A (Futile?) Endeavour

In my last post about first impressions of the Midnight pre-patch, I mentioned checking out endeavours and being disappointed that they seemed to consist of nothing but two new daily quests in the town centre. I wanted to write a follow-up since I've found that there is more to them than that, but they are messed up in an entirely different way.

First off, I learned that several endeavours are live at the same time, but your neighbourhood has to pick one (if it's managed) or gets one assigned randomly (if it's public). Mine was assigned the dracthyr (with a portal to the Forbidden Reach), but there are also ethereals (with a portal to Netherstorm), grummels (Kun-Lai Summit), mechagnomes (Mechagon) and niffen (Zeralek Cavern).

There is an endeavours tab in the housing window now, which shows you a bar to progress and activities to do so, similar to the Traveler's Log. Unfortunately the UI is not very intuitive. Still, once I understood the assignment, I travelled to the Forbidden Reach (now scaled to level 80) and went at it like it was 2023 again: chasing rares, mining Dragonflight ore, opening Zkera vault doors. Since the indicators on the UI weren't very clear, it took me a bit to figure out that the game discourages you from doing the same task over and over as there are diminishing returns on each completion, which is something that sounds sensible in theory but in practice there already aren't that many tasks to begin with, meaning you can quickly run out of things that give points.

Worse, a single person's progress is basically not even measurable. The overall endeavour progress gives you no details about how many "points" you need or have earned, it just has those milestones dividing the bar into quarters, and all my efforts seemed to do virtually nothing. There's also an activity tracker to show you who else has been working on the endeavour in your neighbourhood, and over the past day it's all been me. Before that I saw a few people getting credit for "killing a raid boss" or "doing a delve", which were probably not done specifically for the neighbourhood, and maybe one or two names actually doing things in the neighbourhood or in the Forbidden Reach. I'm guessing the complete lack of visible progress put them off after a while though.

Apparently the progression bar is supposed to have some sort of dynamic scaling, as people in small guilds were able to fill up the whole bar in a matter of days, but if you're in a public neighbourhood where most people don't really care about endeavours and only put down a house because the UI kept nagging them about it, it seems you're just out of luck. Five days into the forty-day endeavour, I reckon we've achieved less than five percent progress. If we wanted to hit the final reward in time for the end, we'd need to be at least halfway towards the first milestone already (12.5%?).

I'm not that bothered because I'm currently not that invested in this housing system anyway, but it's still a shame that the devs have been so far off the mark on this one. I'm sure the numbers will be adjusted eventually, but the whole thing just feels badly thought out. They wanted neighbourhoods to be a thing "for the social aspect" and gave us endeavours as something to work on together, but there isn't even a way to properly communicate with the people in your public neighbourhood.

So far, endeavours have only managed to make me feel more lonely in retail WoW than I've felt in a long time. It seems to be commonly agreed that retail is not good at fostering cooperation and community spirit, but it does generally feel lively enough to me. Dornogal is always busy, and I always see people out and about in the world, whether they are gathering, doing world quests or what have you. However, being the sole person in a public neighbourhood who's trying to progress the endeavour on their own while achieving absolutely nothing is a decidedly isolating experience. If they want this to be viable for public neighbourhoods with mixed engagement levels, they'll have to do a lot more than just tweak the numbers.

Midnight Pre-Patch Impressions

The Midnight pre-patch landed this week, and I feel like I approach this kind of update with more and more trepidation as time goes by. Where I used to be excited to see what's new, now I just sigh. Oh, all my alts' talents are reset again? Addons stopped working again? These changes always just seem to mean more and more chores.

That said, the addon situation actually wasn't that bad. For all the talk about the "addon apocalypse", I was pleasantly unaffected as someone who never used many combat addons to begin with, and the few utility addons I do have all had updated versions available for once (I think because Blizz disabled the "use out-of date addons" option for this patch from what I read, which forced all the addon creators to get a move on). It's rare that all my addons have been this up to date all at once!

The warband screen was simultaneously an amusing and horrifying surprise. I knew that part of the pre-patch was a revamp of the transmog system, but what I didn't anticipate was that this was going to strip all my characters of their current transmogs, which made the lot of them look like hideous clowns.

I kid you not, the random shaman alt that I last played through Burning Crusade Chromie Time and who hadn't mogged any of her gear actually looked the best of the lot. We used to make fun of the BC "clown suits" but at least everything you got back then still looked like armour, even if it was easy to end up with a lot of mismatched colours. In modern WoW, so many of the armour sets are these ridiculous fortresses of spires and wings and god knows what, they often look awkward enough when you wear the full set, never mind jumbling pieces from different ones together. Basically, this experience taught me that modern WoW needs trangsmog or we'd all look unbearably hideous.

