Filled with sprawling worlds ripe for discovery, teeming with thousands of new people to meet, and capable of sucking up entire months' worth of playtime, massively multiplayer online role-playing games offer one of the modern world's most extreme forms of escapism. Join GameSpy columnist Leif Johnson as he turns a critical eye on the biggest and best of today's MMORPGs and quests for the virtual worlds most worthy of your time.
Time Travel, Apocalypses, and Fashion
After chatting up Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street last month about the sweeping changes scheduled for World of Warcraft's Patch 4.3, I gushed that the conversation left me more excited about a World of Warcraft patch than I've been in a very long time. I'm happy to report that I still feel that way, even after spending the weekend wetting my feet in the patch's rough draft that's currently up on the public test server. The bulk of the content won't be added until later (such as two five-man-dungeons, the Deathwing raid, and the raid finder tool), but even the tiny sampling Blizzard released for testing seems to hold much promise for the actual launch.
Much like every other Alliance dog logging in to the server, I first sauntered over to the Stormwind Cathedral District to play dress-up with the new Transmogrification service, which lets you alter the look of an equipped piece of gear so it looks like another item you already own. So far, it's not a bad deal at all. For an agreeable 339 gold pieces, I managed to change transmogrify my mage's entire set of gear to my flamboyant 8-piece Netherwind outfit that's been gathering dust in my bank since 2005, along with an antiquated Grand Marshal's Stave and a matching cloak and wand for good measure.
It's time to party like it's 2005.
Once I tired of waddling around Stormwind like a dwarven Jay Maynard, though, I was pleased to find that reverting your gear to its previous appearance costs nothing, and it simply requires clicking on a circular arrow besides the gear's icon while speaking with the NPC. I was, I admit, a little disappointed to learn that there's no way to dye your gear. Players with the scholar profession in Lord of the Rings Online, for instance, make serious cash off of cosmetic dyes, and an option to make dyes seem like a perfect match for the oft-neglected Inscription profession. Since I saw at least one other mage running around in my same get-up, I can't help but feel that a change of color would go a long way toward allowing players to retain their uniqueness.
With its current pricing, Void Storage will leave a void in your wallet.
The new "Void Storage" was much more cost prohibitive, which may be fine since it's geared toward players who been around long enough to have their bags crammed with outdated but cool-looking gear. Unlocking the 80-slot extended bank of sorts costs 1,000 gold pieces, and depositing or withdrawing an item costs 100 gold pieces a pop. So when I went to clear my existing bank of my eight-piece Netherwind set after using it for Transmogrification, I found myself looking at a 800 gold bill, which I later had to repay when I withdrew it after changing my mind about another set I decided to transmogrify. Once I was done, I ended up paying a ridiculous total of about 3,000 gold pieces. Since both the Transmogrifying NPC and the Void Storage NPC are close enough to whisper dirty jokes about Thrall and Jaina to one another, it seems like Blizzard could fix this expensive process by simply letting players transmogrify from Void Storage or getting rid of the withdrawal fee.
Deathwing hogs the choicest dying spot in the Dragonblight
Yet Patch 4.3 isn't just about making fashion statements; it also introduces three new five-man dungeons and an epic raid featuring the final fight against Deathwing. At the time of writing, though, players can only venture into a gloomy Caverns of Time instance called End Time, which boots you into an alternate future in which Deathwing has wiped out all life on Azeroth. It's an impressive experience (even if you can't explore it as you could in previous Caverns of Time dungeons), and Deathwing's colossal lava-dripping corpse impaled atop Wyrmrest Temple in Northrend's Dragonblight provides one of the game's best visuals to date. Elsewhere, the Dragonblight's formerly snowy expanses have been reduced to a charred lunar bleakness, and the only signs of movement are hostile "echoes" loitering about the region's five dragonshrines.
Don't expect to explore all this; a portal takes you where you need to go.
