Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Warcraft Lore for Dummies - Part X

CHAPTER X: BECAUSE WARCRAFT DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH FAT FURRIES ALREADY

If you've ever seen the movie Dragonslayer, at the end of the film after the real heroes defeat the dragon the old king walks up and pokes the carcass with a sword, and he is declared the 'dragonslayer.'  That's pretty much how Deathwing went down.  A bunch of dragons in human form give Thrall a laser beam and he pew pews Deathwing and then we poke him with swords and we have have an epic battle with his toenail fungus and hooray, we're Dragonslayers.


Then suddenly after ten thousand years (everything in WarCraft is always ten thousand years later) the fog surrounding a hidden island called Pandaria lifts and we discover new lands to fight over, because if there's anything we do really well, it's discovering beautiful and exotic new lands to kill each other in.

The Alliance is led by King Varian Wrynn (also known as Lo'Gosh, which he will remind you at every opportunity), and the Warchief of the Horde is Garrosh Hellscream.  Garrosh is leading the Horde because Thrall is too busy trying to cross over as an epic aspect/guardian/protector/elemental/farseer/rap star and marketing his new fizzy sports drink to take any actual interest in the affairs of the nation he built.

Blood and Thunder, hear me roar
When I drink Thrallade my mouth says MORE
For homies in da Barrens be fightin quillboar
Only thirty calories and packed with lore


Varian used to be a slave gladiator and a vicious warrior who slew Onyxia, but now he has a teenage son so he needs to act all responsible.  Of course his son has nothing to do with weapons, he's a priest.  It's gotta be disappointing.  "Son, let me show you some of the techniques I learned when fighting orcs twice my size, with my bare hands..."  "Oh no father, I'm laundering my white robes and reading a really interesting illustrated manuscript..."  So Varian is slowly changing from a burly mancastle into a bit of a think-first politician.  He still growls once in a while, but it's pretty much for show now.  You have to rescue him from just about everything because he can't even organize a landing party on his own and is nearly killed by an adviser who's been sitting 10 feet away from him for years.

Garrosh on the other hand needs no defense.  He's busy killing, burning, and smashing everything in the whole world.  If it's got a Horde banner on it, he's using it to attack something.  Stonetalon Mountains was never beautiful, but now it's about as pretty as a strip mine.  Ashenvale is on fire.  The Undead have their pestilence creeping over most of the northwestern kingdoms.  It's a bloody mess.

So when this island appears, Garrosh is all like "Mine!" and Varian is like "Not his!" and we rush off to establish bases without asking anyone, because of course the island is already inhabited by powerful but peaceful peoples that we care nothing about until we discover we can't loot the whole place without talking to them.  The island is called Pandaria, which means "island of the fat furry bears."  And it is filled with fat furry bears, led by a bear named Taran Zhu who is always bleeding from something.

The whole land is very peaceful except for a seeping evil called Sha.  You see, ten thousand years ago (here we go again) the emperor of the panda people was a fat bear named Shaohao.  He felt that the best way to deal with his troubles was to bury them where nobody could be bothered by them.  Of course this is a giant metaphor for responsibly managing your personal psychology, as the entire expansion is.  It's just filled with morality plays and lessons to be learned, as if Blizzard woke up one day and said "oh shit, we have 10 million kids playing our game, maybe we shouldn't let them live in a world where people only kill things."  I'm guessing Chris Metzen has kids now and he probably doesn't want them to end up draining his wealth paying for expensive therapy.

So Shaohao literally buries his negative emotions.  Using fat panda magic he buries them in the lands under Pandaland, and deep under there an old god twists and shapes these emotions into ghost sha creatures.  As the humans and orcs show up and begin exploring and gathering resources and fighting, the sha latch on to these violent forces and emerge like fracking leaks, poisoning the landscape.  Garrosh takes this to the extreme (because he's an extreme kind of guy).  When his diggers discover the heart of an old god he does what anyone else would do with a giant, icky evil black diseased thing... and throws it in a pristine well in the middle of Pandaria.  Taran Zhu tries to stop him, but he gets impaled on Gorehowl and is bleeding again. 

