Source, which includes a whole gallery of lovely Victorian photos.

Source, which includes a whole gallery of lovely Victorian photos.

Source, which includes a whole gallery of lovely Victorian photos.

Source, which includes a whole gallery of lovely Victorian photos.

Source, which includes a whole gallery of lovely Victorian photos.

Found this really cozy to play. One of the comments on the listing kind of nails it, which was "it's like a demake of the Sims."

Blurb off Steam:

In Tiny Life, you control a set of people that live together in a household. You take care of their daily needs, build their skills, forge new relationships... or just mess up their entire life in whatever way you can think of

Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.

---

This is the seventh part of my write-up. You can read the other parts here.

• Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla

• Part 2 - Burning Crusade

• Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

• Part 4 - Cataclysm

• Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

• Part 6 - Warlords of Draenor

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

Part 7 – Classic and Legion

Classic was a separate game created to emulate early WoW. Legion was the sixth expansion for retail WoW, coming after Warlords of Draenor but preceding Battle for Azeroth. Since Legion was relatively uncontroversial, I didn't want to dedicate a whole post to discussing it, so I have added it to the end of this one.

“You don’t want to do that. You think you do, but you don’t.”

Those words, delivered by WoW executive producer J. Allen Brack, became immediately symbolic of the relationship Blizzard had with its community. The customer was not always right. In fact, the customer was a fucking idiot who needed to sit back, shut up, and keep paying. At least, that’s how it was seen. In the years since, Brack’s statement has only grown more infamous, more telling, and more painful for the company. It resurfaces whenever Blizzard shoots itself in the foot – an increasingly common occurrence these days.

It came in response to a question asked at the 2013 Blizzcon Q&A – had they ever considered creating legacy servers so that players could revisit old expansions? The answer wasn’t just ‘no’, it was a disgusted, emphatic, overwhelming ‘no’. It was a ‘no’ that said the developers were affronted that they had even been asked.

It wasn’t the first time, either. They had been refusing the idea for years. In February 2008 a community manager said, “We were at one time internally discussing the possibility fairly seriously, but the long term interest in continued play on them couldn't justify the extremely large amount of development and support resources it would take to implement and maintain them. We'd effectively be developing and supporting two different games."

Again in November 2009, they said no.

"We have answered these requests quite a few times now saying that we have no plans to open such realms, and this is still the case today. We have no plans to open classic realms or limited expansion content realms.”

And again in August 2010, Tom Chilton responded to requests with this,

"Currently, my answer would be probably not. The reason I say that is because any massively multiplayer game that has pretty much ever existed and has ever done any expansions has always gotten the nostalgia of, 'Oh God, wouldn't it be great if we could have classic servers!' and more than anything else that generally proves to be nostalgia. In most cases - in almost all cases - the way it ends up playing out is that the game wasn't as good back then as people remember it being and then when those servers become available, they go play there for a little bit and quickly remember that it wasn't quite as good as what they remembered in their minds and they don't play there anymore and you set up all these servers and you dedicated all this hardware to it and it really doesn't get much use. So, for me, the historical lesson is that it's not a very good idea to do"

Perhaps he was right. But the demand was clearly there. And since Blizzard failed to provide, players did the job themselves.

Enter the private server.

These were alternative copies of wow, hosted by a third party. Many private servers were simply replicas of the retail game, offering the same content for free. Others specialised, providing powers and mod commands, the ability to skip straight to max level, to gain items that might normally take weeks or months to get, or visit secret areas which were usually inaccessible.

Since private servers did not update along with the main game, they acted as a kind of time capsule. A private server created during Wrath of the Lich King would stay there long after new expansions had come and gone. Modern World of Warcraft bore almost no resemblance to its earliest form, not in its philosophy, its aesthetic, its gameplay, or most importantly, it’s community. As players became increasingly dissatisfied with WoW’s new direction, and began to hunger for return to the older instalments, these servers gained a new relevance. In some cases, private servers could be listed among the most popular MMORPGs in the world – quite the achievement for something technically illegal.

One of the most successful was Nostalrius, a server preserving Patch 1.12 – the sacred final patch before WoW’s first expansion. It was true to life in every possible way. Recreating the experience of vanilla WoW was easier said than done - not many servers had been able to crack it, but Nostalrius was one.

”Nostalrius is a living museum: a near-perfect record of a place, design choices and play styles that don’t exist anymore.”

What’s more, it was a totally non-profit endeavour. Its creators never asked for any kind of re-numeration, though they could have. They ran the server at a loss. Over its short lifetime (it was up for little more than a year) Nostalrius grew at a faster rate than Guild Wars 2, FFXIV, or Elder Scrolls Online.

"The heart behind all private servers, including Nostalrius, is to recreate a version of the game that many enjoyed and that Blizzard no longer provides," the team wrote in their AMA (LINKS TO REDDIT).

But it was not to last.

On the 10th of April 2016, Blizzard issued the Nostalrius administrators with a cease and desist letter. At that time, the server had 800,000 registered accounts, 150,000 of which were active. The creators had no choice. During its final days, users flooded onto the server. Those crowds, a seething mass of furious indignation and loss, reached a scale that hadn’t been seen in retail WoW for years. It was covered across gaming media.

Some players fired off /cry emotes, others mounted their most impressive horses, or spammed the chat with calls to protest, or made a last ditch attempt to advertise their guilds, and a few simply wished a fond farewell to the server they had come to call home. On the Horde side, hundreds of players marched the hour-long journey from Orgrimmar to Thunder Bluff, before leaping to their deaths from its highest peak. “ATTACK BLIZZARD SERVERS!! TAKE THEM DOWN!!”, one player screamed as he fell.

”THANK YOU NOSTALRIUS FOR THE GREAT MEMORIES THANK YOU AND GOODBYE! <3”

Time ran out, and the game reset to the login screen, where the black portal sat glittering in the background. ‘Disconnected from server’, said a popup message in yellow text. The buttons no longer worked. Nostalrius was dead.

And its community exploded.

All of Blizzard’s social media accounts were overwhelmed by angry messages, begging them to find some morsel of mercy and, in some cases, threatening them if they didn’t. Major gaming figures weighed in. The scandal broke into every forum, every subreddit, and every server. No private server had ever been the topic of such passionate discourse. But the Nostalrius scandal had come to represent more than a server, it was a martyr in the fight for the right of the consumer to preserve games. Vanilla WoW was not the first game to disappear because its owners no longer wanted to support it. Someday, all online games would face the same fate.

Across the video game industry, a conversation arose. Was modern World of Warcraft the same game it used to be, or something else completely? If Blizzard were not going to provide vanilla servers, did they have the ethical right to stop players from making them, just because they owned the IP? Was this new attempt to clamp down on private servers a desperate bid to reclaim players who had left the retail game? That last question provoked a backlash of its own.

”This is not stealing profits from your game”, declared Jontron. “These people weren’t even subbed. In fact, most of these people just don’t like your current game, so they’re trying to go back and play your old one.”

A petition was created on Change.org to resurrect Nostalrius following its closure. Ex-World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern pledged that if it gained more than 200,000 signatures, he would print all five thousand pages and deliver them to Blizzard President Mike Morhaime personally. It reached 279,000.

In June of that year, something remarkable happened. The team behind Nostalrius was invited to a meeting at Blizzard, where they met Morhaime and Brack, as well as Tom Chilton, Ion Hazzikostas, and Marco Koegler – all the men who held power over the future of Warcraft. For corporate executives to meet with people who had effectively stolen their game was unheard of. They didn’t even put them under a non-disclosure agreement – which Blizzard usually required for all visitors.

”People at key positions inside Blizzard attended the meeting. They were also all very interested, curious, attentive, and asked a lot of questions about all of the topics we mentioned.

We did everything we could to make this presentation & discussion as professional as possible, which was something that clearly was a pleasant unexpected surprise for the whole Blizzard team, Mike Morhaime included.”

It was planned to last two hours, but went on for five. It was summarised on the Nostalrius forum.

”One of the game developers said at a point that WoW belongs to gaming history and agreed that it should be playable again, at least for the sake of game preservation, and he would definitely enjoy playing again.”

The most important thing to come out of this meeting was a confirmation from Blizzard – they wanted legacy servers, but it would be a tremendous undertaking. At the end of the meeting, Blizzard promised to keep in touch.

But they didn’t. In fact, Brack wrote a letter prior to Blizzcon 2016 insisting that legacy servers would not be discussed at the event.

”We had invested our hearts and souls into this meeting, and we got some really good feedback while we were there. But after we left, we heard nothing from Blizzard for months - even after continuing to reach out. And so what were we supposed to do at that point? Were we supposed to just let the legacy server die? Is the dream dead? Well we took things into our own hands, and that’s when the Elysium project happened. We released the server code for the entire Nostalrius project to the Elysium team, Including the player databases for both of our servers.”

Elysium was a new project intended to take over from Nostalrius. A short while later, Nostalrius itself was re-created, but not for long. It shutdown and withdrew its code from Elysium under pressure from Blizzard. Elysium struggled on for a short while alone, until it was broken up from within by internal strife and embezzlement.

All seemed lost.

“I want to talk about ice cream.”

It was Blizzcon 2017. New adventures had been announced for Hearthstone, new maps for Overwatch, and StarCraft 2 was going free to play. The next World of Warcraft expansion was about to be revealed, and there was no doubt that ‘Battle for Azeroth’ would overshadow everything else at the convention. That was until J. Allen Brack stood on stage and started discussing food.

”Before we get to the big news, I want to take a minute. And I want to talk about ice cream. Ice cream is great. Ice cream is one of my favourite desserts. Personally, I love chocolate, and I love cookies and cream. Cookies and cream is actually my all-time favourite dessert. But I understand that for some of you, your favourite flavour… is vanilla.”

A trailer played, reversing through all of the expansions in order, before returning to the famous opening shot from when World of Warcraft first came out. The reaction was colossal.

