Back in the year 2000, when most non-gamers thought of computers, they thought of the Millennium Bug. Or maybe the Dot Com Bust, which began in March of that year.
But for us gamers, the year 2000 was more well remembered for two games that released within a few months of each other, and because they both kind of fit into a similar game type their fates became intertwined: Diablo II and Baldur's Gate II.
Released on June 28th, 2000. From Wikipedia.
Released on September 21st, 2000. From Wikipedia (again).
The fact that the game that released first, Diablo II, was an Action RPG and that Baldur's Gate II was more of a "traditional" RPG was kind of lost in the discussions that followed, as the fans of the two games devolved into two separate camps as to which game was superior.
I know, the concept of both games being good was kind of lost on people --myself included-- as I found myself being the Baldur's Gate fanboy among my gamer friends at work.
And yes, I will freely admit that I was outnumbered in the arguments that followed. Part of that was simply because I lived with D&D for so long --and dealt with so much crap for it back in the 80s-- that a good, well-designed D&D game was always going to get my love. That what my friends loved the most about Diablo II, that you could use gems to customize your gear, wasn't why I played Baldur's Gate II. BG2 had story, the setting, a familiar system, and honest-to-god romance storylines in the game that blew me away. In an early prelude to my love-hate relationship with gear in MMOs, my friends' preoccupation with gear wasn't what drove me to play either of these games.*
***
The irony is that here, in 2023, we're back to the Diablo vs. Baldur's Gate arguments with the releases of Diablo IV and Baldur's Gate III within a few months of each other.
Just like before, D4 released first, on June 5th, 2023. From Wikipedia.
And BG3 followed suit later, on August 3rd, 2023. Can you guess? Yes, it's from Wikipedia.
One thing is certain: I won't be playing either game any time soon. I've got other games to play, and once I settled all of my bills for the month, I had other spending priorities in mind.
I mean, I'm sure both games are nice enough, and they likely scratch the itch of their respective fanbases, but at this stage in my life I can afford to wait.
That being said, if people want to make arguments here, go for it. Just play nice. It's been quite a while since I've had to wield the ban hammer on someone other than a spammer.
#Blaugust2023
*Although having also played a Paladin in my early D&D days, I'll freely admit that Bioware adding Carsomyr, an actual Holy Avenger, to the game was highly inspirational. No, I didn't play a Paladin in BG2, but my heart soared knowing it was out there.
One thing about Classic --and Classic Era/Vanilla Classic in particular-- is that you can simply grind out a level or two whenever you feel like it.
By that, I mean that you can simply run about and kill monsters until you level; no quests required.
Sometimes that "grinding out a level" is a side effect of doing something else in the game, and in my particular case that's because I've been grinding out materials I need for leveling professions: cloth of various forms and some magic items I can disenchant for their basic components.
This system has worked for me, keeping Era Cardwyn in relevant gear as she went up in levels, but when I looked back on the previous month I realized that of the last ten levels she gained she got most of that experience through the grinding process than anything else.
Unlike, say, Retail WoW, the crafting professions provide viable gear that remain useful throughout the entire leveling process. Are you a Frost Mage? A Fire Mage? Guess what? You can get the majority of your useful gear through simply making it yourself rather than having to constantly run dungeons. That doesn't mean that you can skip running dungeons at all, because there are still really good gear pieces in there, but you'll find that if you don't get the drops you want off of the bosses, your "back up" gear courtesy of the crafting professions will work nearly as well.
And a nice thing about working on crafting professions is that you can plan ahead more easily because you might get the recipe early enough that you can start working on what you need beforehand.
Like what Era Card is doing right now, which is killing demons --always a noble concept-- for Felcloth. Card can turn that Felcloth into Mooncloth, and then subsequently make a Robe of the Archmage, which is a Mage's best non-raid chest piece.
Little things like that are why I enjoy hanging around in Classic Era, because when I went back to Wrath Classic I found that the crafting professions I prefer aren't nearly as useful. With Tailoring, you can make bags and the odd item, but being useful for the leveling process? Eh, not really. Some of that is the focus of the game, where it shifted away from being a world that you inhabit and more toward the raiding process to finish the story, and some of that is the developers' better understanding of what works and what doesn't, so they increasingly put the majority of what works behind dungeons and raids. And if what a crafting profession did supported the raids, it got the lion's share of attention. Otherwise... Not much.
I'm happy to keep plodding along, however. It's stress-free playing, and I'm all for that.
If there's one thing that brings out the "old man yelling at cloud" meme, it's the people who rush to the end in a game.
Unless the game you're playing is predicated on a timer to win, what's the point?
Like oh, say, THIS one. From Hasbro, which is also the owner of Wizards of the Coast, ironically enough.
