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World of Warcraft Previews: Cataclysm – Worgen Starting Zone Preview
Garrett Fuller has a terrific preview of the World of Warcraft Cataclysm Worgen starting zone. After spending a few disappointing levels as a human, Garrett found that the transformation into and questing as a Worgen to be less of a 'grind' than expected. Read on!
By Garrett Fuller on July 09, 2010
Ah Gilneas, where somehow Azeroth turned into eighteenth century Europe. The Worgen opening zone plays more like a first chapter in Underworld or The Wolf Man than anything else. The Alliance gets the Worgen, for some, they are the cooler looking race with Cataclysm than the Goblins. I mean who doesn’t like Werewolves? Well the Worgen have some great play options and a racial ability that is similar to a Sprint. Let’s take a look at the new race, their starting zone, and how they measure up to the Goblins on the Horde side.
Gilneas is the area where you begin your journey as a Worgen, but you don’t actually. You start as a human and from levels one to five you are given a random human avatar to run around as. The opening quest chain is very linear and events move throughout the zone as you work with the Greymane court to rid the various districts of Rampaging Worgen. In terms of story, I found it strange that I was constantly killing Worgen in the first five levels, only to eventually become one. Also, I found it disappointing to design my own cool looking Worgen only to see my character on the screen be a human when I first logged in. It’s okay though. I’m putting my faith in Blizzard that the transformation movie will be worth the quests for the change, sadly, it was not yet in the beta. Hopefully next patch, I cannot wait to see it.
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Again the opening Worgen area plays a lot like the Goblins and the Death Knight starting experience. It’s more like a story than an MMO. Events are going on around you as the Worgen are attacking townsfolk and battling with Greymane nobility, who look like something out of a Sherlock Holmes movie. I chose a Druid to play and found that running around an 18th century gothic looking setting casting plant and moon spells felt funny for me, but it was only the beginning. There’s a lot of story for your character to follow and events move from district to district in the town. At one point in the Military District I went back to find my Druid trainer and the NPCs were gone because the event had closed.
The pacing of these story style quests is a breath of fresh air to WoW. Even though you are still killing eight Rampaging Worgen or collecting five Supply Crates, the environment still has a sense of urgency to it. Two quests that stand out were helping Lord Darius fight the Worgen on the top of the wall. You have to survive and onslaught of Worgen as they storm the wall for two minutes. It racked up some nice XP and had a fun feeling, when done I had already gained another level. The other quest was the Rescue of Krennan. You are given a Horse and have to jump up to save an NPC who is hanging from a tree. My only complaint with the Worgen is that unlike the Goblins, they are not given a mount to drive around the zone with. However, the zone and quests do have a much more streamlined linear model than the Goblins do. So while the Goblin zone is wide open you are given a hot rod to get around in, the Worgen zone is more streamlined.
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So after running the quests I woke up in the stocks as a Worgen. Finally my character looked like the one I designed. I do like the look of the race, but the movement seemed a bit clumsy. Still the speed boost was great and gives the Worgen a racial ability that is actually useful in game play. I do think that the race overall is a great addition to the Alliance. If I played Alliance, I would definitely be a Worgen.
The biggest thing to remember is that Blizzard is going for more variety and different quest styles in their new starting zones. With the addition of minigames and more themed style quests, the zone actually moves faster and plays better. Also this was the first time I had played WoW in a long time where I did not care about my experience bar. I never once looked down to see how I was progressing. That to me is an achievement because the story kept me going. I know some think Blizzard is going for the fast food MMO approach, but some of those changes are definitely for the better. If anything the Worgen starting zone did not seem like a grind to me, even with the kill ten mobs quests.
We will continue our look at Cataclysm next week with some features on Mount Hyjal and other high levels zones. I’ll be bringing in my shaman for some leveling and exploration. Unfortunately he is Resto main spec, so I’ll have to use Enhancement again, which is fine, my gear is not as good, but come this fall we all start with the same gear score again.
Sounds absolutely great. As Blizzard said a while back, this expansion will not be about raising the level cap, as much as improving the world of Azeroth. I do, however, see the "red thread" between the 2 new starting areas, and the "fast food MMO approach". Anyway hope they bring an awesome cinematic or 2 into the starter areas.
