08.01.06

For The First Time

Posted in Gaming, The Unbelievers, World of Warcraft at 7:14 pm

Session Time: 2h20m. Advanced Ceilai from 8 to 9; rest state started at four “bubbles” (roughly 20 minutes of gameplay before it was exhausted). Completed a quest in the Fel Rock area and made it halfway through a quest in the Banethil Barrow Den area.

So, I’m enjoying myself. Why??

Let me start over here for a moment. The gameplay is very much the same as it was over the last couple hours. Leave town, kill things, collect the resulting detritus, sell detritus for a paltry sum. Occasionally talk to an NPC to get XP, money, or shinier detritus. I’m not paying attention to the storyline any more than is required to actually complete a quest; that is, I read over the quest descriptions looking for key words such as “north”, “dungeon”, and “kill”. I really have no emotional attachment to or investment in the story surrounding Azeroth, and I don’t see that changing unless the game makes a bigger effort to engage me. Rob called the setting “unoriginal”, and while it’s hard to refute him, there are a few things which manage to impress me. When I find them more than once during gameplay, I’ll let you all know.

One thing I thought was quite interesting was a quest I literally stumbled upon by accident. I had been wandering through Darnassus and accidentally found myself teleported to a small fishing village on the south end of the island. I was, of course, grateful for the 70 XP I gained from “exploration”, but more interesting to me was the fact that I had found a teleporter. It was a glowing purple aura. Later int he evening, I came across a similar aura surrounding a particular tree in the hollow south of Darnassus. Naturally, I approached it, thinking, “great, where will this one take me? Nothing happened; well, no actual transit happened, anyway. The tree could be interacted with, actually, and it awarded me with a fruit that “would be of interest” to one of the previous quest NPCs I’d dealt with. It was a rare stroke of luck that I actually remembered who the quest was talking about, and a few minutes later I had completed the task. It was rewarding– not just in the large monetary gain afforded me upon turning in the fruit, but also because it involved no combat (until the fruit was planted and the quest already complete; the monsters spawned were pathetically easy, though, so it hardly counts) and wasn’t made blatantly obvious, either by the game’s “!” markers or by any other in-game indication. It’s an interesting mechanic and I am looking forward to seeing more of this type of quest in the future.

As said in the summary, I did wander into a couple of dungeon-like areas; actually caves, and not specifically “dungeons” (the term in WoW is reserved for the instanced missions, I believe). Fel Rock was actually an interesting place for a hunter to go, as demons spawned pretty regularly and were easy enough to handle solo. I may go back there just to take out some more demons, as they tend to drop the occasional handful of coins. The Barrow Den, however, was a different story. It’s loaded down with gnarlpine monsters, who are curiously not as affected by the hunter’s Nature-elemental based powers as, say, a demon. Moreover, there are way too many of them in the cave. Now, granted, this is mitigated quite a bit by the fact that there are usually many more adventurers entering the cave than there are monsters, but the quest I have involves collecting items from treasure chests scattered in the dungeon. Which means that unless your group is all on the same page, you’re likely to fall behind the meat-shields– er, excuse me, casters– who’re plowing their way through the depths. The mini-map is useless in the dungeons as it doesn’t account for height. Finally, and this is probably a shortcoming of the Hunter class, it’s too closed-in for ranged attackers; you can probably only get in about one or two shots before the monster closes to melee range. I suppose once I get a pet, I can have that hold the monster at a distance while I pick it off, but that’s a portion of a level away.

On a completely unrelated note, the quest in Fel Rock required me to decapitate a monster and bring the smaller portion of the corpse to the quest NPC. It is exactly the first time I’ve ever given head for XP. My slow descent into levelwhoring has begun!

The Good: Quests can be gained in unorthodox ways, and also solved in unorthodox ways. If you ask politely (read: not in global chat), people will generally point you in the right direction. I’m getting oddly familiar with the gameworld; as soon as I logged in, I answered a new player’s question. The map of the island is almost complete for me. Apparently there are many UI mods available; however, I’m refraining from using them so I review the game in its default state (otherwise, it would be fair game to bitch about GTA: San Andreas for having Hot Coffee); this is also why I’m only accepting limited help or information from external sources.
The Bad: If grouping is discouraged until Level 20, why are the low-level areas too full? Is there a way to turn off duel requests or otherwise indicate to people “No, I will not duel you, stop asking me”? The WoW forums are a dark and scary place, much like SomethingAwful but with less parental supervision. Moving windows in the UI should not require a mod. The minimap remains near-useless except in finding your corpse. Death penalties are not clearly defined in the manual or documentation.
Opinion Change? Improved somewhat. Quest diversity is good, but it’s still boiling down to “kill things”, “collect things”, or “deliver things”. I would love to see a quest revolve around a riddle that the player has to solve; bonus points if it requires knowledge of the gameworld that can be learned from within the game (no strategy-guide-only answers, please).

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