Tour #13: Silithus

We’ve taken all of the printed and in-game material and arranged it into a roughly thematic order within each expansion and we plan to go through the story using a number of thematically appropriate toons. We’ll be discussion our impressions here. Be warned: our discussions will contain spoilers for all currently published Warcraft material. This isn’t meant for first timers, but for old timers like us to experience it in a new way.You can find our tentative list here.

This is the only “classic” zone we’ll be doing (until Classic itself launches), and we chose to do it because it was largely untouched by Cataclysm. If you tell the nice bronze dragon that you’d like to go back in time, you’re right back to an embattled Cenarion Hold, trying to figure out what’s woken up the silithid and the qiraji.

Sonaira says:

Questing Experience

Sadly, you only get hints of what’s really going on while you’re questing. If you know your science fiction, though, you’ll be a little suspicious when you see Commander Mar’alith and a quest named “Into the Maw of Madness.” The very final quest – the turn in for Into the Maw of Madness, in fact, is the only time you’ll hear C’Thun mentioned by name, though the letter you find from Brann Bronzebeard (as a drop quest) does mention that he’s found a real Old God. Shoryl and I actually had a discussion about this, because nothing directly leading up to this (the short story), nor after it (the war effort and the raids) actually mention Old Gods. And if memory serves, Old Gods weren’t widely mentioned in the classic zones either. Was this the first mention of the Old Gods?

It’s also interesting trying to figure out what the Twilight’s Hammer is up to. I recall encountering them briefly during Classic, but not extensively. Here, they go from being a nuisance in the beginning to gradually becoming more of a concern to the people you talk to. It’s clear that there’s something going on, what with wind stones that talk to “Dukes” (they won’t talk to you) and whatnot. It was also interesting to run into Highlord Demitrian, tucked up behind some cultists, who would like to tell you about his lord Thunderaan. This would be well-known to you if you were playing a shaman during Legion, but was a random bit of lore in the middle of nowhere for us. We’ve gotten so used to the Twilight’s Hammer, though, that it’s interesting to see a lot of NPCs running around asking just exactly what they’re up to.

Character Selection

We originally chose tauren because we needed to be a race that existed during classic, and we had already picked our Alliance race, which didn’t. It went something like this:

Shoryl: I want to play a shaman
Sona: Well, we can play draenei then. But we should have Horde toons who are a different class.
Shoryl: … Tauren or trolls?
Sona: Tauren could be druids back then. Want to be druids?

So tauren it was. While the tauren aspect didn’t bring much resonance for this zone, it was an excellent, if unintended choice to bring druids. It felt like we were sent there for a reason – not just because we were “adventurers,” but because we were there to help out the Cenarion Circle. Good choice for this one.

Did the thematic tour help with appreciating this zone?

Not much this time. There simply wasn’t much leading up to it, just the short story, which served more to illustrate important facts about Fandral before Cataclysm than telling the full story of the War of the Shifting Sands. In the end, the only lore information here came from the zone itself: the bugs are restless, the land is being destroyed, and there are weird warlocks everywhere. Go figure out why and fix it. I do remember there being quests in Un’Goro and Tanaris about why there were silithid hives so far outside of Silithus, but I believe those are gone or mostly gone after the Cata revamp. The “old” Silithus really is a zone out of time now.

Shoryl says:

Questing Experience

This really illustrated the questing experience from classic, in comparison with how we quest today. There was one central hub, with three sort of secondary places you might get quests; and a ton of back and forth. I don’t think the questing really did a very good job of conveying the mystery of the Silithid becoming more active, though.

Character Selection

Being a druid really helped me feel like there was a reason for my character to be here. Otherwise, the small Horde area had so little in terms of questing left that it felt more like a token presence.

Did the thematic tour help with appreciating this zone?

One of the other things Sona and I discussed while we flew back and forth was game design, and how this zone was designed to always be traversed on “foot”. The zone was small and flat, and anything in the mountains surrounding it had fairly clearly defined paths from the main flat area. Sticking to the roads in this land would have, indeed, been safer.

But while Silithus, in general, gave us a glimpse into the past, I don’t think the story was provided in a compelling way. In general, it threw into stark relief how important the revamp of the old world was to the game in Cataclysm.

Tour #12.5: Patch Notes

Sonaira says:

We just had a great show on Girls Gone WoW talking all about our Thematic Tour of Azeroth (and Surroundings)! (You can find that show at GGW #355.) During the show, I opened The Grand Spreadsheet for the first time in a long time.

Oh.

Oh my. I appreciate the love everyone has shown the list, I do. But as an inveterate list-maker, I knew I could do so much better.

So in the grand tradition of WoW, I’d like to give you the Thematic Tour of Azeroth (and Surroundings) v.2 patch notes:

Silithus no longer appears both right before The Burning Crusade and right before Cataclysm

New! Additional List Items:

• Animations that should have already been there but inexplicably weren’t!
• A list of the thematically appropriate toons that will be going on each part of the tour
• Updates for Battle For Azeroth Patch 8.0 and 8.1
• Links to previous posts (in the Title column)
• Links to online media sources (in the Type column)

Interface Changes:

• The numbering system has been unborked
• The list is now an actual spreadsheet instead of a PDF, so now you too can sort and filter to your hearts’ content

When we post Tour #13, the intro text will contain the link to the new, improved spreadsheet.

Tour #12: War of the Shifting Sands

We’ve taken all of the printed and in-game material and arranged it into a roughly thematic order within each expansion and we plan to go through the story using a number of thematically appropriate toons. We’ll be discussion our impressions here. Be warned: our discussions will contain spoilers for all currently published Warcraft material. This isn’t meant for first timers, but for old timers like us to experience it in a new way.You can find our tentative list here.

Sonaira says:

I thought I had read this, but while I remember the events, I couldn’t have said where I first learned it. It might not have been until we discovered we’d been complicit in poisoning Malfurion, but it’s hard to say. At any rate, I found the flashback parts of this story to be a little weak and rushed, with one exception. In Chapter 2, we get this nice bit of possible foreshadowing.

Shiromar watched as Fandral stood guard, looking out from Fire Plume Ridge, the steam of the volcanic vents rising behind him, the orange lava glow illuminating his face[…]

I just finished reading Before the Storm and I feel like there’s an interesting discussion that could have happened between Fandral and Velen and tragically dead sons.

Overall, I actually liked the framing chapters a bit better. I wasn’t playing during the Scarab Lord race, but it was nice to see the nods to it here. I thought it was also a nice choice to have the POV character be a night elf who would have been here for the original conflict. The Opening of Ahn’Qiraj is actually one of the things I’m most looking forward to in Classic WoW.

Also, there are too many Warcraft characters who (1) are willing to believe their dead loved ones are speaking to them, and (2) have suddenly become evil. (See also, Ner’zhul)

Shoryl says:

It took me a little bit to realize that this is a story framed to explain the players’ perspective of the opening of the gates. I remember when this happened on my server, and feverishly trying to stay connected because the entire server population was in Silithus.

On my list of characters that I dislike because of their shallow reasons for being evil is Fandral Staghelm. In this one moment, his grief is reasonable. But 1,000 years later, he could give it a rest.