I thought I remembered reading where worgen could switch between "human" and "worgen" looks at will.....
Or are they always worgen after level 5?
If you can switch to a human at will, I'd certainly hope you would be able to choose your appearance, not be a random human model.
I quit WOW right after the Burning Crusade, There was never anything wrong with WOW really I just felt like I didn't care for the things they were adding and the overall model of mmo's at the time really left me jaded (work for months and months for hardly noticeable changes) it just stopped making sense. WOTLK did nothing to change my opinion of the direction the game was moving in but with Cataclysm they have me battling myself to not resub again (which Imore than likely won't) but the fact that I'd even consider it after my last experience is saying alot for them.
If i'm right you change to worgen once you start attacking
Hopefully cataclysm will bring the wow! back in WoW.
Also not sure if anyone has been paying attention to Rifts Planes of Telara... but it is looking to the big surprise everyone has been hoping for in the mmorpg world.
Im looking foward to Rifts - That game's gonna rock and hopefully will be done well.
Im done with WoW once I realized my lvl 80 DK is a worthless character.
worgan specifically might bring me back to WoW. I like everything im hearing, and look forward to seeing how the community responds once all the dust clears.
I agree with you cept Cataclysm pretty much killed any desire I had to return.
I mean worgen are Dark Evil Kill Everyone Baddies, numerous quests from Darnassus and Duskwood say so. Yet, "suddenly" there are the Not Evil Other Worgen. Huh? This is like when they made up draenei, saying "no player draenei are New Evolved Draenei while the mobs you been killing since launch are Old Broken Different Draenei".... ummm ok?
Cataclysm is just recycling more content. No new classes (again) but taurens can be paladins! That's new cuz Blizzard says so! Redoing the old world is easier than making zones from scratch. Probably also to allow the people who whined they couldn't fly in old world to stop crying.
Still a tad irked that they made the Lich King from a supreme villain to a "curses I'll get you next time and your little dog too!" villain. Plus how they "ended" him was... lame.
Lineage 2 had the exact same thing. The orcs one killed were from lesser, inferior tribes but the player orcs were a proud race that worshipped the god of fire (more like klingons really).
This, a thousand times this. He went from being a Magneto or Dr. Doom (comic versions, of course) caliber villain to somewhere around the quality of Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget. Hell, each time he was 'foiled', I half expected a cutscene of him scheming out loud while petting the undead equivalent of Mad Cat to play. Between that and his 'end' (which I've seen on various videos around the net), I've lost much faith in the ability of Blizzard's writers to tell a good story.
That being said, the Worgen do look interesting. Interesting enough for me to go back though... maybe. I'll be keeping an ear tuned for further news before I make any decisions.
Looks nice; shame Real ID killed their pitch (to me)
The only thing I don't like about cat is that there isn't any new classes. I would've loved to see a Necromancer or Beastmaster Hero class, that could have more than 1 pet, but oh well.
I still think WOTLK would've been better if they would've added a necromancer hero class to the Death Knight starting area, not everyone wants to be a melee magic hybrid...actually alot of people don't.
Oh boy gearscore gets reset! Sadly the fun score still dwindles, while the lobby score rises. If I wanted a quality lobby game I wouyld have stuck to PSO
"In terms of story, I found it strange that I was constantly killing Worgen in the first five levels, only to eventually become one."
This is an extremely common story-telling element, especially when the protagonist is fated becomes the monster in question themselves. Not to be rude, but you need to read more.
Not to derail, but what a great starting zone that was. I remember being blown away the first time my young orc left the sacred cave and seeing that HUGE statue in the midst of the starter village. Awesome.
I even read that either a dev or blizzard forum mod posted his name using realID and not even 15 mins later someone posted his address and phone number on the same forum. Needless to say they deleted that post.
Still amazes me that someone at Blizzard thought RealID was a good idea.
Actually they were originally planning to have DK and Necro hero classes. Then someone decided to "merge" the two into the DK class you have today. Personally, I think a Necromancer class would of been a great idea. Heck, use the warlock template but use frost/shadow instead and undead pets.
Alas, though, blizz been getting lazy as WoW ages.
