Eccentric Flower talk:200908/Cataclysm

Danima:

(insert obligatory I-read-these-too comment)

-- 17:24, 27 August 2009 (BST)

Settsimaksimin:

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)

Columbina:

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)

Columbina:

No, if anything, it looks like they're softening the requirements for flying mounts.

-- 15:41, 28 August 2009 (BST)

Settsimaksimin:

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)

Columbina:

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)