It’s the end of the world as we knew it
You guys still big into REM? Yeah, me too. Love those ironic 90s hipster glasses.
So I quit World of Warcraft about a year ago, but now I find I’ve unquit. And it turns out that some giant robot dragon blasted holes in the world while I was gone, so now everything’s not the same as it was. For example: pretty much all of my characters, when I logged them for the first time, were just like chillin’ somewhere out in Khaz Modan, and I’m pretty positive I didn’t park them out there. I guess, in the geography shuffle that took place when a dragon robot put holes in the world, the coordinates they had been standing at moved over a little bit, and were now just like out in the damn mountains. I just consider myself lucky that they were actually in playable territory, unlike what happened last time.
So the cataclysm’s basically an excuse for Blizzard to revisit the old-world content and revitalise it in light of the shit that’s happened over the last six years. So it’s all been overhauled — the play structure is entirely different, and all the quests reflect the developments in the storyline. So, for instance, there’s no more Defias Brotherhood — which means, among other things, that not only will Missing Diplomat never be finished, but also they’ve removed the bits that made it in-game in the first place.
All this leads to some interesting musings about permanence and nostalgia. People have said to me that in some ways it sucks that the old content is gone — they really liked this or that quest, or such-and-such a zone was always a highlight of the leveling experience, and now it’s gone. To my mind, that just gives the cataclysm itself more dramatic force; it’s not just a back story in a cutscene at the beginning of a game — ooo, there was a huge cataclysm! And a robot dragon! And the world was forever changed! Now, brave hero, go slay rats in yonder sewers to uncover the truth behind history (hint: a wizard did it)! Instead of that, it’s something significant that happened to a world we knew, and that we were attached to. We’ve actually lost something we cared about as a result of Deathwing’s actions, and that’s pretty unusual in a video game. Sort of a breaking out of the hierarchy; actions taken by actors within a video game have changed the relationship we have to the game.
And, of course, Blizzard didn’t just cut a whole bunch of old content and leave new players to try to grind lv58 Hellboars in Hellfire Peninsula — there’s a whole crop of new content, also. So along with the pain of loss, there’s also the discovery of a whole new set of experiences. It’s an interesting design idea, and so far I think it’s good, but I haven’t thrown enough hours into it to be sure yet.
Though I will say that I think leveling is way too fast right now. I can understand it from the perspective of leveling your seventeenth alt and you’ve fucking done this already, but that’s not quite the situation here. The whole world has changed, and I, for one, kind of wish I had more time just to explore and interact with the zones, but I’m leveling past them too quickly.