”It brings tears to my eyes thinking of sitting down with my son and wife to show them WoW Classic.”

[…]

”Thank you blizzard for giving me the game i fell in love with back”

[...]

”THE ABSOLUTE MADMAN BLIZZARD ACTUALLY DID IT. STRAIGHT FROM THE GUY WHO GAVE US, "YOU THINK YOU DO BUT YOU DON'T".”

[…]

”No game has had me tear up before, that changed when I saw the announcement. And after rewatching this 40 times, I still get the same feeling.”

It wasn’t just a trailer, it was a landmark shift in Blizzard’s philosophy toward its games and its community.

With a quick two-minute trailer, Blizzard backpedaled on years of dismissal to finally offer fans an official, unblemished version of the world's most popular MMO as it existed in 2004. This is something they said they'd never do.

To this day, the trailer is the second most upvoted post on /r/wow (LINKS TO REDDIT).

”Amazing. I can now ruin my 30's in the exact same way as I ruined my teens.”

[…]

”This is not good for my career prospects”

[…]

”I'm legit crying right now. SO FUCKING PUMPED!”

[…]

”It took me a few seconds to get the ice cream bit, but when I got it my jaw fucking dropped.”

It’s really difficult for me to convey quite how shocked the community was. This wasn’t like any other announcement. It was spectacular to watch it all unfold.

There were a lot of questions asked in the following days.

Would this be covered by a normal WoW subscription, or separate service entirely? What version of Vanilla would be chosen? It had spanned two years and twelve patches, after all, each different in its own way. Which bugs, glitches and performance issues would be included for authenticity, and which would be left out?

No one at Blizzard knew the answers to most of these questions. The project was still in its early stages.

"We’re going to hire people specifically for this job, and we’re going to staff it with people who are interested in bringing back Classic WoW in the best, most authentic way," Brack says. "And that’s how we’ll be successful."

Even with the whole team focused on it, several years would pass before Classic went live. Blizzard has always loved deadlines – especially the whooshing noise they made as they went by. There were those who started asking why it was taking so long.

If you've been around the World of Warcraft ecosphere for a while, Blizzard's tentativeness might come as a surprise. There is no shortage of emulated vanilla servers on the internet. The official subreddit for the scene points to 15 of them, and there are dozens more holding crystallized copies of Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, or Cataclysm—wherever you happened to leave your happiness.

The reason was this: Blizzard didn’t want to just throw up an emulated Vanilla server. They wanted to fully integrate Classic into the modern game. Brack explained more in an interview with PCGamer,

"We think we have a way to run the Classic servers on the modern technical infrastructure. The infrastructure is how we spin up instances and continents, how the database works. It’s those core fundamental pieces, and running two MMOs of that size is a daunting problem. But now we think we have a way to have the old WoW version work on the modern infrastructure and feel really good."

Why did they bother? Well if they took the easy route, they faced a number of potential issues down the line. These servers were unstable, buggy and incredibly insecure to hacking. Anyone who had touched a private server could tell you so. The work required was immense.

”First, they DO have the source code for Vanilla WoW. Code version control systems are not something new, as it has been a standard in the industry for a long time. With these systems, they can retrieve the code at any given previous backup date.

However, in order to generate the server (and the client), a complex build system is being used. It is not just about generating the “WoW.exe” and “Server.exe” files. The build process takes data, models, maps, etc. created by Blizzard and also generates client and server specific files. The client only has the information it needs and the server only has the information that it needs.

This means that before re-launching vanilla realms, all of the data needed for the build processes has to be gathered in one place with the code. Not all of this information was under a version control system. In the end, whichever of these parts were lost at any point, they will have to be recreated: this is likely to take a lot of resources through a long development process.

In addition to the technical aspects of releasing a legacy server Blizzard also needs to provide a very polished game that will be available to their millions of players, something existing unofficial legacy servers cannot provide.”

A lot was still up in the air. Blizzard were clear, however, that it would be as authentic as possible. They sneered down their noses at the quality-of-life changes which had, according to fans, ruined the game. Guns and bows would need ammo, pets needed to be fed, and they even laboured to recreate the annoyances caused by early 2000s dial-up internet, like spell batching, which processed user inputs in clusters rather than instantly. But some changes remained, like the in-game clock (which wasn’t originally added until Wrath).

Dungeon Finder? Of course not.

Cross-realm grouping? Never.

Flying? Come on.

Achievements? Nope.

Unified Auction Houses? No Way.

”ITS FUCKING HAPPENING!”

On Tuesday 14th March 2019, the fandom awoke. News. Fresh news. Wherever they were, whatever they were doing, thousands of nerds stopped on the spot, and scampered back to their mothers’ basements like they’d just won a golden ticket to the chocolate factory. They finally knew (LINKS TO REDDIT) when Classic would go live.

”I just have to stay alive for 3 more months.”

Another user wrote, “THAT'S THE WEEK OF MY HONEYMOON - WEDDING'S CANCELLED”, and he was reassured that if his fiancé was ‘the one’, she would understand. She did not.

”This is what I imagine a former junkie feels like when they’re offered an Oxy.”

Rather than start at 1.12, Blizzard decided to resurrect Vanilla from its first moment. It would begin with Onyxia and Molten Core - the two first raids to be added originally. From there, the patches of Vanilla would be added over the course of a year and a half, so that players could relive Classic as authentically as possible – and so they wouldn’t get bored and unsubscribe.

The days ticked slowly by, and the hype grew to astronomical levels.

”Fuck it's so close, SO GOD DAMN CLOSE

I've dreamt of this since I first got into private servers and I never thought they'd do it but the mad lads did it

Honestly half the fun right now is being part of they hype wave, it's like sitting at a starting line revving your engine”

[…]

”Shit, it's like being back in 2004 all over again, waiting for release. But the hype is deeper, I have so many memories I can't wait to re-live.”

[…]

”Never in my life have I been this excited to play a game.

AZEROTH, I'M COMING HOME BABY! JUST 11 MORE DAYS, 10 HOURS, 12 MINUTES AND 30 SECONDS!!”

Then all of a sudden, the day had arrived. On 26th August 2019, the Classic servers opened, and immediately collapsed due to high demand. But once players got past the hours-long queues, they rushed into the Azeroth of their childhoods. To many, it was everything they had dreamed of. They dived in with youthful abandon. Over a million concurrent viewers tuned in just to watch it on Twitch.

”WoW was essentially struck with a nuclear blast of nostalgia that sent the franchise back into the stratosphere, appropriately enough, for the first time since 2004.

Sixteen years after the game’s original release, WoW permeates the many spheres of online culture once more. What’s most impressive, though, is how the game has stayed resurgent. While the nostalgia surrounding Classic WoW was a driving force for the resurrection of the franchise in August 2019, that nostalgia has morphed into a sustainable platform for WoW.”

During an earnings call a few months later, J Allen Brack revealed the extent of Classic’s success.

“Given the content updates for modern WoW, and the cadence that we have for Classic, we exited our year with a subscriber base that was double what it was at the end of Q2.”

Stories immediately flooded out of the game. Screenshots showed players queuing up in their hundreds to kill mobs in busy areas. One player sent another a box full of mangoes following a conversation in a random battleground. A famous Guild sponsored a race (LINKS TO REDDIT) to be the world’s first max level character, only for a completely separate unrelated player to beat them to the punch. In one bizarre case, hackers discovered a way to leap between copies of the world, in order to get a PvP advantage. I would write about the political intrigue and guild drama surrounding the opening of Ahn’Qiraj, but someone has already done a good job of it (LINKS TO REDDIT).

The long and short of it is this: Classic was a resounding success. It re-vitalised the game and even prompted people to look at retail wow in a more positive light. That was a return to player driven adventures, bizarre encounters, and collective action. For the first time in many years, Warcraft was a community defined by its optimism, not it’s nihilism. And all this did wonders for Blizzards reputation at a time when they desperately needed some good PR.

”People were loving this recreation of the great massively multiplayer game's early days and lamenting what WOW had become in the 14 years since. Someone celebrated freedom from the tyranny of item levels. Someone mentioned the hushed sound design, noting that they could hear every footstep and clink of their chainmail. Someone else remembered how the community was so much friendlier back then, in so much less of a rush.”

”git gud scrub”

For some, Classic was a rude awakening.

WoW had been slowly replaced over the years like the ship of Theseus, piece by piece, patch by patch, until nothing remained of its original form. Those who noticed the change were often unable to pinpoint what exactly was happening, or why. But Classic peeled back all the layers to reveal the bones of Warcraft, and it suddenly became clear.

It wasn’t just that the game was buggy or janky or tedious – though it was all of those things. It was a product of a its time, built in the days of Ultima and Everquest, and that showed in its philosophy. What should be rewarded? What should be punished? How should players overcome challenges? What makes a game fun? Is it more liberating to have a thousand things to do, or nothing at all?

Blizzard answered these questions differently in 2004. Nothing came easily. The time and effort required simply to hit max level were crushing. And for every player the game captured in a cruel cycle of addiction, another bounced right off it.

Perhaps more than anything, Vanilla WoW had been designed for new players. That might sound contradictory, but stick with me. Vanilla had been a new game. Most of its players had never seen anything like it, and it was made with that in mind. While every new expansion brought along more and more features to help newbies find their feet, they gradually abandoned them as the target demographic. Rather than inspiring wonder, they opted for spectacle. The point was not to capitalise on Vanilla, but to depart from it.

The best example is when Cataclysm remade the two continents from Vanilla. Each zone became a sequel to its previous (lost forever) self. A new player wouldn’t understand the references or story threads, but that was okay. New players weren’t who Blizzard wanted to impress.

Vanilla had been awkward, unintuitive, confusing, unforgiving, and full of bizarre experimental edges, but it was only after Blizzard ironed out those wrinkles that players realised how much they lent the game its character.