I expect more from them because it seems they still have that old grind gameplay mechanic no matter how different the world looks now. Still grind for gear, still grind for levels, still grind for rep points and raiding is yet again for the 50th time endgame content.. It is the same thing many people have been doing for years now. I expected more from Blizzard. Thank god we atleast have SC2 and Diablo 3 on the way.
To SaintViktor... All and every MMO as been about grind. The only thing You are to look at while choosing your MMO is the Ability of the compagny to make you Enjoy It none the less.
Tired of people complaining of Grind... yet call themselves MMO players.... Where have you been the last 15years.?
I for one have been under my rock urthal, but that neither here nor there.
I like what I am hearing but have been tired of WoW for over a year now. Maybe Cath will bring new life into the game maybe it wont. We all will have to wait and see.
But I agree with you on the whole Grind thing, all MMO's are grind fest and its entirely up to the company to make it somewhat fun to do since you have no choice.
Now RIFT's I might want to try as well, hope it is not a clone of WoW, if it is then I will go back to WoW.
Same goes for Tera, while the combat looks good I hope that that is not all there is to it.
And FFXIV as well, while the combat on it seems to be slow as a snail, as long as they work on it and make it better I think I will try it and see what its all about.
Lots of MMO's to try out in the future, will have to see what they bring to the table. They all promise something different but will it work? While some of us can complain about the slow combat, the lack of story or the lack of graphics, you have to have a good mix of all 3 to keep people playing the game. I can play something with not so great graphics but I want some good combat and good story line.
So... like a mage?
Or wait... Necro would summon undead instead of demons like a Warlock? Big difference....
Instead of Shadow + Fire you'd have... shadow + umm... frost? Wait that sounds just like a DK....
There is no Necromancer because a Demonology Warlock pretty much already is one.
"Not everyone wants to be a melee magic hybrid" yes, that's why they have 8 other classes....
DKs were put in to fill a gap of "not enough tanks".. This has been and still is a problem in getting more tanks.. Even with the LFDungeon tool, Tank (99% of the time) is the last role filled and sometimes depending on the time of day, you'll wait 10-30 minutes for one.. Now that there are 4 healing classes, and 4 tanking classes, and every Tom, Dick and Harry is a DPS class.. I doubt you'll ever see any new classes come into the game.. EVER.. not even a hero class.. Blizzard has cornered themselves into this "Holy Trinity" role model, which cripples them from deviating from that design..
Good Luck with a "status quo" classes...
Hell.. I was even bored playing the classes I had because it felt all the same.. I had Six 80's over the 5 year span I played, and at first there was a purpose to have alts.. but not now.. I have a pet class (Hunter) so why bother with my Warlock (whom is also lvl 80).. I have an 80 Pally and Priest (healing is covered) I had the both cause they healed differently ( now anymore after Cataclysm) I had CC & table and ports covered with my 80 Mage (so much for needing CC anymore and really don't need the dps since everyone does it) and last but not least a 80 DK.. Only reason why this class even exist is because it's opposive faction.. With a Pally, there is no need for a DK.. So as it stands to be after Cataclysm, All I need is my Pally and Hunter.. This way I have range dps covered, melee dps covered, heals covered and tanking covered..
Anyone want my stuff on my other toons.. wait.. it's all BoE.. nevermind.. LOL
No not like a mage, similar to a warlock since it would have a pet.
The undead pets could have different abilities over their warlock's demonic counterparts. I said use the template for the warlock, not just copy every single spell. Though it wouldn't surprise me if Blizz did that and called it "new".
If you think a demo lock is just like a necromancer, I guess you never played in Northrend? The necromancer npcs there do not turn into a demon form for one thing.
Point was, they could of made a new class that was similar to a warlock but with noticeable differences in the pets, spell types and effects they used.
the goblins in right i like it:)
the big surprise is TERA not rifts,TERA will be the big bomb untill ofc GW2 comes out and crush everything else with ease,rifts will simply fail.just because YOU like rift doesnt means that it IS the mmo bomb cause its absolutely bring nothing new to the mmo genre.
wow grind? lol seriously wow is an eaz mode mmo the easiest ever played,i got the best end gear for my rogue and it was a walk in the park, you want grind try crapy aion then u will understand what grind is
May i remind you that neither did WoW, Rift may be a bad game for several reasons as far as i know, but lack of groundbreaking material is not the factor that dooms it.