Tag Archives: World of Warcraft

Flying Around, Underground

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about World of Warcraft, or any MMORPG for that matter. While I skipped Shadowlands entirely (I’m sure I’ll play through it some day) I jumped into Dragonflight not too long after its launch and started gradually chiseling away at its campaign. It was rarely a priority, and the amount of time I spent on it waxed and waned without much of a discernible pattern, often with massive gaps of no activity at all, as has been the way I’ve casually played World of Warcraft for many years now, with the major exception of the launch of World of Warcraft Classic, of course!

“Vibin’ in the Emerald Dream.”

You know, I don’t think I ever wrote about how that ended. To keep it short and sweet, in an amazing recreation of how a lot of WoW guilds probably ended back in 2004, and indeed have ended in many games before and since, my dozen or so guild mates (all coworkers!) found ourselves with differing levels of interest, different gaming schedules, and different playstyles, and as soon as we entered into the mid-late stage of leveling, when things really started to slow down, that lack of cohesion started to matter more and more, and we began to splinter. At first one or two people made the call to leave, and then our numbers continued to bleed. I think I quit not long after writing my one post about WoW Classic. I might have made it into my 50s, I don’t recall, but I hit one of the very same leveling walls I remember hitting back in the day, yet this time I simply decided I’d had my fill and that the experiment was over. No regrets, it was a fun little trip back in time!

Back to Dragonflight though!

This expansion’s big new feature, Dragonriding/Skyriding, kind of sucked at first, but as I got used to it, and of course as I leveled it up, it started to feel superior to the old way of flying. Challenging at times, yes, but also much funner when it all worked correctly. This is especially true now that Blizzard allows it anywhere, with any flying mount, and more recently, has removed the need to manage your vigor – this has dumbed it down a bit, for sure, but also makes it a lot less of a hassle, and therefore more appealing for casual travel. Dragon racing challenges are fun, even if they did kind of feel like extraneous, bolted-on content. I also loved all of the customizable mounts you unlock throughout the campaign, though I wish so many of their customization pieces weren’t locked behind reputation grinds and other endgame busywork. Such is life in Azeroth, though.

“Thar be dragons! and boy, do they have a lot of quests for you to do.”

Dragonflight also added the new Dracthyr race and its exclusive class, the Evoker. Of course, I had to play through their new introductory questline just to check them out. While I don’t think the Dracthyr are quite my style, the Evoker is pretty fun, and I’m sure some will love both. I’d recommend anyone playing “retail” WoW to at least try them out, if you somehow haven’t already.

The Dragon Isles and their new zones were really quite enjoyable. In many ways the variety of biomes, enemies, and storylines reminded me of my first playthrough of Wraith of the Lich King’s Northrend zones, although with a ton of added verticality to support Dragonriding shenanigans, of course. Part of that might be due to the return of some old favorites, the Tuskarr and the Centaurs, having major parts to play. In some ways it felt like a return to form to me, especially once you make it to the Ohn’ahran Plains and The Azure Span.

At some point I stopped to catch-up with all of the dungeon related quests I’d skipped while leveling, which happened to coincide with the addition of the new Follower Dungeons feature. This basically lets you bring a full party of NPC bots into dungeons, so now even the most asocial WoW player can at least play through the more story-relevant dungeons and complete dungeon related quests. I gave this a spin and I was delighted with how well it worked. Unfortunately, I later found out the hard way that because I’d reached max level, this feature was no longer available to me. I guess I’ll have to finish those quests when I can easily solo those dungeons or *gulp* join a PUG. That felt bizarrely punitive, though I believe this has since been changed, thankfully. Another new feature to help out us lowly casuals is “Warbands” which is just a catchy way of saying that there is a lot more in terms of items and progress (reputation, various unlocks) shared account-wide rather than per character, similar to Star Wars: The Old Republic’s Legacy system. About time!

“This random return to Dalaran’s sewers was certainly unexpected.”

Once I finally beat the main story quest (I lost a lot of steam when I finally reached the final zone, Thaldraszus, plus Plunderstorm is always a major distraction when it comes up) it was onto the areas added via seasonal patches. The Forbidden Reach wasn’t that exciting, but it had some cool quests and was kind of a fun diversion. The Zskera Vaults was a cool idea, but playing it so long after their release, the excitement to keep pushing through them just wasn’t there. Zaralek Cavern was also kind of neat, giving me major Planetside: Core Combat vibes. It wasn’t until Bel’ameth and the new Emerald Dream zone that I really connected to one of these new areas. Overall, a little boring, but part of that is on me as this seasonal content, even the meatier stuff, is design to keep players occupied during the current season, and don’t quite hit the same once their time has passed.