Then more mists dissolve (for no discernible reason) and an island is discovered... off the coast of the first island.. and it is weirdly stuck in time, hosting the ghost of Shaohao and a bunch of elite monsters that poop epic gear.  This is a timely discovery since it allows people to gear up quickly and enter the final scene of this act, returning to Azeroth to lay siege to the city of Orgrimmar and attacking Garrosh to bring him to justice.  Thrall leads the way and is kicked aside, and then when Garrosh is defeated is stopped from executing him by Varian, who insists that he msut stand trial for his crimes.  Jaina begs Varian to kill the entire Horde leadership, but when the new Warchief is discovered to be Vol'jin he backs down, because he is regenerating five HP a second and there's nothing you can do about it.  He backs off with a warning that "we will end you" and Jaina is displeased.

Meanwhile, on Timeless Isle the bronze dragon Kairoz gives players a quest to view events that could take place inside Orgrimmar, and they suggest that Garrosh might escape justice after all.  But who is responsible for freeing him?  TunE in next time, same orc-time, same orc-channel!

10 Years :: 10 Questions

Coming up on the 10th anniversary of World of Warcraft, these are the 10 questions being asked of players:

1. Why did you start playing Warcraft?

I was playing RTS games like Red Alert, and a friend at work turned me on to WarCraft 3.  I wasn't really excited about it because - and this will sound pretty stupid - I don't like fantasy games very much.  The genre just doesn't excite me.  I've played D&D, read Tolkien books, gone to GenCon, and been around fantasy nerds for decades, and the genre is done to death for me.  But I liked RTS games and it was a chance to game with people I knew, so I played it.

It was a lot of fun.  Even more fun than the game was playing the custom scenarios people built, like tower defense maps.  We would log in every evening and play some Wintermauls, and fooling around with the map editor to make our own scenes was tremendous fun.  I was amazed that the game designer gave us these powerful tools to work with so we could express things that came from our own imagination, and fully supported us sharing them through battle.net.

In December of 2004 I heard that the next WarCraft game was coming out and I decided to buy a copy for myself for Christmas to see if maybe the guys wanted to play it.  I logged in on New Year's Eve and experienced my first MMO - my mind was blown.  I adore games that provide a persistent experience and remember who you are and what your progress and experience has been, it felt constructive, instead of just blowing things up.

2. What was the first ever character you rolled?


That first night at the character creation screen I was given a choice between Horde and Alliance.  I wasn't really into the happy-shiny fantasy hero, so I rolled a Horde character because they had interesting flaws and they weren't pretty hero types.  I made a male Tauren warrior named Glue.  I leveled him up to 20 and logged him out at the Crossroads, and never played him again - my friends had decided they wanted to play, so I rerolled with them and we all played Orcs and Trolls, and I rolled a new Troll priest named Kadoo.  He was my main through vanilla.  He still exists somewhere under the name Wickerman.

3. Which factors determined your faction choice in game?

Early on, it had to be Horde.  Horde took everyone, with their flaws and warts, and rallied them under one banner.  I didn't feel like playing a soldier marching to someone moral code, I just wanted to explore and adventure and discover my own morality along the way.  Alliance seemed like a faction with a high overhead, and I wasn't sure I wanted to invest that much time in a philosophy.  I just wanted to run around and smash things.

That morality concept determined some choices in game.  For example, I was worried when I met Mankrik the first time that his bloodlust might corrupt me.  Sure, I'll find your wife for you.  Kill dozens of Quillboar?  Jesus man, that's genocide.  Nope, not doing that quest.

4. What has been your most memorable moment in Warcraft and why?

Two moments - one good, one bad.  The bad one sums up my early attempts at organizing people in game (which is far harder than playing the game itself).  The guild I founded with my friends ended up bringing in an additional officer, who told me point blank that if we ever got the item from Molten Core for the epic priest questline that I wouldn't get it.  That was a huge f*** you moment, and taught me that I can't trust anyone in game to look after my own enjoyment.  I had helped hundreds (literally hundreds) of players level up and finish quests and healed them through troubles and traveled to unlock UBRS, etc. so many times, and their was nobody there for me when I asked for the only thing I ever wanted in the game.  I never got the staff, and it has been removed from the game.