You'll have to fight two of four possible secondary bosses at these shrines, each being a twisted echo of pivotal leaders from WoW lore. At the ruins of the Blue Dragonshrine, for instance, you'll battle an "echo" of the alliance mage Jaina Proudmoore while she tosses meteors and a frost blade spell that I want to see shooting from my own mage in the next expansion. At the Black Dragonshrine, an echo of Baine Bloodhoof jumps across multiple platforms that sink into the surrounding lava, all while clobbering players with a beastly mace. The buildup to the Echo of Sylvanas Windrunner at the Ruby Dragonshrine might be a snoozefest, but the fight itself is a memorable jumble of spawning ghouls and a hovering Sylvanas that rains down hell on you from above.
Even the end of the world can't stop Sylvanas from kicking Alliance butt.
My personal favorite is probably the ruins of the Emerald Dragonshrine, which features the troubled shade of Tyrande Whisperwind. Here, you fight under the cover of an inky star-filled sky, and you rush to temporary beams of moonlight to fight the unending onslaught of enemies (and to regain full use of your abilities). Once you've downed one of the random two bosses at their respective dragonshrines, you venture to the Bronze Dragonflight to face off against Murozond, a nasty twilight dragon who's some kind of alter ego of Nozdormu. It's a fun and visually beautiful fight, featuring a unique time-reversal mechanic that uses a giant hourglass to reset all cooldowns (although I noticed that the reset didn't apply to my mage's Time Warp spell, even though it worked for a Shaman's similar Heroism spell).
No frolicking in the autumn mist for Murozond.
But none of these fights was really challenging. I mean, none. The Murozond fight in particular felt like beating on a submarine-sized target dummy, and I once saw a healer disconnect on the Jaina encounter with almost no noticeable impact on the fight. And no, that's not because I jumped in there with overgeared guild members--I braved the greenest random pick-up-groups, complete with ready-made healing shamans who had no idea they could use totems and warrior tanks who didn't know you needed a shield for certain abilities. And somehow, against all odds, I ran the content no less than 12 times without ever dying or seeing a wipe.
Jaina Proudmoore rages against her under-tuned abilities.
It's likely, of course, that Blizzard is just using this first public test build to make sure that the mechanics work before tuning them to a higher difficulty level. Indeed, we probably still have a month or more before the patch's release, and that's more than enough time to make it challenging enough that we'll feel compelled to actually pay attention to the boss abilities. But that may not be entirely true. During my interview with Ghostcrawler, he mentioned that the Patch 4.3's dungeon content would be designed for people who were fresh out of the troll dungeons introduced in Patch 4.1--dungeons that are already a breeze for even many casual players owing to upgrades from valor points over the months. That may be so, but the ease with which even the shoddiest players are lollygagging through the instance means we'll probably see at least an HP buff for most of the bosses.
Tyrande Whisperwind hogs the spotlight in the Emerald Dragonshrine.
These are the big notes, but one small change caught my eye as well that I haven't seen many people discuss. While cleaning out my bags to make room for transmogrifiable gear, I noticed that you could no longer sell used Mysterious Fortune Cards to vendors for the rewards. I hope they'll change this, since munching on a fortune cookie before a raid pull and wondering if I won a 5,000-gold fortune card was always one of my favorite simple pleasures of the expansion. I'm not sure if they've removed it because of some crazy fear of gambling or because some players were using them to circumvent the money cap when they transferred servers (or even because they possibly have some tie-in planned for the revamped Darkmoon Faire), but for me the loss makes WoW just a little bit less fun.
Yet, overall, Patch 4.3 is off to a good start. The question remains, however, if it will be enough. Star Wars: The Old Republic always seemed to pop up into verbal cesspool known as trade chat despite valiant efforts at changing the subject, and every mention of BioWare's upcoming title sparked a flurry of Mountain Dew-fueled commentary on how much WoW would or would not suffer. To Blizzard's credit, the feeling that SWTOR would steal a Hutt-sized portion of WoW's players didn't seem quite so potent as it has previous months, and I'm ready to believe that that feeling with only intensify with the coming updates to the test realm. That's good news for Blizzard, especially if it means the news about WoW's dwindling numbers won't prove as cataclysmic as we originally feared. Now let's just hope the rest of the content is up to par.
Leif Johnson is a Chicago-based freelancer who likes sushi and long walks along the Brandywine. Find out what he's doing over at his blog or follow him on Twitter.