Sure, in a video game there are your share of DPS races that you have to go fast for if you want to win a game, but I'm talking about a methodology about approaching the game itself. And unlike a methodology of following the current metagame, which can encourage skips and bypasses and speed running*, I'm talking about injecting speed into a game that wasn't built around it.
Obviously it's diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, but when I first encountered this phenomenon early in WoW's Cataclysm expansion, there were all of these players who rushed to the end and then spent their time in Stormwind or Orgrimmar complaining that they were bored.
Pick a Feral Druid, any Feral Druid...
"I'm bored" is now a tired old meme, but back then in 2010 that was my first encounter with it, and I was thrown for a loop.
I still am, honestly.
If you're bored in an MMO, go play something else. Nobody put a gun to your head and told you to try to go as fast as you could in a game to finish it as quickly as possible. And from my perspective, "the internet told you to do it" is the 2023 version of "the Devil made me do it". To which my response is "What a load of horsecrap."
And that's coming from someone who had an email address back in the 1980s. I may be a grumpy old man, but I'm a grumpy old man whose internet activity from the mid 1990s can still be found online today.**
Hey, if you enjoy speed running, great. Go for it. But don't expect any sympathy from me if you chew through a game and ingest all the content and then complain there's nothing to do.
#Blaugust2023
*Or even the entire concept of Mythic and Mythic Plus, which in Retail WoW is based upon how fast you can finish an instance while still accomplishing certain tasks; essentially a video game version of Perfection while hyped up on meth.
**You have to do some hunting, but it's still there.
One thing that always bugged me about some long running MMOs, such as WoW, is the underestimation by the game creators for the impact of war on society.
If you've played WoW long enough, you know the basics of some aspects of the game: 90% of the Blood Elves were wiped out by Arthas' invasion of Quel'thas, and a similar number of Draenei were killed in Outland by the Legion-enhanced Orcs.* Even not taking into account the Forsaken, many of the human kingdoms of the North were wiped out by a combination of the Second War and the Plague/Third War. And that doesn't even take into account the impact of years of fighting the various Troll tribes, the persecution of the Tauren by the Centaur, and that the current Horde --centered around the Frostwolf Clan-- is but a small fraction of the Orcs.
All of this constant fighting does add up over time.
As I'd mentioned back when I was examining the timeline for the pre-WoW Azeroth, this constant state of war is akin to the Thirty Years' War, when entire regions of Europe were depopulated. And believe me, when Blizzard tosses about "90% of the Blood Elves/Draenei were killed", we're talking depopulation.
So where is the population to continue the "war" part of World of Warcraft coming from?
***
I'm pretty sure I know how sex and child rearing work --I can at least claim some experience in this area-- so I know how long it takes for you to first have kids and then get them to adulthood. When you factor in the differences between modern society and, say, a part-steampunk part-high fantasy world, you're still going to have to wait an average of about 15-16 years between generations. And really, you need a time of (relative) peace in order for populations to even start to rebound.
So when I saw the video by Michael "Belluar" Bell about some suppositions about how Retail WoW in the Lordaeron areas could pan out, I was... skeptical, to say the least.
The suppositions, among them the return of the Scarlets from Northrend and who will the Humans in the Plaguelands support raise an eyebrow to begin with, but when Michael starts talking about the Blood Elves from Quel'thalas marching south (starting roughly at 19:30) into Lordaeron, my first reaction is "Oh? Exactly what army is freaking left for them to do that?"
I mean, has anybody been paying attention to all of the death and attrition since WoW was created?
For historical precedent, look at Henry V's campaign into France that ended at the Battle of Agincourt.** Henry has roughly 12,000 men with him when he began the campaign, and lost at least a quarter of them besieging Harfleur. As the campaign came to a head at Agincourt, Henry's army of roughly 8000 was confronted by a French army that outnumbered him by anywhere from 2:1 to 5:1. (Accounts vary, and at least Encyclopedia Britannica acknowledges that.)
The thing to remember here is that neither England nor France had standing armies, so they had to levy their armies every time they wanted to fight. That means any leader wanting to fight would be drawing from the populace that would ordinarily be the engine of your economy and the heart of your people. If you fight long enough, you stunt the growth of both through attrition.
Now, take those population and army numbers and slash them by 90%, which is what happened to the Blood Elves and Draenei. (And likely any Humans still left in the North.) That's far more than what the Black Death did in Europe, mind you, although in spots entire villages were wiped out by the Plague.
The thing is, constant warfare is a net drain on your population. You need periods of peace to rebuild and your population to recover. And really, a few years here and there ain't gonna cut it. So call me skeptical when I hear about all these grand campaigns that Blizz has prepared for Azeroth. Unless you want Azeroth to turn into the equivalent of Easter Island, that is.
#Blaugust2023
*Obviously, these percentages have no impact on toon population, given the popularity of both races in-game.