“It’s bad, but it’s also really good? I mean, it’s still a lot of fun, but it’s also pretty garbage. It’s garbage, but it’s still a classic.”

[…]

”There can be no argument at all that quest design and storytelling were better in early WoW. They could be quite poor. There's an awful lot of mechanical drudgery, with endless culling of wildlife and troublesome local populations, low drop rates and high kill counts padding out the levels with makework. You can find grace notes, of course, like an amusing spat between rival goblin factions, but these could often end up fighting the game systems or poor design.”

It has always been difficult to pin down what made Vanilla great. Topics like design philosophy and historical context are complicated and difficult to explain.

”I logged into current WoW, and just looked at the character screen, wondering: How it was possible to start with such a great game, and end up here like this?”

A lot of people in the Classic community boiled it down to difficulty. Its leaders encouraged an almost cult-like obsession with ‘the grind’, because things had been better back in the day, before the game went soft. They thought suffering and inconvenience were part of what made WoW great.

”If there's no sense of challenge, there's no sense of reward (LINKS TO REDDIT)

In retail, challenge is only an optional way to see content, so there's much less incentive to actually do the challenging content”

Not everyone was unreasonable, and plenty of Classic fans (LINKS TO REDDIT) mocked those who took it all too seriously. But some were, and unfortunately they clung to the spotlight. To them, you weren’t a ‘true fan’ until you accepted Vanilla into your heart. And if you weren’t a true fan, you were the enemy.

Yes, rose-coloured glasses were involved, but you couldn’t say that to people in these circles. To suggest their feelings were the product of nostalgia meant implying they weren’t ‘real’. It was tantamount to an insult, and had been used by the fans and developers of modern WoW for years to dismiss calls for legacy servers.

”Nostalgia is, of course, an important part of the overall picture. WoW landed at a really formative time for a lot of people, a time when they were in high school or in college, had a lot of free time, and all their friends had a lot of free time, and their lives meshed well with the pace of the game, and the game became their shared social space. That is a potent element.”

[…]

When asked about the differences (LINKS TO REDDIT) between modern WoW and Vanilla, one user responded, “Vanilla didn't have people crying about how much better Vanilla allegedly was.”

Discussions of difficulty in games have always evoked strong emotions, and WoW is no exception. This Puritan style of thinking was nothing new – fans of the Souls games had been treading these waters for years. But in the lead-up to Classic, it gained a toxic edge.

Vanilla became an almost mythological entity. Its strengths made it great, they said, but its weaknesses also made it great. Criticism wasn’t just wrong, it was seen by some as actively harmful, borderline blasphemous. But a lot of the people who bought into this idea had never actually been around during WoW’s early days, and so when the first servers came online, they saw behind the curtain.

”For many, this complete lack of direction was clearly overwhelming. The global chat was a chaotic mess of players asking where to find gnolls and bandits, with many picking a random direction from the quest hub and striking out to explore the region, hoping to get lucky and happen upon the right kind of enemy.”

For a lot of players, that was the moment they realised this promised land had never been that great to begin with. They found themselves apostates, cast out of a fandom which was far too busy touching heaven to even notice them leave.

”Wow Classic is god awful. (LINKS TO REDDIT) I played the game at various stages and i have no idea how Wow even survived when it launched in this state. People shit on retail when its magnitudes superior to classic no matter its faults. Classic doesnt even do the basic things well at all.”

[…]

”There is a strong and passionate fanbase of folks for whom this is the best thing ever, but I think a number of people don't realize how many quality-of-life and mechanical changes have been made in the years since.

Blizzard may have strayed too far in some areas, but it's hard not to see some of the tedium reintroduced to WoW with Classic.”

Some weren’t sure if they loved it or hated it.

”Blizzard could not have picked a better zone to stir nostalgia and then skewer it on the truth of how boring the game could be.”

But everyone acknowledged there was something here.

”World of Warcraft Classic is compelling in ways that modern WOW isn't.”

[…]

”I think it’s true that Classic offers something for everyone that retail WoW cannot. They say it’s about the journey not the destination, and I definitely feel that’s the case with WoW.”

And veterans weren’t the only ones who loved it.

”I figure this is mostly for older gamers who have a rose-colored, nostalgic view of the game, but I'm a little curious, so I test it out.

Oh boy was I wrong.” (LINKS TO REDDIT)

It’s hard to have an impartial talk about Classic. The discourse has always been fraught. Classic actively fosters an in-group mentality, due to its emphasis on social dependency. You can't get by as a lone wolf. You can't dip a toe in the water and hope to remain competitive. Either you give everything to the game, or you get left behind.

”If you've only got a few hours a week to dedicate to an MMO, Classic may not be the game for you and you may be better off looking at modern Warcraft to fill that Azeroth-shaped hole.”

[…]

”You spent time together (LINKS TO REDDIT) and got to know each other. Maybe that still happens in small doses but it used to be the whole game.”

This aspect was so strong that for some players, Vanilla WoW was less a game and more a social network.

”WoW was so popular because it gave a sense of community (LINKS TO REDDIT) - something that wasn't really available elsewhere. Social media wasn't a thing, outside of MySpace(lol) and bare bones Facebook you needed a college email to sign up for. No Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Discord, etc. So after a long hard day at work/school, you chilled with your guildmates, who were doing the same.”

Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.

---

This is the sixth part of my write-up. You can read the other parts here.

• Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla

• Part 2 - Burning Crusade

• Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

• Part 4 - Cataclysm

• Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

• Part 7 - Classic and Legion

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

Part 6 – Warlords of Draenor

This might seem like a bizarre topic to start with, but stay with me here. It all links together.

The Warcraft Movie

On 9th May 2006, a Blizzard press release announced the production of a live-action movie set in the Warcraft universe, in partnership with Legendary Pictures. Fans were euphoric. Blizzard’s cinematic trailers had some of the best CGI in the world. Even today, they have never released a bad one. Fans wanted something like that, only 90 minutes long.

"We searched for a very long time to find the right studio for developing a movie based on one of our game universes," said Paul Sams, chief operating officer of Blizzard Entertainment. "Many companies approached us in the past, but it wasn't until we met with Legendary Pictures that we felt we'd found the perfect partner. They clearly share our high standards for creative development, and because they understand the vision that we've always strived for with our Warcraft games, we feel there isn't a better studio out there for bringing the Warcraft story to film."

However good their intentions may have been, the film would linger in production hell for a decade before seeing the light of day. It was scheduled to hit theatres in 2009 under the direction of Sam Raimi (of Spiderman fame), but it was still only in its early stages when Blizzcon 2011 came around..

Uwe Boll, grim reaper of video game adaptations, tried to get his fingers on the film. Blizzard’s response was emphatic.

"We will not sell the movie rights, not to you… especially not to you. Because it's such a big online game success, maybe a bad movie would destroy that ongoing income, what the company has with it.”

Seven years into production, they settled on a director. Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie) had directed three films and one of them had been somewhat successful – Moon. He immediately set about changing the story, which set the film back a bit, but they were finally able to make progress. A ‘sizzle reel’ was shown at San Diego Comic Con later that year, featuring a battle between a human and an orc. By the end of 2013, the film had been cast, and began shooting in mid-2014.

Warcraft finally premiered in Paris on 24th May 2016. It grossed $439 million, making it the most successful video game adaptation of all time, but the costs of production and promotion were so high that it still made a loss of up to $40 million for the studio.

The film was… divisive. The average Western viewer was alienated by the dense lore and confusing plot. In fact, it made most of its profit in China, where people flocked to see some CGI warriors smash into each other. Critics (most of whom knew nothing about the Warcraft franchise) absolutely hated it. Writing for Movie Freak, Sara Michelle Fetters said:

”Warcraft can't help but be a major disappointment, the game all but over as far as this particular fantasy franchise is alas concerned.”

Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson had a similar opinion.

”Having sat through this baffling movie's grueling two hours, I can't in good conscience even recommend it to Warcraft devotees. There's nothing here for anyone --neither man nor orc”

The New York Post was very critical too.

”Jones ... is trying to deliver something like "The Lord of the Rings" minus the boring bits, but without the boring bits what you have is Itchy and Scratchy with maces.”

It’s true that the film was… a fixer upper. The CGI was impressive but often awkward, the accents were all over the place, the armour looked like bad cosplay, the tone was off, and the characters were hard to empathise with. Nonetheless, it found a following among Warcraft’s oldest fans. On Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, it has user scores of 76/100 and 8.1/10 respectively, which speaks to its cult classic status.

It was a thrill seeing the places and people they’d been playing alongside for years, rendered with such love and care on the silver screen. Stormwind City and Dalaran, the Dark Portal, Durotar and Thrall. It was a love letter to the fans.

The user ‘nerdlife’ had this to say:

”A truly work of love. As a diehard warcraft fan this movie was amazing. So many details, amazing art design and amazing sound design. It truly shows how disconnected the critics are to the everyone else. Me and everyone i know that went to watch the movie truly liked it.”

Here are some more responses.

”Simply a great movie, enjoyed every single bit of it as a Warcraft fan.”

[…]

”As a fan of Warcraft I went into this movie a little bit sceptical, but from ten minutes in I was already loving the film. The majority of critic reviews are pathetic and should just be ignored. The CGI is mostly fantastic, and the story while it is a little rushed at the start is also pretty good.”

In 2018, Duncan Jones would speak out about the issue he raced making Warcraft. It took place during a tumultuous time, both for his personal life and for the film. He said production was plague by ‘studio politics’, with Blizzard and Legendary picking the film apart and forcing multiple re-writes.

Despite all of its issues, rumours circulated in 2020 that a sequel was in the works. The rumours were picked up by Lore Daddy Chris Metzen, who helped create the story of Warcraft, though he has since left Blizzard.

"A new movie based on the huge video game series, World of Warcraft, is reportedly in the works at Legendary Pictures. According to relatively reliable scooper, Daniel Ritchman, Warcraft 2 is now in development, thanks largely to the game and first movie's popularity overseas."

