Reactions To WoW Legion

World of Warcraft is so far off my radar right now that the announcement of the new Legion expansion* is about as interesting to me as a deer tick. Even that horrible analogy was more interesting to me. It’s not that I don’t like WoW when I play it. It just doesn’t hold my attention for very long.

There are two things I just don’t understand about WoW fandom: The first is how people can look around at all of the MMORPGs out there and decide that WoW is the only one they want to play, and the second is how anyone can follow any of the lore that happens in WoW.

The “Burning Legion” mentioned in the sort-of-kind-of trailer means absolutely nothing to me. I guess we’ve seen them before? It says they’re “back” so I assume we drove them off in a previous expansion or something. Wait are those all the demon dudes wandering around in Hellfire Penninsula? Hey, maybe I know more than I thought I did.

Before Draenor came out, I remember a lot of discussion about how we were going to be time traveling into the past, or something like that. I bought and played Draenor. I don’t remember one single quest dialog telling me that I was traveling into the past. I didn’t know why there were Orcs and Draenei fighting it out in that expansion. I didn’t know why the Orcs wanted to time travel. Or maybe it was the Draenei doing the time traveling. Maybe it was a cosmic worm hole. I have no idea. Maybe I should have known why Orcs and Draenei were fighting ever since Burning Crusade, when the Draenei first fell out of the sky or whatever. I leveled a Draenei priest through those starter zones, you’d think I would know their backstory.

But I don’t even know how to spell “Draenei” without looking it up, that’s how disconnected I am from WoW lore.

Anyway WoW fans’s heads are probably exploding with disbelief right now, but for a casual player who doesn’t follow WoW, it was not obvious what was happening there at the beginning of that last expansion or why it was happening. And I didn’t just click through the dialogs either. But even if I had, it should still have been obvious what was going on if time-traveling was taking place. You’d think maybe somebody could have said out loud in one of those cut scenes, “Where are we? More like when are we!” Maybe when I re-subscribe for Legion I’ll double-check to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I still haven’t used my free level 90 boost.

Speaking of boosts, I hope they give out another free level boost in this new expansion. They probably won’t, but it would be cool if they did. I think I said it for Draenor too: That level boost alone is easily worth the cost of the expansion, when you consider how much time it takes to get to 90.

The only thing I’ve seen about the expansion so far that might be entertaining for a player like me is the new class. But I’m very wary about WoW classes. One day I should write a post about how nonsensical and weird I find all of the classes. They throw the strangest abilities in there. And you only end up needing to use like four abilities out of the one hundred they give you. (No I haven’t done any raiding-I’m sure it’s more complicated at the high end.)

But despite all my personal feelings about WoW-or lack thereof-I’m happy to see Legion is coming. It’s good for the genre.

* It occurred to me that when I link to MassiveOP I should probably disclose that I did throw a few bucks at their Kickstarter. So yeah I have a tiny, microscopic self-interest in sending traffic their way. Though I seriously doubt that my traffic is making any difference to their business.

Posted on Blaugust Day 10. Read all of my Blaugust posts here.