World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor

The 2014 World of Warcraft expansion reminds me of that brief and happy time when I managed to dramatically improve my physical appearance and hid all the pictures of the old me from the eyes of my romantic conquests before we didn't know each other a little better. Warlords of Draenor takes the same approach. Blizzard's resilient MMORPG may turn 10 this year, it manages to keep your focus on its latest content like no expansion has done before. Blizzard wants you to keep your attention on Draenor, and it's easy to see why. While the elements of the expansion emphasize solo play a little too much, the experience of playing the reigning ruler of MMOs has never been more enjoyable.

With this expansion, WoW places virtually all services in the new strongholds of Stormshield and Warspear, bypassing the need to frolic around decade-old items to finally place them in the Auction House. You can also indulge in expansion-specific occupation tasks, regardless of your skill level. The expansion even offers propulsion at level 90 for anyone who buys it. Thanks to new character models and other updates, WoW is really not looking its age until you leave the new content and cross the old world boundaries again.

Orcs & Humans

It's also pure Warcraft. If Warlords of Draenor comes with a strange time travel story centered on Garrosh Hellscream and his attempt to patch things up with his good old daddy for the pleasure of invading Azeroth, basically the story is about the need to kill. lots of orcs. And these orcs are downright cool too. Blizzard killed most of its real villains a long time ago, but this time-leap-based tale to the original orc world of Draenor before the events of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans finally lets us face them. again.

For Warcraft veterans with 20 years of experience like myself, this doesn't come without nostalgia. There's Ner'zhul, the orc who merged with Arthas to become the Lich King! There is Grommash Hellscream, nervous as ever! Blizzard introduces these characters and a bunch of others so quickly, in an hour-long window, that it's clearly difficult to fit in all of this information if you're new to it, but that's okay. They're really cool, the cutscenes establish their personalities in seconds, and they're fun to fight. If the simplistic story stumbles, it's only because Blizzard seems too eager to take inspiration from Game of Thrones by killing off plethora of key characters during player leveling up, even though we already got stuck with it. to them again.

But the world of Draenor itself is a compelling character. It's beautiful already, and like the rest of WoW, the environment is populated with nifty new character models for pretty much every race. The world itself is technically the same as the one we saw in 2007 with The Burning Crusade expansion, but placing Warlords before its destruction allows it to take on an entirely different appearance. The old fan-favorite area of Nagrand remains largely untouched, but you can find grassy meadows in the moonlight instead of the gruesome debris of Shadowmoon Valley in 2007, and the formerly ruined Auchindoun Dome. , regained its splendor. Warlords of Draenor enshrines Blizzard's return to the pinnacle of aesthetics, already achieved in Mists of Pandaria, but here the focus is on orc encampments and wild environments which renews the experience regarding the most significant places of Warcraft.

It is an environment that you will almost always discover on foot or on foot. Blizzard's bias in removing the flying mounts entirely from Warlords of Draenor sometimes results in the frustration of not being able to foolishly hover over a mountain range to cross it, but that only makes the trip more enjoyable. This development brings to life some idea of the exploration that had been lost since the original game, when it was necessary to inspect the surroundings for new paths, to climb isolated ridges and there. unearth seemingly inaccessible treasures. It adds a welcome touch of adventure to hunting enemies for your quests. Brought down to the character's eye level, Draenor feels like a world you live in, rather than just a topographic map.

Mr. Garrison

All of the quests associated with your choices emphasize that the story here is mostly about you. You are not just the average adventurer, you are the "commander" - the murderer of the Lich King and the bane of the Deathwing dragon - and the NPCs greet you and whisper their admiration for your exploits, while you walk strutting. This system comes to a head in the new Garrisons in Warlords of Draenor, where you can build and expand your small city to all four corners of faction starting areas in Draenor. As with the outposts, the main garrison allows you to customize your playstyle at will, and this affects just about every aspect of the gameplay. Want new mounts and immunity to stun when you mount them? Build and upgrade your stables. Want special access to Personal Banks, Guild Banks, and an Auction House? Build and upgrade your trading post. And my favorite: Do you want to increase your chances of getting Quest Gear Upgrades? Make yourself a dwarf fort.

Across three levels, the garrisons evolve in much the same way as the basics in old Warcraft strategy games, growing from dilapidated fortifications to proudly erected castles with stone walls and pikes. But, there is more than a little touch of Facebook social play here: you log on every day, reap the rewards of your mines and plantations - whether you're a herbalist or a miner - and you send out various supporters, whom you recruited during from your quests, look for resources and gold. Games such as Star Wars: The Old Republic and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood pioneered similar concepts, but in true Blizzard style, Warlords of Draenor takes the idea and makes it more fun by including it. small, brief animations, showing the results of the progress of the work off-screen, while letting your workers wander around your garrison to discuss the fat between them. It makes for an addicting fun feeling, in the same way that social games can be fun from the moment you take a bite of their hook. And like social games, garrisons can be terribly expensive if you're not prepared. Mine has already relieved me of 17,000 gold pieces, and I'm far from done.

However, I'm afraid the garrisons are focusing too heavily on the solo aspect, to the detriment of the World of Warcraft community. Garrisons transpose key services such as Banks, Herbalists, Mines, Stables, Merchants, and even Auction Houses into a single player mode, minimizing the need to go to the world and interact with them. other people. And the strengths of those interactions - if we forget the constant hateful and racist words in the general chat - have always been one of the factors that keep WoW above its ambitious competitors. A lot of us come back to WoW, at least partially, because that's where our friends are, and unfortunately garrisons potentially reduce the likelihood of making new friends.

