Welcome to a (hopefully) normal version of Monday Update where I ramble about video games for a few minutes of your life.
World of WarCraft Transmogrification – World of WarCraft continually throws task at you, and most of them remain optional aesthetic choices for your character. Yes, the armor you get from current raiding content and/or PvP looks wonderful, surely, but maybe you’re not too enamored with the Asian theme that Mists of Pandaria foisted on the game. I like samurai helms and Chinese swords as much as the next guy, but everyone tends to look the same after a while. Maybe I want to look like the Emperor, and maybe I don’t, but it’s nice to offer a choice to players who’ve stuck with the game for so long (judging from the numbers, 8.3 million still feels like a lot of people).
Enter transmogrification, a silly lore-sounding name for changing the appearance of your current gear to something else. Not that summarizing the entire concept in one word happens all that often, but I wonder what you would call it anyway. For people who prefer the swords and sorcery Lord of the Rings-style fantasy gear from earlier expansion, or the far-out science fiction-themed gear from The Burning Crusade, or even the Scandinavian/undead necromancy visuals of Wrath of the Lich King, you go get the gear and change its appearance. This turns into a miniature obsession as you pore over old raid content, PvP sets, and all manner of other outdated content just looking for the perfect sword, mace, axe, shield, or whatever. Assuming, anyway, that you’d spend the time figuring out how to defeat some of these bosses and old content.
For my part, I always loved the utterly insane styling of Ahn’Qiraj. Think anthropomorphic bugs plus Egyptian stereotypes, and you could begin to imagine this raid and its myriad wonders. Or, in this case, giant sets of empty rooms filled with creatures and the occasional Anubis lookalike. Frankly, the soul-crushing mob grind of vanilla WoW founds its zenith here, where reputation required killing every single trash pull and gear required collecting an arbitrary set of items to make – add forty people vying for that same gear, and you’d run AQ40 for a long, long time. It’s enough to make a lot of people quit the game – thank goodness I never got far enough to actually experience it as current content (anyone who says that they enjoy such a thing is surely lying. The exclusivity of an experience doesn’t mean said experience becomes enjoyable by virtue of being inaccessible. A hundred other examples come to mind outside the game, but let’s not get off track in my rambling).
Not so anymore! Now you get to experience the fun of old raid content by blazing through it with your incredibly superior gear options. It’s fun killing bosses that took many, many tries in one shot, and it’s also fascinating to see how Blizzard’s art design team improved their craft so much from one expansion to the next. The gear looks rather drab, sometimes, but they’re iconic armor sets at a time when owning such a thing required a significant time investment – not just the free time to wander around and kill everything.
For someone like me who’s been playing the game (in one form or another, poorly) since 2005, now we finally obtain those items we could never achieve. So I did:
And that Power Rangers outfit might not seem like something amazing; in fact, a warrior who wears psychedelic colors might inspire certain people in the WoW community to say…well, not nice things. But you know what? I like my crazy looking set because no one else seems to have it, nor care that the developers left it in the game for our enjoyment. I’d rather take advantage of that and see what other awesome gear one can find.
Now, it’s not all butterflies and roses; some of the content clearly wasn’t designed for solo play or a small group (especially when you start doing twenty-five man raids for level 80 characters with four people), and this causes some complications. Bosses became more intricate and mechanical in their designs as the game progresses, and you can see that clearly as you tackle different instances. Some mechanics, thank God in Heaven, never returned ever again as they made far too much hassle and too little sense. Overall, though, there’s a clear progression towards challenge and multitasking over all else.
Still, it’s not as if any of this content compels you by default – the challenge lies in making do with less characters than you’d usually have. Given that bringing more people means sharing the different items with more people, I’d rather earn them this way then find myself out-rolled by a complete stranger. That used to happen all the time in Cataclysm’s much-maligned Raid Finder (whose loot system meant that nearly anyone could roll on anything like a giant free-for-all), and I’m not trying to recreate that horrendous experience by any measure.
For something that’s basically the equivalent of “dress up” for virtual characters, I’ve spent far more time then I’d like to admit looking for the coolest weapon or the best helmet. Honestly, if you played the game this long, you’d find yourself grateful for incentives to do different things (Pet Battles, Brawler’s Guild, Scenarios, etc, also give out new rewards), and I find this feature excellent and awesome. Except for the distinct lack of bag space, which will soon arrive as my greatest foe in all the world of WarCraft. So what did I mean to say from all of this? Absolutely nothing, for once! I just like World of WarCraft, and playing it with my whole family is still fun…if occassionally stressful due to us not knowing what exactly we’re doing. Insert long laugh here.
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So that’s it for this week’s finally normal Monday Update! Honestly, I need to finish some long-running series before they drive me crazy, so keep watch for those (no, I won’t spoil it).