Now, you might be wondering why I started a post about the next World of Warcraft expansion by talking about the film. You see, there was a problem. The movie focused on the ‘First War’, which played out in ‘Warcraft: Orcs and Humans’, the original Warcraft game from 1994. It was pretty light on plot, so most of its story was added retroactively in sequels and novelizations. Only the hardcore lore-nerds really knew much about it.

The most recent WoW expansion, Mists of Pandaria, took place thirty years later, and those years were full of incredibly dense plot. Blizzard were setting their film so far in the past and basing it on a game so few people played, they worried it would alienate fans.

Their solution was ingenious. And by ingenious, I do of course mean mind-bogglingly stupid. The next expansion would take players to an alternate universe, set thirty years in the past.

The Big Announcement

Blizzcon 2013 was a good one. Siege of Orgrimmar had recently come out, and players were loving it. They had seen four patches in the last year, and two of the best raids ever. Diablo III’s expansion was revealed, and it looked great. Blizzard also showed off Heroes of the Storm, their first foray into the MOBA genre, the movie was making strides, and the trading-card game Hearthstone got a beta release. In terms of content, it was one of the busiest conventions Blizzard had ever held.

With so much going on, Chris Metzen didn’t have to generate any hype when he took to Stage D – the audience was already excited. But he took his time warming them up anyway. When he promised a return to Warcraft’s roots, they practically foamed at the mouth. The trailer was a hit. You can watch it here.

People weren’t quite sure what they were looking at, but they liked it.

I need to cover quite a lot of lore to give you a sense of what’s going on, but I’ve boiled it down to its absolute simplest form. Feel free to skip to the next section it if you don’t care.

There were two planets: Draenor and Azeroth. Draenor was the homeland of the Orcs, Ogres and Draenei. Azeroth had the Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, and so on.

The Draenei were being pursued by the Burning Legion, an infinite army of demons. The legion didn’t find the Draenei, but they found the Orcs and began corrupting them, starting with Gul’Dan.

Gul’Dan manipulated the Orcs into uniting to form the Horde, and waged a war on the Draenei. In an iconic scene, the Orcs drank the blood of the demon Mannoroth, turning their brown skin green and making them fully subservient to the Legion.

Empowered with demonic magic, they easily overcame the Draenei, who fled (and eventually found Azeroth). In response to all the evil energy, Draenor began to die, and the Orcs were forced to kill each other for what little food remained.

While all this had been going on, an extremely powerful wizard named Medivh was born on Azeroth, with his own demonic corruption. He made contact with Gul’Dan and together they hatched a plan. Two Dark Portals were built, one in Draenor and one in Azeroth, and Orcs flooded through. They fought the humans and succeeded destroying Stormwind, one of the Seven Kingdoms. That concludes ‘The First War’.

The Second War followed the Horde as they moved north, conquering most of the continent. The remaining Human kingdoms united with the Dwarves, Gnomes and High Elves to form the Alliance. The Horde was defeated and most of the Orcs were locked up in camps. One of them, a baby called Thrall, would go on to liberate the Orcs, cross the ocean to Kalimdor, and create a new ‘honorable’ Horde. Here’s a helpful map.

Ner’Zhul, an important dude who I’ve mostly left out of this summary, was chased back through the portal into Draenor by the Alliance. He cast an extremely powerful spell which ended up destroying the planet, turning it into Outland.

Anyway.

Thirty (in-game) years later at the end of Mists of Pandaria, Garrosh is put on trial for all those War Crimes he did. Through some confusing plot shenanigans, he’s spirited away to an alternate universe version of Draenor, right before Gul’Dan convinces everyone to drink demon blood. Garrosh sees this as the moment everything turned to shit for the Orcs, so he intervenes and stops it, as we see in the Warlords of Draenor cinematic. Rather than serving the Legion, the Orcish clans unite to form the Iron Horde. Wrathion (from the Mists write-up) engineered all this to happen because he wanted to conscript the Iron Horde to fight the Burning Legion.

They still build a portal and invade Azeroth (our Azeroth, not an alternative Azeroth), but this time they’re just doing it to be dicks I guess. The leaders of each clan make up the titular Warlords.

If you’re interested in learning more, RUN. It won’t end well for you. You don’t want to get into Wow Lore.

But if you do, here’s a concise history of the entire Warcraft universe told by a friendly Dutch fellow. Go to 13:13 for the story I told above.

The bizarre concept wasn’t as controversial as you’d expect. At least not at first. The community was eager to leave Pandaria behind and return to the themes and characters that had made Warcraft great. Draenor offered limitless possibilities for creative storytelling.

Blizzard marketed it as a dark, cut-throat, visceral expansion. The word ‘savage’ was used so much that it became a meme. When the cinematic came out, Chris Metzen tweeted, “the age of the whimsical panda is over”. To help players overcome to premise of Warlords, they showed off detailed plans for zones, patches, the new ‘garrison’ feature, and even the end boss.

This was a mistake.

Death By A Thousand Content Cuts

The beta for Warlords of Draenor began on 5th June 2014, and by all accounts it was kind of a mess.

A bug caused female Draenei characters to ‘fail to display their default undergarments’, which made it possible to be fully naked. The female draenei population skyrocketed on the affected servers. Another bug warped Night Elf facial textures, which one beta tester described as ‘similar to the aliens from They Live’. The dungeons were ‘violently unstable’, and ‘the loading bar boss was reported to have defeated 99% of players’. All characters were wiped – multiple times. At one point the servers were knocked offline due to a fire at a substation near Blizzard’s offices. One of the servers was labelled [EU] when they were all actually US servers, so that server became overpopulated because all the European players were using it.

And that was just July.

In the PvP zone ‘Ashran’, Paladins were given an overpowered item that let them stun enemies and teleport them to the Stormshield dungeon. A group of Alliance roleplayers began abducting members of the Horde, keeping them stunned while they held trials, sentenced them to death, and summarily executed them. A developer discovered this and described it as ‘awesome’, but the item was removed.

WoW betas are best compared to the Wild West. They’re a chaotic storm of bugs and half-finished assets. It can be difficult to figure out what exactly is going on. But it soon started to seem like almost as much was being taken away from Draenor as was being added.

On 26 June, Blizzard cancelled the cities. The beautiful temple complex of Karabor had been promised to the Alliance, and the Horde had been offered Bladespire Citadel, a colossal and intimidating fortress. The buildings remained as empty shells where a few story quests took place, but were otherwise abandoned. Instead, players would get Warspear and Stormshield, small villages made from generic assets, nested on either end of Ashran.

The reaction was immediate. Complaints filled every forum. The main MMOChampion thread stretched out to well over six-hundred pages. There wasn’t much debate – everyone was pissed off.

"Yes I was positive about other changes in warlords, but this one makes me one to not play the game."

[…]

"This is absolutely horrible, why would they do this?! I don't understand. I was looking forward to these cities a lot. Please change it back."

The community speculated on why this had happened. Was Blizzard cramming the Horde and Alliance together to encourage PvP? Was there a lore reason? Did they have more important plans for Bladespire and Karabor? Some players believed the faction capitals were being made deliberately shitty because Blizzard were going to introduce new, cooler ones later (LINKS TO REDDIT).

Blizzard tried to create some story-based reason, which was immediately torn apart in a storm of mockery (LINKS TO REDDIT) and sarcasm.

As more information came out, it became clear that the truth was much less exciting. Blizzard was struggling for time. Bashiok, one of the developers, said ‘We saw how much time it would take, said that’s not reasonable, and went for a reasonable solution’.

But if you read my previous post, you would know why that explanation fell on deaf ears. Mists of Pandaria had the longest content drought ever, specifically due to the development of warlords taking so long. So this expansion was taking longer to make, but delivering less? (LINKS TO REDDIT)

"This is a huge part of every expansion (LINKS TO REDDIT) because it's where we spend the most time in the expansions lifetime. And after our previous lackluster faction hubs in MoP to have an even more lackluster faction hub in warlords puts a MAJOR damper on my excitement. I REALLY hope blizzard finds a way to give us what we want."

[…]

"Ice Mountain Tower would have been better. That's something new for a city. Instead we got Orc Camp 37G."

[…]

"Fuck the shattered capital, beacon of light in a dark world. Fuck the mystical floating city. Fuck the golden pavilion hidden away in the ancient grove.

We've got wooden huts with red roofs! Maybe get some sharpened logs jutting out everywhere. Slap some spikey iron on a couple of the important buildings. And the floor can stay dirt."

There was a subset of players who tried to defend the decision, pointing out that things can change during the beta of a video game and it doesn’t always constitute broken promises, or that it simply didn’t matter.

"People are making this a bigger issue than it is. (LINKS TO REDDIT) Your just going to use it for portals and the bank anyway so what is the problem?

Honestly, I'm fine with the change. Apparently the sky is falling circle jerk revolving around this change is so strong that someone trying to stay positive is treated as a pariah, though."

The outrage which flared in response to this logic was almost worse than the fury aimed at Blizzard. The fans began to turn on one another. It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training.

"Suddenly the thread is full of people who never commented on the issue before, for some reason trying to support Blizzard's bullshit. Smells pretty bad in here. Lots of people aren't just going to follow along with blizzard on this one, fucking deal with it."

At first Blizzard had given the impression that the cities had been cancelled during development. It later came to light that though the exteriors were complete, there was ‘never any actual work done to build them into faction hubs’. It seemed Blizzard had known for a while that the cities were never going to materialise – perhaps even before Blizzcon - but they had chosen to avoid mentioning it until as late as the beta. It was never going to go down well.

"So they were teased specifically to get people to preorder the expansion with no intention of actually making them?"

This realisation only added more fuel to the fire.

"Thats not even changing their minds during the developing process, which they said they did, they just fucking lied when they told us Karabor would be a city."

