Battle for Azeroth

18 entries. 13,046 words.

November, 2017

• WoW – Battle For Azeroth. 2017-11-06 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Pre-Release
  
  From the media assets on the Battle for Azeroth web site. In general, I don’t think about WoW very much, but when Blizzcon comes around every year, Twitter explodes with chatter about this game. Even more than the moderate level of chatter that persists year-round. It continues to amaze me how many people seem to live completely inside a Blizzard bubble. 595 words.

August, 2018

• Battle for Azeroth Impulse Buy – Blaugust 13. 2018-08-13 3:19 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  It was probably inevitable. I went ahead and pre-ordered the World of Warcraft expansion Battle for Azeroth one day early. There’s a couple of reasons I caved. First, I was thinking about buying a new game anyway. Even though I said I wasn’t going to buy Diablo III, I started contemplating it. I did in fact load up Path of Exile Sunday night and play a little bit of my old characters (level 13 is my highest level guy there), and it wasn’t as fun as I expected. PoE is a far better-looking game, but it also has more complex mechanics. It swung the pendulum a bit too far in the other direction. It’s actually hard to beat bosses. You have to watch your health bar and drink potions at the right time and dodge stuff and think about what you’re doing. :) 859 words.
• The Siege of Lordaeron – Blaugust 14. 2018-08-14 5:55 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  I re-activated my World of Warcraft subscription this morning and played the new expansion for about 45 minutes. Hardcore! I had some hope that I might avoid spamming posts about Battle for Azeroth, but what else is there to talk about? I also made an appointment to take my dog and cat to the vet next week. Not exactly riveting stuff. I’m going to refrain from mentioning any of the negative observations I made and just focus on the good things. We live in a time when even constructive criticism is interpreted as a personal affront to most fans. (It’s a bit like politics… you can either express hate for games, or express love for games, but anything in between is socially unacceptable now.) In reality it’s the same World of Warcraft with all of the same pros and cons as before, but I’ll just pretend I was starstruck the whole time. 770 words.
• 2.5 Hrs Into Battle for Azeroth – Blaugust 15. 2018-08-15 1:40 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  Finding spoiler-free screenshots typically results in rather bland imagery for blog posts. The second problem with writing post after post about Battle for Azeroth, besides boring everyone to death, is that nobody is going to read them. Everyone is avoiding spoilers, so nobody is going to click on a post about the expansion two days in. (I wouldn’t, and I’m generally not reading WoW posts right now.) 745 words.
• Finding Teldrassil – Blaugust 16. 2018-08-16 2:48 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  That’s not Teldrassil, that’s the new city in Kul Tiras, which I can confirm is, in fact, sprawling and confusing. I’m already tired of writing about Battle for Azeroth and I’ve played for less than 4 hours. It’s possible that you can infer something on how I feel about MMORPGs in general right now, but I’ll leave that to the reader’s imagination. 699 words.
• Sunday Browns and Disenchanted Disappointment – Blaugust 19. 2018-08-19 3:36 PM.
  • Media
  • MMORPG
  
  Drustvar, the brown zone … for a few steps, until the lighting changes. Today is not just an “I can’t think of anything to write” day, it’s an “I actively don’t want to write because I hate the way I write” day. I was working on a post about comments last night but it’s not finished and I don’t want to post it until it is. 581 words.
• Drustvar Screenshots – Blaugust 20. 2018-08-20 6:07 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  Screenshots! Because it’s that kind of a day. A friendly, inviting architectural feature for the entrance to a building. Here we see the bow of a boat built in a house, and the incredibly rare Swift Stormsaber mount that I usually ride in WoW. 108 words.
• Drustvar Complete, Mastodon – Blaugust 21. 2018-08-21 1:24 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  So we meet again, blank page. Stop yelling at me, now-a-total-of-150-draft-posts-I-can’t-use, you know what you did. Ever wonder why I embed the image in the post and also set it as the "featured image" in WordPress, so it shows up twice on the web site? For the RSS feed. I design my posts almost exclusively for RSS feed readers. 627 words.
• Where Exactly Is This Battle? – Blaugust 24. 2018-08-24 6:26 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  Stormsong Valley This is going to get me into trouble, but I’m already bored with Battle for Azeroth. I didn’t even play yesterday. It’s basically a continuation of Legion, and … well, I already played Legion. The story that got me interested in the first place is nowhere to be seen. There is no “battle for Azeroth” taking place in the Battle for Azeroth expansion, as far as I can tell, at least through level 115. I knew this was going to happen, and I fell for the hype anyway. 657 words.
• Stormsong Valley and On Accident – Blaugust 25. 2018-08-25 1:45 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Writing
  
