f13.net

Here's hoping that the Lich King expansion injects some Diablo-style gravitas (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybHAb0VoFT4) into the game, because the general atmosphere of Outland past the first zone or two is the pits.  The whole sci-fi angle is really weak, everything made out of pink and purple crystal just looks stupid, and the pop-culture references are unusually disruptive and hamfisted for Blizzard.  Going directly from the "LOLOL STAR WARS AND STARSHIP TROOPERS" town in Blade's Edge to the "LOLOL MEN IN BLACK" town in Netherstorm really just made any suspension of disbelief or feeling of consistency I had roll over and die.

In the old world, the pop-culture references were usually reasonably subtle.  If you had never seen Aliens, for example, the fact that a couple of quartermasters in Elwynn Forest were named Hicks and Hudson wouldn't mean anything to you.  Meanwhile everytime you go back to civilization to turn in a quest in Outland, there's basically a gnome in a space suit screaming "WIGGITY WACK, BEAM ME UP SNOTTY, WELCOME TO ERF!" while breakdancing.

Just bitching.

I hate Blade's Edge and Netherstorm.  The majority of the crystal offenses are there.  Nagrand and Shadowmoon Valley were much better.  I liked the idea of the bio-domes in Netherstorm, they just look really goofy.  To me, Zangarmarsh (though the quests annoy me) has some of the best looking areas in Outlands. 

Wait, what? Are you playing Alliance?

I hope so, because I totally didn't get those references from the Horde towns.

I agree bud.

Hellfire Penn and Shadowmoon Valley are the better zones in Outland.

Followed by Nagrand, although a few of the quests probably could've been toned down a bit (*shakes fist at Nesingwary*).

Nagrand is my favorite of the zones in the expansion.  They could nuke the rest of them and I'd be just fine with it. 

None of them compare to the zones in the original game though.  Shame that.

There is a gnome town in Blades Edge that is basically the gnomish version of the Starship troopers firebase. It's awesome.

Complete with Bug Zerg attacking it  :heart:

-edit-

Town in question: http://www.wowwiki.com/Toshley's_Station

I'm pretty sure that's the town he was referring to in caps.

Goes to show, some people think it's great, some people don't.

I personally like Blade's Edge, but I don't have to deal with gnome towns either.  Or gnomes.  I think Thunderlord Stronghold and Mok'nathal village, along with the surrounding areas, give BEM a good atmosphere of savageness.  I guess gnomes could screw that up.  For that matter, gnomes screw everything up.

I'm a big fanboi of Nagrand too.  HFP and Zangarmarsh are speedbumps on the way to better zones, IMO.

I very much enjoyed the fact that one of the quest rewards from Toshley Station is a power converter.

And that Nagrand is one big Yes album cover is another big plus in my book.

I was very sad the day they nerfed my reploarised magneto sphere that I got from Toshley's Station :(

Personally, I liked Netherstorm and Zangarmarsh; they had a fairly novel feel to them, while the other places were "Like Durotar, BUT WITH DEMONS!  Er, different demons, rather... well, they give better loot, anyway..."  They don't fit in with the rest of the game, which is part of why I like them.  If you had a whole bunch of zones based around Netherstorm's motif or something, I'd probably like it less, but as it is, I think they're a fairly neat diversion.  Perhaps it's because I'm Horde, and have been questing through barren, rocky, demon-infested shitholes for most of my character's existance rather than magic purple spaceships like the Dranei, I don't know.

I love the skies in Outland.  They're beautiful.

Nagrand is my favorite zone, art-wise.

What killed it for me was the Dwarf hunter handing out quests to kill or collect 30 mobs or mob bits.  That shit stunk in Stranglethorn.

Personally I love Zangarmarsh.

Probably in part because of the engineering quest to make the mote-gathering thingy (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=23821).

But mostly because of Sporeggar.  They're soooooooooo cute. ^^

I'll throw another vote in for Nagrand. I'm going through it a second time at the moment and it's a decent zone - not too much, but not immersion breaking. I found Zangarmarsh hard to take right after Hellfire - "oh yeah, we know that 2 miles away the demons of the apocolypse are invading reality, but before we sort that out we need to make sure the mushrooms aren't rotting..." erm, what?

