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Mists of Pandaria: Review in Progress, Day 2

I'm level 87 now, and I just rode through the golden gates of the Shrine of Seven Stars, the new Alliance-only hub city for Pandaria. Not only is it pleasing to look at, it's also useful. Auction house, bank, transmogrification NPC, portals to every major city (including Wrath of the Lich King's Dalaran and The Burning Crusade's Shattrath) -- everything you could possibly need is here in one place. It's almost as if Blizzard is sending us a message that their experiment with returning to the "old world" in homeworld cd key didn't work as well as they'd planned, so now they're focusing all their efforts on distancing players from it as much as possible. That's fine for us in the 87-90 range, but I worry that players entering the game for the first time will visit cities like Stormwind or Orgrimmar and walk away with the impression that WoW's servers are ghost towns.

Edit: Auction houses were actually taken out of the faction cities in Pandaria during the beta. You now have to go back the old capital cities if you want to use them. My mistake!

That said, I'm enjoying my time in Pandaria, especially when it comes to questing. I'd never roll a Pandaren character myself, but (bear with me on this) I've come to love the Asian aesthetic in the expansion as a whole. So many people complain that the trappings of western fantasy are becoming overworked in MMORPGs (and arguably RPGs in general), and with Pandaria, Blizzard has shown that you can do away with almost all the predictable settings and still be fine. This stunning change of environment, I believe is Pandaria's greatest contribution to the fantasy MMORPG genre, and I'd say it has the same effect on making the game feel fresh as The Burning Crusade's "space" setting on a shattered world. I'm so into the new scenery, in fact, that I just spent an ungodly amount of gold on one of the few cool samurai sword models (and it's from Classic, funny enough) in an attempt to make my Warrior look as appropriate as possible.

Old Friends in Disguise


Most of the quests consist of killing and fetching, of course, but Blizzard usually manages to keep them interesting. Most of the quests consist of killing and fetching, of course, but Blizzard usually manages to keep them interesting. It starts out impressively enough. The Alliance has had a bad time of it lately, losing the coastal town of Southshore, the entire kingdom of Gilneas, and (most recently) the port of Theramore to Horde attacks, and so it came as a welcome surprise that Mists of Pandaria starts out with an exciting sequence in which we get to slaughter the Horde at one of their camps in the freshly discovered land of Pandaria. It's full of rousing speeches, on-rails fighter plane bombings, and a final push in which you land and start hunting some orc. In the few hours after release, it even felt something like a real battle, with dozens of fellow Alliance players wreaking havoc. It's a pity, though, that it's all still based on meeting X amount of objectives (although phasing helps convey a sense of altering the world), and I couldn't help but feel the entire sequence would have been more amazing with something like Guild Wars 2's dynamic events.
Still, Mists of Pandaria does much to break the monotony. Earlier today, I jumped into the shoes of a Pandaren Monk named Clem Stormstout as he recalled the time he visited his family's brewery and found himself appalled by what he saw there. You can only click one button to attack in this quest and one button to heal, but the surrounding story was involving enough that I could forget about this excessive simplicity for most of the quest. Elsewhere, I used a gigantic lizard to toss watermelons into vats of tofu, choosing the proper level of strength to knock them as far as I could. Earlier, I controlled a sniper who picked off monkey-like beings named Hozen so a dwarf ally could get past them. So far, my personal favorite was found in a quiet village where all the Pandaren citizens were overcome by a debilitating sense of helplessness, but none so much as one in particular who lay on the outskirts of town waiting for the vultures to come eat him. To save him, I had to roll him back to town by kicking him while fighting off the vultures. And yes, once we got back, I learned why he was such a "sad panda" and set things right. Such humor's hardly new to WOW Cataclysm CD Key and its pandas -- remember all those gnome and goblin quests? -- and I've enjoyed the balance of humor and weighty issues I've found in my quests.

My Kingdom For a Vial of Tiger Blood!


That's not to say that the experience doesn't have its low points, but I've only seen one area that started to try my interest. That's not to say that the experience doesn't have its low points, but I've only seen one area that started to try my interest. The offender was the middle part of the Krasarang Wilds, which is home to (among other things) the Nesingwary hunting party. Veterans of the previous expansions will recognize Nesingwary as a Hemingway-styled questgiver whose purpose seems to be to satirize "kill quests" by asking you to massacre ridiculous amounts of wildlife, but it seemed particularly annoying here. Killing the required cranes was self-explanatory, but it took ages before I was able to get all the blood from the tigers, particularly since the blood has a pitiful drop rate and the tigers are stealthed. It seemed like a forced attempt to draw out time you spent questing in an area. A similar quest from a nearby group also suffered from the same tedious drop rates, and the area as a whole was the most boring and uninspired questing area of Pandaria that I've seen yet. Unwilling to go on -- the general gloominess of the zone didn't help, either -- I just gave up and went elsewhere to sunnier climes.

And that's when I came across Mists of Pandaria's farming quests by accident. I'd heard about these and paid little attention to them after I heard they were based on Farmville, but I found myself more interested in them than I thought I would be. It all starts out when you're trying to help a rookie farmer start his own farm, much to the ridicule of the "Tiller" faction. You buy your seeds, you till the ground, you plant the seeds, you water them, and then, in time, you harvest them. Sounds boring, right? The fun part starts once they start growing, as vermin will sometimes come out that you have to fight, diseased plants will root you in place, and (my personal favorite) some ornery vines will grab you and toss you around like a rag doll if you don't beat them into shape. I won't find out how my crops fared until tomorrow when I'm allowed to harvest them, but for all the lame Farmville jokes that people will no doubt make, I think it's a fine way to add some variety to the drudgery of daily quests.
One thing surprised me. For World of Warcraft -- no, for an MMORPG -- a lot of these quests are really well-written and well-voiced. In the beautiful Valley of the Four Winds, I had to play babysitter to Li-Li, the niece of the aforementioned Clem Stormstout, and occasionally I was genuinely surprised by how realistic her voice acting sounded. And that's a common occurrence. (Although, as a native rural Texan complete with an accent, I was ambivalent about the "aw shucks" nature of a good ol' boy of a Pandaren named Mudmug. As I joked in guild chat, at least Blizzard is spreading its stereotypes evenly. ) I haven't read much quest text for the sake of speed, but I'm sometimes surprised by the poignancy of it when I take the time to read what a random meditating Pandaren has to say. Over the years, Blizzard has learned to excel at telling stories without including quest text or many cinematics, and it shows up in the way stories unfold through the scripted interactions of NPCs around you. Companion NPCs, indeed, are quite common in Pandaria, and I can see how this will assuage the loneliness of leveling once the leveling rush dies off.
The oddest thing about the quests, though, is that I remember so few of them distinctly, even though I've only felt flat-out bored on a couple of occasions -- although I found the opening zone of the Jade Forest inferior to the following Valley of the Four Winds. They're well-paced and there's not a lot of needless running around, but the experience as a whole passes by without stamping itself firmly on my memory. Gone (so far) are most of the epic conflicts that defined zones like Deepholm and the Twilight Highlands; instead, I've spent hours helping an aging Pandaren find the best ingredients for a new beer. Perhaps that's the point. The opening zones of Cataclysm CD Key are peaceful, bucolic places, and I'm constantly reminded of the words that Pandaren once told me aloud, "There's no need to hurry. " That's a philosophy that's in conflict with World of Warcraft's legendary rush-to-the-level-cap attitude, though, and I have a feeling it'll be shattered as I head into the higher zones and start dealing with the Horde more directly.