I realized I tweeted this out yesterday, but it is Friday and I am not sure what else I was going to write about. Yesterday I was thinking about the Warcraft movie and the Tweet by Metzen that folks are taking as acknowledgement that there is a second movie in the works. The truth is I remember very little about the early lore of the Warcraft universe apart from a vague sketch of the flow of the timeline. I played the hell out of Warcraft II, but mostly in multi-player and while I am certain that I played through the campaign I remember very little of it. When Warcraft 3 came out I was already deeply engaged in MMORPGs and either playing Everquest or Dark Age of Camelot and never quite got around to playing it other than in office LAN parties.
That means there are large chunks of the story that I only know from the perspective of how World of Warcraft presents that information. Doing some googling I stumbled onto this recap video by Drew Peezick aka @dpeezick/ lawllypop. What I particularly like about the video is that it takes either real or created Hearthstone cards to represent the major players and presents the story in fairly simple terms. Warcraft as a universe is this sort of self contradictory mess that has evolved over time and rewritten bits as needed to support whatever the new story initiative happens to be. We are in truth heading into this territory as we approach the Shadowlands expansion and the lore that is being spun up about the pantheon of death.
I had originally arrived looking for the lore of the first two games but found that this is apparently a sequence of videos that carries forward with the first chapter being “before warcraft 3” the second chapter being “Warcraft 3” and then moving forward into classic World of Warcraft and through each off the expansions. It is funny that for even not playing the game Warcraft 3 I found myself familiar with a lot of the lore that was presented. I guess this comes as a result of playing the game for some sixteen years and having bits and pieces of it fed to me in a very slow drip through quest lines. World of Warcraft is a game that has regularly strip mined its past in order to present a path forward.
I think the thing that I really enjoyed the most while watching these videos is the way that they attempt to weave modern and past lore together into something that makes a reasonable amount of sense. Things get messy at times when you try and figure out the actual canon story of the dungeons and raids since these are ultimately multi-player experiences. The videos however do a really good job of shifting back and forth between the perspective of the Horde and Alliance and weaving our way around some of the key plot points that ultimately lead to the phases of the Classic wow release schedule and the key conflicts that were involved in each. For now a large amount of the Troll lore has been pushed off to its own video in the future.
I really enjoyed the Burning Crusade video because having not played horde during this era, I found some of the motivations of the Blood Elves to be a little obtuse and how exactly Kael’thas, Lady Vashj, Akama and Illidan fit together other than just being large set piece battles for us in the raids. I’ve never been a fan of Night Elves so I was turned off pretty early when I attempted to read War of the Ancients, so I greatly appreciate all of the lore bits from the novels, game and other canon sources woven back together into something that makes sense. Nobbel does an excellent job of deep diving into specific segments of lore, but what I was craving was an overview to understand how all of these disparate pieces are supposed to fit together… or at least a narrative that weaves them into something that makes sense. I think there exists a need for both types of content and I am happy to see that this channel is approaching it from a primer standpoint.
When we get to the Wrath of the Lich King, I think is where lore starts to become extremely cogent given that Shadowlands in essence feels a bit like a return to the themes of this expansion. Legion felt in many ways to be a return to the themes of Burning Crusade, so it makes sense hat we would have an expansion that attempts to continue the story forward from Wrath as well. Most of this lore I was already familiar with because I was actively raiding during this time and also I think in Wrath the way the stories were presented did a significant better job of pieces together the bits into a cohesive narrative. That said there were still a good number of things that I learned along the way and the video was well worth a watch.
With Cataclysm we reach the end of this journey so far. This video came out on September 19th, and I am certain that the creation of these requires a significant amount of time. The Pre-WC3 Lore video came out a year ago, Warcraft 3 9 months ago, Classic WoW 4 months ago, and then it seems like things have accelerated considerably with BC, Wrath and Cata coming out roughly a month apart. I would love to see a new video each month, but that still seems like an awful lot of work considering how much sifting through storyline it has to take and then the creation of the really cool Hearthstone style assets. It did remind me however that there were absolutely bits of story that I used to love about this game, and that while time and layers of story on top of it have muddied the water, the core is still enjoyable.
Even though the cosmology of this World of Warcraft has shifted and changed over time, I find it terribly interesting to at least mentally revisit the stories from its past. I think this video series does an amazing job of simplifying things enough to make it all work together. I think this is in essence what Blizzard has been trying to do over the last few expansions, is meld everything that came before with everything that is happening currently and attempt to lay out the cards in a manner that makes sense. All of that said I think these videos do a better job of presenting the core thrust of these expansions, and while there are hundreds of important side bits that blur our perspectives I greatly appreciate the way these present backstory at the moment it is important rather than trying to lay everything out in a strict chronology. I highly suggest you check it out and I greatly applaud someone who can make the nonsense that was the comic book series blend cleanly into the timeline. The entire playlist of six videos is just shy of two hours, and I personally consider that to be time well spent.