Overall though I don't think Outland is exceptional for it's environments or stories. I *do* like the loot...

You mean good ole Hemet?
(http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/community/comics/images/ss157.jpg)

It doesn't help that almost all of Burning Crusade takes place aboard a tiny asteroid flying through OUTER SPAAAAAAAAACE.

Actually, no.  Outland isn't even in normal space anymore, the destruction of Draenor pulled it mostly into the Twisting Nether.  Ever notice that when you fly out beyond the range of the land it says 'Twisting Nether' for your area?  It's in the Twisting Nether, the thing is it's kind of stationary (for the most part) and the destruction of Draenor made the planar barriers weak in that location.  That's why the Legion wants it - for Azeroth, but also because it's got portals to other worlds (Ner'zhul opened a whole buncha portals, and Illidan closed them when he arrived).

Personally, I think Outland could be a lot better, but it's relatively well designed.  And in gameplay terms, the quests and pacing of the zones are much better - there's a lot more quests in each place and less need to go all over the place to gather up your quests.

I guess I am just not as affected by the environment as most of you.  The zones were fine.  I didn't get turned away or hung up on anything in particular.  I enjoy Outland more for the pacing, quests, logical travelling, etc.  Compared to the original design of the old world from that perspective, Outland, hands-down, wins.

Most of the old world zones feel really dead and lifeless due to the distinct lack of questgivers and meaningful hubs. Outland I love outside of Zangarmarsh since that zone is really boring. Blade's Edge is almost as boring but I guess it's alright horde-side.

Netherstorm is kinda wacky but the wackiness ends if you go to Kirin'Var or Stormspire.

I guess I'm thinking about zones like Duskwood.  I loved the feel of that zone and hated to leave.  Sure, the quests weren't laid out great, but it had a real atmosphere to it.   I enjoy Nagrand, but the pseudo-scifi feel of much of outlands really ruins the whole fantasy feel for me.  Maybe I'm broken.

The biggest advantage to outlands is the short travel times. Even a flight across 4 zones only takes 5-6 minutes tops in outlands, whereas a flight across Ashenvale takes that long. I don't really think it is because the zones are that much smaller, as it is a case of better flight routing/faster flying transport. But man....flying to anywhere in the old world hurts nowdays.

I don't know why they haven't implemented teleporters.  DAoC did it and it made travel a breeze.  Yes, having long travel times does help players appreciate the grand scale of the gaming world... but after you've seen it all four times, I think they should give you at least a partial pass. 

I'll give you Duskwood.  That zone is particularly good to a point that I even noticed it.  It also had a nice string of quests that made sense.  The only issue I had with the quests was the back-and-forth you had to do multiple times from one end of the zone to the other.  That got old and was such a pure case of "This will slow them down."

You aren't broken.  We all like different things.

I think plopping teleporters everywhere collides with the WoW lore (demons REALLY want Outland because it gives them access to place they otherwise cannot go) and potentially generates angst within the Mage and Warlock userbase - who have to pay for their abilities, and anything that even partially duplicates those abilities is viewed as a watering down of the importance of the class - all bullshit, but folks love to get their panties bunched.

I'd love it if they'd just add (via quest, etc) the capability to get another/more heartstone(s) (which could be bound in a different location).

Have they said wether or not the flying mounts will work in Northrend?

Last word I heard was that they would, but not initially.  You'd have to wait awhile, because they don't want you able to skirt over lots of stuff right from the get go.  So we'll probably have to quest for a wing de-icer or something at 78 to get to fly. 

I was really hoping they'd just put a lot of lvl 70 mobs in the air that would agro on you and pop you from the sky.  Make their agro range drop quickly after 75, so by the time you get to 80 you can fly around without issue unless you fly right on top of them.  Better yet, make it a faction thing.  Once you are Revered they leave you alone?

Yes, because everyone loves faction grinding!

Personally I think engineers should be able to build more teleporters.  We pay far far more than the mages or warlocks....

A 1 use teleporter would be neat. But of course they would make it engineering only so we could never sell them.