  Moonshade Highlands, I mean, Stormsong Valley The Azshara short was the weakest of the three Warbringer videos, as self-contained short films go. (Sylvanas being the strongest.) My reaction before watching it: Who is Azshara? And after watching it: Who is Azshara? As far as I could tell, it had no connection with the game of World of Warcraft that I’ve been playing the past week. 494 words.
• A Logical Dead End – Blaugust 26. 2018-08-26 3:19 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Island Expedition tutorial I just went ahead and cancelled my World of Warcraft subscription today. It was largely a formality. I can’t imagine a world (of Warcraft! Har!) where this expansion would have been so great that I’d have played for more than a month. Incidentally, no other MMO makes it so easy to cancel its subscription, I’ve noticed. You just click the “Cancel” link and that’s it. No questions, no guilt trips, no nothing. 834 words.
• Side Quests and Spigots – Blaugust 27. 2018-08-27 1:51 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Isn’t anyone going to clean up this beach? Really bad for tourism. My Blaugust posts have definitely turned into a diary. Not normally what I like to write, but the posts must be posted. I’ve abandoned the concept of playing World of Warcraft by giving the game my full attention. I played for two more hours yesterday while watching Hulu, clicking through the quest text without reading it, blindly killing mobs and collecting drops until the objectives were done. 813 words.
• Battle for Azeroth 119 Update – Blaugust 30. 2018-08-30 1:45 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  This will be my last “spontaneous” Blaugust post this year. I started tomorrow’s “performance review” post a week ago, and then there will be my “what I played this month” post after that, which I started yesterday. I started today’s post … well, today. So since it’s my last one, I better make it good! Um. Okay. Here we go. Any second now, something interesting will come to me. 1,008 words.

September, 2018

• Games Played – August 2018. 2018-09-01 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Progression Report
  
  The first story thing WoW gave me to do upon reaching level 120 was to go to this Zandalar desert to assassinate some Horde NPCs. I completely forgot to say this in my huge missive yesterday: Blaugust seemed like a great success, congratulations to everyone who participated! Huge thanks to Belghast and all the mentors for pulling all of that together. To all the new bloggers, great job! It doesn’t matter if you posted every day or not. If you keep going, that’s fantastic, but if you need to take a break, that’s fine too. Every blogger has a different pace that their comfortable with. There’s no wrong way to do it. 387 words.
• WoW – Finding Jaina’s Trail Again. 2018-09-03 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  I mentioned that I was close to giving up on World of Warcraft’s Battle for Azeroth expansion, because the game seemed to have given up on telling me Jaina’s story. Well I finally picked up her story again. It turns out that you have to complete all three Kul Tiras zone story chapters (half of which don’t seem to have anything to do with anything) before a new quest unlocks which begins the followup to Jaina’s cut scenes from the very beginning of the expansion. 601 words.
• Week End – Carbine, CCP, Daybreak, Witcher. 2018-09-08 2:30 PM.
  • Blog
  
  I started to write three or four blog posts this week, didn’t finish them, and didn’t want to post them. Instead I decided to cram all of them together into one summary post for the week. This allows me to post, but without the bother of crafting long essays that have beginnings, middles, or ends, when everything I want to say can be summed up in a paragraph. No wonder listcicles are so popular! I rather like the process of keeping a draft open throughout the week and just throwing sentences into it now and again as they occur to me. 1,275 words.

October, 2018

• Battle for Azeroth Conclusions. 2018-10-03 4:06 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  My World of Warcraft subscription ended weeks ago, and the last time I actually played was September 3rd, a month ago. I meant to go back and complete the Siege of Boralus but I got too involved playing The Witcher again. I rescued Jaina though, so that was a good-enough ending for me. I figured I should finally post what I thought of the expansion. I get the impression there’s a lot of people complaining about Battle for Azeroth. I don’t see that myself. I only see the people saying, “Gosh there’s a lot of people angry about this expansion.” I don’t know where people are looking to see all these angry people, or why people are even looking there. I’ve only seen people reporting what I consider to be legitimate criticisms in a fairly respectful way. 938 words.

December, 2018

• Endgame Viable Awards 2018. 2018-12-31 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Single-Player
  • Steam
  
  It’s time once against for the prestigious Endgame Viable Awards for 2018. 2017 Awards 2016 Awards 2015 Awards I give out three awards for PC games only: Game of the Year, MMORPG of the Year, and MMORPG Expansion of the Year. In my warped worldview “Game of the Year” sort of implies Steam game of the year (because that’s the only place I buy PC games) and excludes traditional MMORPGs. 1,055 words.