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It has been a few days and the dust is starting to settle, but on 21st the game world was shocked by the announcement that Microsoft was going to acquire Zenimax the parent company of Bethesda Game Studios. What this practically means is that Microsoft will be the publisher of the Elder Scrolls series, Fallout series, Doom series, Quake series, Wolfenstein series and Dishonored series among others. Bethesda itself has gobbled up a number of studios in a bid to compete with other major second party studios like EA and Ubisoft. It is somewhat uncertain however how this is going to change the calculus of how business is done in Maryland.
The initial concern is of course that this is going to lock Bethesda titles to being exclusive to the Xbox, XCloud and Windows PC platforms. At least in the short term there are a number of games that have already signed contacts for PlayStation timed exclusivity and it seems like those are going through as planned. Immediately this is going to mean is that the Bethesda games will be making their way to XCloud and Game Pass which makes me wonder how exactly something like and Elder Scrolls Online will work in this world. The truth is I am optimistic about this decision because I can’t necessarily say that it has been bad for other studios that have become acquired.
I’m a big fan of the State of Decay series and Undead Labs and for the most part what acquisition has brought is a seeming stability. There are a lot of names that I see associated with that company still all these years later that I talked to in person at Pax South. They’ve become a company with a single franchise unfortunately, but they have done a good job of supporting State of Decay and its sequel without having to load it up with heinous microtransactions and are prepped to bring the third installment to the Xbox Series Whatever. Admittedly they started off as a company on Xbox Live Arcade on the 360 and for the most part have always supported Xbox and Windows PC so it wasn’t likely much of a transition to move to being a first party studio.
Another studio that got gobbled up is Double Fine a studio with a notoriously independent streak. Tim Shafer has talked candidly about this quite a bit and for them it was largely a move for stability once again. Wildly paraphrasing, he has talked about in the past how tight the independent development cycle is and how rough the finances have been and Microsoft represented a huge font of available cash. You can’t acquire a studio like Double Fine without a full realization of just how quirky they are and how unique the products that they make are, so I would like to think that Microsoft is more or less just going to allow them to continue doing their thing.
Microsoft has been on this acquisition spree, gobbling up game studios and then seemingly letting them do their thing. A prime example is the acquisition of Mojang studios and with it Minecraft which brought a massive rewrite of the game that it desperately needed. However this new version doesn’t support the modding capabilities that the original Java client did, but they have seemingly continued supporting the old kludgy mess along with the new hotness. As far as I can tell the only thing they have done is bring a sort of regularity to the update cycle and the churning out of new features. The clients for “rival” consoles have languished a bit but they are trying to join them all together under a shared Bedrock edition. Basically it has not meant the end of Minecraft and I don’t think this acquisition will really change much for the day to day business of making the next generation of Bethesda titles.
This acquisition made sense for Microsoft for a lot of reasons. I have talked about this generation being a battle of business models. Microsoft is going hard on the game pass model and the recent deal with EA Play bringing it to the platform only underlines this point. Game Pass is massive for the players and I went on a whole twitter thread about this the other day. I use the hell out of it to try new things out, and it still floors me that games are available on day one to download and even pre-load ahead of time. Star Wars Squadrons is a huge game that is coming out soon, and I am probably going to wait to play it through the Game Pass because me and flight sim type games don’t often get along. It gives me the opportunity to test something out before I commit to it, which I find myself doing a lot more.
This generation really seems to be defined by Microsoft who are leaning hard into platform as a service with a reoccurring monthly/yearly subscription that unlocks access to a significantly library of games. Sony on the other hand is for the most part pushing a single platform with their own exclusives and the key decision being made is if you go digital or disc with those purchases. Xbox as a platform seems not to care what system you are playing the games on and appears to be supporting console, pc and mobile via xcloud equally well. It is really that last offering that I would love to see them flesh out some more with the addition of clients for other platforms like PC, Mac, and maybe even some consoles like the Nintendo Switch. If I could play my Xbox library on the Switch I would be so freaking into that.
What I wonder however is if all of the Intellectual property that is being gained in the form of Bethesda games is just icing on the cake. Last year at E3 Bethesda introduced that they were working on a new technology called Orion that had the ambiguous goal of making games run better on streaming platforms. The tests that were shown were all involving XCloud and Doom 2016, but the results were supposedly phenomenal. It makes me wonder if this acquisition was at least in part a way to lock down this tech and make it exclusive to Xcloud and serve as a market differentiator between the streaming options. Microsoft is putting a lot of eggs in this basket and it would make sense that they want XCloud to have every advantage possible.
