to me that her hair had lost its bounce and her mouth had shrunk. I reckon that's something that could be ameliorated with a visit to the barber shop though.

My Draenei ladies, probably my favourite Alliance race these days, were updated in such a subtle fashion that I hardly even noticed much of a change on most of them. That's not a complaint though.

The race that really seems to have got the short end of the stick on Alliance side are the female dwarves. This was somewhat surprising to me, as I thought that the previews for these looked pretty decent. They are not nearly as horribly off as the female tauren, but all the faces have extremely wide noses and heavily lidded eyes now, which definitely wasn't the case before, and it makes them look kind of old and tired. I went to the barber shop to check if there were any options that didn't have this problem, but they all had the same issue.

Speaking of the barber shop, I never noticed that they have all these wigs on male goblin heads - that made me smile.

I was going to say that I never played a gnome either, but then I remembered that I rolled one for a blogger project back in the day. I don't have much of a connection to her, but I don't recall her looking quite so deranged and murderous before. Those eyes...

I also have two token male characters on Alliance side. Wilson the human warlock seems to have survived the changes pretty well, though the eyebrows of this face make him look angrier than before.

Iyan the night elf warrior actually looks sleeker than before, less... malformed than male night elves used to look, which is a good thing. His new running animation looks really weird though.

I generally didn't check out the animations in great detail, though I noticed that all the running animations seemed to have gained a bit of a "cartoony bounce" that wasn't there before, or at least not to the same extent. I didn't seem too bad on most races though, with the male night elf being the noticeable exception.

I also noticed that characters change their facial expressions now when they run around and use abilities, which is neat but also a bit... weird. Like, when my night elf casts a healing spell here, she looks angry enough to want to bite someone's head off (watch those canines), which struck me as slightly over the top.

Overall I think Blizzard did a good job with these though, with more good results than bad. Still, it's a shame about the female tauren and dwarves. Knowing Blizzard, I think it's unlikely that they will go back at this point and make any more changes though, even if people post mega-threads on the forums begging them to do so.

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.

World of... Draenorness?

/blows dust off the blog...

I haven't played WoW in one and a half years and don't really miss it (still happily chugging along in The Old Republic), however while keeping up with MMO news in general, it's hard not to hear about what's going on in ye olde World of Warcraft as well, with the latest revelation being that the next expansion is going to be called Warlords of Draenor.

Draenor? As in... Outland? The place where my favourite expansion took place? I think I actually feel the tug of nostalgia... even though I know full well that this is probably exactly the kind of effect that Blizzard was hoping for. No matter how many times I tell myself that the game has changed and that there is no going back, the promise of getting to see places like Nagrand again - and actually as current content - is alluring.

I don't particularly care about any of the other stuff they announced, such as another reinvention of raid difficulty tiers, garrisons, or the whole Garrosh travelling back in time story. But oh, Outland...

I was quite impressed with what they showed off of the updated character models so far. I don't think that I'm massively picky when it comes to graphics, but I have to admit that during the three months when I played both WoW and SWTOR simultaneously, I found myself getting increasingly disappointed with the look of my WoW characters. Having the direct comparison to player models that looked so much better day after day did get me down after a while.

Yet at the same time, I couldn't really imagine them ever updating the models successfully without completely changing them and causing a disconnect to what came before. I only have to think back to my Neopets days and the sheer outrage that ensued whenever they redid some of the pet art there - and those were simple 2D cartoon images!

However, what they did show off of the redone character models at Blizzcon so far actually had me really impressed. I had to do a double-take whenever I took just a glancing look at the smaller slide images because I couldn't immediately tell which ones showed the old models and which ones the new ones; that's how similar they are. But when you do look more closely, everything about the new models looks so much smoother and crisper while still retaining the look of the old model... that's pretty amazing work. The only caveat from my point of view is that apart from the female dwarf, they haven't actually shown any images of redone races that I actually used to play. I might feel differently about those, having had more of a connection to them.

Either way, where am I going with this? Do I see myself making a proper return to WoW? No. But I can actually imagine myself buying this newest expansion to have a look at my graphically updated stable of alts and to go for a stroll in an alternate universe Draenor. And that's already a lot more than I ever would've imagined happening even a year ago.

Uldum and cut scenes

My boyfriend and I completed Uldum today. From what I can gather it seems to be a very popular zone, but I can't really share that sentiment after this first playthrough.