My little BC-levelling shaman actually looking pretty good. 

So I logged into my warrior with the intent to get her good looks back and immediately hit a snag. Over the course of War Within, my six-year-old PC has increasingly started to struggle with retail WoW, with the most common symptom being the game freezing up and the screen temporarily going black for a second or two, before assets start to slowly load back in one by one. Most frequently this happened after hearthing to Dornogal or - you might have guessed it - when I opened the transmog window.

I was hoping that the revamp would result in a more streamlined UI that would perhaps be easier on my machine, but the opposite was the case: now the game actually crashed entirely whenever I tried to open the transmog interface. Fortunately I wasn't the only one who's been struggling with variations of this problem for a while, so Google led me to a variety of tips that were supposed to help: changing from DirectX 12 back to 11, adding an additional command line argument to my Battle.net launcher for whenever I start WoW, marking my WoW folder as "do not index" in Windows... in the end I'm not sure what eventually did the trick, or maybe each step helped a little, but I eventually got the game back into a playable state. It still chugs and struggles with the transmog window, but at least it no longer crashes and I was able to update some looks. Going through all my dozens of alts will be a lot of work though...

Wanting to distract myself from the impending chores, I decided to revisit the random neighbourhood where I had plopped down my house a few weeks ago. It was interesting to have a bit of a look around and see what my neighbours had been up to in their yards. One guy's house was floating high in the air, something I'd only read about previously.

Endeavours were also supposed to finally be live, one of the housing-related features that had initially intrigued me. So I visited the town square and two dracthyr gave me one daily quest each, one to help with smelting some ore via a short mini game, and one to pick up some vegetables from a nearby farm. That was it. I got two pieces of some new currency that I didn't know anything about but which I guess will probably be good for buying decorations. I honestly expected a lot more out of this feature. Something to make us actually leave the neighbourhood and then come back.

Anyway, Midnight is coming. I'd like to write up some thoughts about that in the next few weeks, as well as a little War Within retrospective.

Living in the Moment

One thing I personally find kind of off-putting about the wider retail WoW community is how a large chunk of it seems to spend more time looking forward to the next thing than actually engaging with the current content. Where the Classic community sometimes gets bogged down by nostalgia and wishing they could play the game again like it's 2006, retail content creators often strike me as the opposite, always laser-focused on what the next patch will bring, seemingly in a race to be the first to report on what's new, and by the time it actually goes live, they've already moved on again.

I've been finding it particularly noticeable recently because while we don't have a launch date for Midnight yet, I'd say the expansion is definitely still at least three months away (probably more) but I swear anything WoW-related in my feeds that's not about Classic has been about seemingly nothing else for months already. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pretend that I'm not at all curious about what the expansion will bring, but I don't want to hear about every time an NPC passes wind in the Midnight beta either. I like having a vague idea of what's to come, plus maybe a couple of more specific things to look forward to, but primarily I want to see things for myself once the expansion launches! The other day a weird headline popped up in my reddit recommendations and all I could think was: "That sounds like it must be alluding to some major story spoiler or something; I think I'll just scroll past as fast as I can." At times, it can feel like navigating a minefield.

It doesn't help that a lot of the expansion discourse I have seen has been extremely tedious as well. To give an example, as a more casual player who uses minimal addons, I really don't think the removal of combat addons is that big a deal. There are millions of us already playing that way just fine! It's obviously going to lead to some changes, but if this game is good at anything it's constantly changing things around, so hey, it's another day ending in y. Another example would be people getting extremely up in arms about Blizzard being open about wanting to monetise housing the way pretty much every other MMO with housing monetises it. I can understand feeling a degree of disappointment if you were hoping for something better/more generous, but let's not pretend that anything they've announced is hugely surprising if you know anything at all about how housing works in other MMOs.

Meanwhile, I'm finding it weirdly challenging to find people talking about things going on in the game right now. I'd like to hear how other people are experiencing Legion Remix for example! Or if you're not playing Lemix, what are you doing? I've picked up running a few delves a week on alts again and it's wild how absurdly buggy they've been for many weeks now (in a way that actually benefits players too). Brann has become stupidly OP as one of his abilities can one-shot an entire group on tier 11, and several of the delve-specific abilities have become similarly overtuned to a ridiculous degree, such as the phase cutter ability in Archival Assault or the footbomb dispenser you can get from treasures.