I’ve talked a lot about the potential positives here, but here comes the big negative. I don’t forsee a world where we do not see new Bethesda/Zenimax games coming out exclusively on the Xbox platform which includes Windows PC and mobile via Xcloud. I am not sure if this is going to be a timed exclusive or a true exclusive, but whatever the case something like that is going to happen and you aren’t likely to play Starfield or Elder Scrolls 6 on team blue. Sony has its own stable of first party exclusives and that is the reason why I will probably always own a Sony PlayStation. Does this Bethesda exclusivity negatively impact me? Not really because I will always favor the PC when given an option of how to play my games and Microsoft has shown that they are willing to treat console and PC as equals.
Does this suck a lot for players who are console only and own a PlayStation? Yes, yes it does. Do I think platform exclusivity is a good thing? Not really and I honestly find it pretty freaking annoying. However it has been the rule of the land since the Nintendo Entertainment System era, and I don’t really see that changing any time soon. Do I think Microsoft is finished acquiring companies? Probably not and I think both Sega and Capcom look like potential targets. Capcom is going to be a little awkward to acquire, but the controlling interest is only 22% which seems highly vulnerable to me. For the players however I think the things that Microsoft is offering at the price points they are offering it is deeply compelling. Game Pass is a phenomenal deal for the consumers, but I guess time will tell how good of a deal for the studios it ultimately is.
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The last few days have seen folks losing their shit over pre-order frustrations, myself included. On the 16th the PlayStation 5 started pre-orders in a very haphazard manner leading to a lot of units seemingly snapped up by flippers and not that many folks in my circle managing to secure the unit they were wanting. Yesterday Microsoft tried something different and instead started all of the preorders at the same time, or at least attempted to. It felt like Microsoft was even throwing a little bit of shade on what happened with Sony, which now seems like hubris. Yesterday did not go smoothly but I can’t necessarily tell if it was more or less successful than the Sony start.
Modern Vintage Gamer is an excellent YouTube channel that goes over the security and design of retro consoles, and he was an early member of the Xbox mod scene. He filmed his out journey yesterday as he attempted to get a system as the preorders started. In my experience it seems like the only folks who got a unit early were the ones who tried to do so through Walmart.com. Target and the Microsoft store both cratered under the weight of all of the user sessions. I have no idea what happened with Best Buy because either the preorders went so fast that it seemed like they never had any, or they still have yet to do their presells.
The person that I knew that was most invested in getting a Xbox Series X was my friend Pete, so I more or less lived vicariously through him during this launch. In the lead up to the PlayStation 5 pre-orders I had followed a bunch of sources of gaming news and releases and as the process unfolded I was sending Pete links each time a new one came across my feed. Even though I expanded my feed significantly, the two best ones seem to be the tried and true that I have followed for years @Wario64 and @VideoGameDeals. Luckily when things opened up on Amazon he managed to get in and snag a unit and hopefully it really is a good order.
That has been another frustration in this whole process is not really being certain that you did in fact lock in your preorder. During the PS5 preorder, there have been cases of orders being invalidated because the platform oversold the number of units that they had been allocated. The image above is from my own PS5 preorder through Sam’s Club and I am hoping it is real. That last statement however always gives me great concern, because they can and have changed orders on me in the past but never in a significant manner. To be truthful… the only online retails that seem to have been able to handle this in stride are Walmart/Sams and Amazon. Target, Best Buy and Game Stop sites all fell apart under the load of all of the people trying to hit them in both the Xbox and PS5 situations. In all of those cases I had systems in basket but encountered problems actually checking out.
So the question that has been kicking around my circles is why this console preorder cycle seems to matter so much. For me I had put off upgrading to a PS4 Pro for roughly a year and a half thinking that the PS5 had to be right around the corner. So this was absolutely a purchase that I had planned for a long time and as such I have a back log of games that I would simply rather play in glorious 4k. For others… I think given the shitty times that we find ourselves living in we are in essence trying to buy happiness or at least future happiness. I’ve been watching a lot of collectable markets that are tied to the nostalgia of days gone by booming. Vintage Magic the Gathering prices for example are going through the roof after stalling or retracting at the beginning of the pandemic.
