Yesterday, I thought I'd login to Retail just to look around a bit.
I wasn't planning on doing much of anything, just wandering around Stormwind and Elwynn, just to see how things looked. There's been a lot of times in Classic when I'd drop into Goldshire as Cardwyn and wander around for a bit, soaking up the scenery and checking out the sights. After all, Darkmoon Faire is in Elwynn on Myzrael this week, so it just feels good to get a glimpse of some of what the Goldshire Harvest Festival might have looked like.
The toon I found was a lowbie Paladin that I'd created and really not done much with, so he was pretty much perfect for the area.* He was still in Stormwind, and as I logged in he was at what was my favorite spot, right under the tree where --in Classic, anyway-- it's right next to the Auction House.
So I ran down from Stormwind, eschewing the flight path, because... come on. Using the flight path to Goldshire from Stormwind is like watching one of our newish neighbors zip around the neighborhood on their golf cart; if you can't handle walking around the neighborhood, maybe you've got bigger problems.**
But as I approached Goldshire, I noticed that things were, well, off.
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| Let's see if you can spot the motorcycle, the dinosaur, the celestial mounts, the flying mounts, and the pack horse type oversized riding mount. There was also a spider-ish mount that skittered away when I took the screenshot. |
I just kind of looked around and thought, "Well, there goes my immersion."
All I could think of as I took it all in was this video:
More specifically, the 1:39 mark.
Well, at least it's not TERA.
*I think; with the level squish I'm never quite sure as I haven't internalized it yet.
**Last night while I was doing yard work, I saw one of the 20-something adult men popping wheelies on a mini-bike --and smoking like a chimney-- while the golf cart trailed behind with 4 40-ish women on it, all of whom (including the driver) with alcoholic drinks in their hand. You couldn't get much more stereotypically white trash if you'd tried; the only things missing were the cranked up Country music blaring from speakers and the occasional "yee haw!" out of them, not to mention having political bumper stickers on the golf cart.
EtA: Apparently I accidentally removed "this week" about Darkmoon Faire. Fixed.
There's a post waiting to be written about immersion (yes, another one) using that screenshot as a lead-in. Are those mounts really immersion-breaking or are they entirely appropriate for the world in which they appear? If you brought someone from the 19th century into 2022 and plonked them down in their own city or town, would they find what they saw fantastical and exaggerated? Perhaps Azerothian society, culture and technology changes over time just as ours does. Is expecting it to remain in a permanent high-medieaval/renaissance stasis either realistic or practical?
ReplyDeleteI'll add it to the ideas file.
Well, here's a question I have: wouldn't you expect other aspects of the world to change in response? If that were the case, that the world wouldn't remain the same, wouldn't what would be considered the "background" --the houses, inns, craft buildings, etc-- to have changed as well? I think that's where the immersion breaking truly happens, where you drop a "motorcycle" in the game and don't expect the houses and especially the roads to remain the same.
DeleteAre bears and Netherdrakes any better though?
ReplyDeleteI was actually wondering about that too. Before Cata, a lot of the most immersion breaking mounts were all of the flying variety, so you never saw them in the Old World. It was always somewhere else.
DeleteStill, with the Warbear, the Qiraji mounts, the Raven mount from Auchindoun, the Sparkle Pony, and others, there were plenty of immersion breaking mounts found in the Old World already. It's just that in Cata the fantastical and futuristic (or the modern) became commonplace without a reciprocal change to the surrounding area. Pretty much everything changed in game except the background itself.
I am not condoning you not condoning people doing wheelies. It's a skill that needs practice and really useful for certain leisure activities :P But yeah, I wouldn't do it on the street.
ReplyDeleteAlso now that I think of it, I'm not sure I've ever seen a golf cart in person in my life.
Oh, I'm not complaining about the wheelies themselves, it's how it was done. Our neighborhood has some hills to it, so you can't see over certain parts, but this guy was going down the middle of the street, maintaining a wheelie for about 20-30 seconds until he went over the hill and I couldn't see him, one hand on the handlebars and another holding a cigarette and taking puffs from it. Oh, and he was also shirtless and unnaturally skinny with sunken eyes, yet he had that arrogant look in his eyes, like something you'd see out of r/iamverybadass.
DeleteIf you've not seen a golf cart outside of a golf course, you're not missing much. I do wonder how they can be considered "street legal" given their maximum speed is --maybe-- 10 MPH at best. For a long time, the only place you'd see them out in the wild would be at a Senior living community, where they'd be used instead of walking or using a sit down vehicle (like that found in grocery stores) to get around. Sometime in the last 15 years or so they've started showing up at trailer parks and campgrounds where people would park their campers for a couple of months at a time, and it kind of became associated with the trailer park scene. One of those dealers moving into a storefront in your neighborhood has the same impact that a same day payday loan place opening up does: it attracts a very specific type of customer. Just like a grocery store putting in a Tesla charging station does.