Raid Engagement

A raid is defined by its bosses, the complexity of encounters, the design and scale and scope of the place, how it guides us through the space and gives us a new environment to explore - but does a raid have to engage us emotionally? What part does that play in our enjoyment of a raid?

While browsing YouTube at work during lunch (as one does), I found along the list of "see also" videos on the side, a link to a Lich King kill video. It has been a long, long time since I did that fight, and much longer since I really thought about it, but I thought - what the hell, I'll watch it again. And man, it really brought everything back in spades. The feeling of hopeless despair, the anguish and anger that Arthas brought out in me, the frustration of seeing him slip away time after time, while waiting to get a chance to take our own crack at him.

And we did, eventually, and we did kill him. I remember how jubilant and exhausted and satisfied I was after the ordeal, how happy to be done with a whole story, it felt like an arc was complete, a resolution was reached. That's what made Wrath the best expansion to date - it was about the god-damned story. That's what people remember, that's what got us engaged, and that's what the game resolved - it gave us a full-stop, at the end of the book. Close it, it's done. But of course, this is a franchise, and it needs to continue, so it did.

Cataclysm's failure I think, had more to do with following up Wrath. There was no way that they could personalize the terror of Deathwing the way the Lich King was personalized for us through the RTS games. We had (most of us, anyway) walked in his shoes, as a Paladin, then as a Death Knight. We came out the other side, and committed atrocities with him, killed Uther with him, raised Sylvanas as a Banshee from her dying breath - we did all this, and now we were back for vengeance. There was no way Deathwing could live up to that.

There is no raid in all of Cataclysm that comes close to Ice Crown Citadel in terms of emotional impact. Nothing carries the weight or gravity that the Citadel had. Even now, thinking of it, I feel nothing but melancholy as if I really did go to war there, even though I was just playing a video game. I left a piece of myself there, and I wrote a story to cement my relationship with the place.

Now, we have Pandaria, and I'm trying, so hard, to engage with the raids here as emotionally as I did the raids in Wrath - and I just can't do it. Part of it is the scope of things - it's just smaller in a lot of ways. We're raiding a tomb in Mogu'shan Vaults. That's it. Nothing noble or heroic about it, there's the thin veneer of trying to save Pandaria from the Guru'bashi as they try to get a weapon to use to regain the Thunder King but face it - we're mercenaries and treasure hunters. It does not inspire the hand-shaking awe of the Citadel.

Take then, the Heart of Fear - a lovely construction and a wonderful raid to explore and fight in, grand cathedral like rooms and lovely work all-around. But the stakes aren't there - we have only the most tenuous grasp of the Empress and while the Sha is a terrifying enemy, the engagement is recent. The ending of Jade Forest was amazing, but man, that didn't inspire me to lust after killing the Sha, especially after killing another Sha over and over again in Kun'lai.

Don't get me wrong, I'm loving the Hell out of these raids - some of the best fights in the game since Tier 11 and I'm super excited to kill them all. I just wish I felt for them the way I did for Arthas. Does anyone else need this kind of emotional and personal impact in the raid to really enjoy it on a visceral, sub-dermal  level? Can Blizzard put out another raid with that level of emotional impact?

I hold out hope.

Interpreting Cataclysm's Ending

I wasn't very happy with the ending cinematic of Cataclysm. The whole thing felt like a re-run, as if I'd seen this movie before. And Ag'ra's pregnancy was just the cheesy center of a cheesecake sandwich. But then, I stopped thinking about cheese and started to try to think of it from an old-god perspective.

What if this was what the old gods wanted?

They put their cards on the table, field their entire army, however feeble it might be, release their strongest lieutenants into the wild and say, "Go. Wreck Azeroth." All the while, they knew full well the army they unleashed, their champions, even Deathwing himself, could not possibly succeed. But success was never their intention.

When the Titans left, their caretakers were the Aspects. It was among their list of charges to keep the old gods in check. How well they did this is debatable, but consider what Deathwing does from an old-god perspective. He creates the Dragon Soul - an object so powerful that it's capable of defeating the Burning Legion - but also an object infused with the essence of every Dragonflight. This diminishes the Aspects, but not enough to matter.

For the old gods to escape, what they really need is to be left alone by the Aspects so they can pursue their agendas.

In comes the Destroyer - who must himself be destroyed if Azeroth is to continue. The Aspects can't do it alone. They need the help of the mortal races - but that's just a distraction. The old gods are still playing this game - and what they really need is for the Aspects to channel their essence into the Dragon Soul to destroy Deathwing, thus diminishing themselves permanently.

Which is exactly what they do.

At the Maelstrom, emerges in full out old-god mode and we were just the catalyst the old gods were waiting for, and at a time when they sensed everything was in place, they played their cards. Nihilistic fool that he is, Deathwing never suspects his true purpose and dies, taking with him the last of what made the Aspects great.

The old gods's hand might look like a mess, but the last couple of cards have yet to be turned and that hand might turn out to be a flush. If you were an old god, you'd be pretty damned happy right now, wouldn't you?

The keepers are gone. There are no more aspects, and the mortal races don't really know or understand the old gods enough to face them down. Without the help of the Aspects, we're on our own against all of the old gods.

We've already seen C'thun come back in the Cho'gal fight. Who knows how quickly Yogg'Saron will return. N'zoth is still out there, and we haven't seen any sign of it at all. Our best hope may lie in the fact that the old gods hate each other almost as much as they hate us, and in that conflict, we might have some hope of victory.

But man, this is a good time to be an old god.

Why do I blog? (Day 2)

Continuing on the track of 20 (non-consecutive) days of posting...

I talked about this earlier, but initially, I started writing in a blog mostly to catalog my raiding experiences so I could  review them over time and see how I had been progressing. It's kind of funny to think that I've been blogging for nearly a year now about Warcraft, but have more-or-less completely stopped blogging on my old Livejournal. But that's a pretty boring answer. Let's see if I can dive a bit deeper and find some other, more meaningful reason...

February of last year was an odd time in my WoW career. After six months of hard-core raiding, I was getting a bit burned out on guild management as an officer, raid management and dealing with the stress of being part of a 50-plus member guild and managing two different raid groups on four different raid nights. I finally quit, moved Horde-side to play with the guild of an old friend and immediately found myself isolated.