If any of you were wondering where i might've been last week, i'm sorry. Guys don't hate me! I was mostly "checking my PC worked", and i've got some screenshots to show you that it sure fucking does. While installing programs and games, i stumbled on a message informing me that, as i haven't played on WoW in a jolly good long time, i've got 7 free days of playtime and all i had to do was click on the big gold button saying "Activate Now!" below.
I was physically unable to prevent myself.. Everything went on hiatus..
I really like a game you can play for [a total of] a year, and still not see everything. This week i achieved the title 'The Explorer' (Rothki is now 'Rothki the Explorer') which means i have finally visited every (major) part of every region in the current universe, even if only briefly. Some areas are pretty easy to miss- asteroids floating several hundred feet above the zone, for example- and some are just plain hard to get to, like the tree-island in the ocean that is only accessed through a portal in an enemy city (turned out getting out was an even bigger pain in the arse than getting in). I'm not sure how common the achievement is, but i've only seen a couple of other people on my server with it. There is an option not to show the title of course, but sadly i think it's more likely that many wow players have little appreciation of the skill and inspiration that has gone into the vast universe created for them, and never really bothered to explore a lot of it. I say this and of course, i myself have only been into a handful of the dungeons and only 3 out of the 6 battlegrounds, so there is still plenty yet for me to discover.
While exploring led to many fun times, like stowing away on enemy ships, parachuting from high places, checking out the weather systems (now my pc can handle it) and discovering a list of horde base camps i never knew about, i was still doing plenty of the old questing. Oh god, have times changed in the way blizzard does things. 'Classic wow' (the 6 year old stuff) is barely recognisable- or comparable- to the current content, not just in the graphics but the quests themselves. Frankly, the old quests were lame. "Go kill 10 boars" "Go kill raptors til you get 10 hearts".. How the fuck did we put up with that? Jeez, our lives must've sucked. While there's still a bit of that going on, the quests are essentially mostly mini-games now. Things like shooting dragons out the sky with turrets, hijacking planes and dropping bombs, possessing eidolons to assassinate targets from the spirit world, riding storm giants and stomping out zombie armies, that sort of thing, which is all a lot more fun. I went back and started a new character for fun and the difference is just jarring. This hasn't gone unnoticed by the developers- "later this year" (so 2011) cataclysm will rip up the old content and start over again to a higher standard.
Quests seem to be more directly telling the story this time, too, and are more single-player orientated, since most people quest solo anyway. In one of my favourite quest chains so far you get turned into a ghoul and have to start working for the scourge. Turns out the caged troll you helped in a previous region- but then transpired to be actually subverting his tribe to get in with the lich king- is now your undead boss. He mentions that "the lich king has plans for you" and hints that higher powers have been observing your potential. The chain ends in a platform-game like boss fight when you betray him, but the hints of lich kings' pursuit of you don't stop there. I've been getting whispers from valkyres for one thing, but also.. I've been having a couple of visitations from a ghostly boy who seems to be luring me into some kind of sympathisation with arthas. Yesterday he appeared while i was mowing down zombies in a siege truck on the glacier, to tell me i could never win that way. He sent me into a trance where i was arthas addressing the human army, and had to fight them and raise them all as zombie minions. When i woke, i found myself stranded in the middle of the glacier fighting off zombies.. nice move ghost boy, you douche! i survived, but still, he's a bastard.
Actually most of the best quests have involved the lich king. I played the death knight starting zone over a year or so ago. That was great. It was full of details. All the villagers would act differently in your presence, only some would dare try to fight back, most would sit and cower unable to move, some would run around the building screaming like psychotic headless chickens- sometimes before you even made a swipe at anyone. And the lich king.. he knew everything you did and he would be whispering to you about it. Commands like 'finish it!' if you dared pass up an opportunity to take an innocent life. Also the instancing.. going into the underworld to collect your horse after you'd sacrificed it and the general stages of zone progression as everything living in the area is gradually wiped out.. this all worked. More stuff like this, please.
Actually, one piece of advice to blizzard. Please.. the website? Ergh! The content's alright, but those awful little graphics and banners.. ok so a few players do act like 6 year olds (sadly the most loyal clientele, i think) but we are not all actually 6 year olds. You can do so much better. Hell, get your fans to do the artwork for you, it's not like you ever get a shortage of it right? Ok, im glad i got that out.
Anyway, i managed to take a couple of pictures. These aren't all of my favourite levels, i wish i had been able to take pictures of more, but i never think of it at the time, and besides, you try worrying about screenshots with frost wyrms on your ass. I was thinking perhaps in the future if i visit azeroth again i may compile a Travellers Guidebook, complete with postcards, tips, and listening notes for tracks that match the atmosphere of each region, which so far is very varied.
One region i want to see more of- but only briefly got to visit- was storm peaks, partly because.. i kind of felt like i shouldn't be there. It's a high, dark, icey, forbidding place, with mysterious giant-size mansions in the side of mountains, and can only be traversed by flying. You know as a kid you think things like, maybe the world is just a dream in a giants head, or we're all invisible giants' toys, or (a friend had this one) the tower blocks are where they live? One of the things i used to think was in the east, north, south and west there were giant machines that made wind and that's where wind came from. When my dad asked where i thought they were and why no one has ever seen them, i didn't know. I guess i thought they were in a place too far away for anyone to have ever known about. Well.. storm peaks is that place. I flew around the back of a mountain and found a mechanical hole, I went inside and it was all huge clockwork.. like huge huge, i was just flying between the tiny gaps in the cogs.. I had to turn back for fear i would never find my way back out again. There's probably a dungeon or a city or something in there, i don't know, i'll have go back and find out another time.
Anyway, i digress. Here's some damn pictures.
Yay @ my new PC
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