Wow Oh WoW

CE Jenkins 



               This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone, but I am a geek. Meaning I play WoW. Meaning I play World of Warcraft, the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game with orcs and night elves and spacegoats. Those who have accessed the internet on prior occasions may be familiar with it. Now, one reason I enjoy the game is that it comes with a detailed and constantly changing storyline; another is because it allows me to take out my rage at the injustices of so-called “real life” by punting gnomes into pools of lava. We will be focusing on the first reason today. Mostly. There might be forays into gnome punting. Mostly I just want to talk about why I think the latest expansion pack sucks. It’s also good to keep in mind that I’ve only ever played World of Warcraft and none of its predecessors, so all the ways in which WoW supposedly butchered it have no effect on me. Yay? >.>

            WoW’s lore is extensive; I’ve been playing since I was barely old enough to know what trolling was and I still can’t say I know it all. They have to add new content on a periodic basis to placate the raiders, and then they have to come up with a reason in lore why we’re fighting mind-reading octopus-faced things (yeah, it's a thing). It’s kind of like a really long-running season of a TV show that’s also one of those interactive novels, that also has hundreds of important characters to keep track of. That is also as addictive as crack. Needless to say, shit gets fucked up.

However, the expansion Wrath of the Lich King (WOTLK for the lazy of typing) saw things going just dandy from a lore point of view: dragons were slain, heroes fell in battle, and gnomes were drop-kicked with ruthless efficiency and enthusiasm. The storyline and the actual game play teamed up and with their powers combined kicked more ass than can reasonably interpreted by the human brain. Everything you did felt like you were actually moving through the storyline and accomplishing something, so that by the time you reached the Frozen Throne you had no choice but to be invested in the story. Not to mention the final boss, the Lich King; badass voice acting, badass writing, badass badassery to the degree of badassitude. The more troops you threw at him, the most ravenous ghouls he would have at his disposal when they all died horrible deaths. He killed his own father, massacred his own people and completely turned his back on the light, and he doesn’t even give a shit about anything except destroying or corrupting every living thing on the planet. It was all so very epic.

And then Cataclysm came ‘round.

            To illustrate my point, watch this video. It’s the trailer for the WOLK expansion.

         Cool guys don’t look at the giant fucking undead dragon coming out of the ice behind them.

            Now, if you’re me, by the end of this video you have goosebumps and a burning desire to go kill some undead. If you’re a normal person you might feel mildly unimpressed. Reserve your judgment until you’ve watched this glowing gem of a cinematic:

            See the difference? If not, the difference is that one of them leaves me with a deep-seated sense of personal shame. I’m thinking that wasn’t what they were going for when they made the Cataclysm trailer.

            What I like so much about the WOTLK trailer is that, for an ad for World of Warcraft, it’s actually pretty classy. The narration adds a tang of bitter irony and doesn’t need to drop two octaves and use every ounce of its rage to get the point across. In both trailers the visuals are very good; they might even be better in the second. Alas, that was never enough to save it.

            The operant problem I have with the second one is the voiceover. Let’s put it this way: where the first trailer employs subtlety and irony, the second trailer beats you with a giant-ass club screaming, “HE’S EVIL! HE’S EVIL! HE’S SO FUCKING EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVVVVVVVVIIIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLL!!!11!!!” And it’s not even written well. Thus is Cataclysm.

            Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots that I really enjoy about Cata; but little to none of it is in the lore. The worst part is how much potential they’re throwing down the Maelstrom by screwing this up; the basic idea behind Cataclysm is really pretty neat. I mean, the evil aspect of earth breaking free from his prison and getting loosened up from all those eons of confinement by curb-stomping Azeroth in the nuts? Uh, awesome much? The main problem in my opinion is bad writing. All the dialog is overblown and overwritten and soggy with melodrama. I have yet to hear a boss say something genuinely off-putting enough to make me stop chewing on my poptart and think about death like I used to in WOTLK.

            Another huge problem with the Cata lore is that they look at every ongoing plotline they had going at the end of WOLK and say, “Ah fuck it, let’s just make money.” Allow me to veer a little deeper into nerdville for a moment and give an example: Blood elves were addicted to magical energy, the source of which was destroyed by the Lich King. As a result, blood elves got kinda evil in the insatiable need for magic way. At the end of WOTLK their energy source was restored, thus resulting in dramatic changes to blood elven society as their crippling lack of magical energy was finally relieved! Right?

            Quite obviously wrong, or else I wouldn’t have set up the sentence that way. Fuck all has happened on the front of elven magic use. The most they have done is to change a few lines in the quest text to mention that the Sunwell is back in business before sending you off to do a bunch of shit that was only relevant when it was still out of order. Obviously I’m oversimplifying it, but you should still feel outraged nonetheless.

            One thing Cata lore does really well is off the front lines of the battlefield. Thing is, no matter how bad and scary their newest end boss might seem, it’s pretty obvious that they’re going to die in the end. “Evil wins” is not a very effective marketing strategy when your income directly depends on your customers not wanting evil to win. But now they’ve added in tensions within the ranks of the Horde and the Alliance, and the threat feels pretty real. At their most basic level most of the faction leaders are assholes, self-righteous or an unholy breeding of the two. Finally someone realized that putting that many personalities in a room would be like giving six people a steering wheel and putting them in a shopping cart full of cinderblocks before pushing them down a black-diamond ski slope and telling them to steer. And the fact is, the idea that Blizzard would break up the factions is more feasible and threatening than anything an external threat could provide. Will they do so? Probably not. But the fact is that it really wouldn’t be out of the question, and with the direction they’re heading it’s going to be looming there.

            And lastly, the supposed new expansion pack: Mists of Pandaria. Exibit A: Pandaren are a joke. No, not metaphorically, they are literally a joke that one of the designers came up with and everyone was laughing about up until some idiot decided that what the game really needed is more bullshit. The preview on youtube has 50/50 likes and dislikes, with about 18-19k on both sides. Blizzard is literally giving us all a giant middle finger. The worst part is that I will still be buying it. I have an addiction that no level of fury or shame can unhinge.