The Crusade that Burns.

It was pretty much inevitable. I had even bought the damn game, just hadn't installed it. But when Anton and Jon asked me why on Earth I'm not playing the Burning Crusade (the recently released expansion to World of Warcraft) I answered "Uh, I dunno."

Hell, I mean, it seems that everyone has played TBC for a while at one point or another. Even Ragnar Tornquist and Ron Gilbert are playing too, the latter even making his own Blood Elf guild! I'd so join that if I could play on his server. Oh, wells.

In all honesty, one of the reasons I started playing WoW again was because I wanted something to drive me away from Justice for All, which I had begun to rush through. And I really want to savor this game, enjoy every single bad pun, figure out every single reference etc. I dunno, it's kind of a weird feeling. From what I've been told, I'm not the only one who gets it with certain games, that feeling of sweet melancholy you get when you're nearing the end of a game you really liked. On one hand you're happy because you had a great time with it, and on the other one you're kind of sad because it's about to end. That's exactly what I got, and since it's gonna be a while before we get Ace Attorney 3, I'm in no rush to finish #2. Besides, playing Justice for all while in bed in the early hours of the night rocks.

So anyway, back to the Burning Crusade. I started playing with my level 60 Druid Erdalion, in my old server Argent Dawn, which is a roleplay server, in theory at least. Thing is, pretty much everybody rushed to level 70 (the new max in TBC) in the first few weeks, so leveling so far has been a pretty lonely experience. Sure I've teamed up with a few people here and there for dungeons or difficult quests, but it feels like most of the people I've met have characters level 70 already and just use the characters I meet them with as a past-time for when they're bored. So yeah, TBC is a Massively Singleplayer Online RPG for me so far in the Outlands. Still, I had a lot of fun with certain quests, and Blizzard's love for pop culture references made me laugh out loud a few times, a good example is the Tenacious Defender.

Unsurprisingly then, it wasn't long before the sameness of everything got to me. Quests so far don't really vary from the "Go there, kill X of this and get Y of that" variation. Sure, the new locations look pretty nice (except Nagrand and Hellfire Peninsula, fuck that place) but it gets boring after spending so many hours in the same place. I've been told that quests get better, and there are several dungeons to explore, which don't take that much time, but there are only so many times you can run those before it gets tedious. At this rate, I'll probably quit the game before I reach level 70 for the ranked Arena matches, but really, single-player grinding is not my favorite past-time, I rank it up there with shoving searing needles in my eyes.

And it doesn't help that the level of roleplay in my server is... Well, I'll let the following video describe it better, even if it's not made for my realm:


In all fairness, WoW isn't exactly tailor-made for RP, and I have found some occasions of excellent random RP. But generally, that's how it's been in the Outlands so far.

So what's a guy to do then? Why, roll a Blood Elf of course! I initially made a male hunter with the intend to level him because hunters are great fun, but I also made a female rogue because I had this storyline idea about such a character and thought I might as well give that a try. The result was, I got hooked on the rogue style of play. Stealthing everywhere is so much fun (even for a druid player, who's used to it) and the starting areas are so well-designed, Silvermoon City is one of the most beautiful cities I've seen in a game, and the quests are interesting and quite balanced. I decided to take this rogue business seriously, so at level 14 I swam all the way to Westfall (one of the starting areas for human characters) and got the Red Defias Mask, a rogue trademark, here's Gil at Undercity:


I'm up to level 21 currently, struggling a bit with the poisons quest, but leveling has been a blast so far. There are many people around leveling their Blood Elves as well, so it's really easy to find a good group, not to mention that most of them are really nice, which is quite surprising. Sure, there's the occasional jackass around, like one guy who expected me to run him through a series of high level quests so he'd get a certain item, when I wasn't really able of doing some of those quests on my own to begin with. And all that for just 5 gold! People these days. But hey, you can't avoid idiots in real life, so it's hardly surprising when you run into them in such an anonymous environment.

I have to say, on the roleplay side of things, I've been lucky enough to find a lot of it so far. Most people react in-character if you approach them that way, and I've had a few excellent RP sessions so far, more than I've had in a whole year almost. Only last night I run into an Orcish/Trollish celebration at Ratchet, apparently they had killed some boss and they were celebrating about it in excellent in-character fashion. They didn't seem to like Elves though, and my character isn't that fond of Orcs either, so this resulted in some hilarious misunderstandings, all in-character though. I hope I can run into more of these soon, here's a screenie of the aforementioned party:


Still, I agree with Ragnar Tornquist when he says that the first 20 levels are the best, after that it gets a bit boring for me. Initially, my goal was to get the Mask, the Cape seen in the screenshot above and a really nice dagger. Now that's over, I only feel like finishing the quest that gives me access to poisons, but after that is done... Chances are, I'll lose interest again, and with many games to play like the new Sam and Max episodes, WoW will be left behind, again. At this point, I doubt I'll ever get Gil the rogue to the Outland (the new area in TBC).

As it is now, I only have one goal in the game. I met this Tauren Shaman called Atlas, my mission is to make him shrug at some point and take a screenshot of that. 'Nuff said.