New Azshara is an explosion of gratuitous entertainment, where quests flow smoothly in jolly yarns with satirical punchlines. Old Azshara was a rugged mountain wilderness where life was hard, travel was long and experience had to be won with grit and determination. Now, boasting over 100 new quests and revised from level 40ish down to levels 10-20, it introduces the newly playable Goblins, a comedy race of rapacious capitalists, to the old world. This reboot is, in fact, free, and was pushed out to all WOW players in a mega-patch a few weeks before Cataclysm launched.Īzshara was known as one of the worst zones of classic WOW, with its awkward geography and thin, context-free questing. Some zones have changed more than others, but the overall experience is overwhelmingly different, right down to the evocative music. Feeling that the six-year-old experience of levelling to 60 was confusing, bitty and dry when compared to the much slicker, more eventful questing offered in the expansions, Blizzard has used the catastrophic emergence of the dragon Deathwing into the world as an excuse to re-engineer the whole thing.įloods and eruptions have physically changed the world, and events have moved on, rewriting the scenarios and quests of the two continents of Kalmidor and the Easter Kingdoms. It's one of the most extensively remodelled areas from the original game. Indeed, Azshara is a demonstrative case-study for Cataclysm. And, yes, there's an achievement for riding it from end to end: a digital souvenir. The Goblin-built Rocketway sits players on a cartoon missile and shoots them around the crescent bay of this rocky zone, eradicating tiresome travel times with its big-dipper bumps and swoops. In fact, the developer's now so comfortable with the theme park motif that, in the old-world zone of Azshara, it has actually constructed a rollercoaster. Almost everything it's done with Cataclysm – the third WOW expansion, which goes hand-in-hand with a sweeping reinvention of the six-year-old game – is about maximising the easy-access fun and minimising the unpredictability and pain. If I can have that without paying 10 dollars for a Coke and wading through thousands of human bodies to get to the entertainment, sign me up. Horses for courses, but it's always struck me as a curious insult theme parks are, after all, supposed to be magical and exciting escapist wonderlands where the fun never stops. Hell, the polygons probably have padding. After you've killed the biggest dragon in the world, you can get off the ride, rejoin the queue and do it all again. The implication is that they're kiddy activity centres where every event has been designed by committee and carefully stripped of personal risk, and where nothing ever really changes. Developers and fans of hardcore, sandbox online games like EVE or Ultima Online – emergent, changing worlds born from dog-eat-dog player interaction – like to dismiss the more populist virtual worlds, like World of Warcraft's, as "theme parks".
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