Well, as it stands now, the only teleporters are Gnomish/Goblin only, so you HAVE to specialize to get them.  There's only one (per specialty) in all of Azeroth, and only one (per specialty) in all of Outlands.  It certainly wouldn't kill them to throw a bone to the engineers.  Then again, I also think that engineers should be able to build a land mount in addition to the new ROFLCOPTER for Outlands.  They certainly make the ingredients for the schematics enough of a pain in the ass as it is.  I had to grind in Silithus on earth elementals for-fucking-ever to get the four cores of earth necessary for the Gadgetzan teleporter.  And it's on a four hour cooldown, Gnomish engineer only, possibility of malfunction that could kill you.  Just give us more cities we can teleport to.

Goblin Cartel landing rights fees are expensive, Blizzard probably cannot afford them.

I'm not too overly keen on the High-Fantasy feel of Outlands either to be honest, but the next expansion is going back to Gothic Fantasy according to the devs. Gothic Fantasy architecture, monster design, armor design, and another the things the devs have said so far is that you'll be crossing grey moral lines a LOT more in Wrath of the Lich King. You already sort of do this in BC with Black Morass, but I think the general theme of WotLK is that everything you do is drawing you closer to being corrupted and used by Arthas.

Black morass is a grey moral area how exactly? While i understand the idea that stopping the origional orc invasion of azeroth by letting medhiv die would be cool, general principle of things just flat out says "dont fuck with the past".

That's one thing that bugs me about the whole Caverns of Time thing, and it looks like it's going to get a lot worse with the new Stratholme instance.  The whole "don't screw with the past" thing strikes me as awfully convenient morality.  I'm not sure what exactly the consequences of mucking around with the timeline are, but it seems awfully flimsy to justify the slaughter of innocents on the premise of "some dragon I don't know much about said it would be a good idea if I did this".  I find it very difficult to believe that a Blood Elf could be walking down the road in Old Hillsbrad, bump in to Kel'Thuzad, the guy whom the Scourge nuked the Sunwell to resurrect, and just shrug with "well, that ghost chick said something bad might happen, so I'd better be nice to him".

Hemet Nesingwary is an anagram of Ernest Hemingway, who wrote The Green Hills of Africa about his safari expedition mowing everything down for trophies (as the "great white hunter" type used to do in Africa). Pages of The Green Hills of Stranglethorn are one of the things he makes you collect in the old world. The amount of killing he makes you do, while a conveniently huge grind, is a dig at the hunting safari worldview.  :drill:

I'm not a big fan of the WoW expansion either. I got to 70, started the new raiding grind, and quit because it was longwinded and boring. The PvP is the shallow kind I'd rather do in TF2 or COD4, not the strategic MMO kind that brings change to the game world. I decided to skip it and try the next expansion.

This is probably true but very annoying, because it means people will be trying to skip over lots of stuff anyway so they can get back to flying.  Designing content for flight-capable people is harder.  However, having given us flight, the only thing that taking it away 'for a while' will do is be a needless annoyance and therefore an entire level range of content that people are going to want to skip through as fast as possible.

Of course, it's obvious the engine can handle fighting in 3-D, cause monsters like those pain in the ass birds in Skettis can hit us while we're flying.  So what they should do is just let us engage in combat while flying, and then they can design clever and interesting aerial combats.

I doubt people will skip 10 levels of content just because their fancy flying mounts won't work until then. Or at least the majority of the playing population won't. The kind of people who care about that enough to skip all the content are going to skip it anyway to get to the endgame.

In Stratholme you're basically going to be leveling the place to the ground beside a then thoroughly insane Arthas trying to catch Mal'Ganis. The whole Caverns of Time thing is about the most interesting subplot introduced in BC in my opinion since there's a bunch of oddness about it. It's not 100% certain that changing any of those events really dooms the entire world, the dragons just tell you that. There's a bunch of theories on WoWWiki but the one I like is that Medivh somehow has something to do with it. It's only based on a single quote by one of the BM bosses though, "The time has come to shatter this clockwork universe forever!" which is an odd phrase to use specifically since in ye old' Warcraft novel about him he despises the concept of a "clockwork universe."