First things first though: I did like the overall look and feel of the zone, what with me being a fan of all things related to ancient Egypt. The Harrison Jones quest line bordered on being tacky at times, but personally I thought that it was quite funny. (My favourite bit was the "into the chests" line early on that made fun of the extremely dodgy start of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.)

I also liked the tol'vir. They are basically cat centaurs, which is cool. I was just kind of disappointed that they didn't seem to have any females as far as I could tell. Not to press the feminism angle too much, but this just struck me as kind of lazy. I mean, I can kind of understand why Blizzard hasn't introduced any female ogres into the game to date for example, because they aren't something that's been frequently portrayed in fantasy art and they'd have to invest rescources into designing something that looks convincing themselves. But the tol'vir... are freaking cat centaurs. Normal centaurs already have females in the game, take that basic concept, replace the head with that of a cat and the legs with cat paws and you're golden! I just don't understand... /sigh

Quest-wise Uldum played with some new mechanics, which was interesting, but also repeated some old mistakes that Blizzard really should have known to avoid by now. Killing a trillion pygmies for some quest item with a rubbish drop rate is not fun! Another quest that I remember as impressively unfun was one where you have to pick up some items off the ground in area filled with neutral mobs that turn hostile and aggro as soon as you touch anything, with some additional mob spawns all over the ground that triggered as you walked past them.

And then... there were the cut scenes. The popular opinion seems to be that these are the greatest thing since sliced bread, but personally I really came to loathe them throughout the course of the zone.

One reason for this was that a lot of them were simply very badly bugged. I expect some bugs here and there, but I had problems with about a third of all cut scenes, most often because they would simply force my camera to look at the wall for a minute and watch... nothing. Most often this seemed to be triggered by me and my boyfriend trying to set off a cut scene at the same time, and we finally managed to avoid more troubles by making sure to "take turns" as it were if we knew that something was coming up. I just can't believe that problems like these made it into the final release. I mean, it's an MMO; surely more than one player completing a quest at the same time is not that strange a concept, is it? On other occasions I've had a cut scene fail to play altogether, or the opposite: it started playing for me again when my boyfriend completed his quest even though I'd already seen it once. Another time I saw my character randomly appear in the air and fall to the ground halfway through a series of unrelated events that I was supposed to watch.

If the cut scene was supposed to play in the middle of a quest and failed, I could at least abandon and try again (and again...), but some scenes only triggered upon quest completion, so if you missed them you were out of luck. This was particularly annoying when I was supposed to watch an important council meeting that I'd been working towards for about a dozen quests - and then I got to stare at a wall for a minute and had no idea what was actually decided in the end.

Other wonky side effects included unwanted teleportation. One quest triggered a cut scene upon picking up the last quest item and then dumped you back at the quest giver, which was a fair bit away from where you had been working on the actual quest objectives. I was rather annoyed by this because there had been loot on the ground that I hadn't picked up yet! So I started to fly back to fetch it, and just as I was about to reach my sparkles, my boyfriend completed the quest as well, for some reason I got the cut scene again and was dumped back at the quest giver again! I guess the developers thought that this would be a convenient way of saving people the oh-so-long flight back, but for me it was just a nuisance.

This sort of leads me to what else I didn't like about the cut scenes even when they weren't bugged, namely the lack of control. About half the time I felt that they added little to the story and seemed to be more about taking control away from the player by fixing their camera angle and making them watch certain pieces of NPC dialogue in real time. I just didn't really see the point. At other times, they even take control of your character away from you, most often to justify them doing something stupid, like getting captured by a bunch of random bandits or whatever. If you died to some felboars in Hellfire after having killed C'Thun that was kind of silly but at least your own fault, but now every Kingslayer gets pwned by random pygmies because Blizzard says so. This doesn't help the roleplaying experience, it hurts it.

I can't blame Blizzard for wanting to try something new, and I did enjoy some of the cut scenes. When they were used to show events happening on a greater scale or to show character animations that we don't usually see in the game... that was nice. However, especially towards the end of the zone I couldn't fight the feeling that someone just went nuts with their new cinematic tool and decided to make every bit of NPC speech into a "cut scene" just because they could. Take quest. Watch cut scene. Hand quest in. Watch cut scene. Hello, I would like to do some actual playing here!

I do hope Blizzard won't consider Uldum a successful experiment in that regard...

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.