By the time I wrapped all of that up, The War Within had been out for a little while, so I continued right onto that expansion’s main story quest. TWW feels like much more of an iteration on what was done in Dragonflight than we typically see with WoW expansions, which I definitely prefer to throwing away most of the prior expansion’s systems and pretending like it never happened. Dragonriding is still here, as are its racing challenges. The crafting system is still more or less the same (unfortunately – I’m not a huge fan) and its talent trees were expanded upon instead of more dramatically overhauled. Likewise, Follower Dungeons and Warbands were iterated on quite a bit, becoming more standard features of the game. In fact, one of TWW’s biggest (and best) new features feels like it was built on top of Follower Dungeons.

“The majesty of Hallowfall!”

Delves are basically little micro-dungeon instances scattered all over the Isle of Dorn and Khaz Algar. Most people will run Delves solo, choosing only to bring your NPC companion, Brann Bronzebeard, though you can run them with up to 4 people. There are a lot of challenges related to grinding through Delves, which can lead to an endgame gear progression track, amongst all kinds of other goodies. There’s also quite a bit of variation and customization in the system – beyond the huge number of delves, each has multiple, sometimes drastic variations, quite a few tiers of difficulty, you can level and customize Brann in various ways, etc. I had quite a lot of fun running Delves, and while I won’t go into describing every mechanic around them in detail, I did progress quite far, using them instead of my usual PVP grind for catching my gear up once I hit 80. Between my own experience and what I’ve heard and seen from others, I’d definitely call them a massive success, and thankfully, they appear to be a mechanic that is here to stay for now, already confirmed to be coming back with Midnight.

The only thing I didn’t enjoy about TWW’s campaign was its odd habit of locking various things behind completing the main story quest. For instance, at one point I really wanted to create an Earthen alt, but I had to beat the campaign to unlock it. Okay, that’s somewhat understandable, but those delves I was loving so much? I couldn’t access higher difficulty tiers nor the “bountiful delves” which have better loot until, yep, beating the campaign, despite being max level for much of the time. And I have to say, the main campaign of both of these most recent expansions felt far longer than I wanted them to, despite how much I enjoyed them overall.

“I could run around in a mech killing elites for hours on end. In fact, I did.”

TWW’s campaign was filled with all kinds of cool moments and areas. I loved the Dwarven inspired architecture of the Isle of Dorn, the city of Dornogal, and the Ringing Depths. Hallowfall and the Arathi Lamplighters were an unexpected, extremely cool surprise. I can’t say that I loved Ajk’kahet nearly as much, but as a Warcraft 3 fan it was cool to see Nerubians get so much more attention. The seasonal patch zones were really cool this time around too. For some reason I got absolutely addicted to Siren Island – I’m not sure why, it just clicked with me and I ended up almost 100%ing it. I don’t think I’d had that much fun since tooling around on Mechagon Island in Battle for Azeroth. It should come to no surprise, but The Undermine, the huge Goblin city zone, is an absolute trip. While I didn’t obsessively grind it like I did Siren Island, I really loved how much detail went into it – speeding around in my G-99 Breakneck while some sleazy jazz plays in the background, passing by all kinds of bizarre Goblin robots, trash blowing around in the streets – there’s nothing else like it in all of WoW. K’aresh, the Ethereal zone, was neat but ultimately didn’t do much for me. Perhaps I just had a sour taste in my mouth because I accidentally triggered “The Warning” questline which locked me out of doing it’s main storyline in the proper order.

I wrapped up almost all of the TWW storylines and side quests the very week the Midnight pre-patch came out. It’s a good thing too, as my Outlaw Rogue feels a lot less punchy after its stat squish and talent changes, and the patch itself has been a bit rocky, with broken add-ons, performance issues, and the occasional disconnect. Nothing new for these huge expansion pre-patches, I guess, so hopefully this has all shaken out before the launch of Midnight. As usual, I’ll probably wait quite a while to dive into it to find out for myself. In fact, I believe I’ll be taking a break from WoW for quite a while.

“If you like Warcraft’s Goblins, you’ll loooovvvve Undermine.”