All products right now are having severe supply chain issues, either in getting the materials needed to manufacture something or getting the product out to the customers. This is leading to an artificial sense of scarcity on products that should in theory be stable. We all remember the toilet paper rush at the beginning of the pandemic, and I still have yet to be able to purchase a single Clorox wipe either online or in store. This ends up building to a anxiety of not being able to get the things we want or need and that is sort of trickling out to everything as well. Console launches are always stressful and frantic, but the level of fervor over this one is considerably higher. Products that feed into this, like Zendikar Rising Set Boosters which already have a massive gambling component are benefiting by either a real or manufactured scarcity. In this example it is a product that should retail for $150 a box that is going upwards of $250 if you can even find it.
So we live in this time when things that should never normally be hard to get are weirdly hard to get. I think everyone is craving stability and normalcy, and it is leading us all to do some somewhat dumb things. For me it is raging over trying to order a console system that doesn’t really even really have a game that requires it. For others it is attending big house parties that end up infecting everyone with Covid-19 all because they craved social contact. We are living in weird times and I find myself digging deep into nostalgia to get through them. I think that is why I have been hoarding cartoons that I grew up watching and playing World of Warcraft again because it lets me drift along on the afterglow of better times. Folks deal with things differently, and I am trying to do so in the manner that keeps me the safest in the long run.
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One of my many secrets to surviving the time of pandemic has been spending time in World of Warcraft. No matter how long I am away from the game, coming back to it always feels like coming home. We shall not look at the /played time for all of my characters because it would probably frighten me, but needless to say I have spent many an hour poking around in this game since it launched in November of 2004. I go through these periods where I attempt to be super serious about content, but my happiest times are always when I am just poking around and doing casual stuff on my army of characters. I find leveling to be exceptionally calming and before the pandemic I had two characters at 120, and now I have 1 Alliance side and 10 Horde side. Leveling is just something that gives me an opportunity to turn my brain off and relax, and stop worrying about everything that is going on and every possible interaction that I might encounter.
Most recently I had been working on my Mag’har Orc Shaman and I had a really fun time leveling it. Always in the past I have focused entirely on melee characters and as a result I have always leveled Shaman as Enhancement. This time around I decided to mix things up and leveled from the very beginning all the way to 120 as Elemental. I have to say Elemental is exceptionally fun with the way the play style factors around various procs. I think what I enjoyed the most is the fact that I didn’t feel squishy in the same way that I attribute to casters in general. I usually had time to heal myself back up when I was taking damage, or hit one of my “oh shit” buttons like Earth Elemental to take the heat off of me for awhile. The only negative is it felt a little weak in the AOE department, and shocks were really the only viable means of tagging mobs especially when it came to world quests. I finished the Shaman on Friday and then turned around and immediately started working on the next character in sequence.
That would be my Vulpera Rogue, because it just seemed to fit given they are a small and tricksy race to start with. I am leveling Outlaw because I still don’t like daggers at all, and am having a great time of it. Tam would be proud as I use the various rogue tricks to whittle my way through camps of mobs. I’ve also learned the joys of Sap and Pick Pocket used in sequence. I am not sure if I have ever leveled all the way through Stranglethorn Vale since it was changed drastically in cataclysm, so I am absolutely enjoying that as well. I should ding 60 before I finish the area and at that point I will likely jump over to Outlands. I’ve recently developed a taste for the Burning Crusade content and it seems more efficient than running through Wrath of the Lich King for that level block.
Now I realize that all of this is going to be meaningless shortly when the pre-patch lands. I don’t expect to make it all of the way to 120 on the Rogue before that happens, which means I will likely be leveling my last character under the level squish. The only remaining character I have horde side is my Nightborne Shadow Priest, and it is currently wearing heirlooms in Ashenvale. I was not entirely certain how well I would do at leveling a pure caster, but at this point I have leveled the Elemental Shaman and the Warlock, so maybe just maybe shadow will feel natural after those. At least in the case of Shadow Priest I still have a bunch of ways to bring my health back up… which is not a thing you have on a Mage which is why I ultimately used my boost on that character.
Other than that I have been running Coren Direbrew each day on my army of alts, mostly just to farm a few trinkets and that I guess it feels like the thing to be doing. I really enjoy World of Warcraft when we are in these in between times and there is zero pressure to be leveling or gearing. My hope as is always the case is to go into this expansion without feeling the need to chase other players in level or in gearing. However I also know that once I get in the thick of things that the old instincts will kick in and I will apply pressure to myself to rapidly move through the levels and be “ready” for things I am not likely going to do. Right now my plans are to do some Mythic+ key pushing, but for that I need to figure out a viable group. Right now we have my Paladin and Grace’s Monk, so I need to sort out who else we might have access to. I am targeting a EST/CST friendly time frame so apologies to my West Coast friends, but yall need to operate way the fuck too late for my old ass. Hopefully I can make something happen, but for now I am happy leveling my alts.
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