#worw

apparently these r blonde raccoons

and these are albino raccoons

"A genetic mutation causes albino raccoons to lose the traditional black and gray colour including the bandit strip across the eyes."

Hillsbrad Foothills went under one of the weirdest zone reinventions of the Cataclysm era of World of Warcraft.  Not only was it one of the most extensive revamps of the entire old world overhaul, it’s by far the most openly comedic, and often, the most bizarrely meta. Nothing represents this better than the quest “Welcome To The Machine”.  Which is the very first quest given to you if you choose to level in Hillsbrad, and sets the entire, again weird as hell, zone story line into motion.

Uniquely, you don’t actually undertake any objectives in this quest, you simply hand them out to three facsimiles of different kinds of World of Warcraft players.  You’ve got “Orkus”, the absurdly over powered high level character working their way through old content for no reason other than to show off to low level players everything they’ve achieved.  You’ve got “Johnny Awesome”, an adventurer in full heirloom gear and riding a Celestial Steed, who in the most dated part of this quest, openly references to those “Now look back at me” Old Spice commercials.  And finally, you’ve got Dumass, which.....the joke about him is not subtle. All three of these characters will go on to appear in quests further on during the Hillsbrad story line, and some of them work a lot better than others.  Orkus is the clear standout of the three, his storyline is so over the top that it winds up being some of the funniest writing in the entire game, let alone just in this zone.  Johnny Awesome’s storyline takes a disappointing turn away from the “Cocky alt” vibe and ends up indulging in a lot of weird “Ha ha, don’t Blood Elves look like girls?!” humor, trying too hard at best and looking a little transphobic at worst.  Dumass is.....look his story line isn’t subtle at all, he’s intended to be a new player who doesn’t understand how the game works, and I think it’s both really funny, and totally at odds with the game by that point at the same time.

One thing Johnny Awesome gets correct though?  We all feel far too invincible in those heirlooms. The whole joke with Dumass is predicated on the idea of a new player having zero idea of how to play the game. He runs around asking NPC’s for help as if they were players, he’s wearing some kind of weird set of overalls instead of any armor, and when told he needs to go south to the mine where his quest is, he immediately shouts that he’s headed west.  The thing is, that same new player confusion is one of the main reasons Cataclysm even happened!  I can remember the conversations about WoW being so resoundingly new player unfriendly by the end of Wrath of the Lich King, and Cataclysm was so plainly an attempt to fix that issue that I don’t quite know why Dumass is a joke they felt they needed to make.  If the Dumass joke was made today I like to imagine it’d be far less mean spirited, it was still funny don’t get me wrong, but at this point even Blizzard is fully aware of just how insane starting World of Warcraft must be to new players right now.  Making Dumass a joke that is more based on a still outstanding issue than one they can really say they solved. 

Hillsbrad has a lot more standout quests, but none come anywhere near this one.  It’s like some writers at Blizzard got together, wrote a bunch of jokes, and then had to think of a way to get the player to be forced to listen to them.  It’s such a strange setup, and I don’t think we’ll ever really see one quite like it again, but man was it a lot of fun....I wonder what Dumass is up to these days.

Random Screenshot of The Day:

Man, I’ve poured thousands of hours into this game and even I still don’t have a Sindragosa mount, where’s my undead dragon!?

Stray Notes:

- I might do a post some day about how weird Hillsbrad got during Cataclysm because this is really only one of the strange changes they made to this classic zone for that expansion pack.