I should mention that I’ve played quite a lot of other MMOs in recent years, but I’ve yet to write about many of them here mostly because I’m planning to revisit almost all of them sooner or later. Next on that list was New World, which I played a bit at launch and haven’t been back to since. I liked it a lot at the time, and I was already planning on going back into it to see how it has shaped up, but now that it is closing down in early 2027 it seems I have no choice but to make that a priority. 🙁

Allied Races

With the recent reveal of World of Warcraft: Dragonflight I started thinking about how much I missed WoW. As many MMOs as I’ve played, I still love the high standard of polish that, until relatively recently, I associated with Blizzard games, I still love how buttery smooth the game feels, and most of all, I still love the core lore of the Warcraft franchise.

“Raining hell with Gallywix’s G.M.O.D.”

Against my better judgment, I hopped back into “retail” restarting an unfortunate cycle that I’ve been stuck on for quite a few years now. That is, when a new expansion is announced I get hyped up for it, reactivate my account, and try to catch up on the previous expansion’s content until I get burnt out again, usually just before (or just after) the new expansion actually launches. Case in point, I logged in to discover my “main” still where I left him when I got burnt out at the end of the Battle for Azeroth Alliance campaign, and my new Horde “alt” that I created when Shadowlands was announced that I had created to familiarize myself with the changes to the game before diving back in with my main, left in the middle of a zone less than half way through the Battle for Azeroth Horde campaign. Doh.

This time would be different though. This time I had a goal: allied races. Allied races are a feature that was added to the game with the Battle for Azeroth expansion. Essentially, Blizzard added what would eventually become 5 new races per faction. Most of these new races were more or less reskins of existing races, but alas, as someone who likes to stand out in my online games, I was very interested. Unfortunately these races needed to be individually unlocked through achievements which almost all included lengthy quest lines and/or reputation grinds. Still, I figured I could focus on a few of the ones I was most interested in. That never happened.

With Shadowlands, the reputation grinds were removed and the option was added to simply skip quests that required dungeon content. Nice! I decided I would make it my goal with this return to Azeroth to not unlock one, but all of the allied races.

I wish I had kept a more detailed journal of my progress, as it occurs to me now that this could actually be pretty helpful to a lot of people. I can at least recount the journey in general. First, one small tip. The addon BtWQuests can be extremely useful for keeping track of the multiple questlines required to unlock each races. Even using it, things still got a little confusing for certain quest lines and achievements, so I can’t recommend it enough. You’ll need both the Battle for Azeroth and Legion versions. Anyway, here’s how it went…

“All allied races unlocked! A Mag’har Shaman on display.”

First I returned to my main Horde alt. I picked a Hunter for this class specifically because of how easy yet capable they are to play, so this character was the logical selection for getting re-reacquainted with the game without rolling yet another new character. First, I realized that I was already eligible to unlock the Highmountain Tauren due to questing in that zone in Legion with my main. Next I finished off my questing in Nazmir and then headed to Vuldun and more or less finished off the base Horde campaign. The Vulpera were unlocked from that alone. Then I finished the base Horde war campaign plus some of the later war campaigns to complete Tides of Vengeance, and then completed the final Zuldazar quests, unlocking the Zandalari Trolls. I’d already completed Ready for War on my main, and finishing it off for my Horde character meant I also unlocked the Mag’har Orcs.

Finally, the most grueling part of this was heading back to the Broken Isles from Legion to unlock the Nightborne. I had never played through Suramar back when Legion was current, nor had this character ever set foot in the Broken Isles, so I had to essentially start from the beginning and go through innumerable quests with sometimes little to no “breadcrumbing” to follow. I did encounter one reputation gate, which was with the quest “Uniting the Isles” which requires you to get to friendly with all of the major factions of the Legion campaign. Luckily with flying unlocked, it was quite quick to head to each zone and grind quests for just long enough to hit friendly, with only Stormheim giving me any issues. Despite how much effort the “Insurrection” achievement took, I actually really enjoyed the lore behind the Suramar questlines, never mind the unique city itself.

Victorious, I headed back to my old main and went with a similar strategy. I’d go ahead and finish off the base Alliance campaign by completing the last little bits of Stormsong Valley. I’d already earned Ready for War on this character, so the Dark Iron Dwarves were available without any real work. I then finished off the war campaign and portions of the later war campaigns for Tides of Vengeance, then completed the final Tiragarde Sound quest lines to at last unlock the Kul Tiran Humans. Next I learned I needed to play through a good part of Nazjatar in order to unlock the quest to get me to Mechagon Island. I’d never seen either of these zones when originally playing Battle for Azeroth so this was an interesting diversion and I’m tempted to return to finish both zone’s quests, but it didn’t take too long before I had Mechagnomes unlocked.

“The Kul Tiran druid forms are some of the coolest.”

