Pure Heavy Prepared: World of Warcraft, The Burning Crusade

"Look to my coming on the first light of the fifth day, at dawn look to the east." is exactly what I said to my mum the night before the release of World of Warcraft’s second expansion The Burning Crusade. In truth though, my body gave up after the third night. This was my favourite time whilst playing World of Warcraft and for me, no other MMORPG will come close to its level during The Burning Crusade. Even before its release Blizzard was having fun and sent a lot of demons to attack. You know, like sending a Raid boss to attack a main city. That kind of stuff. It was all in preparation for the release of the expansion.

It was 1.55am, standing outside the Dark Portal, waiting for that realm restart to then make your way through. I still remember my excitement. It was a journey into the unknown, a feeling that you don’t really get with games these days, even new Warcraft expansions. In those days, there was no cross-server play, all the players you came across were from your realm. The dark portal stairs were packed!

Being on a PvP server (Thanks James), there were dead bodies everywhere. Players trying to be the first to enter the world of Outland, and failing miserably. We made our way, slowly and surely to the steps and waited for the clock to strike two. It seemed to take an eternity, constant fear that some dick of a Tauren would have his way with me, but it didn’t come and when the clock struck 2, we charged forward! I’ll never really forget that feeling, running through to be greeted with the warzone that is Hellfire Peninsula. Covered with Pit Bosses and demons, fire from the sky and destroyed settlements, Hellfire was a furious place. It doesn’t have the same lustre nowadays, but my goodness was that an awesome sight. We pillaged, looted and levelled. Items being constantly linked into guild chat, chat on Teamspeak or Ventrillo about how much more damage we could all now deal, and the occasional expletive when one of our merry band were stomped by a Fel Reaver.

The second night was our first LAN and it as enjoyable as the first night, journeys into Zangarmarsh and Nagrand were as fruitful as our exploits in Hellfire Peninsula and onwards we pushed. Fuelled on coke-cola, pizza and a ton of sweets we had a smashing night at our Rogue’s place. I don’t remember if we done anything out of the ordinary that night. We maybe ran a few of the new dungeons, probably got pissy with each other if we both needed the same item and then just laughed it off an hour later when something better dropped. The sun came up again, and we ventured to Microplay for the 3rd night.

Microplay was a gaming centre just behind Central Station in Glasgow. It’s no longer there, like literally no longer there, they demolished it. I have nothing but fond memories of Microplay. Many a Counter Strike: Source game was had in that hallowed room. Several hours killed between lectures at Uni and some good friendships started. Occasionally, I do miss it. My fondest memory is definitely that LAN. Our merry band of adventurers, now sitting around level 64 or 65 decided to run Zul Gurub, a level 60, 20 man raid. We had 7. So you can imagine that it levelled itself out. We fought and fought and eventually killed a few bosses and grabbed some loot. Bloodlord Mandokir was our last kill after numerous attempts, and we cheered louder than anyone in Glasgow that night when the boss dropped down dead. These bosses, in that form, are now no longer available and some of the items are gone for good. I still have a few for nostalgia and a just a little reminder of that night.

There was one zone in The Burning Crusade that was more enjoyable than the rest. Karazhan, this was a 10 player raid and was balanced beautifully. It was difficult enough to be enjoyable, yet allowed you to progress at a level relative to your gear and skill. In my honest opinion, it was, and has not yet been matched, to be the most balanced raid experience in an MMO. We cleared Karazhan on a number of occasions but it did have its scope for a little fun.

For example, by breaking crowd control intentionally. Crowd control is a term used to control a pack of enemies. For example, you could stun an enemy, turn them into a sheep or a frog or if they were undead, shackle them with chains of light. Further into Karazhan when you are ascending the tower itself there’s a room, full of undead enemies. Packed. It took a lot of time to slowly pick off each enemy one at a time and plan your route through the room. What made it more fun was to break the shackle. This was extremely easy to do even by mistake. An area of effect spell that hit that enemy would allow it to run free and attack. Honestly, there was nothing more fun than breaking a shackle when James ws your tank. He hated it. Literally hated it, you see it made him work harder as the tank and you could just stay back and fire off spells or attacks. If the group dies, doesn’t matter, James’ fault. This was similar to fighting “Shade of Aran” who would cast a flame wreath around you and if you moved through it, it pretty much exploded the raid. Not as fun, as you got the blame, but still quite fun if you had enough time to keep going and you wanted to piss off someone in the group!