The discourse was getting rough, but the cuts had barely begun.

Things were disappearing from the map. This included a large island at the bottom-left of the main continent and Farahlon - one of the main zones revealed at Blizzcon. The loss of Farahlon was particularly controversial because it was meant to become Netherstorm in Outland.

"It's such a shame (LINKS TO REDDIT), because it was the zone I was looking the most forward to, and now that it doesn't even exist on Draenor, Netherstorm feels out of place…"

[…]

"Not having Farahlon leaves the experience of seeing Draenor pre-shattering incomplete, IMO."

[…]

"Fucking half assed expansion."

The explanation Blizzard gave for abandoning the zone was rooted in a lack of direction - no one could agree on how Netherstorm should have looked before it was destroyed. In a later Blizzcon, the developers revealed that the zone was originally planned as a starting area for boosted characters, but the idea was abandoned. Whether that is true, or Blizzard was simply struggling with time and resources, we may never know. We can only be sure that it was scrapped early on, at a time when almost nothing had been built yet.

Since Farahlon was promised as patch content, nobody could be quite sure whether it had been cancelled or simply delayed. There was no big bombshell moment. Blizzard certainly weren’t offering one.

"I don't necessarily think it's confirmed it's not coming so I'm holding out a tiny bit of hope but I'm not too optimistic about it."

Time passed and the map stayed empty and players were left to draw their own conclusions.

The third blow came on the 24th of July when Blizzard cut Tanaan Jungle from launch. Once again this major announcement came in the form of a tweet from a developer, but at least this time they were able to offer a little clarity. It would still arrive in the form of a patch. As Tanaan was the base of the Iron Horde, Blizzard explained, it wouldn’t be practical for players to go there straight away. And it surely had nothing to do with the fact that the zone was so incomplete on the current beta that it could barely be recognised.

The excuse would have gone down more smoothly if it hasn’t accompanied yet another lie. Once again, Blizzard said:

"As to Tanaan, the rest of the zone has always been planned as patch content."

Players were quick to pick holes in that.

"For having been in and following the beta there has been no evidence or hint Tanaan would be pushed into another patch. I don't mind personally but there has been absolutely 0 hints on Tanaan being "intended" to be a patch."

[…]

"I feel if that's the case then this should have been clarified earlier. Today is the first day that its been mentioned that the rest of Tanaan is a patch zone, it's been months since WoD was announced. People have been thinking Tanaan in its entirety would have been with WoD launch.

I have zero issue with the rest of Tanaan zone being patch content, personally. If that was always the plan, then it is what it is. But the lack of communication is disconcerting."

[…]

"Their PR is horrible nowadays (LINKS TO REDDIT). How do they advertise a zone at BlizzCon and then act like we misinterpreted when it was coming out? We understood Farahlon's status as a patch content area easily enough. Tanaan was never presented that way."

To those players closely involved in the beta, it was impossible not to notice that this was a recurring issue. It was starting to draw attention.

"It seems like every week something is getting cut, gated or completely changed from what was announced and hyped people up at Blizzcon."

[…]

"They are getting caught with their pants down, time and time again now."

[…]

"Something is definitely going on behind closed curtains over at Blizzard, the amount of cut content is ludicrous."

[…]

"We can only speculate as to what caused so many issues inside Blizzard."

Then there was the Zangar Sea, which was implied to be a zone – it had its own music, its own enemies, concept art, and someone had clearly started building it. In fact the seas all around the continent were surprisingly detailed. But the Zangar Sea simply never materialised.

There was never any official statement on Zangar. After everything else that had been cut, no one held out much hope.

"Most likely scrapped."

At Blizzcon, developers discussed the Gorian Empire, the homeland of the Ogres. They heavily implied it might be explored in a patch. But like so much else, it was cut.

While we’re on the topic of cut content, I need to mention the Chronal Spire. This appeared in very early maps as the gateway from Azeroth to Draenor. For whatever reason, Blizzard changed their plans to have players enter through the Dark Portal instead. The only problem was that they had already paid Christie Golden to write the book leading into the expansion. Garrosh travelled to Draenor with the help a rogue bronze dragon (the ones with power over timelines).

By changing this plot point, they undermined the book’s narrative, and caused a number of plot holes to appear. By connecting the dark portal in Azeroth to Draenor, they effectively cut off access to Outland. And since players broke that new connection immediately after visiting Draenor, the Dark Portal was rendered useless. Nowadays when players step through, they are teleported to Ashran – which makes no in-game sense whatsoever.

This Bronze Dragon stuff is actually kind of important and cutting it is a huge issue, but I digress.

The player Kikiteno summarised it this way: (LINKS TO REDDIT)

"Blizzard stated they didn't want this to come across as a "time travel expansion" so they really toned down any and all elements of chronal/bronze/infinite anything.

The problem is WoD became a time travel expansion the moment they decided to use fucking time travel as a plot device. Honestly, I would have preferred a time travel expansion, as dumb as it would have been, to a goddamn orc expansion."

But goddamn orcs is what they would get.

A Promising Start

Gamers can be fickle. After all the cuts, all the convoluted plot threads, the bad communication, the messy beta, and after much of the community had begun to notice serious problems behind the scenes at Blizzard, all it took to turn the tide was one really good cinematic. We’ve talked about the trailer before, but I really need to emphasise just how popular it was. To this day, it remains the most viewed video on the World of Warcraft YouTube channel. It had an extraordinary effect. The hype hadn’t been this intense since just before Cataclysm.

There were also the shorts. To promote Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard had released ‘The Burdens of Shaohao’, a set of animations explaining the themes of the expansion. Warlords of Draenor established this as a tradition. If you’re interested in seeing them all, the other sets are, ‘Harbingers’, ‘Warbringers’, and ‘Afterlives’.

Even at this point, perceptive players were beginning to voice serious doubts, but they were helpless in the face of the expansion’s unstoppable momentum. When Warlords released, ten million players flooded its servers. No one in their wildest dreams had predicted numbers like these. Clearly Blizzard hadn’t either, because in the days that followed, almost every realm was brought low by rolling crashes and waves of lag. Most players could barely stay logged on, let alone make progress. Garrisons were totally unusable. Even moving near the garrison area caused the game to break.

It was a problem, but to Blizzard, it was a good problem.

And what’s more, fans loved it. The zones were beautiful, the stories were well-told and ended with lavish in-game cinematics, the dungeons were fun (though there were angry murmurs about how few there were), the garrison system was incredibly popular, and while there was only one raid available at launch, it was extremely good. The Warcraft renaissance heralded by Siege of Orgrimmar was a bust, but this felt real. WoW was back.

While we’re here, let’s just look at what the final product contained.

There were six questing zones, but one was exclusive to each faction. The introductory sequence involved players beating back the Iron Horde at the Dark Portal, passing through, and shutting it down from the inside. Trapped in this new world, players fled on boats to their starting zones.

The Horde started in Frostfire Ridge, a snowy region littered with jagged volcanoes and full of Orcish architecture. Players followed Thrall as he got to know some of Warcraft’s big-name Orcs, such as Orgrim Doomhammer and Durotan – Thrall’s dad.

The Alliance got Shadowmoon Valley, widely considered to be the stand-out zone of the expansion. It was a blue-tinted land full of willows, glowing fae creatures, and crystalline Draenei temples. Its focal character was Yrel, a young paladin trying to find purpose.

After completing their starting zone, players were sent to Gorgrond, a beautiful and wild zone based on Yellowstone park. It typified the ‘savagery’ Blizzard had promised. Then came Talador, a Draenei zone full of fantasy forests. Spires of Arak followed, a totally original zone which explored the origins of Outland’s Arrakoa. Cities were built into its twisted rock formations, and made for an impressive sight. Finally came Nagrand, a remake of the most beloved Burning Crusade zone. It was very similar to the original, and players wouldn’t have wanted anything else.

Blizzard had clearly taken liberties when they designed Draenor, creating zones that had no business existing and ignoring zones which should have been there, but the ‘tourist sights’ had been preserved. The Dark Portal, Black Temple, Auchindoun, Shattrath, Oshu’gun. Blizzard had become masters at exploiting the draw of nostalgia, and they did it excellently here.

Pandaria’s treasures, lore tidbits, and rare enemies had been so popular, Blizzard took them to the next extreme. Draenor was packed full of things to find. Exploring was half of the fun. These zones also saw the advent of World Quests - rather than follow the tightly-choreographed story, they offered broad goals which could be completed in numerous ways, and gave the player huge EXP rewards. It was a welcome change that made levelling alts easier than it had ever been.

Every zone offered the option of two unique abilities which would only be available in that zone. It might be a mount you could use while in combat, or a tank, or a second hearthstone, or the option to call in an airstrike. Each one opened up new gameplay options, and made every zone feel distinct. Players loved it. The idea of ‘borrowed power’ would be much more prevalent in later expansions, and much more controversial, but in Warlords it was beloved.

After reaching max-level, it all became about the garrison. The much-maligned dailies of Mists were almost completely gone, and what little ones remained were kind of pointless. Choosing which buildings to place, upgrading them, collecting followers, and sending them out on missions was incredibly fun. You could have your own inn, your own bank and auction house and farm and mine. It was the player housing that the community had begged for since the game began. The system was popular.

"It’s an interesting iteration of the Panda farms, but the garrisons are good enough at this point to make it interesting to think about how future expansions will incorporate the tech. Farm to garrison to...what? Your own city? Your own airship? It’ll be fun to see how they top this."

At this point, you might be starting to wonder why anyone hated Warlords at all.

Writing for Polygon, Phillip Kollar said:

"At launch, this expansion was a brilliant addition to an already massive game, brimming with new ideas and dozens of potential directions to take things in the future. But following release, Blizzard dropped the ball in a way so spectacular that it’s still hard to believe."

The Problems With Garrisons

It didn’t take long for the first cracks to show.

