Shortly after the Beta opened up, however, Blizzard announced that these towns would no longer be made into fully-fledged cities, but instead, we would have bases on Ashran, the world PvP zone. Warspear and Stormshield are thankfully not within the auto-flagged part of the zone, existing on their own little peninsulas. However, visiting them on the Beta, there's a real sense of underwhelming. Both "cities" are really just outposts using building models that are used in your garrison. Not only does this come off as cobbled together in a hurry, but it also kind of undercuts the whole sense of the garrisons as being the small outpost you're carving out in this new world. Karabor and Bladespire were both earned by your hard work - saving the former from conquest and conquering the latter. But the Ashran hubs are just kind of there.
Now, to be fair, Blizzard has mentioned that they've got their level designers working on Stormshield and Warspear to spruce them up and make them seem cooler, but this late in the process, I'm not expecting anything spectacular.
Cities in World of Warcraft are kind of an odd thing. The ethos in the beginning was clearly that every race should have its capital. Trolls and Gnomes were the oddities in that they had to share a capital, though if you know a bit of the historical trivia about those races, it makes sense. When the game was first being designed, it was only going to have six races - Humans, Dwarves, and Night Elves for Alliance, and Orcs, Tauren, and Undead for the Horde. Don't believe me? Watch the vanilla WoW cinematic. The Trolls and Gnomes were squashed into the Orc and Dwarf starting zones (and for those who started playing post-Cataclysm, Troll and Gnome characters used to have an identical starting experience with their host races, with Trolls starting in the Valley of Trials and Gnomes in Coldwinter Valley.)
Other than the Auction Houses (which used to be exclusively in Orgrimmar and Ironforge,) the idea at first, I think, was that you could call any of the major cities home. Some of the advanced profession training was limited to certain cities, so, for example, Engineers or Blacksmiths would want to stick to Ironforge, once they got to Expert Level.
Burning Crusade brought with it three new cities. The Draenei and Blood Elves came with the Exodar and Silvermoon, and Shattrath was established as the new neutral hub. Wrath had no new races, but they followed the Shattrath model, creating Dalaran as the new neutral hub city.
But something became pretty clear pretty quickly. Exodar and Silvermoon, perhaps mostly because they were separated by a loading screen and, in Exodar's case, a boat ride, made for pretty crappy places to set your Hearthstone. These two cities in particular became ghost towns even during Burning Crusade, except by those who needed to use their Jewelcrafting trainers.
Following the Shattrath model, Dalaran encouraged players to go back to the old cities for things like banking or class training (which you used to have to do every time you got to a higher level and could get new abilities.) During this time, there was a pretty decent equivalence between any of the cities. Profession trainers existed in Dalaran and all the other cities, so if you were in the Northrend level range, you could go back wherever you wanted to do your auction house business.
In Cataclysm, though, they only revamped the two headliner cities - Stormwind and Orgrimmar. These cities also got the portals to the various Cataclysm zones, and so the two factions were basically funneled down into one city each - which admittedly was better for lag than having everyone in "Shatlag" or "Dalalag/Lagaran."
Cataclysm also notably did not establish new cities for its new races. Actually, there is a Worgen city, which is the setting for the level 1-5 "kiddie pool" experience for Worgen players, and is pretty key to questing in Gilneas, but is left an abandoned ruin after you get through those initial quests. The Goblins at best got a relatively large town that plays a part both in Azshara questing and the intro to Twilight Highlands, but neither race got a fully-fledged city.
In Mists, the "cities" each faction got were really just individual buildings with the usual amenities - bankers, and inn, and portals back to the other cities.
It's clear, then, that Blizzard has been kind of lowering the priority of building new cities since Cataclysm.
And to be fair, that's not such a crazy idea. One of the stated goals of Mists of Pandaria is that they wanted us to get out of the city - not to just spend the entire game queuing up for instances like we did in much of Cataclysm. I adore Dalaran, but I still think I spent a great deal of Wrath of the Lich King running around that city while waiting for a dungeon queue to pop (or for the first half of the expansion, spamming trade to look for a dungeon group.)
So I can see why, with the evolving strategies to get people out and about, they decided not to make Karabor and Bladespire into cities. The question then, is why they bothered to make the Ashran "cities."
The big X factor here is Garrisons. Garrisons are absolutely the hub of all your activity while leveling up through Draenor. You return there between each questing zone, and the growth of your garrison mirrors your growth in strength as you level up. In a real way, I think Lunarfall and Frostwall are the true capitals in Warlords of Draenor.
But they aren't really capital cities in the same sense that Dalaran, or even Shrine of Seven Stars were. You only get a banker there if you have a specific building. I don't think you can have an auction house there (but that's always been a limit on expansion cities.) The big thing is that the portals back to Azeroth are not found there. You can get a Mage Tower with portals to other zones, but not back to Stormwind or Orgrimmar.
But it wouldn't be too hard to implement enough changes to make our garrisons into the true "Capital Cities" the way that previous expansions have handled it. The big problem, though, is people. Unless you invite people in your party (possibly your raid) to it, you're always going to be alone in your garrison. From a pure gameplay point of view, that's not so bad, but one of the appeals that these capital cities have always had is that they tend to be bustling with the activity of other players. Where is that one Tauren Druid with the fancy mount and gear going to sit for months on end to bask in the hypothetical adulation of his fellow players?
Still, with all the level-cap activity that takes us out of our garrisons, we'll surely be seeing other players all over the place. So the question remains: do we need capital cities?
Well, I think that logically, no. But they are fun. And what is the sole purpose of World of Warcraft (from a player's perspective?) To have fun. Dalaran was a city I was excited to explore, filled with fun little secret areas and hidden toys like those elixirs that makes every other player and NPC there look like a Mage in tier 2 gear. The Vanilla and BC capitals have some of this charm as well (Shattrath was always a bit dull though.) But the Shrines? Eh... not so much. I think the main reason that people were so excited about Bladespire and Karabor is that it looked like we were going to get the kind of intricate, explorable areas that we haven't really seen since Wrath of the Lich King, but instead we're getting cobbled-together towns that aren't even as flavorful as the Shrines.
Will the expansion be broken without them? No. But do I think those cities would be cool to have? Absolutely.
No comments:
Post a Comment