Eccentric Flower:200908/Cataclysm
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Cataclysm
It is a source of some mild unhappiness to me that the set of regular readers here does not, as a rule, play multiplayer online games. There is me, and Mel, and as far as I know that's it. Neither Iko nor Nancy followed me over here (and Nancy has mostly been spending her game time playing City of Heroes/City of Villains, the one milieu I will not go near with an eleven-foot-pole). Ysabel plays computer games quite a lot, but not the kind I'm talking about.
Not that this is a problem - like with beer, personal taste is your own business, and frankly, if you have the good sense to avoid this attractive timesink, you're a better person than I am. However, it does mean that I am often reluctant to write about gaming news or in-game experiences. I figure only Mel will be interested in the former, and that no matter how often I say the latter is pertinent to the real world (as a psychological microcosm of it, or what-have-you), I know that many of you will simply not believe me and will skip anything that even smells vaguely of online games.
So. This is news for Mel about the announcement of the third expansion pack to World of Warcraft which was announced at Blizzard's trade show/convention this year - yes, Blizzard is ubiquitous enough that it has a con of its very own.
Everybody else can leave now.
OK, so, Mel: The expansion is called Cataclysm. Remember how Blizzard said, "Oh, no, it'd be way too much work to structure the old world so people could fly there too? There are gaps and missing spaces that only make sense from land travel and don't work when you fly over them? It's a bad use of our development time and is very unlikely to happen?"
Well, apparently they decided that the way to go for this expansion was to do that restructure of Azeroth after all. In order to make the geography real, some places which they could just block off from land had to be added. Gilneas exists now, for example (the place which was blocked by an impassable wall before). The Lost Isles have become unlost. But in addition there seems to have been some geological upheaval. The Barrens is now divided into two parts, and Darkshore is apparently a mess.
Apparently, in fact, a lot of the old world has been restructured - quests redesigned, etc. This is seen by most commentators as Blizzard desperately trying to keep people interested in their aging game. "Look! The old world isn't the way you remember it! Start an alt!"
Of course this will not appease the rush-to-the-level-cap-as-fast-as-you-can crowd, so they're also apparently adding a huge load of high-end raid and instance content that I don't give a damn about. That's the problem with an old game. You already have reasonably well-developed content for the newcomers who keep trickling in, but your established players constantly threaten to get bored and go away, so you have to keep handing them all kinds of high-end stuff - and very little of that stuff is material that interests me personally.
And of course, as has become expected behavior for WoW add-ons, they've raised the level cap again (85) and added two more playable races. I'm not impressed with either. Goblins have become a playable Horde race (boo! hiss! their neutrality was a good thing!), while the Alliance have to make do with fucking worgen. Who the hell wants to play a worgen?
Other items of note can be found on the BlizzCon panel page or the WoW site page. Non-Blizzard news posts on the matter here, and here, plus everywhere else on the web.
Blizzard hasn't announced a date, but one would assume they'd want to get it into channel in time for the holidays.
despite not playing, i read quite a bit about WOW because i'm interested and it helps me keep up with family members (my brother has work-related reasons for playing and my retired father practically lives there). i know better than to ever start because it would be just like acquiring a heroin habit.
i remember being pretty impressed when i finally saw travel in-game (i'd assumed that it would be some hand-wavy short-cut). i guess i've spent too much time in games where you can't get there from here because they didn't bother to *connect* there to here. hooray for go anywhere! now i want to look at maps...
-- 19:15, 27 August 2009 (BST)
Well ... you could always get here from there. As a non-player you may not know the full history.
Most town-to-town transport in WoW, the paid system, the equivalent of buses or trains, is via flight (gryphon rides, airships, etc). Prior to the expansions, this was the only kind of flight in the game. Since these flights ran along fixed paths, the continents had a number of "holes" or unfinished areas which nothing ever flew over and were not reachable by land means.
In the expansions, suddenly players were able to buy personal mounts which could fly (in addition to the old assortment of landmounts - horses, rams, ostriches, riding cats, etc) ... but only over the new landmasses added in the expansions, because those had been built to be geographically consistent. So you got players who paid an awful lot of money for a flying mount and the training to ride it, who were accustomed to zooming anywhere by air in Outland or Northrend ... who would go back to the old world for something and have to plod it by land or take a paid flight somewhere again.
