There’s a special place in Hell for those who destroy good lore. Sure, some lore tweaks are necessary now again just to keep a back-story consistent, and fluff moving in the right direction. Yet some designers, like George Lucas, take things too far when they butcher Star Wars by introducing midichlorians and other such nonsense. Yet we forgive even some grievances, like when Blizzard decided to arbitrarily split races in the World of Warcraft along rigid lines of Alliance versus Horde. Sure, they put the usually-peaceful Tauren up against the similarly nature-loving Night Elves, but made up for it by making a druidic stronghold where both races got along peacefully. But then Blizzard did very little with actual factional warfare, so like many other things WoW, the whole idea went to shit fairly quickly.
Let’s be honest: Blizzard ignoring good lore has become ever more frequent over time, to the point where we seriously wonder whether Azeroth will just be one big hodge-podge of confused races and classes, where no one is truly unique anymore because being different is bad, even if it’s only bad because the game’s developers can’t figure out a good way to balance things effectively. Look what happened to the only two classes unique to the respective factions upon WoW’s release: by the time WoW’s first expansion came along, Paladins were offered to the Horde, and Shamans to the Alliance. One of these we could have argued as reasonable, but bringing a holy order to the typically shamanistic Horde?
There’s clearly a lack of communication between those who developed WoW’s fluff, and who’s making the game’s design decisions today. Maybe that’s because many of WoW’s original developers are no longer with Blizzard, or maybe it’s because the company has just “sold out”. But clearly, there’s a discrepancy between what’s sensical in-character, and what changes have been made merely to keep millions of subscribers hooked to a grindy enterprise, particularly when any semblance of perpetuity of a character is thrown asunder when paid character modifications result in race, faction, and aesthetic changes. Simply put, a character rolled in 2004 may look totally different today, with the only consistent factor being class, and the role of that class may have changed over the years as well.
So what’s bugging us this time around? Well, with the Cataclysm expansion announced, Blizzard is adding two new races to WoW: Goblins for Horde, and Worgen for Alliance. We’ll even disregard any objections to these inclusions by the truly hardcore lore zealots, but instead move directly on to class/race combinations. When we began writing this, we thought we’d do a run-down of every class and prod at the allowable races upon Cataclysm’s launch, but that exercise quickly became too painful to finish. But we’ll still mention some highlights, just to illustrate the sheer stupidity of it all.
- Everyone can be a Death Knight. Nice, dumb precedent, Blizzie.
- The Undead now commune with the animal kingdom. Undead druids next?
- Holy Cows. LOL.
On the one hand, we can now create guilds based almost entirely on one race, though arguably that was doable before. So that leaves us with the other hand, which points at the same old sad story of Blizzard watering down WoW in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Five years ago, not only was WoW a well-polished DIKU, but it was a well-polished DIKU with unique toons, limited by their choice of race, class, and spec, not to mention slight aesthetic tweaks. Today, everyone of a given class is practically the same, with some racials no longer being unique (ala the Priest racials), and players able to settle on easy race decisions because there are too many race options for most classes. Compounded with the fact that existing players can funnel funds from WoW’s broken economy to new toons for an enormous advantage over new or returning players, and the stage is set for the casual WoW player (“the grinder”) to have too much say in WoW’s continued development. Never mind that dual-specs further water-down the character building process.
It’s sad, really, because while Cataclysm is a snazzy attraction to everyone who’s played WoW before thanks to the focus on “evolving” old lands, WoW as a whole is still on the slippery slope to trashville. It’s like the X-Files of the video game world, with a strong start, a great following, and an ultimate decline into obscurity.
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Eh, it’ll still be more fun than pre-BC WoW. Not complaining.