At first I shrugged it off as "haha, patch day, right" but it's been literally weeks now and I'm finding it weird how nobody seems to be talking about it. Are we just keeping quiet in hopes that Blizzard doesn't notice? I would have expected their "fun detected" sensors to go off pretty much instantly, and I keep thinking that surely they must at least be aware of this bug and have it their backlog somewhere. Are they just too busy with Midnight and Legion Remix to care about things being wonky in the mainline game, where it's presumably a bit more quiet at the moment?

The funny thing is that it's only because of this bug that I've actually started doing delves on my healers again - I'd previously stopped because while they were doable, they were just too slow and tedious. With Brann one-shotting things occasionally (not all the time, but frequently enough), the pace actually feels much better and fun. I now kind of dread Blizzard actually fixing the bug and taking that away again. With how long they've left it in the game at this point, I honestly hope they just leave it in for what remains of the expansion as well. When Midnight arrives with its gear reset, it's going to be enough of a slog to get geared up and powerful again anyway.

The Midnight Expansion Reveal

I'm glad I didn't try to watch the Midnight expansion reveal live, because from the sounds of it they abused WoW's popularity to the maximum possible extent this time - which is to say, they knew that people were primarily watching for WoW, so they crammed in two hours of Call of Duty ads and the like beforehand to keep everyone online.

I did hop over to the official WoW YouTube channel later to watch the announcement videos and... huh.

Back when the Worldsoul Saga was first announced, I wrote the following: "I applaud their long-term thinking for planning the next three expansions in advance, but to be honest I'm not sure it was a good idea to reveal all this to the public, as by doing so, they've basically spoiled their big BlizzCon reveals for the next several years."

I think the Midnight reveal has proved my theory correct in so far as I've never seen so many people react with a kind of "meh" attitude to a new expansion announcement. There are always those who'll love it no matter what and will be hyped, and there'll always be those who hate everything Blizzard does no matter what. But those in the middle can be swayed either way, and I've never seen this much apathy from the masses before.

There are probably a number of different reasons for that, but I reckon the fact that everyone already knew roughly what was coming must have been a major contributor. "It's gonna be about the void and about elves, something something Silvermoon." So when the trailer showed us elves fighting to defend Silvermoon against the void, that was at best exactly what everyone expected, and at worst a bit of a let-down in the sense that people wanted more (as MMO players always do the moment you tell them about anything).

There was something else about the trailer though. I liked it well enough, but something felt ever so slightly "off".

At first, I thought it was just the fact that Liadrin had been given a new haircut. Seriously, the first thing I did after watching the cinematic for the first time was google pictures of Liadrin's current player model, because I kept thinking "She didn't always have a tight braid, did she?" - and no, she did indeed not; they are giving her a new haircut for Midnight which will be reflected on her in-game model as well.

However, when looking around to find out whether anyone else had the same reaction, I actually found a lot of complaints about the trailer's visuals, which I believe is a first. In the past, even if players hated a trailer for what it conveyed, it was pretty much universally agreed that it was still impeccably animated at least. Not with this one! I don't think all the criticisms are necessarily equally valid, but let's just say that after people pointed out that Liadrin in this looks more like the Elven Hero from Elder Scrolls Online or Tauriel from the Hobbit movies than a Warcraft elf, I haven't been able to unsee that.

After comparing to the Battle for Azeroth trailer (which does feature a similar situation including a city siege), I also found it noticeable how many unique characters were featured in the BfA cinematic - while Sylvanas and Anduin are the focus, we also get shots of Saurfang, Zekhan and Greymane, as well as a number of different "generic units", from undead archers to dwarven riflemen. In the Midnight trailer, we have exactly three focus characters and everyone else is an indistinguishable melee soldier covered from head to toe in armour like they are a bunch of stormtroopers, which I hadn't really picked out before.

I think the biggest thing though is that the pacing/scripting feels slightly off and fails to reach a proper climax. I'd say it's fine for most of the cinematic actually, but when Liadrin returns with the help from the Sunwell it ends too quickly without letting us fully feel the triumph, while also just getting plain confusing because the help are also just a bunch of armoured mooks. I've looked around online and even the most passionate lore nerds are unsure of who these are actually supposed to be (though there are seemingly a million theories, from Guardians of the Ancient Kings to the Army of Light to the Arathi to representations of us, the players).