After a month or two, everyone finished getting their garrisons how they liked them, and settled in for the long haul. The entire end-game was built up around garrisons, and every commodity players could possibly need was within arm’s reach. They were simply too convenient. No one had any reason to leave. Rather than purely acting as a nice place to hang out (like player housing in every other game), Blizzard had needed to make them ‘practical’, and this backfired immensely.

Writing for Massively Overpowered, Eliot Lefebvre suggested that the problem with garrisons was Blizzard’s aversion to customisation for the sake of customisation.

"…the design choices were pretty much universally made with a strictly functional viewpoint. The stated goal of having WoW‘s version of housing fell away based upon the designer assertion that no one wants to play The Sims in WoW, disregarding that the two aren’t mutually exclusive goals. There’s space to argue that these were bad choices, but I think that ties in nicely with examining the other major complaint about Garrisons being an unpleasant chore.

When you can get better rewards from Garrisons than from doing anything else short of Heroic raiding, so to speak, you are naturally going to do that, because why would you not?"

Since every aspect of the garrison had to carry a clear practical purpose, Blizzard found themselves increasingly limited in the customisation options. The features advertised at Blizzcon gradually fell away. Players couldn’t choose which zone to build their garrison in, as they had been promised. They couldn’t choose between multiple layouts - that was scrapped in development. They couldn’t name followers or display trophies taken from enemies. They were very limited in which buildings could go where.

"I think the biggest misstep here is that Blizzard stubbornly refused to acknowledge that players don’t just want an identical castle to everyone else in the game, but that they craved their own personal space to customize.

There is virtually no room in garrisons to express individual creativity. Sure, you can place buildings slightly different and choose music and I think pick a tapestry here or there, but my garrison is going to look pretty much the same as every other alliance character’s place.

Look at how rabid players are with transmog — it’s because that’s pretty much the only way that the game allows them to express creativity and visual personality. Proper player housing in WoW could have been that to the nth degree."

Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.

---

This is the fifth part of my write-up about World of Warcraft. You can read the first four by clicking the links below.

• Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla

• Part 2 - Burning Crusade

• Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

• Part 4 - Cataclysm

• Part 6 - Warlords of Draenor

• Part 7 - Classic and Legion

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

It was mid-2011. The final patch of Cataclysm was on its way, and Blizzcon was just around the corner. The subject of World of Warcraft’s next expansion had begun to gain traction once again, and as was tradition, the internet became awash with leaks. Some promised Old Gods, some foresaw Kul’Tiras or Zandalar or Nazjatar, Tel’Abim or Suramar or Sargeras – in short, players made every possible prediction in the vain hope that one of them might be proven right.

But none of them were.

No one could have predicted Pandaria.

An Unexpected Trademark

It wasn’t until the user ‘Mynsc’ went wading through the US Patent and Trademark Office website in search of info about Titan – Blizzard’s ‘open-secret’ new game in development – that they stumbled upon a recently-filed trademark by the name of ‘Mists of Pandaria’. Among all the theory-crafting and scavenging for information, it had been there a week, out in the open where anyone could find it, and yet completely overlooked.

It was immediately dismissed by many users as a book, a figurine, an in-game microtransaction perhaps. They cast it aside and turned to the more realistic leaks. But upon further inspection, the trademark was for a game, distributed on CD-ROMs with instruction manuals and guides. It had to be WoW content.

Okay, the community said. It was a patch.

”they don't trademark patches. If they never did before, why now?”

Then it had to be some kind of trading-card game spin off. Definitely not an expansion.

”The international class used in the trademark is the same as they used for previous expansions. The timing and information for the Mists of Pandaria trademark matches that of The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, and Cataclysm. If this is not going to be the expansion, they would really need to hurry to come up with a name and trademark it before they announce it at Blizzcon. Seems risky. Seems unlikely.”

It was a red herring, said the user ‘Johnnyarr’.

”Do you think blizz trademarked it to throw people off because they know we'll be searching pre-blizzcon?”

This sentiment echoed around the forums. Players simply refused to believe that Mists of Pandaria could be a real, genuine, true-to-life WoW expansion. What even were the ‘Mists of Pandaria’? A lot of them had never heard of Pandaren before.

But they did exist. Sort of.

One of Blizzard’s main artists, Samwise Didier, was known by the nickname ‘Panda’ to his friends, and had imagined and drawn Pandaren in the early 2000s. Blizzard had announced their addition to ‘Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos’ as an April Fools joke, and the response had been overwhelmingly positive. In fact, many fans were disappointed it had been a prank.

Pandaren became a favourite after that, an inside joke, and they began to worm their way into the game for real as easter eggs hidden away for perceptive players to find. When Blizzard released ‘Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne’, it was with a real Pandaren playable character, Chen Stormstout.

In World of Warcraft’s early development, questions arose about whether Pandaren would make a return. A community manager replied with the following:

pandaren will not be a playable race ... at this time. Will they make cameo appearances in the game as NPCs? Some things are best left unanswered I think :)

There were a couple of items that referred to the Pandaren, and one NPC child who would walk around telling unbelievable stories, one of which was ‘I swear, people have actually seen them. Pandaren really do exist!’

They re-emerged in 2005 as part of another April Fools joke. This time it was the Pandaren X-Press, a service that allowed players to order Chinese food deliveries within the game. A few years later in 2009, a cosmetic pet was added – The Pandaren Monk. I actually covered it in my Wrath of the Lich King write-up.

In fact, Blizzard had originally planned to make Pandaren a playable race in the Burning Crusade. They had created the models, designed the cities and the buildings, and written the lore. But when the Chinese government found out, they put a stop to it. Draenei were cobbled together to replace them at the last minute. That didn’t go public until after Mists was announced.

In a 2009 podcast, Sam Didier and Chris Metzen joked that Pandaren would be added as a playable race in ‘Patch 201732-and-a-half’. You can see why the trademark was dismissed as a red-herring at first. They had always been a joke, never a serious part of the lore. And that’s how Mists was seen.

”Decoy, I'm calling it right now,” said ‘Ryme’.

[...]

”Hehe, I know the news is slow at the moment, but I don't think this is the answer.”

[…]

’Vetali’ replied, ”I think they be trolling..... or they better be....”

[…]

”obviously a decoy before blizzcon, no way would they do a whole f'ing expansion on pandaria,” said another user.

Some players were receptive to the idea of a Pandaren expansion.

’Austilias’ replied, ”I was always under the impression that Blizzard avoided the Pandaren issue with respect to WoW, due to problems that it might cause in China which already has a pretty strict code on what aspects of WoW they permit (investigate Abominations in the Chinese version, for example, compared to the EU/US versions). Still, if the Pandaren are to be introduced as a race, I know that i'd be rather overjoyed where they a neutral race who perhaps in a questline would pledge themselves to the Alliance or the Horde.”

The expansion was divisive. There were those, like the user ‘Gunner_recall’, who said “If this is happening....SUPER STOKED!!!!”

‘Kathandira’ had the honour of being the expansion’s very first hater. Sixteen minutes after the trademark was posted, they responded:

“if this goes live, you will see my goodbye thread soon after, this game has been bordering TOO cartoony for me, this would be the last nail in the coffin.”

It caused quite the stir. I won’t post every reply, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Most people dismissed the entire concept, and those who didn’t were heavily divided. In an IGN interview a few weeks after the trademark, Game Director Tom Chilton further put players off the trail.

Chilton said the speculation was, "wildly overhyped." He added, "if you look at traditionally how we've handled that race it's been in those secondary products because we haven't realized it in the world. Most of the time when we do anything panda-related it's going to be a comic book or a figurine or something like that."

That put rest to the debate. For a while.

The Desolation of WoW

The stage had been set for one of the biggest dramas in World of Warcraft history.

Blizzcon 2011 had a different tone. The cosplay was still there like always, the esports were still going ahead, the merch shop still sold keyboards and hoodies. But there was an unspoken tension in the air – World of Warcraft had lost two million subscribers by that point, with no clear end in sight. Unlike every other announcement year, there hadn’t been any conclusive leaks. No one knew what to expect. It was with uneasy, desperate excitement that fans packed Stage Hall D. Chris Metzen (or as we real fans know him, Daddy) warmed up the crowd with his usual charm and some rather obscure promises of a new faction war. Daddy told us a war was coming, but this expansion would be the calm before the storm. He got everyone hyped up, and then the trailer began to play.

At Blizzcon, the guests went wild. But most of these players already knew about the trademark. They were prepared. And there’s something to be said for the effect of a good atmosphere. The announcement streamed out to Blizzcon pass holders, and then was uploaded to Youtube. Within minutes, it was on every forum, every server, and every gaming news site. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of pandas, which obey their own special laws.

It was official. Mists of Pandaria (hereafter abbreviated to MoP) was the next World of Warcraft expansion.

The community imploded. It was utter pandamonium.

From the frost-bitten slopes of Northrend to the sands of Uldum, the reactions came in thick and fast.

I though the Pandaren were a running joke? I stopped playing WoW just after Cataclysm but I still keep up with it since I do think it's a great game and I still love the art direction. But seriously. Pandas? What. The. Actual. Fuck?

The MMOChampion user ‘Quackie’ said, “Pandas? This is Blizz just trolling us right? […] Time for a new game.” To which others responded with, “Don't forget to close the door behind you, lock it and throw away your keys!!!”

My personal favourites were those who looked at it and said ‘Oh, how original,’ the way a kindergarten teacher might do when one of their students turns in a messy crayon drawing of their parents fighting.

Reporting on the scene of Blizzcon, Simon of the Yogscast said:

”I played a monk, a panda monk. It was strange. I sort of just waddled around, I hit things, I was doing [KUNG FU SOUNDS].”

”There’s no weapons, you don’t even punch things, you hug them. It’s going to be renamed World of Hugcraft,” he said, before reaching over and giving his colleague a big old squeeze.

