The Beginning of The End

The Antiheroes are nearing the end of a long journey. After a lot of effort, the remaining original members broke lvl 80. Here is a picture of us on that day, in front of the Orgimmar board that starts the next chapter. (Thakut as an honorary member of course)

For a short while, we will join a new guild started by our wayward friend. With this new group we'll see higher heights than we could on our own. Mostly we will be outcasts, tolerated only because we are Thakut's associates, but this is enough.

We are nearing the end of the story, I can feel the weight and finality of this final chapter, looming on the horizon. Once this cap is reached I'll return to the guild and let Glyph rest in piece, with honor, as an Antihero. New challenges. New worlds.

New Friends

Are they brothers?

While I'm not nearly as dramatic as Stabby, I do make my own observations. Like... for example the recently married Taur and Karn Stonehoof. Thunderbluff's recently married butch gay duo have gone into business selling blacksmith supplies like leather pants, leather gloves, big hammers and hot pokers.


I know I'm not the only antihero who has my eye on these two. Species differences aside, I could really stand to get some good gym advice in Thunderbluff.

Fighting and thinking:

Being a warrior doesn't encourage thinking. I don't have time to consider the moral weight of the the skulls I'm smashing.... If blood stops spraying, I lose the berserker rage that gives me momentum. It's funny how Blizzard builds these traits into the game, messing with my mind.

Anyway,

I'm going to Northrend. I hear they have a zombie problem. I hear they have frozen axes out there.

-Glyph

A Morality Tale

Now those of you who have played a modern video game will know that story telling has greatly improved since the days of simple eat-dots-avoid-ghost narratives, or even the stereotypical rescue-princess-from-turtles scenario. Millions of dollars are spent on cutscenes, voice actors and top notch writers to render blockbuster movie quality storytelling.

WOW, not so much.

Which is not to say that WOW doesn't feature any of the above mentioned things, simply that it is not really presented in the same way as you'll find in other games. WOW does what is sometimes called passive storytelling- If you're interested in understanding WHY you're killing 20 whatsits, you can read the text and talk to various NPCs and find out, but if you're just interested in getting to the next level, you can go through the game largely unaware of the story being told underneath the actions you're undertaking.

As a writer, I'm fascinated by passive storytelling. It's a delicate balancing act, trying to create a full, rich narrative while couching it in ways that can be disregarded. It's a pretty thankless task, really: No novelist writes with the understanding that his words will be a largely optional part of the expirience. But, games are not books, are not movies: They're games. And if a gamer doesn't want to watch your movie, doesn't want to read your briefing, why should he? In some games, those elements are more part of the playing experience- Games with dialog trees or quicklime events - but not WOW. If there is a story to be told, it has to be told in ways that don't get in between the player and the thing the player is supposed to kill.

WOW deals with this in various ways: Many of the zones have real world analogues so that if you don't take the time to understand how an oil rig works in WOW, you'll at least have the real world counterpart to equate it to in your mind. All of this which is a lead in to a morality play that played out the other day:

Stabby was setting out in the typical adventure: Head to place Y, Kill X amount of creature Z. But then when he got there:

If you don't see it in the screenshot above, that is a den mother, naturally, surrounded by her cubs. Wait- what?
In Alpha Protocol, a recent action RPG, one of the statistics that the game keeps track of is "orphans created". It's really just a little tougue in cheek number, based off of the kills you make through the game. I mean, it's not like you kill various guards and militia members when they're surrounded by their children. Well, here.... I'm mean, it's WOW, right? There's no real narrative complexity. Press a button, numbers come out and if you do it long enough, the numbers get bigger. Besides, it's not like you can KILL the kids by right clicking on them or anything. Right? Right?
Oooo...

Listen, this game is about races constantly at war with each other, each titanic clash followed by a bigger, crazier, more epic one. Death is a minor setback, involving at worst a long run back to your corpse and a trip to the nearest blacksmith to fix up any broken equipment. You can spend hours chasing a fellow player back and forth across the land, killing each other over and over again dozens of times. But killing little kids, even bear creature kids... That shit is fucked up.

When I returned to drop off my quest, I noticed a daily quest (which I typically avoid) that happened to actually address the issue: This member of the tribe you're allied with worried about the ramifications of the war with the bear creature tribe and wanted you to, instead of killing, CAPTURE the cubs to some un-elaborated upon end.
Better?

