It’s been a tough week here at Chez Dragonchasers. I was sick as heck, then Angela got it, then the puppy needed to go get spayed and came home hurting something awful (requiring lots of cuddling on the couch). So not a lot of gaming has been done, but when I’ve had a few minutes I’ve been puttering around on my Worgen.

But y’know, I haven’t gotten the WoW Faithful all in a tizzy by saying something bad about their beloved game, so I figured I’d shoot out a post anyway.

The Worgen quest line has possibly been even more hand-holdy than the Night Elf quest line is! There are some quests that literally task you to click on a vehicle. Once you do, your character jumps in, goes on a canned ride where you have no control, then jumps out in front of a quest NPC that you have to click on to finish the quest. SUCCESS! You’re an awesome wolfie, you pulled it off! It’s like an MMO for pre-schoolers.

So anyway yeah… I’m loving it. Ha, psych! You militant WoW SOBs can put down your torches and your pitchforks. I mean, there are a couple of quests that do just that and from a pure gameplay point of view they’re beyond trivial, but by the time I got to them I was so immersed in the lore and the storyline that I didn’t care. I was just anxious to see what happens next.

Right now WoW, for me, is a lot like Dragon Age: Origins. I’m playing different races to experience these difference storylines and they’re all interesting and fun to go through. The Night Elf has, so far, been my least favorite and it was the one I did first when I returned, which had a lot to do with my voicing concerns with the gameplay. For my 2nd run-throughs I’ll be skipping quests and finding other ways to advance, probably.

The other thing the Worgen quest line does is really show off the power of phasing. I don’t want to spoil anything, but if, like me, you think of phasing in terms of an NPC moving from spot to spot (which is most of what I’d seen up until my Worgen days), well you ain’t seen nothing yet.

There’s a nice variety of quests in the Worgen start-up too. Sure, some of them are old school trivial fetch quests along the lines of “Go 5 feet outside my door and pick up that object” but even then they kind of lead up to something…they seem deliberately dull in a semi-successful attempt to lull you so you can be surprised (it’d be more successful if the starter area wasn’t so populated that you see things happen before you get the quest to do them, but I don’t see any good way around that). But others having you manning guns or riding mounts or sneaking around… things feel mixed up so I never get bored doing the same thing over and over. Some great new swamp environments, too.

At one point you have to save innocent people from alligators in a swamp. I saved the requisite number to complete the quest but on my way out, I just couldn’t leave the others to fend for themselves. I kept saving more and more of them; that to me is a good sign. I was immersed in the task and not just ticking off a check box of “Things to Do” (and I’ll admit, leveling up my Skinning at the same time).

I’ve also been reading a WoW novel (Christie Golden’s World of Warcraft: Arthas: Rise of the Lich King) which is helping me stay immersed in the lore of the world. When I’m questing in a town that I was just reading about in the book the previous night, it kind of adds to the overall experience.

I honestly thought I’d be done with my return to WoW by now, but I’m still anxious to play more of the human starter area, and I haven’t *touched* horde side yet. I’ve managed to snag the week between Christmas and New Year’s as vacation days from one of my jobs, so I should have some real time to devote to WoW during that week.

I still have no interest in jumping into the Dungeon Finder and dealing with other people. WoW has been completely a single player game for me so far, and I’m not sure that’ll change, but we’ll see. But there’s enough new stuff that I do not regret my purchase of Cataclysm at all; something that was not true of my purchase of Wrath of the Lich King, which I regretted buying after just a few hours of playing as a Death Knight.

Maybe I just wasn’t ready to go back to WoW, or maybe this content is just that much better (for as much as I bitch about it being too easy, and yeah, it is still too easy) but for whatever reason, WoW is ‘sticking’ this time around.

My only real gripe at this point is that there are SO many servers and people I know are scattered all over them. How come we can get tossed into a dungeon with a random stranger from another server, but we can’t choose a friend on another server to jump into a dungeon with (or can we?).