There were reactions of confusion, bewilderment, incredulity, reactions of despair and anger, reactions of tentative anticipation. And some, like me, actually liked the look of MoP, if you can believe it.

Fans had a number of gripes.

The first, and perhaps the most knee-jerk response, was that it was just dumb. It had no solid foundation in the lore, it was too girly and cheery and bright (WoW’s worldbuilding was historically quite dark), and conflicted with the existing style of art, music and story-telling. It was a jarring Kung Fu Panda rip off..

Some thought the resemblance was so uncanny that there might be legal action

”Oh dear... I would not be surprised if this ended in a lawsuit, its too close, even if you can argue that the concept are not similar (martial art pandas vs... martial art pandas?)almost every environment they showed looks like a Kung Fu Panda set...”

Another responded.

My knee jerk reaction as well, the camera shots, building layouts and color pallets are uncanny. There's the building with the pool of water similar to the scroll room from the movie, and the squared courtyard very similar to where the festival takes place at the beggining of kung fu panda. The scene with the peach tree in particular with the bright pinks and dark purples are almost short for shot.

However not everyone felt that way.

Most likely because both pull from the same real world sources of ancient china and martial arts.

[…]

Yeah I just don't see it. It's like saying racing movie B copied racing movie A because they both have american cars in it....

Nathan Grayson, writing for VG247, had this to say.

Back in my day, Warcraft had orcs and humans. Squishy, weak-willed, whiny humans who wouldn't stop saying, “Moah work?” That was it. And now? Pandas. Warcraft has rotund kung-fu pa-- [CONTENT REMOVED, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DREAMWORKS ENTERTAINMENT].

During BlizzCon's opening ceremonies, Blizzard roundhouse kicked fans' perceptions of what Warcraft's all about with warm, soothing colors, furry fists of fury, and heaping dollops of d'aaaaaaw. Folks weaned on bloodshed, angst, and cold, calculating strategy were understandably (and audibly) upset.

Are things really as bad as they seem, though? Will Blizzard's behemoth be done in not by a giant apocalypse dragon, but by fluffy – and perhaps even wuffy – pandas?

Far from a departure, Senior Game Producer John Lagrave promised a return to form. Conflict between the Horde and Alliance had driven the story of the original Warcraft games, and it was WoW that constantly forced the two factions to work together against a common enemy.

“It really hearkens back to the original game where you landed in Hillsbrad because the Alliance were coming up and starting to fight. That spontaneous world PVP was happening. That's the old war that's coming back.”

But even then, there was no hook, no big bad, nothing to keep players engaged beyond ‘faction conflict’. There was a villain, but it was ‘the Sha’, which was explained as a kind of misty black manifestation of negative emotion. It had no personality, no goals, no motives, and was generally difficult to care about.

”So how do you even get players excited about that? You're billing it as ‘the calm.’ Generally, that connotates to “not very exciting.” The point between the epic clashes. Those pages everybody skipped in Lord of the Rings where people started singing.” Nathan said. “How do you make people say “Oh boy!” about that?

One classic mock-trailer kept the deep angry voice but changed a few words around.

“An adventure safer than any we’ve known thus far. Low textured clouds, retextured trees.A mystery shrouded in a mystery. Architecture that looks really, really close to Chinese. And a people that may well know… how to sprinkle water on their opium an easier way…”

Here’s another.

”A mystery shrouded by April Fools jokes, a land of forgotten power – mainly because we made it up over the last couple of months.”

One of the biggest accusations levelled at Blizzard was that they were trying to win over the girls, the gays, the kids, the Chinese, the causals – everyone except the ‘real fans’. Of course, those ‘real fans’ only made up a tiny percentage of the playerbase.

”glad I stopped playing this game. getting gayer every update,” said one user.

[..]

Over the past seven years since WoW’s launch it’s gotten increasingly more cartoonish and playful. Gone are the savage looking armor sets and the grotesque demons littering the various dungeons, to make way for foam weapons, motorcycles, helicopters, and now, a playable Panda race. The Pandaren are the hardest to defend, take a look at them, they’re a race composed of bipedal Panda Bears–there’s no getting around it.

Many people within the community voiced similar opinions.

"I gotta say I really, really dislike the addition of pandas. Yes, I am going to get a lot of stick from morons who have no concept "OPINION". I just think they are way too silly, even though this has never been the most serious game in the world. The worst part is that it seems they are trying to do it with a straight face, which makes it even more hilarious (not in a good way).Apart from that though? I think the expac looks really, really good."

Not everyone had a problem with all the players complaining, and promising to leave.

"I think it's better that the people who don't like the next expac leave anyway. They are probably the sticks in the mud."

There were, of course, plenty of players who really looked forward to Mists. Here are a few of those reactions.

”I'm very satisfied with what I saw at Blizzcon today. MoP looks fantastic.”

[…]

”I don't get the hate for this expansion. They're adding some fantastic features, and are taking a much better design direction with the game. If only people looked passed Pandas. People are so freaking dense.”

[…]

The moment I saw this I cried. I don't ever care if that's crazy. I CRIED.THANK YOU BLIZZARD!

The China Problem

There was a whole section of this debate relating to China. Some players saw it as a shallow appeal to the Chinese market.

“The only reason Blizzard created Mists of Pandaria was to save their sinking ship. Only about 20% of WoW subs come from North America. Half of the subs come from Asia, and the rest are from Europe and other countries. To put it simple, Blizzard isn't solely surviving off of North American subs ..so they created Mists of Pandaria to appeal to the people from Asian countries.”

One response said:

”I wouldn't be suprised when Deathwing will be changed into a Charizard...”

To which another player replied,

”charizard is jap mate.”

Others took issue with all this blatant racism.

”Rather arrogant statement your making about how WoW should be a game aimed only for Americans and not rest of the world.

Old Asian culture is interesting it has nice potential of creating interesting zones and the story of that area has almost zero lore behind it. This gives Blizzard as a company to explore new idea's and gives them freedom that they didn't have before when trying to create a story.”

Some not only rejected the idea that MoP was meant to satisfy the Chinese, they accused it of being a carefully coordinated insult. They claimed the whole expansion was a caricature, which not only combined stereotypes from all across East Asia without regard for their origin, it also made a total mockery of them.

“Mists of Pandaria,” Blizzard’s latest expansion for their legendary massively multi-player online role-playing game “World of Warcraft,” is a high-resolution mishmash of every Asian stereotype available, sans poor driving and high grades — however untrue any of those stereotypes may be. From the dragon kites to the koi in various ponds, everything is all so Asian.

Notice I don’t say Chinese — though the humanoid pandas are certainly based more closely on the the Middle Kingdom’s history than the Land of the Rising Sun’s.

But it’s all so shallow — and borderline racist. The Pandaren speak in near “Engrish,” the dialogue is ripped straight from a midnight kung-fu film and some Pandaren have Fu Manchu mustaches. I’m already encountering lazy yin-yang themes that draw heavily on spirit worship and ancestor references.

It’s hard to dismiss this take. The Pandaren were not ‘cool’, like in the Sam Didier art, nor did they try to be. They were fat, goofy, greedy, lazy, characters with silly accents.

”Although they are anthropomorphic pandas and always have been, early sketches of the race depicted them as more muscular than chubby, and their samurai armor gave off an air of ferocity and strength. Now that the race has been made playable in Mists, they’ve been significantly de-fanged.” Sophie Pell wrote for NBC News. “Every pandaren has a belly, and they remark constantly how they love to eat, very similar to Po from the Kung Fu Panda franchise. They have not one, but two racial bonuses that apply to food.”

An NPR article criticised their portrayal:

“To be completely honest, I don't know what Blizzard was thinking when they announced the new Pandaren race and having them be known for their "Art of Acupressure"? Laughable.”

Commenting on the ‘wow-ladies’ blog, the user ‘Baisuzhen’ was also unhappy:

I'll be honest here. Being Asian Chinese in South East Asia, personally I am not entirely very fond of the entire theme itself, since it's practically my heritage/culture. The translated names are just cheesy beyond belief, as Blizzard literally translated many Chinese words/names directly.

Maybe also having grown up and surrounded by Chinese temples, culture, history etc, having to see all these in a predominantly fantasy land is just jarring to me. This is different from other Chinese MMOs that takes place in Ancient China as those are still Earth while Azeroth is definitely not. To have so many familiar themes, words, history and social nuances translated in a rather cheesy manner across just irritates me.

Again I would like to reiterate that this is my personal views and I am not attacking anyone.

Indeed, according to Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime, most of the player losses following the announcement of Mists came from Asia. Over a million of them dropped WoW and went to go… find something else for their whole lives to be about. And that was before MoP even came out. But if you’ve read my Cataclysm write-up, you’d know that 2012 was dominated by ‘Hour of Twilight’, an infamously hated patch which went on for over a year.

When confronted with the whole ‘racism’ issue in an interview with Wired, WoW Production Director J. Allen Brack dismissed concerns:

”We’ve always tried to make Warcraft very much its own thing. Certainly we have influences from all around the world. And certainly the panda is the symbol of China. Obviously, there’s a lot of influence, but it’s a very light touch of how much China it is or how much it is the rest of Asia. We just tried to take little bits here and there and incorporate it into our own thing.”

There were some who acknowledged the ‘problematic’ aspects of Mists, while also still wanting to play it.

I agree wholeheartedly that MoP is appropriating a wonderful culture and creating some kind of Disneyland trip.

So how do we respond? For those of us who DO want to play it, what kind of action should we take? Should I feel bad for even wanting to play it? What kinds of things would be critical to point out in a letter to Blizz? And would a letter do anything at this point in their creation of the new expansion? I've really been quarreling with myself about the expansion because I'm really excited to play it, while at the same time recognizing that it's culturally insensitive and there are several things I take issue with.