My utmost fondest memory of Burning Crusade was within Karazhan. Prince Malchezaar was the last boss of the dungeon. Famed for being notoriously dickish with his infernal spawns that would constantly spread fel fire across the room, and for knocking everyone’s health down to 1HP with a spell. An unlucky run could see you go down to Prince several times without it really being your fault. It’s about 4am, we’ve been in Karazhan for about 3 hours. We took our sweet ass time at this LAN, stopping for pizza midway through and then with a groan “Suppose we best finish this then”. One of our rogues wasn’t at the LAN. He was with us on Ventrillo though and knew the score. Prince Malchezaar was being a King Troll. We had died a few times, gear needing repairs, frustration setting in. Another run came and we got him down to about 10% health, at this point an Infernal came down and pretty much landed on James and he went down. Still watching his health tick away whilst the boss was now loose killing everything in sight. 5…4…3…2… Only our Rogue left alive and while Prince made his demonic charge towards our helpless softie, something wonderful happened. A massive critical hit brought the demon to his knees and down he went. The place erupted! We scared the cats, hell we probably scared half the neighbourhood. 4am on a Sunday and BOOM! Milton on Campsie was rocking! I don’t even remember what loot we got that night, does it really matter? I just always picture our Rogue sitting in the dark, by himself, and letting out the smallest “Yas” he could muster.

Shattered Planet - Kitfox Games - PC (2014)

Following an ever increasingly popular trend of “Rogue-like” games, Kitfox Games opted to return to the roots of the genre with Shattered Planet. An isometric turn based RPG with some very interesting mechanics thrown in for good measure and it’s harder than your Granny’s stew!

Playing as one of four playable clones you descent through Shattered Planet looking for scrap metal and crystals and trying to not die horribly. You’ll lose everything you were carrying when you die except the scrap and crystals. These can be used to purchase strength, wits and health upgrades for your clone and also used to create randomly generated items or summon companion pets. When you’ve spent your hard earned resources it’s time to dive back in for another randomly generated shot. Rinse, repeat, Rogue-like.

Exploration is at the heart of the title, you’ll constantly be pushed to find the next teleporter plundering further into the unknown. Being nudged to fill a research catalogue to level-up is also a very nice feature. Levelling up will unlock summonable companions, other classes and items. If you’re a completionist, like me, you’ll find it hard to resist coming back to Shattered Planet. Even if your goal is just to collect new entries to the log. The daily challenge mode offers an experience in itself and the exploration mode, where the real meat of the game is, is long enough to keep you interested in progressing.

The environment Shattered Planet is set in is a perilous yet lovely world. The soft palette of colours coupled with the cartoon style seems to pop off the screen, you will not have a huge amount of time to explore each environment as with each move a spreading area of damage known as “Blight” will spawn into the area. Not only does blight damage on contact, it will spawn reasonably difficult enemies to contend with and ultimately will lead you to your death or to the next teleporter. Unfortunately, it feels like a mechanic solely used to push you further on. For me, I’d find it much more entertaining to clear the area of enemies and reap the rewards of the zone before moving on, it doesn’t add tension, only frustration.

The combat is refreshing, there’s been quite a few Rogue-like titles recently that fixate on the action being live rather than by turn. Rogue Legacy, Tower of Guns and Risk of Rain all done this, all successful in their own right but all having larger difficulty curves. Shattered Planet isn’t an easy title to master, but it is to learn. Being played solely with the mouse makes it easy to plan your next move through the world and decide which path to take. Clicking on your character will cause you to wait a turn which can also be useful to bait enemies into coming into your range. Focusing mainly on Swordplay means being kept to melee range and this can lead to some hectic situations. Being forced into a corner by two adjacent enemies can be extremely frustrating but is usually avoidable.

Shattered Planet does a lot of things right. The combat works well as does the music and sound and being able to fill a codex of everything you’ve seen a goal in its own, however, where the game frustrated me most was with its randomness. Rogue-likes, by their nature, are designed to have random elements. Levels are generated, randomly. Items dropped, at random. Enemies spawn, at random. It’s random. Kitfox may have pushed this a little too far. Before beginning a level you will be given the option to buy consumable items for crystals, these items rotate in options of three and if the Gods of RNG aren’t with you, you could end up buying quite a few grenades and no healing items. Throw in the fact that the crystals are also used to generate your equipment (either a weapon or an armour) and you could very possibly be equipped like Rambo with a headband and 6 grenades and no sword or you could be Robocop with regenerating health and a plasma sword, most of the time it’s down to sheet luck. There’s ways of circumventing this outcome, your inventory will store equipment, healing items and companions and there’s the very real option of saving for that one run that you’re going to throw everything at. Only to be squashed with more RNG from bottled pick-ups or unfortunate enemy spawns. Some more focus on guided gameplay, for example, by telling the player what the bottled item does, and a more forgiving item roll algorithm would help Shattered Planet greatly. When the outcome of your run is down to more luck than skill, that sense of being gripped to keep playing fades quickly.

Shattered Planet is on the right track, it does a lot of things right and with a bit more structure to the randomness it would be a highly enjoyable title. In its current form, and asking for £10, its worthy of your time. Throwing half an hour at it at a time is how to get the most out of Shattered Planet, playing it for a few hours on end will leave you frustrated by its heavy reliance on randomness.