The best moment was raiding with a new group of friends, and we banged our heads against Sartharion with three drakes over and over until we finally killed it, prior to the Twilight Residue nerf.  It felt like a real achievement, and it was really rewarding.  Within 24 hours of the kill the guild split in half, and since we had all of the content on farm there wasn't a real motivating force there to do anything, and I went casual for a while.  I ended up not raiding for the rest of Wrath.  Cataclysm was a disaster and ruined the familiarity of the old world - how could you do that to my Barrens? - so I unsubbed for about a year.  I did not miss it at all.  I wouldn't have cared to come back and play the game if my son hadn't started playing.

5. What is your favourite aspect of the game and has this always been the case?

Crafting, hands down.  When all is said and done, there is nothing in WoW that is an original creation.  Everything is just a random relocation of items that Blizzard has designed, that end up in locations like your bank slots.  You are given one opportunity to add original content to the game (two, if you are a hunter) - and that's your character name.  When you see someone walking around with a weapon or piece of gear and you inspect it and see someone's name on it as the crafter, it's a magical feeling. Back in the day when new servers would be brought online there was a real binding force to the community.  Who was the first engineer who could make targeting dummies for that centaur quest?

Once the top level items were only obtainable in raids that community started to erode, and raid guilds took over, and they only ever cared about their own glory.  Blizzard has made crafting less interesting with every expansion.  They should look at their own origins - we loved making custom maps in WarCraft 3 - or at the huge popularity of Minecraft.  People want to make things.  They want an outlet for their creativity.  They tapped into that market when the game launched, and they attracted artists and people with imagination.  The game since then has mostly pushed these people away.

6. Do you have an area in game that you always return to?

The Crossroads.  I mostly play Alliance now because I spent so many hours playing Horde and I want to keep the game fresh, but I always come back to the Crossroads for nostalgia. Every Horde character I make must kill Sarkoth, and must set his hearth in the Crossroads inn.

7. How long have you /played and has that been continuous?

I've played since December 31, 2004.  It hasn't been continuous, I unsubbed for a year during Cataclysm.  People post on the forums that they're leaving WoW and they aren't happy with the game, etc., but the truth is that when people really leave they don't post.  Because they don't care.  They just leave, and you can't get them back because they don't give a shit anymore.  My son got me to play with him, and Warcraft was incidental at that point.  I would have made cupcakes with him.

8. Admit it: do you read quest text or not?

When I am playing solo, I do.  When I am part of a group or in the first couple weeks of an expansion with a guild rushing to content, I don't.  Some quest lines are very interesting, some are just "kill 20 more boars."  I'll read what I find interesting, what I don't I just breeze through.

9. Are there any regrets from your time in game?

Back in BC/Wrath I would look at the hours I spent in game and consider it a waste of time and I was regretful.  But I don't go to bars, don't watch TV, and do many self-destructive things.  Playing video games has kept me at home with the family all the time and made me available to talk to my kids and play with my kids.  Raiding excepted - I hate the aspect of raiding that it demands large blocks of undisturbed time and when it happens I will sabotage my personal raid progression in favor of spending time with the family because everything they do is always more important.

10. What effect has Warcraft had on your life outside gaming?

WoW came along at the right time.  It coincided with the expansion of broadband access.  Early vanilla I teamed up with a regular 5-person group and two of them had dialup access.  Pretty quickly when broadband became more accessible, WoW was one of the better things you could do with it.  Everything we do now - can you imagine doing it with a 56k connection? 

When WoW succeeded it became popular enough for people who weren't fantasy nerds to play, and game video game exposure to a wider audience.  Now it is a socially acceptable means of enjoyment.  To be done in moderation, like everything else, but not strange at all.  So someday I will unsubscribe again (I am a casual and I've played about 15 minutes in the last three weeks, with dwindling interest), but I will remain a video game enthusiast.  I don't have to sneak off to stick quarters into a Mortal Kombat kiosk, I can game at home and chat about it.