#mankrik

Oh, there she is.

“Where is Mankrik’s Wife?” is one of the oldest in jokes in WoW.  For good reason too, it’s genuinely emblematic of some of the WoW Classic’s (And especially The Barrens) issues with giving the player almost any hint at all with where they need to go or what they need to do for a quest.  Not only does the quest text provided give you no detail further than Mankrik saying “i’m pretty sure my wife is dead, find her”, but even when you do find her her corpse isn’t even named!  Giving you no indication that you actually found your target unless you take the time to click on this random dead body, that looks almost exactly the same as all the other ones, only listed as “Beaten Corpse”.

This isn’t even the only quest that has this issue in The Barrens.  “Angry Scytheclaws” tells you to find and kill raptors for their feathers and leave them at their nest....then stops short of actually giving you any idea where the hell those nests are.  This is why websites like Wowhead and Icyveins showed up in the first place!  These esoteric quest objectives that are more of a time waster than anything else.  That said, I do understand the presence of some of these  things.

WoW classic, above all, wanted to be a whole world to explore, and like the real world it’s not always going to make sense.  As a strange reference, it makes me think of Castlevania 2 in a way, a game that was Infamous for having NPC’s that either give you directions way too vague to be useful or just flat out lie to the player for really no reason at all.  A lot of the quests in wow classic feel like that, like the NPC’s either have barely any better grasp on this place than you do, or are deliberately leaving details out of their stories to find some dumb adventure to look through a raptor nest for the like, six silver stolen from their payroll.

Okay, tangent real quick at the end of this post here.  What the hell is with the Raptors in WoW?  They wear like arm bands, and in one quest just straight up stole money from the Crossroads like they knew it had value.  Are they sentient?  Do raptors in this game have like a society?  I know I kill a lot of people and animals in this game, and then skin them even (remember, you can skin Worgen in Classic, messed up given what we know about them later one imo).