Good quests make good friends?

That said, the traditional channels for mingling with other players remain intact, whether it's dungeons, guild raids, or the new Ashran battlefield (100 players vs. 100 players). The removal of Blizzard's airflight in Draenor also has the happy consequence of randomly provoking conversations with players around, more easily than in the days of Cataclysm or Pandaria, since we must now work together to find the path that leads to objectives or to slay rare Nagrand monsters to find reputable items.

For now, it's satisfying enough to continue to log in daily to build my garrison and complete the steps necessary to earn the Legendary Ring that all players have access to, like the Legendary Cloaks from Mists of Pandaria. The excitement of gaining experience wanes a bit once the level cap is reached, but this should be temporary. Warlords of Draenor's first raid, slated for no later than December 2, has yet to be clarified, and most current PvE clashes center around obnoxiously frustrating daily quests for Apexis Crystals that will be used as currency in order to to get a better loot. On the positive side, players are realizing that they can complete Apexis quests faster if they work in a group, contrasting nicely with the risky - albeit sympathetic - solo reframing performed by the garrisons.

Of course, Warlords of Draenor didn't stand out as the least chaotic launch in World of Warcraft, so I was able to wait up to eight hours in a queue before I could connect. Fortunately, after a few periods of emergency maintenances and server resets, the problems seem to have disappeared on this side - and Blizzard has given everyone a five-day free subscription compensation.

Warlords of Draenor is an important expansion for the Warcraft universe: not only celebrating the tenth anniversary of one of the most popular MMO games ever, but on it lie the strong expectations of a community that remains among the most impressive in the field paid MMORPGs. After the not splendid performance of Mists of Pandaria, which paid a long period of absence of content (almost a year) and some questionable game design choices, also marking a not inconsiderable loss of users, Blizzard is playing two cards for this expansion important: a plot that brings the players back to their origins, on Draenor, the home planet of the orcs and the last refuge of the Draenei, before its destruction (the Outlands of our timeline), as well as an unprecedented mechanic ... the garrison, thus aiming to celebrate the link between Warcraft and World of Warcraft.

In fact, if Cataclysm was also born with the intention of attracting new users, "renewing" the clothes in Azeroth, while Pandaria winked at the oriental public, Warlords of Draenor has the difficult task of titillating historical Warcraft fans ( after all, this year 20 years have passed since the publication of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans), recalling the old players. And to do this, Blizzard takes us back to a past era, disturbing iconic figures from the Warcraft universe (Ner'zul, Grommash, Velen, Durotan, Garona), introducing mechanics vaguely from RTS (such as the management of Garrison resources) , as well as offering the possibility to take advantage of an already level 90 character ready to start playing the new contents directly, an advantage designed specifically for those who want to return to play after years or start now for the first time.

The news, in part already introduced with the 6.0 patch which as usual precedes the launch of the new expansion by a few weeks, and those that await the players beyond the portal, go to introduce substantial changes in the game and it will be interesting to see the impact that they will have not only on the game itself but also in its community.

Furthermore, already with patch 6.0, the graphic revamp of the breeds has been introduced to finally bring them to a higher resolution, a feauture that characterizes this expansion, but which has given fluctuating results: if in fact some breeds have benefited from it (dwarves, trolls) , orcs), for others it worked less (Night elves, male humans, female draenei). Beyond the subjective "beautiful / ugly", some breeds have undergone changes that have somewhat betrayed the promise / premise of keeping the personality and spirit of the characters unaltered, sometimes with results between exhilarating and depressing, this for some faces have taken on distressed expressions which they originally did not have. More than a revamp, in some cases it looks more like a transition to the cosmetic surgeon.

But the real star of this expansion, which we all can't wait to try, is the Garrison: not a banal housing system, but an entire outpost to be built and managed, whose structure is strongly intertwined with the game itself.

Needless to emphasize, therefore, how, after a year without content and waiting artfully assembled by Blizzard, with the animated series that so admirably introduced us to the "Warlords", the comics that showed us how Garrosh convinced his father to refuse the Mannoroth's "gift", the novel that acts as an accord between the events of Pandaria and Draenor, there was great excitement on the eve of the publication of the fifth expansion of World of Warcraft.

And therefore, exactly as it happened seven years ago for the launch of The Burning Crusade, here we are piled up in front of the same portal, which, instead of taking us to the Outlands, this time will make us travel backwards in time, guided by the archmage Khadgar, through a short introductory session in the jungle of Tanaan (a sort of tutorial for new players who take advantage of the already level 90 character), and will finally bring the Horde players to Frostfire Ridge while the Alliance will arrive in Shadowmoon Valley.

Unfortunately, not everything went smoothly. With results not very different from then, indeed perhaps worse, given that in recent years the experience should have helped Blizzard to prevent certain problems, the servers have not held up, and there are still serious discomforts due to continuous disconnections and lag. Rarely, during a launch of an online title of this size, everything goes smoothly, but this time the problems seem even heavier than the usual ones. A sign of renewed enthusiasm on the part of the WoW people? We hope so. But above all, we hope that this initial phase will pass soon, because we want to continue playing!