At this point, I've gotten heritage armor on a Lightforged Draenei, Void Elf, Nightborne, Kul Tiran, Dark Iron Dwarf, Highmountain Tauren, and now Vulpera (the latter has an annoyingly unexpected delay - rather than getting it in the little Vulpera section in Orgrimmar, you have to go to Vol'dun, which means that, barring a friendly Mage to portal you there, you have to do the entire BFA starting quests to get to Zandalar, which is a little annoying if you wanted to hold off on them until you, you know, had your heritage armor.)
The thing is, as someone who has now played this game for nearly 14 years, I don't lack for alts (see name of blog). Most of my main characters date back to 2006 - I've been playing my Paladin, Shaman, Rogue, and Warlock since vanilla, my Priest since Burning Crusade, and my Death Knight since early in the morning after getting back from Best Buy with my copy of Wrath of the Lich King, back when you actually had to install the game from CD-ROMS.
The Allied Races are cool, and a lot of them have a ton of story potential for the future (the Vulpera, while very cute, are by far the thinnest playable race in terms of lore, and that includes Void Elves.) The thing is, the vast majority of these alts are very unlikely to become characters I play prominently.
Of all my allied race alts, the only one that has become its "class leader" (essentially the one that I play when I want to play that class) is my Kul Tiran Druid, and frankly, the only reason I felt ok with retiring my Night Elf Druid (which was, I think, the third character I ever made in 2006) is that I've never really been that into Druids as a class (yes, I know they can do everything, but I generally just don't like the way they do those everythings.)
Fun story about that Night Elf Druid: it's the only character for whom I've paid to have its name changed. When made it, I was taking an Irish Gaelic class in college and decided it'd be clever to throw in some Irish words for character names. While my Shaman, Tarbhad, has the Irish word for "bull" (Tarbh, pronounced, if I recall correctly, "Tar-roo") the Druid was just the Irish word for river, Abhainn (pronounced Ah-wen). When I joined a guild that was actually doing stuff, I changed it to Selarion so that people might be able to actually pronounce it. The only other character I have whose name changed was my Priest, whom I transferred along with my other Horde characters to another server in Cataclysm to make room for some other alts (if only they'd had the current lack of limits on characters-per-server they do now!) Originally named "Eclesius," I changed it to the less on-the-nose "Etharian" when that name was already taken on that server.
Anyway, playing with the XP buff (which, to be fair, will feel like nothing compared to the way Shadowlands is going to speed up leveling) I've been working on allied races, trying to unlock their heritage armor.
But it's a sort of ephemeral reward. Most of these alts - the Highmountain Warrior, the Nightborne Hunter - are destined to just sit there at 110. Even the allied races I really like - the Lightforged and the Void Elves, for example, are still secondary characters. There's no way that I'd retire my Human Paladin, whom I created in 2006, was my first Alliance character, and has been my main since 2008, even if the Lightforged guy has an awesome beard (that is, tragically, hidden by his heritage armor helmet.)
I've grown attached to these characters over more than a decade, and even if I briefly considered changing my Death Knight to Lightforged as a "canonical" development of his story, it would just be so weird for him to suddenly have a different voice.
I'm all for the broader diversity of options in playable races, and their presence gives the creative team tons of future story potential. I'm not complaining about their existence, just lamenting that, with few exceptions, I'm not going to be playing them all that much.
No comments:
Post a Comment