Whats wrong with hypnotize
In a way, I kind of hope TBC and WotLK prove to be sort of the extreme ends of a development spectrum, and that they use the lessons learned from them to manage a happy medium between the two in the future.
For instance, in TBC undeveloped content was basically made into nonfunctional, enter-at-your-own-risk wilderness full of mobs that few players could hope to survive against. There wasn't a sense that anything was being shortchanged when the plateaus overlooking Blade's Edge Mountains were populated by uber-powerful Legion elites, or when Skettis was mostly a forest dominated by elite Ancients, Giants and Arakkoa. It just felt like they were neat little corners of the world, and were thus made all the more rewarding when they finally got used for something.
In Northrend, unfinished areas feel like just that; places where the developers ran out of time or decided halfway through that it wasn't worth the effort. Places like Crystalsong and the camp outside Ulduar feel like voids of implied content, where NPC's stand around almost mockingly, like living signposts that read "this is where the content was going to be". Grizzlemaw feels like a relevant place where things are going on that should be expanded upon as the furbolgs battle over the area, yet players are only expected to make a quick one-stop visit for two related quests, and then it's never used again. The fact that the reputation mechanic is so watered down in WotLK (as in, nearly half of them are essentially meaningless nametags) kills any sense that future development of heretofore under-utilized factions might add neat stuff and rewards, since they're pretty unlikely to add whole tables of quartermaster items and incentives for a faction that half the max-level players already reached exalted with through the Argent Tournament.
Similarly, the outside world of Northrend suffered from Blizzard going all-out at the start. The overworld plot got fleshed out, which is good, but notably at the expense of having fewer fresh new raids than TBC did. So they ended up having to pile on the raid content with patches while lumping all the outside world content of the patches into the Argent Tournament instead of further expanding upon other undeveloped parts of the greater continent of Northrend. Hence, the Sunreaver and Silver Covenant content is plopped down next door to the Argent Tournament to keep it all geographically close to the rest of the new stuff despite the existence of entire basecamps for both factions in Crystalong.
I'm still holding out hope for something interesting before the end of WotLK, though. Something the other day slightly refreshed that hope, as I was running dailies in Icecrown. On a whim I headed down into Naz'anak, the Forgotten Depths. As I plunged downward, a message flashed in the middle of my screen.
"Discovered: Naz'anak, The Forgotten Depths"
Nothing remarkable in and of itself, except I've been there dozens of times. It's quite discovered. Since well before I even set out for the Explorer achievement. Yet something's been reset, and while it might be an outright glitch, maybe it isn't. I'd like to think perhaps something's being changed down there, and maybe this symptom popped up when 3.1 and the subsequent hotfixes came out. And while we already know that the Anub'arak encounter takes place in a similarly named "sub-zone", that place is part of a raid instance. It isn't built on the regular world server, so it shouldn't affect the zones there. And after spending about an hour and a half running around looking for hints of any changes (yeah, I'm that stubborn) though I couldn't find any it became clear to me during my search that the Nerubian architecture down there doesn't seem arbitrarily designed. The topmost portions of the structures are awfully reminiscent of the entrance to Ahn'kahet, with spider leg-like protrusions surrounding a hexagonal archway. And the edges of the sub-zone include numerous short side-tunnels that are blocked off by invisible barriers. Almost as if they're flat textures where someday there might be branching tunnels.
Maybe that message was nothing. Just an isolated hiccup or an error.
Or maybe it's a tiny hint of something more. After all, they set the bar high with Quel'danas for final patch content. It just might take something like a real , full-on Azjol-Nerub to meet that bar this time around. Maybe rather than outright eliminating the Azjol-Nerub zone, Blizz decided that something as expansive as an underground empire residing beneath much of Northrend called for something more than just being one more zone at release, and would be better served as the stage for the final assault on Icecrown.
After all, we spent most of TBC wondering where the corrupted "empty" Sunwell and Anveena were, despite the story of the Sunwell Trilogy and indications that both still existed somwhere in Quel'thalas. Nothing in-game outright indicated that they were anywhere to be found (and that wasn't helped by the fact that our only point of reference - WCIII - had the Sunwell placed seemingly in the center of Silvermoon City itself); not even any inaccessible areas of Silvermoon were there to keep us wondering. Yet our question was answered with the final patch and the addition of Quel'danas. Similarly, greater Azjol-Nerub remains absent as a zone and the Nerubians are marginalized so far despite the continued hints of there being more; the fact that they bothered to elaborate as much as they did in the official on-site Azjol-Nerub and Ahn'kahet instance profiles feels to me like they haven't forgotten or written it off entirely. According to those profiles, the Nerubians are still fighting the Scourge in the hopes of someday restoring their kingdom. Perhaps patch 3.3 will involve taking our own battle against the Scourge beneath Northrend, to tip the scales in a battle that's been going on since before we even arrived and clear the way to Icecrown itself.
I know I'm probably setting myself up to be disappointed, but still...my cautious optimism refuses to be smothered until I can look back at the entirety of WotLK and declare it an overall disappointment, and it's hard to do that when we're really only one content patch into the expansion.
Topic: System of a Down Thread (Read 61680 times)