I'm not sure. Wow isn't a game that I typically ask questions about. Penny Arcade recently touched on this kind of thing. I mean, I went and did the quest, "saving" a dozen of the little cubs. But it wouldn't let me save more. And even if I did, the nature of MMOs leaves them doomed to a cyclical fate, set to watch their parents killed over and over again, only occasionally to be "saved" by a player. Rinse, lather, repeat.

This whole episode gave me pause. Really, what was this game trying to say to me? What was the right thing to do? Had WOW passed my personal threshold of appropriateness? It was while I was thinking these thoughts that a baby polar bear attacked me out of the blue and forced me to kill it.
I mean, come on, XP, right?

Refinements

So after playing the game again for a little while, I've discovered that a lot has (thankfully) changed about the game. Not everything, as can be seen above, but enough to really streamline the experience. So, in case you're thinking about getting back into the game or maybe you just want the perspective of someone who essentially took 4 years away from playing, here are some awesome changes:

• Better quest tracking, specifically with areas outlined in your map to help you locate whatever you're supposed to kill 20 of. One thing I always hated about WOW was the almost necessary use of Thottbot at every second. Now I only look things up when I'm having a hell of a time finding what I'm supposed to be looking for which is significantly less.
• Random Dungeon and PVP group finding. Back when I used to play the game, if you wanted to do a Dungeon, you'd have to message people all over the game world, wait for them to get to your particular dungeon, THEN play. It was not uncommon to spend 40 minutes in transit before actually doing anything. Towards the end you could line up using a meeting stone, but you'd have to make your way to a particular dungeon first, still eating up a lot of time for very little fun return. Now I can use a handy button on the UI to start searching for a group to do a random or chosen dungeon, which I'll be teleported to from anywhere in the world when everything is lined up. It's not an idea system- no random matchmaking service is - but it's heads and tails above the old way. I've found myself actually finishing all my dungeon quests, which was not something I had the time commitment for before.
• Flying and Flightpaths. First of all, there are MORE flightpaths, which was very much so needed. When the pre-Cataclysm patch dropped, we got even more. Yay! But what is really the game changer for me was gaining the ability to fly. Not only does the addition of vertical movement drastically improve the design possibilities for the game, but it also greatly speeds up most of the questing. Fly over enemies to get to a goal, go over terrain that would normally force you to take a long detour, swoop in to attack the Alliance: It's a huge improvement to the game and probably the real reason why I've played a bunch since re-joining. Without it, I'd probably have quit after a couple of days.

There are other refinements of course: Tons of them in fact, although as a combat rogue, Stabby doesn't play much different than he did before. Still, I'm very interested to see how everything shakes down come December 7th... Overland flying in the old world is very welcome. Never get stuck of terrain while trying to trail-blaze a shortcut ever again!

Stabby doesn't know where he's going, but he's getting there in style, dammit!

The Anti-Heroes Return!

Well it's certainly been a while, but it looks like the Antiheroes have risen from the dead. Yes, the introduction of Cataclysm has done exactly what Blizzard had intended, which is draw a bunch of absent players back in. This is particularly notable for Stabby, since the last time he played was for a brief window during the trial period for Burning Crusade back in... *GULP* 2007. But with Thakut hoping to see his old guildies around for the end of the world and me suddenly having a huge hole in my schedule (not to mention finally having a computer that can handle the game!) I did the unthinkable and reactivated Stabby: A level 54 in a world filled with level 80s, most of his allies level 70.... Well, that's a lot of catching up to do.

So, here we go: A return to the World of Warcraft, from a player who never particularly cared for the game. How will I fare? Well, let's find out!

Yeah, This Blog Is Dead

So, this blog has been dead for a while now and I figured I should post to that effect so that people don't stumble upon it and get the wrong idea. I stopped playing WOW after only about 6 months, and was shortly thereafter joined by the rest of the AntiHeroes with a few small exceptions. Sadly, a bunch of screenshots I took for this blog got deleted in a system reformat, so I've got nothing more to add here. Still, I'll keep the blog up in case there should ever be another group attempt at an MMORPG (Well, there was: Kevin, Veronica, Dave and myself played City of Villains for a month or two) but for now it will be a graveyard, and a small one at that.

There were a lot of fun times with the AntiHeroes and I'm saddened that I've lost all photo proof of it. But all good things come to an end. Good night, and see you next time around.

A sign of things to come

Soon, more crazy AntiHeroes pictures and stories. Promise.