{"id":8918,"date":"2010-08-09T06:15:58","date_gmt":"2010-08-09T11:15:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=8918"},"modified":"2010-08-23T06:01:51","modified_gmt":"2010-08-23T11:01:51","slug":"postcards-from-wow-week-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=8918","title":{"rendered":"Postcards From WoW, Part 4"},"content":{"rendered":"

A bit about my character<\/a>‘s outfit:<\/p>\n

wow_stripper.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Through some miracle of chance, my outfit basically matches. Orange and black. I did not design this. I’m just wearing what I’ve found that seems to be the “best”, according to my understanding of what I should be looking for in armor. It’s unusual to have a matching outfit like this. Any minute now I’ll find a bright green and red breastplate that will ruin the whole thing. <\/p>\n

For most of the game you’re gong to look like my level 14 warrior:<\/p>\n

wow_panzerkrieg.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Red shirt. Orange vest. Cyan pants. Brown cape with yellow trim. Then a few splashes of green & beige for good measure. Maybe in a couple of levels he’ll score some nice blue shoulderpads and a yellow hat to complete the angry fruit salad<\/a> look.<\/p>\n

Having said that, I’m very unhappy with the outfit I have for Shadowless. Plus ten points for having matching colors, but minus a hundred for looking like a stripper. On another character this might work, but a chain link tank top with chain link garters<\/em>? That doesn’t really say “hunter” to me. In fact, if I had a rogue this would be pretty cool gear to have. But if I ever level a rogue I’d probably aim for something stripperific<\/a> but end up with a green hooded cloak and body-covering armor. <\/p>\n

I’ve had this outfit for a couple of levels now. I’m sure I could replace it. But I hate spending money on gear because new gear usually comes along so quickly. I’m sure as soon as I plonked down money for gear I’d get my hands on a bunch of replacements. (For a while I had a full helm, which made Shadowless look like a stripper with a trashcan on her head.) I am not the first person to notice that characters usually look like they got dressed in the dark<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I really, really miss the cosmetic outfit feature of LOTRO. Throughout the Lulzy series<\/a>, she was always getting new gear. But the cosmetic system lets you control how you look independently of how your gear performs, so I was able to take the gear she acquired early in the adventure and make that her established look regardless of what items came along. With a system like this you don’t have to choose between looking ridiculous or going into battle with sub-optimal gear. I’ve always said that good games offer lots of choice, but choosing between looking<\/em> like an idiot and being<\/em> an idiot isn’t much fun.<\/p>\n

But it’s probably too late to fix this now. WoW’s customization options are actually pretty good compared to the games of six years ago, so this is more an issue with WoW’s age than the design. <\/p>\n

Still, it’d be nice.<\/p>\n

wow_lost_village.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Here’s an interesting location. It’s a Tauren-styled village way on the southern tip of Kalimdor. Because most of the world is walled in with mountains you actually have to enter the water on the other side of the continent and swim all the way around. I used a water-walking potion so I could use my mount, but even mounted it was a long trip with nothing but a sheer cliff face on one side and open seas on the other.<\/p>\n

wow_lost_village2.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

The village is deserted. No NPC’s. Nothing. Just empty buildings. There’s a cave network nearby that contains no monsters or loot or anything else. I expected the cave to lead back into the gameworld, but it didn’t. It’s a dead end. I wonder if this location was just never finished, or if it was active and accessible in years past and has since been retired for whatever reason? <\/p>\n

And speaking of strange places, here’s one shown to me by a player named Emza:<\/p>\n

wow_fallout1.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

This is in the city of Stormwind, near the arch that goes from the bank to the Mage Quarter. Jump from the boxes onto the torch. (A tricky jump.) Then hop up onto the ledge where my character is. Then carefully edge around to where Emza is. Then run away from the arch along the edge. There’s no collision check on that part of the ledge, and you fall right through…<\/p>\n

wow_fallout2.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

You’ll land on this plane beneath the city. It’s interesting to see behind the scenes like this. The game seems to use the same culling logic that it would if you were up inside the city. So, if you’re standing right under the auction house it won’t bother drawing the Mage Quarter, because under normal circumstances there would be walls in the way. This means that as you run around down here, buildings will pop in and out of view in strange ways. <\/p>\n

In fact, if you’ve ever been to Stormwind you’ve probably been annoyed by the layout that’s always making you zig zag and weave around just to move through the city. If you want to get from the front gate to the forge in the Dwarven District, you’re going to have to make many, many turns:<\/p>\n

wow_stormwind.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

I suspect those baffles are there for no other reason than to break line-of-sight, so that your computer never has to draw more than one district of the city at a time. It might seem a bit daft now, but back in 2004 I’m sure it was crucial for making the game playable. They didn’t do this for the expansion cities (Shattrath, Dalaran) and so those cities are a lot easier to navigate. And quite a bit slower. My framerate is always capped in Stormwind, but it chugs a bit when I enter Dalaran. <\/p>\n

Note that when Cataclysm goes live, it will go live for everyone. You need the expansion to play the new races and locations, but either way you’ll get the new Azeroth. And the new Azeroth is undoubtedly going to need slightly more GPU oomph. It will still be tame by today’s standards, but I wonder how this will go over for people who are using old computers that already struggle. Kind of odd to think of a company raising the system specs of a game you already own. Might make for some rough days for the tech support people. Although, I’ve called them three times and the recording has always told me they’re too busy to take any calls, so maybe they won’t even notice.<\/p>\n

Poor guys. It is so hard to fund a proper tech support staff when you only have ten million monthly subscribers. <\/p>\n

Wait. Where was I? Oh right. Stormwind…<\/p>\n

wow_fallout3.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Anyway, neat things to see underground. It’s interesting that the server doesn’t at least perform periodic sanity checks. Emza said you could walk all the way to (underneath) Searing Gorge from here. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A bit about my character‘s outfit: Through some miracle of chance, my outfit basically matches. Orange and black. I did not design this. I’m just wearing what I’ve found that seems to be the “best”, according to my understanding of what I should be looking for in armor. It’s unusual to have a matching outfit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pictures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8918\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}