The gameplay reveals suffered from a similar mix of "well, we knew that was coming" and muddled messaging. Yes, housing is a big deal, but we've known about that for almost a year, and there's been a constant drip-feed of more details since then. You can't expect people to suddenly gasp and be super-excited about hearing the exact same thing again.

I also used to think it was kind of funny how they'd include things like "level cap increase" or "new dungeons" as major expansion features to be excited about, but this time they didn't and it was actually kind of confusing. I saw people ask questions like "Will there actually be a level increase this time?" (yes) and only later found out all kinds of interesting stuff that they didn't actually put into the features trailer, such as that Valeera Sanguinar will be the new delve companion or the major changes coming to transmog (huge!).

My personal takeaway is simply that Midnight will continue the War Within, which was kind of what we knew was going to happen. I'll be happy to buy it because I'm enjoying my time in retail right now, but I'm not sure it really delivered in the hype department the way these expansion announcements are usually expected to.

K'aresh and the Story of the War Within

Patch 11.2 arrived about one and a half weeks ago, and with it the final major story update for the War Within. That still feels weird to think about, considering the Midnight expansion announcement is still a few days away. I mean, we know that there'll be plenty of content to tide us over until 12.0, from Legion Remix to the release of housing, but it still seems odd for the War Within to just kind of end where we are now.

K'aresh is a nice enough zone. It recycles the city of Tazavesh from Shadowlands, which I don't have any particularly strong feelings about as I only ever did the associated dungeon one or two times. The wider zone with its purple tinge, floating rocks and eco-domes is strongly inspired by Netherstorm, which makes sense and is another thing I'm quite happy with. The large areas of desert and packs of devourer mobs also recall Shadowlands and Zereth Mortis for me, and look, I know everyone loves to hate on Shadowlands but Zereth Mortis was a great zone and I don't mind being reminded of it either.

I also liked the storyline well enough (I have yet to kill Dimensius and see what comes afterwards). I wasn't a fan of Xal'atath constantly crooning at me that I was her champion (though this meme on reddit made me chuckle) but the return of Ve'nari's sass gave me life and was good for some genuine laughs. (When she ended that one quest with "Now get some stygia... I joke.") However, I'm also left with a certain feeling of "Why are we here?".

I'm not saying there's no connection at all between the War Within's patches, obviously Alleria chasing Xal'atath has been a through line. But should it have been? The hook at the start of this expansion was that Thrall, Anduin and other important characters were hearing the call of Azeroth's world soul, and that something was seemingly wrong down there. We descended deep into the earth, learned about the earthen and world soul "shards" like Beledar. We met the Haranir, who also seemed to have a connection to Azeroth itself and were worried about corrupting influences. Undermine was admittedly always going to be a bit of a mid-expansion side quest, but it wasn't so far off that we couldn't have pivoted back to focusing on the world soul after that. Dataminers have reported that there was a planned zone called the "Rootlands", presumably under Azj-Kahet, which would have made sense as a final destination for us to find out just what is going on inside Azeroth.

However, instead we chased Xal'atath to K'aresh because suddenly it's all about the return of Dimensius the All-Devouring and the call of Azeroth's world soul seems all but forgotten. Now, considering that War Within and the next two expansions are meant to form "The Worldsoul Saga", we're probably not all done with world soul business, and I really hope that we'll get back to it - but right now, this doesn't feel like the first part of a trilogy but rather like something that was meant to be a stand-alone expansion and was cut off at the knees at the last moment to pivot towards a completely different plot.

Now, this does kind of mesh with how Chris Metzen said that large chunks of War Within were already done when he rejoined the team and had to be somewhat retooled to fit the new Worldsoul Saga narrative. He also indicated that he almost expected people to possibly feel a bit unsatisfied with War Within on its own, while promising that it would all pay off later.

I really, really hope that he is right, because at the moment I can't say that I'm really sold on this story. It's one thing for part one of a trilogy to have a bit of an open ending hinting at bigger thing to come. At the end of Fellowship of the Ring, we know that we're not done, but we do know where we're going and have been witness to some pretty exciting adventures relating to that.

The War Within has not given me that vibe. I know that the next expansion will be about elves and the void only because Chris Metzen said so, not because the War Within has really built either of those subjects up to be a major theme (until the sudden pivot with this patch that is). It's just been very focused on Alleria and Xal'atath as characters, and to be honest I kind of feel like that's been a mistake. You may blame part of that on my general dislike of Xal'atath, but I have no issues with Alleria - it's just that I don't think you can place something like a WoW expansion on the shoulders of two NPCs. Their personal struggles can be part of the larger story, sure, but I don't think they're strong enough to form the framework that's supposed to hold everything up.

