Unfortunately, bad timing. At the moment, my interest in World of Warcraft is best expressed in Newtonian infinitesimals.
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| Or tiny-origami-dragon-tesimals. |
There's lots of reasons for this, but this also isn't unusual for me (or, indeed, for many players, if the other blogs I read are anything to go on). I've just run out of things I'm really super keen to do in-game, and combining that with the burgeoning feeling that I again don't really have anyone to talk to, well. Not a lot of motivation to log in.
I've also been thinking about Warlords. How, to be perfectly blunt, I'm disappointed with the theme of the expansion. Okay, sure, the orcs-as-bad-guys has a pedigree as old as Warcraft itself. That's fine. But this "let's all go back to Outland" thing? In the past, even? I don't understand it.
I know I'm pre-judging here, but I kind of get the feeling like this is the TRON: Legacy of expansions. I.e. retreading familiar old ground, just dressed up new and shinier. Orcs invading from the Dark Portal again. Going through the Dark Portal to stop them again. Dealing with someone who's messing with time. Again. And the only "new thing" we're getting is Garrisons, and who among us honestly thinks Blizzard will actually keep them relevant past this expansion? We'll build our buildings and gather our minions, and then when Warcraft 7 gets released it'll go the way of our farms.
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| Poor Dog. |
Now, I'm aware, painfully so, that there are only so many tropes to explore in a high fantasy milieu, and Warcraft, due to its nature as an all-ages game, can make use of only a subset of those tropes. It's therefore inevitable that, after a decade, the game is going to feel a bit played-out.
Unfortunately, it's a bit of a catch-22. Pandaland introduced something genuinely new to the Warcraft mythos. Several somethings, actually. The problem was that these things that were introduced didn't feel like Warcraft, at least not to me. I talked before about how Mists didn't really draw me in thanks to its obvious anime influences, and that hasn't really changed at any point along the way.
Now, they're returning to the old standbys. Orcs as the enemy. A world we've visited before, only different. And I, at least, am not all that interested.
In order to keep things fresh, you have to introduce new elements that nonetheless fit in with Warcraft's overall theme. For example, the draenei. Sure, the extradimensional fortresses and the space goats were weird and different, but they were Warcraft weird and different. Pandas? Mantid? Sha? Weird and different, but out of place in Warcraft.
Are there any tropes left for Warcraft to indulge in? Well, we could spend some time planet-hopping. Take the fight to the legion. That could keep us busy for a while, going from world to world with the repaired Exodar, killing the Legion's generals until finally we're able to take down Sargeras himself. That's the sort of thing that could provide a nigh-infinite number of expansions. But I suspect it would get old, too, being on permanent campaign status.
To be honest, I find myself wishing for the first time that Warcraft would end. Because I know I'm going to keep playing it, off and on, until it goes offline. In many ways it parallels one of my ... well, former favorite shows, Supernatural. They spent the first four seasons building up an epic, apocalyptic story, that finally had its resolution at the end of season 5. And then ... it kept going. On and on. They're in season 9 now and I don't even care anymore. I keep watching because, you know, familiarity and mild curiosity, but ... the story's over. It's been over for four years, why are we still here.
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| Whyyyyyyy |
Same thing happened with Star Wars. First three movies, fantastic, gripping story. But then they had to keep at it. On and on. Money to be made. And now Star Wars is this humongous bloated corpse where so many Sith Empires have risen and fallen to the hands of the lone Jedi that one wonders what the point was in making the original trilogy at all.
Stories have an ending, is my point. And if you keep going on beyond that ending, the story suffers for it.
Warcraft hasn't reached its ending, yet -- whether or not that ending is the defeat of Sargeras, I can't say. That certainly would be one ending, or perhaps defeating all the Titans, or whatever, but the ending is out there and we haven't reached it. But there's another way of ruining a story -- padding it for length. That's what's going on here.
I want Warcraft to end. I want it to be something I look back fondly upon, the way I look back on the early Final Fantasy games. I want there to be a nice, neat, solid resolution, and no more boilerplate filler. I want to beat the Big Bad and ride off into the sunset. I want to know how the story ends, and then I want to move. on.
Seinfeld had the good sense to leave the party while it was still having fun. So did Bloom County. I really hope that World of Warcraft exhibits that same good sense, but ... as long as there's still money to be made ...
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| The wheel keeps turning... |
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