So, I recently reached level 10. Let me tell you, was I in for a surprise.

There are a couple of interesting things when I finally hit double digits. First of all, one of my biggest issues with the game got addressed, however briefly. I don't like the impersonal feel the game has. The little intro cinematic told me that the fate of Ironforge was in my hands, but at this point I mostly feel like an intern running errands for the people with enough sense to build a house and stay put. When I reached level 10 however I received several quests which applied to me specifically (or at least created the illusion) regarding my hunter...dom. My hunterdom. I was taught by some hairy old dwarf hunter master how to tame animals to be my freinds. This took a little while, but eventually I left with a whole bunch of experiance and some neat abilities. While this still isn't as intimate as I would like the world to be, it certainly was a step in the right direction.

Immediatly after that fun little excursion I left snowy dwarf land and entered sunny dwarf land, which is gorgeous, esspeically Loch Modan which I just wanted to run down to and swim in (I wouldn't recomend it--there is an abundance of creatures normally ascociated with a certain other Loch). This new place introduced a whole number of interesting things including a new found ability to ride griffons which is so much fun it is actually worth the money I lose from not just using my hearthstone. However, the most relevant development I found was spiders. Giant spiders. Giant tarantullas more like it, actually. Naturally I tamed one as soon as I possibly could.


Hunters: the game COMPLETELY changes once you get a pet. My spider has more health than me, and does more dammage. It is like suddenly getting twice as powerful. Since taming Winsor (the name I have given my new partner) I have leveled up at least twice per session, not even close to my previous crawl (I hit level 14 by the next day). In addition it emphasized how much of a team game it really is. While he (or she?) runs up to our enemy, I just stand back with my gun and rattle of a bunch of shots and spells. There are few things we've encountered, including things four or five levels above us which don't go down almost immediatly.

So, I don't really know what this says about the game. It picks up, that's sure. I'm still not sure if it has picked up enough. After all, the excitement of running around with a gigantic spider is bound to wear off eventually. Until then though, Winsor and I are going to see how much dammage we can do to ourselves by jumping off cliffs (our current record is 256 dammage each).

Bonus Question: Which two words in this post would make the best movie title?
Answer: "Taming Winsor"

I found something really cool

So I was doing some research for a paper about video game design, and I stumbled across this article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_blood

Here are some videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiEFR1Y3fm8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAEhyHiNdrA&feature=related

I think this is awesome. Using WoW as a control in an experiment is something which had honestly never occurred to me. So it looks like WoW might actually have a use after all.


No one ask why I was on Wikipedia for a paper.

Some House Keeping

I am currently drafting a post about a really exciting development in WOW, but for those elite among my audience who are actually grading these posts, I should probably inform you that my new non-trial version character is named Abpeum, and I am on the Elune server. I hope that clears up some things.

Next time on WOWblog (spoilers): I got a pet spider!!!!!!!!

Exploration!

Followers of this blog will remember that I frequently state that my favorite part of WoW is the exploration aspect--quests are a fun incentive to get better stuff, but at the end of the day I'd rather be wandering around in some valley or new city. Most of the quests are just there to encourage the player to leave their comfort zone anyway, so I often just cut out the middle man and go on an "un-sponsored" adventure.

You can imagine my delight and shock then when I was wandering around in the dwarven capital city and discovered a subway stop. Curious, I waited for the next train to come (I have always wanted to play on the tracks of subway stations, so I missed my train three times while frantically trying to avoid being hit) and hopped on, not sure of what would happen. A few minutes later I realized that my mouth was actually hanging open. The train sped underground at breakneck speed while my dwarf stood there and shuffled from one foot to another. We actually shot through an underwater tunnel, and I found myself looking at fish flying past. Then, we screeched to a halt, and I found myself on the other side of the continent, in the middle of an imense human city.
The landscape is beautiful. They have the perfect ratio of warm greens and blues with flashes of red and orange and brown in the flowers and critters. I spent a good forty minutes just orienting myself without doing a single quest. My suitemate who has been playing for a while peeked over and said, "dude, what the HELL are you doing over there?!" It was a triumph for exploration-based gameplay!

My suitemate also recomended this great site: http://www.wowhead.com
Its just a massive database of wow information. Search the name of your quest, and they'll walk you through it. Awesome.
I will also link to this, not becuase it has anything to do with Wow, but becuase if you are into folk music this is the folk music equivilent of Einstein and Jesus doing a colaberative project.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr9nf2ZGWhc

This is Awesome

http://pc.gamespy.com/flintlockes-guide-to-azeroth/the-five-stages-of-warcraft/599411p1.html

A Tale of Beer and Tauren Interest

Today I had to do one of the most complicated quests I've had yet, and it was defiantly my favorite. I mentioned in a reply to someone's comment that I wish WOW let me glimpse into some interesting human interest (tauren interest?) stories which I could become involved in, like a widower trapped in an abusive relationship with her brother and this quest was interesting in how close it came to that. There were two beer breweries which got into a rivalry, and I had to switch the beer in one with a nasty concoction to ruin their reputation. This involved an elaborate scheme to distract the guard (help received here: http://www.warcraft-world.co.uk/wow-quest-guide-bitter-rivals.html) which I ultimately pulled off. Hah. Fun times. I hope it comes up again later.

I Guess All My Posts Are Really Long

Well, I'm back, and I've finally left Kalimdor. I finally broke down and bought the game, hoping to make it through the rest of this class on the free month and two guest passes that came with it. For round two (two and a half? three?) I decided to play as a dwarf. Since the primary thing stringing me along was the interesting settings, I thought that being in a frozen mountain would be a good idea. It turns out I was right. While not as beautiful as the rolling plains were, the mountains really are something to look at, especially iron forge.
I started out the way you do, doing some grindy quests before you can get to the interesting stuff, and I decided, fuck it, I'm just going exploring. I did, and to my pleasant surprise the game rewarded me almost immediately. While I was prancing around in the woods I came across a number of fun places, an eye-poppingly awesome city (seriously, it was like walking into Notre Dame. Of COURSE I don't mean that), and surprisingly I stumbled into the place I was supposed to go for my quests. This leads me to wonder if "fuck it, I'm going exploring" is exactly what Blizzard was hoping their players would say. Perhaps the quests are not the focus of the game after all. That would certainly earn them props on my part since thats what I'm enjoying right now.

A few comments on being a dwarf. First, while the location is good on the eyes, it doesn't have the same visual diversity that Kalimdor had. Pretty much everywhere you look there will be snowy trees. I feel as though Blizzard should have made the environments more extreme in a way, since after all the World is the thing that separates World of warcraft from other games of this type. Instead of being on a snowy mountain, I should be on top of something which dwarfs everest, towering into the clouds like a massive stone pillar, snow and ice whipping in the wind. Instead of being in a haunted forest, I want to be in a wild, untamed place of madness where the tangled, dripping branches block out the sun and paths snake through like a labyrinth. I feel as though they were too tied down to the environments they set up in the previous warcraft games, but the locations are so much more important now, and the whole appeal of fantasy is that you can magnify it as much as you want.
Second, being a dwarf is far too similar to being a minotaur (sorry, tauren) then I'd like. I know I've mentioned this before, but I wish the game play experience from one race to another would be less similar. I wish undead could fly, or never died, or that you could play races that lived under the water. I know that would expand the learning curve, but great, then the players have more to talk about with each other. As it is right now all I'm really picking is a paint job.