I enjoy hearing tales about the adventures of different denizens of Azeroth - I did so in Vanilla too; and I'm fine with the additional bells and whistles of voice acting and cut scenes. But in my opinion at least, WoW is at its strongest when the focus remains on the big picture and the world as a whole instead of one specific character's journey, and I'm just not seeing that right now. People have ragged on Dragonflight's story a lot, but even if you want to make fun of Alexstrasza being kind of useless and other NPCs being flat in their characterisation, it was all extremely cohesive thematically, focused on the Dragon Isles, the dragon flights, the primalists and all their minions and allies, which made it easy for me to overlook the flaws in individual storylines.

War Within on the other hand reminds me strongly of BfA, which started off with this strong Alliance vs. Horde theme, including a very personal and powerful narrative for Jaina, but then we were suddenly spending our time on mechagnome island and under the sea, and next it was all about uniting to fight old gods and wait, what? Metzen may have big plans for the Worldsoul Saga, but I don't think it bodes well that the way he decided to build the first part of this trilogy is superficially indistinguishable from an expansion where the story just felt non-cohesive and random at times. We'll see what we'll learn from the Midnight expansion announcement next week.

Warcraft Direct: MoP Classic, Fresh Servers & Housing Confirmed

Last night we were treated to Blizzard's "Warcraft Direct" stream, which was generally seen as a sort-of replacement for BlizzCon this year. And they still know how to draw numbers - I was watching on Twitch (because I could earn some free mounts in the process) and the viewer count sat pretty steadily at around 170k concurrent... and that's without counting those who were watching through other channels, such as YouTube and TikTok.

I'll start off by pointing out the one thing that kept bugging me stylistically: whenever they kept changing the camera angle without changing the way the speaker was facing. That was just such a weird artistic choice and constantly distracted me. It's strange when someone talks to you on screen, seemingly addressing you but staring off to somewhere vaguely to the right! Stop doing that!

Anyway, with that out of the way, the announcements started with the more boring stuff first (no offense to anyone who was thrilled by more Hearthstone expansions) - I guess they knew that the vast majority of people were there for WoW and therefore saved that until the end. Early on we got a shout-out for The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (about which I still mean to write a separate post) and its associated charity drive, which I thought was sweet and in which Holly revealed that she personally met his parents.

In terms of actual game news, Mists of Pandaria Classic was confirmed for next year with its own launch trailer. I already mentioned a few weeks ago where I stand on this one.

However, there will also be "Classic Classic" launching in only a week! I guess the "fresh lovers" got their wish at last, though it's also been confirmed that these servers will be progressing into Burning Crusade, which may muddy the waters for some people? Because once again, where do those characters go after? Interestingly, a new hardcore server will be launching at the same time, and that progressing into BC would be something new for sure. Can't wait to see the clips of someone suffering permadeath at the feet of a fel reaver or something.

Again, as I said previously, this isn't really for me. I can't deal with the rushing, FOMO and mega-server environment any longer, but it'll be interesting to observe for sure.

On the retail front, it was confirmed that while we're still awaiting patch 11.0.7, 11.1 after that will take us to the underground goblin capital of Undermine, something that had already been speculated about for a while. I can't say that this sounds like the most appealing location to me, but we'll see.

What intrigued me about this one was that there was talk about us getting a special car ground mount which sounded like it will feature dynamic ground riding, which was another one of those things dataminers had found hints about some time ago. Curious how that will pan out.

At this point in the stream I was kind of like: okay, all of that sounds decent but I can't say I'm actively excited about any of it. Then Ian concluded his segment by saying that there was just one more thing they wanted to show us, and a little trailer began playing, showing a male human warrior in the new tier two armour entering a house. "Now what's this," I wondered, and it slowly dawned on me as the camera showed him walking past a bunch of decorations including an Ony head on the wall.

The trailer then shows him comfortably sitting down with a mug that says "home sweet home" and we get the tag line "your next adventure begins at home", followed by the logo for the next expansion (Midnight). I was keeping some notes already and just wrote down "HOUSING" in all caps. Good job, Blizzard, for saving the biggest hype feature until the end.

It's funny because I'm not even the biggest housing enthusiast myself, but it's just felt way overdue for the game at this point. Ian Hazzikostas actually commented in an interview a few years ago that they were finally looking into it, and I already half-expected a housing announcement at last year's BlizzCon; it just felt like it had to happen eventually, and here we are now.