Vanilla Confessions: World of Warcraft, the Early Days

As World of Warcraft approaches it’s 10^th anniversary I thought this would be a great time to take a look back on some humorous memories I have of when I first started playing. 2004 was the year it began for me. Halfway through my first year at University and at the age of 17 I took my first foray into the world of MMORPGs. Armed with and a copy of World of Warcraft and 4 friends who had been pushing me to get the game since I stepped foot into my first lecture. It was on that fabled Boxing Day that a Dwarf Warrior with 2 handed axe in hand stepped foot into Kharanos, and my World of Warcraft story was to begin.

172 Days of game time later (yeah, really) I can now look back on my time with WoW with fondness. For me, Warcraft was never about pushing to have the best gear or the most achievements or even being just that little bit better than your peers. No. For me, it was all about the social interactions. I could babble on about Stratholme 45minute runs, Sunday evening Upper-Black Rock Spire or 6 day long Alterac Valley fights but those are atypical of the nostalgia of Vanilla Warcraft. I’d like to share some of the less desirable pastimes that my companions and I were fond of participating in.

For those of you unfamiliar with World of Warcraft or its “Vanilla” version. Stranglethorn Vale was one of the most evil places in all of Azeroth. Being on a PvP server (Thanks James) meant that we could be ambushed by higher level players from the opposing faction with relative ease and dispatched before you could utter “oh not a-fucking-gain”. However, every cloud has a silver lining as they say and this opened up some fun ways for the 5 of us to bully lower level characters, for example, by drowning them.

Back in Vanilla, you had a pretty realistic breath meter. As far as I remember you had maybe a minute tops before you started to take damage from being underwater. They did change this and you now can breathe for a lot longer, making this pretty much impossible nowadays. Our Warlock at the time made sure we could breathe underwater and we went hunting.

It all started with our Priest mind controlling a low level hunter into the water, my warrior landed a concussion blow (5 seconds in those days), James, our mage would frost nova, the rogue would gouge. We’d cycle this round until the last droplets of breath escaped and the corpse fell to the ground. Yeah we probably could have just killed the poor fellow on the shore, but, where’s the fun in that? It’s a bit sadistic, but we planned that forced drowning very carefully! Happy with our handiwork, we’d then wait for him to respawn again under the water and well…drown him again. It was malicious but our Ventrillo was full of hilarity!

It wasn’t just the Horde that felt the force of our nastiness. Oh no, this is to date, one of my most favourite memories within a game. I don’t think I’ve laughed so hard at a game like I did on this night in a long, LONG time. Volchan, a level 60 elite (powerful) creature resided within Burning Steppes, an end level zone. This creature was formidable, he’s what’s known as a Molten Giant, a huge lumbering behemoth, dripping in lava and rock and on occasion firing off a huge fire blast in a circle from his feet outwards, causing some pretty hefty damage to end level players.

Close to Burning Steppes is a very low level area known as Redridge. Within Redridge is a town called Lakeshire, safe haven for the inexperienced and weak. Well not on the day we decided to take Volchan for a walk. Back in Vanilla you could partake in a technique known as “Kiting”, kiting works by periodically attacking a creature whilst moving away, then attacking, then moving away. Again, nowadays it’s pretty much impossible, the vast majority of creatures will only chase for a certain distance and then run back to where they were. Volchan liked to be kited.

After several failed attempts and a lot of patience, Volchan was a new resident of Lakeshire. I made sure that I kept Volchan’s attention our Priest would be heal my health back to full after each fire blast and our band of merry bandits were riling up support from the locals: “Come help us slay the giant” they’d yell, often followed by “We need help” and the most blatantly nasty one of them all “He drops Epic Loot!”. In their bucketloads the newbies responded. Volchan disposing of their puny attempts at battle with ease, one fire blast after another. Guards and NPCs fell like leaves in the wind and with each satisfying death yell from members of our own faction we laughed. Oh how we laughed and laughed. Eventually our priest forgot to heal me, or I forgot to attack (could have been both due to the giggles) and Volchan was now free to pilage as he pleased. A few minutes later he ran back, undefeated, to his magma covered home of Burning Steppes. We still laughed.

To be honest though, we weren’t that bad all the time. We had several enjoyable evenings and weekends working as a team to kill enemies and become closer friends. World of Warcraft gains a bad reputation at times and sometimes it is deserved. However, if you can disfranchise yourself with the game there’s some solid foundations of social interaction and it’s with these I remember Vanilla Warcraft with fondness. I’ve built quite a few friendships through Warcraft to the point of being one of my Uni mates Groomsman at his wedding (She plays too in case you were wondering) and although I may have spent 172 days in the last 10 or so years playing Warcraft. Most of the time, it was time well spent. Who knows if I’ll be playing and if it’ll even last another 10 years. One thing’s for sure though, we’ll still be laughing at the memories.