As with the Nightborne, I now had to head back to Dalaran to start the Legion Argus quest lines. At least this time between having played much of Legion previously on this character and having just completed some related quests on my Horde alt, I was able to head to Argus without too much effort. I hadn’t been to Argus before now, and always being intrigued by the Draenei, the Naaru, and the Light in general, I was looking forward to this, but found myself rushing to grind through these quests without too much investment in the story, unfortunately. Finally, completing most of this story granted the You Are Now Prepared! Achievement, unlocking both the Lightforged Draenei and the Void Elves.

Once you meet the requirements to unlock an allied race, you still need to do a questline associated with each one kicked off in the embassy in the capital cities of each faction. In some cases these are quite quick, while in some others they’re fairly involved, but none are difficult. Some, like the Vulpera’s for example, were quite fun, while others will be essential for lore nerds. Once completed you’ll unlock the race, their associated achievement, and be given their race specific mount. With that…

Success! So, what will I actually do with my new found power? Well, more alts of course! I actually had vague plans to play through some old campaigns a second time with some variety of Mag’har Orc, and a Lightforged or Dark Iron Paladin could be fun, but my immediate plans were for a Kul Tiran Druid and a Mechagnome Monk. In fact, I already started my Kul Tiran Druid and headed into the Legion campaign so I could jump right into the Druid class hall, which I’ve been enjoying immensely so far. When it comes to my Monk, I’ll likely bring him through the classic Catalyst zones since that particular ridiculous race and class combination seems hilariously incongruous there.

One thing is for sure, over a year and a half later and I still haven’t even stepped foot into Shadowlands yet. Maybe I’ll keep up with tradition and wait until just before Dragonflight is released. *shrug*

Big Robots and Bigger Grinds

As mentioned when I wrote about Iron Brigade originally, I bought the game’s DLC expansion, Rise of the Martian Bear, shortly after completing the main campaign. I didn’t immediately dive into it and actually ended up taking an even longer break than originally planned. In fact, it had been so long that I considered not even playing through it since I’d surely lost whatever skills I’d managed to build up over the course of the original campaign, and I’d read that the expansion was notably harder than the original campaign to boot. Alas, despite some reservations, I finally talked myself into it.

“Back in the trenches again!”

When I finally got around to playing it I discovered that the game had been pulled from Game Pass, popping up a licensing error when I went to launch it. Not entirely unexpected. What was unexpected was my inability to actually purchase the damn thing! When I went to the game’s store page I received a weird message that the game was only purchasable on Xbox 360 or on xbox.com. Ok? At first I thought maybe this was an odd side effect of having already had the game installed, so I went ahead and uninstalled it and tried again. No dice. I begrudgingly went to my PC and pulled up the Microsoft Store webpage. Oddly, I got the same error there. Finally I had to resort to booting up my old Xbox 360 and buying the game there, at which point it worked normally on my Xbox One once again. This whole thing was absolutely bizarre and I have no idea what the issue actually was – I could buy some other Xbox 360 games on my Xbox One, just not Iron Brigade. Perhaps this is some sort of licensing issue but that’d be even weirder since Double Fine is owned my Microsoft these days.

Anyway, onto the game. First, if you’ve read my original blurb on Iron Brigade, Rise of the Martian Bear doesn’t really change anything I had to say about the game back then. Instead, it adds a 5 mission sort-of epilogue to the original campaign and expands the level cap, adding a fairly large amount of new, higher level loot to compensate. The new maps are, of course, playable cooperatively as well as in Survival mode. And that’s about it! That was plenty for me though, and just like with the original campaign I replayed every level until I managed to get a gold rating on it.

“Fuck. This. Map.”

Getting gold on these maps was no easy feat given how rusty I was at that game. In fact, I was stuck on the DLC’s third level, Settlement, for quite a long time, trying a mind boggling number of variations in strategy and loadout before I finally nailed it. Things got so desperate that I even briefly dipped into Survival mode to try to score of the game’s more exotic, mode exclusive rewards to buff my damage output. Eventually I succeeded and brought my time with Iron Brigade to an end. For the record, a combination of carefully placed sniper turrets, a few machine guns turrets to help mop up Knobs, and aggressively running my dual Muerte Fiesta Numero 6’d engineering trench around the map to do as much of the actual Tube elimination legwork as possible myself was the key.

Rise of the Martian Bear doesn’t really do anything significantly interesting and the ridiculous story is perhaps even more throwaway than the original campaign, but it’s basically just a content pack, so if you really liked the base game (or absolutely loved it in my case) the expansion pack isn’t a hard sell. If you didn’t, well then there’s absolutely nothing redeeming for you here.