I’ve been all doomy and gloomy, but a lot of Chinese players responded positively to the expansion. One user from Beihang gushed about it in a Quora response:

”From my perspective, the MoP was really a shock to us. Blizzard does made it a fatastic game for us with lots of Chinese elements in the game, including the cute pandas, beautiful buildings in traditional Chinese style such as the WALL, the awesome BGMs made by some Chinese instruments, some of the famous characters in Chinese stroies...

What I really want to express is that, thank you Blizzard, thank you for working on such a wonderful masterpiece, thank you for carry out all these details, that really made us feel a special bond to see so many familar stuff in such a western background game.”

As if that wasn’t enough drama, there was a whole controversy in which Chinese players complained that there were non-Chinese elements in the expansion. Particularly here, in which a pillar has writing on it in gasp Japanese characters.

On Weibo – China’s Twitter equivalent – an angry user said:

“What’s the next chapter in World of Warcraft? The Mists of Pandaria! Everyone can fucking see you’re just trying to sweep up the mainland Chinese market again. So how is it that the fucking whole thing is full of Japanese culture, it makes me so disturbed!”

And another.

“[…] even though there are pandas [in the expansion], for the sake of the [game’s popularity] you mixed in Japanese culture. If you love Japanese culture so much, why didn’t you just make it Japanese monkeys [instead of pandas] and call it a day?”

Of course, WoW had always had Japanese influences.

”Have you seen how many tentacles Deathwing has? And that is just the beginning.”

In fact, the characters were not Japanese. They were ‘Pandaren’, a totally fictional script which Blizzard made up, and which Chinese players had just assumed was Japanese.

One Chinese commenter said it didn’t matter, because ‘Chinese people invented Japanese people and Korean people’, so it was all Chinese culture at the end of the day.

This reply sums everything up wonderfully in my opinion:

”To say that the Chinese have a bad past with Japan is like saying that a drinking a mixture of cyanide, rat poison, jet fuel and a bowl of lit matches is a bad idea. It's a HUMONGOUS understatement, so I would understand if blizzard didn't want to risk it.”

The Million-Man Beta

I usually wouldn’t discuss the betas in these threads. Every patch and expansion has a beta, so there’s not much to talk about. But MoP was different.

In a last-ditch effort to cling on to their subscribers, Blizzard made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. The Annual Pass. If players simply committed to remaining subscribed for a single year, they would get three very tantalising things.

• A free digital copy of the heavily anticipated Diablo III

• An extremely sexy Diablo-themed mount, Tyreal’s Charger

• Guaranteed access to the Mists of Pandaria beta.

A whopping 1.2 million players signed up. It was a colossal success – I certainly continued paying long after I got bored and wanted to stop.

But there was a problem. Everyone got to see the expansion months before they had to buy it. They got to play through all of its content while Cataclysm was still out. And not only that – they saw all of its content while it was being developed.

I recall seeing broken combat, half-finished zones, crippling lag, server crashes, buggy quests, buildings without any textures. Personally, I loved the experience of ‘seeing behind the curtain’, but not everyone did. First impressions matter, and these people (many of whom were already wary about the concept to begin with) were not seeing Pandaria at its best. For those who didn’t get the Annual Pass, the internet was littered with first impressions and gameplay videos which exposed the half-finished expansion. Sometimes these online personalities laid out disclaimers about the nature of a beta. Sometimes.

It’s kind of surprising how incomplete it is. A couple of my buddies were in the Burning Crusade beta, and from what I saw and played it felt like a complete game that we were just basically stress testing. While I can’t speak for the WotLK or Cata betas, the Pandaria beta definitely caught me off guard in that context. Zones are still inaccessible, many animations are still missing, and overall it feels more like an alpha than a beta. Many quests are buggy and include testing notes in the quest text to get around the bugs

To make matters worse, World of Warcraft and the Beta took place on totally separate servers with separate launchers and installers. This had the added downside of splitting the World of Warcraft player-base. In a year when subscribers were already dropping, over a million of the most dedicated players simply disappeared from the main game. And it was really noticeable. Online communities came apart at the seams because so many of the old faces were off traipsing through the Beta.

Until then, the weeks and days preceding an expansion were filled with excitement. Many players have memories of waiting outside shops until midnight so they could storm inside and buy their copies of Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King, staying up until the early hours of the morning. When Mists of Pandaria finally released, there was very little of the usual fanfare. Everyone who wanted to see the expansion had already done it. A lot of them would be levelling through its zones for the second, third, or fourth time now.

Blizzard had shot themselves in the foot.

The Game Comes Out

And so, it was with a whimper, not a bang, that the expansion began. On the 4th October, the mists finally lifted. Blizzard sold only 2.7 million copies within the first week. Cataclysm had sold considerably more, within a single day. There were a few hiccups, such as the hilariously broken gyrocopter quest, but those are core to every expansion.

We’ve spent all this time focusing on the outrage, without ever looking at what people were outraged about. So here’s the lowdown on Mists of Pandaria.

During Deathwing’s world-breaking shenanigans, he disrupted the titular ‘Mists’, a supernatural veil which had hidden the Southern continent of Pandaria from the rest of the world for ten thousand years. Both the Alliance and Horde, finally free of a big bad to unite against, sent teams to explore the continent and plunder its resources.

The two factions encountered one another and quickly came to blows. The story revolved around this growing conflict, which consumed all of Pandaria. All that negative energy reawakened the Sha, a force unique to Pandaria, which began to corrupt everyone there. Especially Garrosh Hellscream, the leader of the Horde. Before Mists began, he dropped the Warcraft equivalent of a nuke on the alliance city of Theramore, which is what kicked off this whole faction war. He had always had… anger management issues, but gradually became more and more paranoid, vicious, and dangerous, to the point where most of the Horde turned on him and, with the help of the Alliance, besieged him in the Horde capital of Orgrimmar. But we’ll get to that.

There’s not a huge amount to say about Pandaren or Monks. Despite the massive dramas prior to release, they sort of faded into the background. The Pandaren get a stunning starter zone, which is actually the back of a giant turtle. But that’s it, really. The big thing with Pandaren was that they started neutral, and could choose a faction to join at level 10.

The furry community welcomed them with open paws. Until then, they had satisfied themselves with Worgen and Tauren, but the Disney-like designs of the Pandaren made them a firm favourite. I played on a Roleplay server and let me tell you, exploring the many hidden nooks and crannies of Pandaria was often a lot less rewarding than the developers intended. This was not the last time Blizzard threw a bone to the furries, but they were still half a decade away at this point.

There was a fun story of a Pandaren player called ‘Doubleagent’ who refused to choose a side, and instead reached max level without ever leaving the turtle, by picking flowers. It took him 8000 hours.

As of 2020, Pandaren are the least popular race in each faction, but when we combine the Pandaren on Horde and Alliance, they sit on par with most other races. Of course, they’re nowhere near the Night Elf/Human/Blood Elf trio, which makes up a majority of all players. But they haven’t been a failure by any means. Monks on the other hand remain the least played class, just below Shaman.

From my research, the problem seems to be that players are unable to separate Pandaren from Monks. Pandaren mages seem wrong, as do undead monks. So a lot of players seem less willing to be creative with them than other races or classes. Also, while the aesthetic of the Pandaren fits fantastically in Pandaria, it kind of clashes in any other setting.

Five Hundred Dailies of Summer

Overall, the continent of Pandaria was a mixed bag.

All players started in the Jade Forest, one of the most visually spectacular zones Blizzard has ever produced. It had a tightly written story and an excellent plot. There were dozens of hidden locations all around the zone that only max players could find, once they had unlocked flying.

the Jade Forest zone is hands-down my favorite place in WoW (LINKS TO REDDIT). I love flying around, looking at the little solitary houses on the earth pillars, and pretending my panda owns one of them.

I’m so lame, no need to tell me.

After Jade Forest, players could go to either the swampy, atmospheric Krasarang Wilds, or the fertile farmlands of the Valley of the Four Winds. By all accounts, this wasn’t a difficult choice. Players overwhelmingly preferred the Valley. At this point, the story became less linear, and players got more options that branched out across the game-world.

Next was the imposing mountains and plains of Kun Lai Summit. While I loved it, I know some players didn’t.

After that came another choice, this time between the expansion’s less popular zones, Townlong Steppes and Dread Waste. The latter was particularly controversial. It was designed as the dangerous homeland of the ‘Klaxxi’, and as such it was full of enemies – to the point where it was hard to get around without attracting constant attention.

In a Reddit rant (LINKS TO REDDIT), the user /u/hMJem echoed the feelings of most players.

I just hate everything about it. You enter the zone and it's clustered and just looks boring/ugly.

However not everyone agreed.

It's the only zone in MoP I actually like, exactly for the reasons that other people seem to dislike it. I think it pulled the "dark desolated corrupted wasteland" off perfectly, having only a few bits that are actually safe.

There was also the max-level zone Vale of Eternal Blossoms, another visually spectacular zone with an interesting story.

Overall, the expansion is considered to be one of, if not the most beautiful. The music also deserves a shout-out. While there was a narrative that proceeded from zone to zone, they remained disconnected. Each one focused on a totally different enemy – from the Yaungol to the Virmen to the Saurok to the Mogu to the Mantid to the Klaxxi. It was a lot to handle. However, Pandaria was absolutely brimming with lore. Someone at Blizzard had clearly spent months coming up with the history and culture of its various races, and it showed.

”If, pre-launch, you had told people they’d be getting one of the darkest WoW expansions ever, they’d have laughed at you. Early on, they’d still be laughing at you – there was a basic tale of how raw emotion can get the best of you in Jade Forest, but it was pretty light-hearted for most of the zone. Around Krasarang Wilds, it starts to turn darker, getting darker in Kun Lai Summit, and then ultimately leading to the odd brutality of Dread Wastes. There is a military excursion happening, a tale of what happens when a native people are pushed to the brink by a war that they are barely involved in.”

The levelling experience was well-received in general. But after that, things became a little more divisive.