Ahh, the Burning of Stratholme.

I have to disagree with you there.  I don't think Arthas was insane at the time he burned Stratholme. If I was Arthas, in his time and age (magical / medieval), I would have done exactly the same thing he did.

You are faced with a city, which you KNOW is infected with a virulent plague.  To top it off, the plague not only kills people black plague style, but it RE ANIMATES their corpses which then try to KILL YOU.  You have almost no way of knowing who is infected and who isn't, no time to wait for any kind of reinforcements because unless something is done REALLY soon, the whole city is pretty much guaranteed to be infected.

It isn't like he had many options.  I'm pretty sure he didn't have a large enough force to quarantine the whole city.  Besides which, quarantine wouldn't have achieved anything anyway, since if he DID quarantine the people inside, he was basicly condemning them to death and re-animation, leaving him then to deal with an entire city full of angry, hungry zombies to serve as an army for Mal'ganis.

He really only had one option: Put the whole town to the sword, and hope that would contain the plague and keep it from spreading.

The Warcraft version of "Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure".

Arthas isn't real, SurfD, it's just a shitty story.

Beziers, France.  circa 1200AD.

Yeah, I look at the burning of Stratholme as one in a long series of grisly events Arthas was confronted with that lead him down the dark path, so to speak.  He was forced to make more and more horrible decisions that further jaded him and increased his hatred to the point that he was easy to snag by the Lich King.  Very similar to the whole Star Wars dark side thing, but I still thought it was overall well done.

The funny part was how they equated logic with evil.

When I did that mission in WC3 I thought he was insane at that point from his dialog since he was pretty much "BLARG MUST KILL MAL'GANIS ARGH FUCK THE CIVILIANS" IIRC.

I just played it again over the weekend because I wanted to pick-up some of the lore I'd ignored the first time around.*  He was very cold about burning Strath, none of the "Blarg revenge!" stuff happened until AFTER he burned it and slaughtered everyone.  That's what he wanted revenge for, actually, and he blamed Mal'ganis for the entirety of it rather than any part of it on himself.

 He was treading a fine-line between passions and duty from the very beginning of the game.  Hints early on, of course, that he wasn't the best paladin ever and might get out of control if pushed the right way.  (Which is why the Lich King 'chose <him> before the scourge ever started.')  It was also why he made the decision to burn Strath so quickly, despite Uther and Jaina both saying, "woah, hold on a second there they can't ALL be infected, and there has to be a way to try and save the infected ones."

The insane bits came in Northrend when he was seeking only vengance. Burning the ships of his own men to keep them there, abandoning his men to fight the undead while he went to seek out Frostmourne, and then taking-up Frostmourne "No matter the cost" even after Muradin warned him the blade was cursed.

* Interestingly some of the map stuff has shifted around in WoW compared to WCIII.  Nothing huge, but there's a few keeps and cities I saw on the maps that were missing in WoW.  I can't remember them right now but it was enough to make me go, "huh, never heard of that place."

Arthas was quite insane (or poorly written) from the beginning.  He overreacted to everything.  I remember playing through WC3 and calling him a dumbass at every step.

His story was just a way to rationalize an utter twink.  I suppose it's slightly better than Illidan's, but both are pretty bad.

It was poorly-written.  Uther admonishes him on one or two of the first missions on the "don't get carried away by your passions" thing. He's good and sane, but willing to go too far in his pursuit of "the Light."

The whole thing with Arthas was that he wouldn't believe the prophet that fighting the Scourge wouldn't work. Arthas was too proud to admit they had to run away and regroup.

If a crazy old man came up to you, and told you that your only option in the face of the current crisis was to to abandon your people to their fate and bail on the ENTIRE CONTINENT, would you just blithely go along with him?  Especially if you are a holy paladin, charged with the protection of the people, AND the Kings Son, which makes your obligation to your people even that much MORE important?

If I live in a world where prophets come to me morphing out of crows and the dead are rising from the grave, you're damn well betting I'd at least hear the prophet out. Some wars aren't winnable, and you have to begin an evacuation rather than an assault. Even more to the point there were NUMEROUS chances in that game to take stock of what you are up against and realize you're lands are royally fucked if you don't get everyone out of there.