Blizzard's response to people who griped about this is at the top of this entry. Apparently enough people griped for this to change. Most people assumed that the third expansion was going to be yet another new landmass/area apart from the old world (the Emerald Dream, a sort of parallel universe referred to in WoW lore, was a leading bet). The idea that they would reverse themselves and decide they were going to do new stuff on the old landmass is kind of startling.
-- 20:50, 27 August 2009 (BST)
Mel:
It seems to me that those races are just to have something else they can say is new. And new races are probably easier to do than new classes, don't you think? You mostly avoid that pesky skill-balance problem.
If it comes up before my paid membership is up, I'll enjoy going and flying around. Although if they stay with the previous pattern you'll probably have to be 80+ to get a mount, don't you think? (That may be answered somewhere in there - I didn't read near all of that stuff you linked to.)
-- 08:33, 28 August 2009 (BST)
No, if anything, it looks like they're softening the requirements for flying mounts.
-- 15:41, 28 August 2009 (BST)
ah, that makes sense. i hadn't realised that there had been free-flight in addition to the flight-on-rails i'd seen. the big difference to me was that you flew over things that seemed to be happening in real-time instead of the "poof! you're there!" scenarios i was used to.
i did find a site with a good map (http://mapwow.com/) that shows the current dead spots in the old world. what an enormous behind-the-scenes job to rebuild it mostly as-is! i itch to explore...
-- 17:26, 28 August 2009 (BST)
Oh yeah. That was the map I was thinking of that I couldn't remember the URL to.
OK, so, to take some examples. Turn on "Show Names for Zones." That map starts out by showing Kalimdor, the western of the two continents that make up the "old world" (Azeroth).
Go to the bottom of the continent and notice the space between Tanaris and Silithus. That's a dead space. Tanaris and Silithus are, like most Azerothian zones, ringed by impassable mountains. There is presently no way to fly between Tanaris and Silithus without passing through Un'Goro Crater (which is literally a crater, its edges are a sharp drop I would guess to be the game equivalent of about five hundred feet). Since there's a "station" for the fixed flight paths in Un'Goro this is not an issue for those, but if players could fly freely it would be.
Other things on that continent which you might not know about: The zone called "Hyjal," while it has terrain and textures, is unreachable from the ground (the way up to it is blocked) and has never been populated with NPCs and so forth. The upper corner of Darkshore adjacent to Moonglade is unreachable from the ground and contains a "flyover feature" - a village of trolls who occasionally drop everything they're doing and start a group dance. The Dancing Troll Village is one of several little goodies Blizzard put in to liven up the flight paths which are unreachable by ground access. Now they will be reachable.
The big issue on the eastern continent will be the area north of Stormwind (look for a city on the northwest corner of the Elwynn area). Note also a sort of peninsula stretching down from the Silverpine Forest area. This is supposed to be where a considerably larger peninsula known as Gilneas is. The land, in that case, simply is not there at all, despite what Blizzard's printed game maps have always depicted. Now that Gilneas will be a starter zone for a new race, the actual shape of the landmass will have to change.
-- 19:52, 28 August 2009 (BST)
Mel:
In case you haven't already seen it, there's a new GW2 promo out, too: http://www.guildwars2.com/en/
I wonder how close they are to having it ready. (Frankly, I hope not too close. We have too much else to do!)
I did look at the 2 little videos on the WoW site - Gilneas has a haunted-house vibe that looks interesting, although I can't say I much want to start a worgen just to experience it. It doesn't really look all that different from Tirisfal, though, in any case. And the islands don't look too different from what already exists, either. At least at first glance.
-- 07:01, 29 August 2009 (BST)
Mel:
I went and looked, incidentally, because I didn't remember what level my paladin was exactly - she's 76, which is a bit higher than I was thinking. I really think we need to figure something out about this soon - either we need to take a couple of weeks and play WoW exclusively, or maybe do something like play WoW on the weekends and LOTRO during the week. Something like that. (I am going to have a lot of relearning to do - I couldn't even remember how to open my bags.)
The patches first said they were going to take two minutes to load and of course they actually took more like 20. But I'm updated, at least.
Also I am going to try to go to bed early (by my standards) and be in early-ish today. Rob is working all day so we won't be doing our usual Saturday routine.
-- 11:06, 29 August 2009 (BST)
Danima:
(insert obligatory I-read-these-too comment)
-- 17:24, 27 August 2009 (BST)