**For reference, The UK's National Archives article on it is similar in numbers to what I'd found at other places.
Here’s an interesting thought exercise: is a game world obligated to have everything solved?
That’s probably not the best way of putting it, but I’m thinking of scenarios in a game world where the development staff knows the answer, but isn’t obligated to provide an explanation to the player.*
I was thinking of this when I began running into the “Beloved of Elune?” questlines in WoW Classic Era (or pre-Wrath WoW, your choice.)
If you’re like me, I don’t often run into the conclusion of this particular questline, because it begins somewhere in the L40s and ends when your toon is close to the L60 level cap. To be honest, I have absolutely no clue whether this quest chain was ever modified/followed-up-on in the post-Cataclysm reworking of the Old World, and to be perfectly honest I don’t think I’d like to know. Like a lot of quests in the post-Cataclysm reworking of Azeroth, so little is left to the player’s imagination** that I don’t think it’d be worth it to find out.
The brief synopsis is this: there’s a curious Kaldorei in Rutheran Village who has heard a rumor that the Wildkin (aka the “owlbears” or “boomkin”) in Azeroth are actually Elune’s favored creatures, and he sends you to a few distant locales to collect Wildkin feathers looking for evidence of the same. NOTE: If you’re like me, you automatically think “Oh, kill them and take their feathers”, but no, you’re supposed to pick the feathers off the ground.*** Anyway, the end of the questline takes you to Winterspring, where you end up on an escort quest up into the mountains where you get some exposition as to the 'why' behind the Wildkin. (Of course, in traditional WoW fashion, you return to the person who started you on this questline, who says “Wow! This is so cool! Go tell the Archdruid!” who then tells you “We knew all this, now stop bothering me.” FWIW, Azshandra HATES that asshole Staghelm with a passion.)
In case you're wondering, this particular screenshot dates from when I leveled my Draenei Shaman right when TBC Classic launched. I pulled Card out of the garage to help one of the leveling shamans complete the quest. And before you ask, that person stopped playing shortly after reaching Outland, another casualty of the meta.
It’s a nice questline, and it tells you a bit about the world, but are all the secrets of Azeroth expected to end with an exposition like this? And more importantly, should they end all tied up in a bow like that?
In my opinion, the answer is 'no'.
If everything were able to be 'solved' or 'explained away' as part of the game, what does that say about the game? That there is no mystery to anything? That the development staff expect you to find everything, and that all game mysteries are supposed to be solved?
I personally believe that mindset reflects the expectation that everything about a topic can be known, when in real life that is not the case.
Okay, let me back up here a moment.
Not the greatest resolution, but this old
PBS Nova episode from 2000 will do.
I’m not talking about whether we can solve topics such as how to build a trebuchet, because there’s enough evidence and practical engineering involved from original sources that we can figure this sort of thing out, but whether we can solve topics such as why NPCs do what they do, or more existential questions such as “solving the afterlife” in a game.
And yes, that last one is a direct poke in the eye at the WoW devs for their Shadowlands expansion.
Maybe it’s the hubris involved in real life that’s a factor here because enough people around the globe seem to absolutely know what happens after death. Frequently those beliefs can be contradictory, so not everybody can be correct about this. But hey, that never stopped people from believing what they want to believe, but in a game world that assuredness (or hubris) translates into certainty about how the afterlife must operate.
Or why wildkin are the way they are.
Or why the Old Gods do what they do.
I mean, the hard baseline of the existential horror behind HP Lovecraft’s vision of what Blizzard used as a template for the Old Gods was simple: Cthulhu and Company’s motivations were unknowable and that attempting to understand them would drive you insane.
“Watch out for the crazy Elf lady” is a byline that anybody who remembers questing in OG Silithus in Vanilla WoW (or Classic WoW) should be all you need to know about the Old Gods. If anything, that particular questline still exposed more than necessary, but looking at it in hindsight the crazy elf lady questline struck a better cadence in terms of what was unknowable versus the exposition of the wildkin questline.
But still, people want to know everything about a game world, and for a subset of the same the concept of not figuring everything out can drive them nuts.
Well, welcome to the real world.
#Blaugust2023
*Or the Player Characters in a pencil and paper RPG.
**In a relative sense, of course. You might not have all the answers from a particular quest chain, but if you perform a similar quest chain on the other faction's side, you'll figure things out between the combination of the two. I'm looking at you, Worgen questlines in Silverpine Forest.
***Free hint: if you’re like me and have trouble seeing the feathers with your graphics, you may have to dial your graphics settings back to what they would have been in Vanilla WoW to see the feathers easily. Kind of sucks gaming the system like this, but if you don’t want to look like an idiot with your questing buddy trying to find feathers when they are jumping up and down on top of them –not that I’d know anything about this-- you’ll want to do this.