Except that both in RL, as well as virtual life, patches of dirt seem to really stir people up, to the point where they go to pretty ridiculous lengths to defend it.

Man, if there are ten people waiting for a train in Azeroth, probably four of them can turn into crows.  You gonna listen to them all when they take turns flying in your bedroom window at night telling you to do shit?

not to mention that the "prophet" (beacuse EVERYONE just takes you at your word as an infallible mystical prophet when you fly in and proclaim doom and destruction) also hit up, and was rejected by, men who were supposed to be far more wise and influential then the Paladin Prince.

Hell, im willing to bet that if the Prophet had appeared to Uther and told him "Save what you can (which wont be many) and abandon your homeland", Uther would have tried to shove his hammer up his ass.

Here follows the storyline of Warcraft I, from which all this other bullshit spawned:

Orcs vs Humans
You've got these orcs, see, and these humans. And they fight.

And fight and fight and fight.. and then, 16 years later.. the fuckers STILL won't be smart enough to not chase a single summoned skeleton that looks a lot like their pal  into that mass of archers and footmen on the other side of the bridge.

God damn I hate RT"S".

(and in a lot of ways I just realized how AB is similar to playing the AI in the warcraft games.)

Are you going to sit over the top of a city turning into undead and think, "Wow, what a great fucking choice I made! That prophet couldn't have been more wrong! This is going so well I'm actually touching myself while people die!"

Idiot. Even if you don't take full stock off the first point it should reflect in your mind as you wander the path into a holocaust. If you cross those lines with no reflection, you are fully lost before the battle even started.

I never even played WC3.  But it's fun to watch you get mad over Warcraft lore.  lol

Calling people an idiot simply because you don't agree with their interpretation of a videogame's moral compass is just a little petty, don't you think?

Probably, but I don't venture into politics so I like throwing it out there every now and then.

Is this conversation really happening or am I just bored and imagining it to amuse myself?

(http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m20/r3dknight/warcraftep3.jpg)

I feel like playing WoW all of a sudden!   :awesome_for_real:

Anyone want to do an argument over the morality of the Blood Elves?   :awesome_for_real:

I'm excited for the new WoW expansion too.  The screenshots look more like oldschool Warcraft style (Warhammerish).  The fire is prettier too.  I also read there will be cutscenes and such akin to Final Fantasy, to flesh the storyline.  You will hear Arthas talk to you, or he will appear before you, etc.  I'm hoping they fix shadow priests too. 

This rings so true that it made me sick to read it, here's hoping 2.4 fixes everything.

To all the people trying to apply real world morals, logic and whatever to the burning of Stratholme; what the fuck.

Let me lay it out like this:

1. You're walking around with a giant ass hammer, which you apparently can wave around like a toothpick while being enclad in enough armor to fill the Smithsonian. Not to mention, if beating people over the head with your giant ass hammer isn't enough, you can channel the holy power of your God to burn them to death. Said God doesn't seem to care so much what the hell you do with this power, since nothing is stopping you from using it to kill your friends and innocent subjects. Who cares though, you can shoot people with holy fire!

2. The hot chick walking beside you (who you have the hots for) also has the capacity to um... oh yeah, create really, really, REALLY devastating explosions at will. Like nuclear warhead style. She also isn't the only one. Hell there's an entire city where they train people in the art of using exceptionally devastating magic for the SOLE PURPOSE of killing people better.

3. People are walking around with the capacity to a) raise zombies from corpses and b) shoot some bolts of green stuff that kill you so that they can raise zombies from your corpse. These people don't seem to like you very much.

In that sort of situation, any rational human being would take the largest hammer he had, get as many explosion making blizzard casting bitches to follow him around and go save his own ass, exploding as much stuff as he deemed necessary along the way. I wouldn't give a fuck about some innocent citizens of some city being all like "don't smite me bro". If there was any chance that they could become infested ravenous zombies I'd blast them until there was nothing left. Anything short of that would just be stupid.

DII had it right: you take the biggest sword you can find and beat shit to death until it leaves you alone. And then you beat it some more, for good riddance.