Besides that, the other game taking up a lot of my time lately is, of all things, World of Warcraft Classic.

“Checking out the original Dwarf model. D’aww!”

During a long and tedious build up that seemingly started from the moment the game was first patched and continued with consistent nostalgic whinging about “the good old days” of so-called vanilla WoW (and increasingly, the Burning Crusade expansion and even later eras) on every relevant forum out there and culminating with Blizzard finally caving and announcing WoW Classic, I never really owned that particular pair of rose colored glasses. Sure, I had some great memories of the early days of WoW and yes, some of the changes subsequent patches and expansions made were debatably negative, but there were also innumerable improvements, some quite major, along the way too. As I saw it, I was fine with the glory days of World of Warcraft remaining confined to exaggerated “back in my day” anecdotes and as an effortless yardstick to compare other, newer MMORPGs against.

In the summer of 2018 I changed jobs, going from working in IT departments consisting of just a couple of dozen people at best to working alongside literally thousands of fellow geeks. As the launch of Classic approached we ended up with more than a dozen people on my team alone signed on to play and I figured jumping on the bandwagon could be a lot of fun. When Classic finally launched and I joined my co-workers on Discord, I was surprised to discover that a lot of the members of my original World of Warcraft guild from back in vanilla along with numerous other friends I’d known over the years also logged in fighting the same launch day queues as we were. Remarkably, it seems like almost every last one of my online gaming buddies was drawn back into the fold. How long most of them stuck it out, I can’t say, but despite most of the gaming media I follow dismissing Classic, it seemed like it was actually a fairly big deal in my circles.

“I accidentally screenshotted hitting level 2. Also, sorry boars…”

After a lot of internal debate I decided to fully embrace my nostalgia, creating a character absolutely identical to the character I “mained” in vanilla – the same race and overall appearance, the same class, and I even managed to score the same name despite it coming from the in-game name generator. Gulmorok the orcish rogue was reborn (the original having since been converted into a dwarf and moved between servers multiple times in WoW proper, as discussed before.)

Personally, jumping back into what seems to be a pretty damn solid recreation of original World of Warcraft has been an absolute trip. It’s amazing how well I remember the zones, the enemies and the particulars of many of the quests, and even the idiosyncrasies of various mechanics. The original 2004 era graphics and sounds still hold up incredibly well too, which surprised me after long since getting used to the newer character models. What doesn’t hold up quite as well is the actual gameplay. In 2004 the design, a fairly shameless mass market friendly iteration on the EverQuest style of theme park MMORPG, felt pretty damn great if you were in to those types of games back then. Having long since moved on to successors like The Old Republic, Elder Scrolls Online, hell, even newer World of Warcraft expansions, the design of vanilla WoW certainly feels as dated as it sounds to describe it like that. It’s not so much “hard” as it feels like it’s been designed to just utterly disrespect the player’s time – tedious, grinding quests, huge amounts of travel between different areas, a poorly structured quest content flow, and of course the ever present joy of constantly bumping up against the poverty line, are all things probably best left in the past.

“Much, much later, grinding in the Alterac Mountains.”

Case in point, in my mid 30s, I’m having to constantly bounce between zones to do quests that are actually level appropriate (a luxury largely enabled by third party addons and data dump websites, by the way) and I know that, just like in 2004, I’m quickly approaching the level range where a lack of ANY appropriate quests becomes the problem, requiring grinding dungeons or mobs to stay properly leveled and geared. Adding to that, I’m playing on a PVP server for the first time in years and Blizzard just turned on the honor system, meaning that people’s willingness to go out of their way to gank you while you’re busy trying to complete a quest or otherwise mind your own business is at a peak. Of course as a rogue I’m uniquely equipped to deal with these assholes, or at least take opportunistic revenge on them, but it’s still annoying. Fun times!

While I have been tempted more than a few times to jump off the treadmill and devote my limited free time to playing through more single player games, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t having fun. The Azeroth that Blizzard built with World of Warcraft remains still somehow compelling to me, and looking forward to when PVP battlegrounds are finally launched and my co-workers and I can put together some “premade” groups is keeping a lot of us going for now.

In the meantime, Blizzard just announced yet another World of Warcraft expansion and Diablo-fucking-4, both of which have my attention. Despite being increasingly clear that they’re no longer the same company I fell in love with, Blizzard is still somehow managing to make a case for its relevance in my gaming life.

Settlement map screenshot taken from from misc. places on the Interwebz. The in game shot is actually mine though. An original Xbox 360 screenshot on here? Is this the end of an era?! Probably not!